Shailaja Neelakantan

raising the bar

2005-12-02T04:32:00.000-08:00

An innovative university in India has revolutionized the teaching of law

By Shailaja Neelakantan/BANGALORE

Chronicle of Higher Education
Issue cover-dated December 2, 2005

When Mrinal Satish quit his job as a corporate lawyer to teach at his alma mater, the National Law School of India University here in the southern city of Bangalore, his former classmates and colleagues thought he was crazy.

After graduating from India's premier law school, he had been recruited by a top firm and was making an impressive salary. "I did corporate law for a while but realized that I was really interested in teaching — not any kind, but the kind we do here," says Mr. Satish, pointing toward the school's premises.

The campus may not be striking, but what takes place inside the classrooms is. Unlike most Indian universities, where professors often read their lectures from notes and students learn by rote, the National Law School vibrates with energy. In class, one hears students' voices as often as one hears the teachers. Laughter sounds through the halls, and when the bell signals that time is up, students file out with reluctance instead of jubilation.

"Students here are not spoon-fed," says Mr. Satish. "They are encouraged to discover stuff on their own, making the classroom situation more interactive. It is exciting."

In just the 12 years since it graduated its first batch of lawyers, the National Law School has revolutionized the teaching of law in India. Its graduates are some of the most successful lawyers in the country, and it has inspired more than a half-dozen copycat institutions. It has also helped to make law an attractive option in a country where a legal career has not always been a ticket to wealth and prestige.
Until the National Law School came on the scene in 1988, India's law schools often attracted students with little interest in the profession. Some were biding their time while studying for India's civil-service examination, others simply saw law school as a way to extend the perks of college life, such as cheap lodging and the opportunity to participate in campus politics.

"Until NLSIU began, law was not a preferred option; it was actually pretty low on the scale of options," says Probal Bhadhuri, a 1994 graduate of the university and a partner in one of India's top law firms. "So, for example, if anyone didn't get into the administrative services, they would fall back on their law degree."
Sunila Awasthi, a colleague of Mr. Bhadhuri's who attended the University of Delhi's graduate law program, agrees. "In my class of around 60, only 10 to
15 of us were really interested in being lawyers," she says.

The resulting mess — thousands of mediocre lawyers clogging up a legal system already notorious for obstructionism and endless delays — deterred many competent students from entering the profession.

An old joke, true enough to elicit rueful laughter, is that a civil suit in the Indian courts is the closest one can come to experiencing eternity. India's lower courts have a backlog of about 20 million civil and criminal cases. An additional 3.2 million cases are pending before the high courts, while the Supreme Court has about 20,000 old cases on the docket.

In the mid-1970s, concerned about the poor quality of India's law-school graduates and their effect on the legal system, the Bar Council of India, a professional organization that regulates the legal profession and sets standards for legal education, proposed the creation of a university devoted solely to the teaching of law. It took more than a decade of internal wrangling — these were lawyers, after all — before the bar council determined it could actually run a college.

Although its critics point out that most of National Law School's graduates eschew courtroom practice in favor of corporate transactions, others say the university may change the way law is practiced in India.

Stirring Up Debate

The most innovative aspect of the new university was that it enrolled students straight out of high school. Until then, all law schools consisted of a two-year graduate program, resulting in an L.L.B., or bachelor of law.
Five years in length, the new program sought to subsume the entirety of its students' university education.

The man tapped to bring the concept to fruition by the council of jurists was N.R. Madhava Menon, then head of the law department at the University of Delhi. The respected legal educator, who had set up India's first university-sponsored legal-aid program, had clear ideas about how the university should be run.

When Mr. Menon visited the law school at Columbia University, in New York, in the early 1970s, he was struck by the volunteer work that its students were doing for the poorer sections of the city. "My main objective was to provide clinical legal education like I had seen at Columbia," says Mr. Menon, who is now director of the National Judicial Academy, which is responsible for the continuing education of judges. Mr. Menon also felt strongly that the traditional way of teaching law, using lectures and rote learning, was not sufficient. So he introduced the Socratic method.

Mr. Bhaduri, the 1994 graduate, says that made all the difference. "We were told we would be discussing an issue in the next few days, say defamation, so we would go do our own research on it and in class it would be more of a Q and A and much more exciting," he recalls.

Siddharth Aggarwal, a 1998 graduate and a New Delhi-based litigator, says it was not uncommon for three professors to teach one class. "They would stir up a debate just by having different opinions. The school inculcated in us that in law there is no one correct answer. If you can justify your opinion, it is the correct answer," says Mr. Aggarwal.

Training professors was no easy task. "After we selected the faculty, for six months all we did was unlearn the old ways of teaching law," Mr. Menon remembers. "We conducted workshops, had refresher courses, invited faculty from other countries to advise us, and discussed and demonstrated how we should change the ways of teaching." Now all the school's professors are required to teach in this manner, and standards are strictly monitored.
Because Mr. Menon believed that academy-bar-bench cooperation would be key to ensuring high standards, he saw to it that the university's governing body included the chief justice of India, the chairman of the Bar Council of India, and leading lawyers of the Supreme Court and other high courts.

New Approaches

Students also study history, economics, politics, and sociology, says Mr.
Menon, "to give a social context to future lawyers." He notes that more than half of all the people in India are shut out of the legal system because they can't afford lawyers' fees. "We were the first people to seriously do this. A law degree isn't just an appendage to some other degree," says A. Jayagovind, the university's current director.

The range of legal issues students study is broad. Subjects include civil and criminal law, corporate and commercial law, mediation and negotiation, international law, intellectual-property law, medical-negligence law, environmental law, and human-rights law.

The National Law School was also the first to introduce internships that count toward course credits. These begin as early as students' third year so that future lawyers can swiftly apply their classroom knowledge.

"This practical-oriented approach to teaching gives a big edge when we go out into the real world," says Rajshekhar Rao, a 1999 graduate who has already argued cases before the Supreme Court. "It instills the ability to think tangentially and also the desire to make a difference in a variety of fields. An institution that teaches law should not teach just about law." In his brief career, Mr. Rao has been a counsel for the state of Delhi on the case of the 2001 attack on India's Parliament. "I've interacted with lawyers who have studied elsewhere," he says, "and I can see the difference."

The government of Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is the capital, provided land, basic infrastructure, and support of $150,000 to the university when it first started. But administrators say it wisely left the running of the institution — both academically and financially — to the Bar Council of India. India's federally subsidized universities, by comparison, are notoriously politicized and corrupt. Administrators and professors are often hired based on their political connections rather than on their academic credentials.

"We could experiment and innovate only because we were autonomous," says Mr. Menon.

National Law School's high academic standards have paid off — literally.
Starting salaries for recent graduates average about $450 a month — more than six times what other law-school graduates make. Today the university's alumni work at the country's top law firms and serve as in-house counsel to companies like General Electric and organizations like the Red Cross and Amnesty International.

The National Law School's success has had a profound impact on legal education throughout India. In 1995 a three-judge committee appointed by India's chief justice to evaluate legal education recommended that every state establish a college on the model of the National Law School. Six states so far have done just that. Like the university, these new institutions offer five-year degrees, use the Socratic teaching method, and stress an interdisciplinary approach.

Improvement All Around

Members of the legal profession hope that spillover effect will change the face of law in the country. "Because these new schools are trying to measure themselves against NLSIU, the quality of education has improved drastically all around," says Udaya Holla, a Bangalore-based lawyer who has appeared before the Supreme Court.

Some say the change is already under way. "The practice of law has already changed, thanks to all these new graduates," says Mr. Aggarwal. " ... When they perform in court you can really tell they know their stuff. This is a sea change from 20 years ago."

One of the few criticisms leveled against the National Law School is that the bulk of its graduates enter the lucrative world of corporate transaction law, rather than litigation, which requires contact with courts and judges.

"There is disillusionment with the legal system and there is a misconception that there is no room for merit in litigation," says Aditya Sondhi, a 1998 graduate who runs a constitutional and corporate litigation practice in Bangalore. "Another deterrent is that it takes much longer to grow financially in litigation, and when colleagues take up such tempting corporate offers, the trend becomes to go for early money."

That is slowly changing. Mr. Satish says that after he quit his corporate job to teach, a couple of his colleagues quit corporate transaction law to start their own litigation practice. He has also noticed that more students seem to be interested in working for nonprofit groups.

Mr. Aggarwal believes that as the number of top-quality lawyers increases, so will their interest in litigation. And "once the quality of the bar changes, the quality of the bench will also change," says Mr. Jayagovind, the National Law School's director.

Mr. Menon, the university's founder, who went on to establish the National University of Juridical Sciences, in Calcutta, one of the dozen institutions inspired by the National Law School, hopes that these new law schools will help spur legal reform and social justice.

"It is a bit disappointing to see so many graduates go into corporate law,"
he says, "but I have seen that at least sensitivity to the poor has been inculcated in these lawyers. A faster, more humane system is evolving."

Permanent email: sn40@columbia.edu
Web site: www.shailaja.net

scouting for homegrown ingenuity

2005-09-30T04:34:00.000-07:00

A unique academic network nurtures innovation among India's poor

By Shailaja Neelakantan
Chronicle of Higher Education
Issue cover-dated September 30, 2005

Ahmedabad, India

Mansukhbhai Patel, a hard-working farmer with a 10th-grade education, has revolutionized the cotton industry here in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Had it not been for a chance meeting with a college student, the cotton-stripping machine Mr. Patel invented might never have been a success.

That student put Mr. Patel in touch with Anil Gupta, a management professor at one of the country's elite Indian Institutes of Management and the founder of an unconventional academic project. An evangelical supporter of grassroots innovations, Mr. Gupta is on a mission to ensure that rural inventors like Mr. Patel can commercialize their creations. To make that happen, Mr. Gupta founded the Honey Bee Network, a scouting team of sorts, in which academics, scientists, graduate students, farmers, and artisans seek out and nurture the tinkerers, mechanics, and self-taught scientists in villages and small towns across India.

The network, formed in 1987, has discovered Amrutbhai Agrawat and his tilting bullock-cart, which greatly enhances efficiency in spreading manure on small fields; Mansukhbhai Jagani's modified motorcycle, which has attachments for tilling, weeding, and sowing; Kalpesh Gujjar's small, energy-saving seed-oil extractor with a novel gearbox; and Arvindbhai Patel's water chiller that uses no electricity.

All of those men are rural workers whose original goal was simply to make backbreaking work a little easier.

"Poor people have to be inventive to survive," says Mr. Gupta, "and the elite often fail to recognize that the poor are knowledge-rich, and that is a vital resource for any community and economy." Clad in a knee-length, hand-woven shirt called a kurta, white pajama pants, and sandals, he looks more like a zealous social activist than a professor at a university that turns out future corporate executives.

Readers in the developed world may question why a new cotton-stripping machine is needed when Eli Whitney's cotton gin revolutionized the industry more than 200 years ago. But Mr. Patel faced a problem characteristic of this region.

Farmers here grow a tough variety of cotton, called V-797, that does not need much water and can withstand the harsh, arid climate. While most hybrid varieties produce balls of cotton that can be picked directly from the plant, this indigenous variety produces sturdy pods that do not open easily to let loose the fibers within.

Instead, the pods must be picked off the plant and cracked manually to extract the fibers. This is a tedious and time-consuming task performed by women and children, who often cannot pick all of the cotton before seasonal rains arrive. Traditional handpicking methods also force children to work long hours in the field instead of attending school.

Mr. Patel, a self-taught electrician and mechanic, started work on his cotton-stripping machine in 1991. He made three models before selecting the one that worked best, and he finished the first prototype in 1992. The following year, he sold a number of them to local ginners in his village of Nana Ubhada. But after a couple of months, a wire-mesh plate in each machine broke, and the machines failed. Mr. Patel stunned his customers, and the community, by giving the ginners back their money and continuing to work on his invention. His reputation as a dogged technician and an honest businessman grew.

'The Crazy Ones'

In 1995, Hirendra Rawal, a scout from the Honey Bee Network, was touring Nana Ubhada.

"The student scouts are given a clear mandate," says Mr. Gupta. "Go from village to village and look for the oddballs, the crazy ones, the ones who do something different and don't follow set patterns, the ones with curiosity, who have come up with homegrown solutions for various problems.
And Hirendra kept hearing things about Mansukhbhai Patel, mostly about his honesty and integrity, and also about his failed machine."

Mr. Rawal met Mr. Patel and was intrigued by his machine. He wrote up his notes and showed them to Mr. Gupta.

"At the time a professor from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay was visiting, and I took him along to meet Mansukhbhai, and he said that with some alterations the cotton stripper would work just fine," says Mr.
Gupta.

Unlike many of the self-taught innovators the scouts came across, Mr. Patel was open-minded about getting help.

"Initially, many grassroots innovators don't like to talk about what they do or give away their secrets," says Kamlesh Kumar Tawal, a scout. "It takes a couple of visits to convince them that we are not here to steal their ideas, but we are here to help them take the ideas forward and give them credit for it."

Mr. Patel had no such misgivings. "Taking help is a good thing, and I don't consider it beneath me. I knew things would get better when they came to me," he says about the Honey Bee Network.

Soon after he met Mr. Patel, Mr. Gupta heard from Ahmedabad's elite National Institute of Design that a German exchange student wanted to work on design innovations in a rural area. The student ended up staying with Mr. Patel as they worked together on a new machine. A final model, built in 1999, worked perfectly.

"It was interesting working with a professional but also a bit strange,"
recalls the genial Mr. Patel. "I visualize a model in my head and then I make it. But the professionals sit at their computer or with pencil and paper and draw and redraw things before they actually make something."

Before he started the Honey Bee Network, Mr. Gupta was a consultant for the Bangladesh government and helped farmers there use technology to improve yields and working conditions. He says that job left him dissatisfied. "I wrote all these papers, having used their grassroots knowledge, and I got this ... [very high] salary, but I never gave anything back. I felt quite guilty. Maybe it is the Indian mentality."

So he decided to help rural innovators by securing intellectual property rights for them and publicizing their inventions. He explains how he came up with the name of his network: "I had in mind the metaphor of honeybees that collect nectar from flowers without impoverishing them, and in turn, the bees aid pollination and diversity."

In 1993 the Honey Bee Network was renamed the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions, or Sristi.
Students in the society write case studies of particular inventions and publish them in Honey Bee magazine, which was initially supported by the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, but now operates independently and is published in eight languages.

Set for Life

In 1997 Mr. Gupta and his organization helped form the Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network, or GIAN.

"We realized that we were cataloging all these innovations and helping the grassroots innovators, but we weren't equipped to take these innovations forward," says Mr. Gupta, who convinced the government of the State of Gujarat, where his institute is located, to contribute $230,000 to what eventually became a business incubator. "Back then we called it a trust, but turns out it was India's first microventure incubation fund," chuckles Mr.
Gupta. "All these concepts became buzzwords much later, but we were thinking about them even before that."

GIAN gave Mr. Patel $5,100 to start commercial production of the cotton stripper, and the first sales were made in 2000. Three years later GIAN helped Mr. Patel obtain a U.S. patent. Last year he won India's National Research Development Corporation technology award for best innovation.

Today this former amateur technician, who was once chided by his wife for his "crazy pursuits," earns nearly $7,000 a year -- a lot of money in India, where the average yearly income is $350. To ensure that sales don't stagnate, he has made energy-saving and capacity-enhancing improvements on his machine twice since 2000.

Ginners now are replacing their old machines, so sales remain steady. Mr.
Patel has moved out of his village house and built a home about 40 miles from Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat. His new house has air-conditioning, and he has also bought a car.

"I have a computerlike mind. If I had become an engineer, I would be working with microprocessors today, but I am happy," says Mr. Patel, beaming. "My children are now set for life, and my wife doesn't scold me anymore."

The ginners are equally pleased. "Before we had the machine, we could produce only 20 kilos of cotton in an hour; now we can do 350 kilos in an hour," says Prabhubhai Thakkar, a ginner in a nearby district, who owns six of Mr. Patel's machines. "I used to produce only 400 to 500 bales of cotton, but now I produce 30,000 bales a year."

Mr. Gupta has been productive as well. Five years ago he convinced the Indian government to set up the National Innovations Foundation, with an endowment of $4.6-million. The interest on that money is used to support his network and finance grassroots innovations throughout the country.

"There is a lot of work to be done," says the professor, who, in addition to coordinating these multiple ventures, teaches four courses at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. (Most professors teach only two.) "I need to have more work to do than there is time to do it, " he says with a smile.

He has his wish. The foundation has so far documented 51,000 mechanical, technical, and herbal inventions and practices in more than 300 Indian districts. "Now we have to keep scouting and enabling all these innovators,"
says Mr. Gupta. Mr. Patel and his ilk will no doubt keep him busy.

India's Supreme Court Rejects Quotas for Lower-Caste Students at Private Colleges

2005-08-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN

(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in August 2005).

In a judgment that could limit access to professional education, India's Supreme Court ruled last week that colleges that do not receive government aid are not required to use state admission quotas for students from minority groups and lower castes.

The ruling also held that unaided private colleges have complete autonomy to admit students of their choice in medicine, engineering, and other professional fields.

Admission quotas are popular in India, where the Constitution guarantees that nearly a quarter of all government jobs and student places in higher education are reserved for members of indigenous tribal groups or lower castes. Many other people qualify for quotas based on their religion or ethnicity, a disability, or some other characteristic (The Chronicle, February 13, 2003).

Last week's decision has been severely criticized by several lower-caste groups. Government-supported medical and engineering colleges will be able to maintain quotas for lower castes, but those institutions do not have the capacity to meet the demand for professional courses. Private colleges, which charge much higher fees, fill that gap, but they are unaffordable for the disadvantaged, including the lower castes.

The court's ruling will be effective beginning in the 2006-7 academic year.
Admissions made for 2005-6 under court orders and directions of state committees will not be affected.

The ruling stressed that although every institution is free to devise its own fee structure, fees could be regulated to prevent profiteering.

And while unaided institutions can set their own admissions standards, the criteria they use must be fair, transparent, nonexploitative, and based on merit, the judgment said. It also recommended a common entrance examination to cut costs and to make it easier for students who would otherwise have to take several tests.

The court also allowed private colleges to set aside 15 percent of their seats for expatriate Indian students, but those students must pay higher fees than those paid by students who live in India. The court said the expatriate students' fees should be used as aid for needier students.

india's prime minister sharply criticizes universities as lagging behind

2005-08-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in August 2005).

India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said on Tuesday that the country's universities were falling behind their peers elsewhere in the world in terms of both personnel and infrastructure.
"There is a need to make India's institutions of high education and research world-class," said Mr. Singh, who was speaking at the first meeting of a Knowledge Commission that was created to advise him on promoting excellence in the education system.

Mr. Singh's surprisingly critical comments were a harsh wake-up call for India's higher-education system. Even though India has 5.3 million unemployed university graduates, growing sectors of the economy -- such as the news media, entertainment, fashion, advertising, investment banking, and tourism -- face personnel shortages (The Chronicle, June 3).
Academics and economists blame the problem on the country's antiquated higher-education system, which they say has failed to keep up with the needs of the economy. The country's public universities serve 9.3 million students, or about 7 percent of India's population of 18- to 24-year-olds.

The central government has said it wants to increase the college-going rate to 10 percent by 2007, which would mean four million more students in the university system and even more graduates looking for work.

Exacerbating the problem of declining quality, Mr. Singh said, are tight government budgets whose effects are being neutralized only in part by the private sector. "Together," said Mr. Singh, "the public and private sectors are not able to cope with the demand for higher and professional education."

The prime minister said he would like the commission to propose ways to attain excellence in research and teaching, especially in mathematics, science, and technology.

The seven-member commission, which includes academics, economists, industrialists, and technologists, is scheduled to present a plan by October and to finish its work by October 2008.

Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

snap judgment

2005-07-18T19:59:00.000-07:00

Newsweek International

July 25-Aug. 1 issue

The City of Tiny Lights by Patrick Neate

Tommy Akhtar, a "Paki-immigrant-Ugandan-Indian-Englishman" and private detective in London, is hired by Melody, a black prostitute who wants him to find her missing Russian flatmate. Tommy's investigation leads him to a fiendish Saudi villain who has sinister plans for London. It's a multiculti homage to Raymond Chandler's 1930s detective Marlowe, without his stylized sophistication. In contrast to Neate's Whitbread Award-winning "Twelve Bar Blues," a bewitching tale spanning three continents, "City of Tiny Lights" is more of a shambling slog.

—Shailaja Neelakantan

higher education proves no match for india's booming economy

2005-06-03T19:41:00.000-07:00

(From the Chronicle of Higher Education, issue dated June 3, 2005)

By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN

Cochin, India

One recent afternoon in this peaceful coastal town in Kerala, India's southwesternmost state, a 22-year-old shopkeeper is giving a group of British tourists the hard sell.

Hawking his tiny shop's collection of CD's and DVD's, M. Sajjan cleverly gauges their tastes and plays a collection of tabla-heavy trance music.
"Just like Buddha Bar, no?" he says, mentioning the hip Parisian nightspot.
He points out that his DVD's of films like Trainspotting and The Beach cost much less than in England. The tourists leave with several purchases, and Mr. Sajjan, who opened his shop three years ago when he was 19 -- even though he could instead have been in college -- happily records the sale.

Unlike many of his former schoolmates who did go on to higher education, he is making money.

"I could have, college is cheap enough, but it is no use," he says. "Better that I started a business early and started to make money than do a useless degree."

In India in general, and especially in Kerala, where the literacy rate is 91 percent, compared with India's national average of 65 percent, higher education has long been considered the key to a better life. But Mr. Sajjan has a point. India's antiquated higher-education system has not kept up with the needs of its rapidly growing economy. Universities here use archaic teaching methods and outdated syllabi, and their emphasis on rote learning produces graduates who know little about their field of study and even less about how to relate that knowledge to the outside world.

Though starkest in the state of Kerala, the skyrocketing number of unemployed graduates is beginning to worry administrators across India. The problem is expected to worsen as other states catch up to Kerala in literacy and send more students to universities.

Kerala has fascinated development experts because, while its per-capita income is extremely low, its adult-literacy rate, birth rate and infant-mortality rate rival those of many Western nations. In 1957, Kerala democratically elected a Communist chief minister (like an American governor), and since then the state's efforts to empower the poor through universal literacy have been highly successful.

Despite Kerala's gains, the fraying of its social fabric is beginning to show. Of India's 5.3 million unemployed university graduates, Kerala has a disproportionate half a million. By ensuring basic education and schooling for all, Kerala, unlike other states in India, has had -- and still has -- more students pursuing higher education. It isn't uncommon to find bus drivers who are engineers or who hold multiple master's degrees or law degrees.

They have no choice but to take more menial jobs. It is better than being unemployed.

The problem is not simply a shortage of white-collar jobs in Kerala, which has little or no industry. Interstate migration is common in India, and Keralites often work in more industrialized states. By not paying the same attention to the quality of higher education or to market-relevant higher education, Kerala has offset the gains it has made in literacy.

"All this chest-thumping about how literate Kerala is!" a woman with a master's degree recently told an Indian newsmagazine. "Postgraduates are hankering for a Rs 3,500 [about $80] job! We'd make more money if we were illiterate drivers!"

In the last three years the proportion of high-school graduates pursuing higher education has fallen at least 25 percent, according to Sister Tessa, dean of St. Teresa's College, in Ernakulam, Kerala.

The problem has ignited a curious debate in developmental circles. Skeptics often cite Kerala's high unemployment to argue that education doesn't solve economic problems. The Indian economist Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate, holds a different view: He believes the higher-education system must be revised to suit the demands of the contemporary age, including a focus on India's rapidly expanding information economy.

The country's 300-odd public universities serve 9.3 million students, or about 7 percent of India's 18- to 24-year-old population. The central government has said it wants to increase the college-going rate to 10 percent by 2007, which would mean four million more students in the university system and even more graduates looking for work.

Ironically, the problem of unemployed graduates is growing at the same time that Indian industry -- making rapid strides toward an economy based on technology, knowledge, and services -- is experiencing an acute shortage of skilled workers. India produces some 290,000 engineers a year, the source of much pride here and much heartache in the United States and Europe, which have lost technology jobs to India. But in India, that number is small compared with the total number of university graduates in all fields.

Producing 'Babus'

Only 17 percent of Indian students are enrolled in professional courses such as engineering and medicine. The remaining students are pursuing degrees in the sciences, the humanities, and commerce. (The last, which includes business and economics, is not considered a professional field in India.)

Meanwhile, job opportunities in growing sectors of the economy -- such as media, entertainment, fashion, advertising, investment banking, and tourism
-- are increasing, and face personnel shortages.

Indian higher education is still geared toward producing babus, says sociologist Shiv Visvanathan of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, a New Delhi-based think tank. (Babu is a pejorative term used to describe clerks and petty bureaucrats, a class developed by the British colonialists who encouraged education for Indians to create legions of career underlings.) That mentality has lingered in independent India, where acquiring a degree -- or several -- has become an end in itself, says Mr.
Visvanathan.

M.A. Oomen, a scholar at the Institute of Social Sciences at Thiruvananthapuram, agrees. "College education is neither job-oriented nor research-oriented," he says. "It has created a false notion of knowledge and ego in people's minds."

Mr. Oomen recalls his association with universities in Kerala as a professor of economics at University of Calicut and Mahatma Gandhi University in the late 1970s. "For the first time in India we offered several options in addition to basic courses in economics, like forestry economics, the economics of fishing, transportation, etc., all relevant to Kerala's economy," he says. "This was the only way to initiate students into the world of real opportunities, instead of focusing just on neoclassical economics. I was pooh-poohed, but I managed to make these courses last three or four years."

After he left, such courses ended, he says. He blames the teaching community for not wanting to try new approaches, and government officials for hiring candidates whose political connections were stronger than their job credentials.

India has chosen to emphasize public higher education to ensure that the poor are not left out. But the dominance of federally subsidized universities has led to corruption and the politicization of universities.
In some states professors can bribe their way into jobs, says Babu Joseph, a former vice chancellor of Kerala's Cochin University of Science and Technology. "You can bribe someone at the examination center and have your marks changed. All this has become endemic to the system. No wonder we have such poor-quality graduates."

Educators also blame India's university system, another relic of British colonialism. Like the Universities of Oxford and of Cambridge, every university in India has affiliated colleges. In India, that relationship causes serious problems.

"The university sets the syllabus and the examinations, and the colleges have to follow it," says the Rev. Ambrose Pinto, principal of St. Joseph's College, in Bangalore. He believes colleges should be given complete autonomy, so that they are still affiliated with the university and thus eligible for state funding, but are free to set their own curriculum and examinations. The current system offers little room for innovation. "There is a lot of resistance to autonomy because the authorities are afraid they will lose control and power over colleges," Father Pinto says. "This is a very feudal outlook."

In India's education system, students choose their "stream," or area of study, after the 10th grade. In the 11th and 12th grades, students take only subjects in their chosen fields, so that a humanities student could not, for example, take a physics class. That system continues in college. As a result, a decision to specialize made at the age of 15 or 16 determines a student's life.

"Shouldn't a science student study some humanities and vice versa? We need well-rounded graduates," Father Pinto says.

Studying Silkworms

Faced with declining university enrollments and looming competition from foreign universities, the Indian government is finally realizing that drastic changes are needed. The University Grants Commission, India's higher-education regulatory body, has said that Indian universities should allow students to combine traditional education with skills-oriented education. In addition, India's Planning Commission, the country's main economic planning body, has directed the university commission to supplement degree programs with job-oriented diploma and certificate programs.

A pilot program is in place at four universities and 43 colleges. It allows students to choose electives outside their academic specialty and tailor their studies to suit their personal needs. "This system will be extremely beneficial for narrowing the gap between university education and employment," says S.P. Thyagarajan, vice chancellor of the University of Madras, which is taking part in the pilot program.

Some universities are wasting no time in adopting the proposals. In June Bangalore University will introduce four-year (instead of the usual
three-year) integrated-honors degree programs in the humanities and the sciences. The university plans to introduce courses in industrial chemistry, water management, apparel technology, and sericulture (the raising of silkworms). Course work in practical, job-training subjects will make up 50 percent of the syllabus.

A New Mentality

Several colleges affiliated with the University of Mumbai, in Maharashtra State, have also added undergraduate programs in such fields as management, mass media, and information technology. "Right now demand for basic sciences and humanities is declining because they aren't skill-oriented," says M.S.
Thimmappa, vice chancellor of Bangalore University. "These new courses will give students an understanding of industry and improve their chances of employment.

"I believe this could reduce the number of unemployed graduates by 50 percent," he adds.

The University of Madras has also reorganized syllabus committees in all its departments so that one-third of the committee members work outside academe.
The university also plans to submit to Indian higher-education officials a report on the potential of community colleges. Currently there are very few such colleges in India. The state of Tamil Nadu, where the University of Madras is based, has 60 such colleges -- far more than most states.

Mr. Thyagarajan says the report examines how community-college programs can be linked to university degree programs. "This will serve the dual purpose of increasing the numbers seeking higher education and also ensuring that students have employable skills," he says.

But in a country so steeped in the culture of acquiring degrees for their own sake, community colleges and vocational courses will require a major hard sell. Indians view a degree as the route to a white-collar job, no matter how poor the degree.

"Little by little this attitude is changing," says S.P. Gupta, former chairman of India's economic-planning commission. "People are realizing that if salaries are good it doesn't matter if the job is blue collar. For example, in the rural sector, the money in trucking services is quite good.
But it will take some time for that mind-set to change."

For that kind of revolution to occur, most people agree that the economic liberalization that is on the rise throughout India must be extended to higher education.

"It takes a new kind of imagination, one that is not geared toward collecting degrees," says Mr. Visvanathan, the sociologist who worries about India's babu mentality. "People have to change, higher education has to change. It will take a couple of meltdowns for the tool kit to become cool."

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Section: International
Volume 51, Issue 39, Page A32
Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

tokyo cancelled by rana dasgupta

2005-05-16T21:35:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This snap judgment appeared in Newsweek International in May 2005).

A flight heading for Tokyo is canceled. Thirteen passengers are stranded in the airport, and to pass the time each tells a story in this book. These modern-day Canterbury tales are fantastical and, when they work, grippingly depict the outcomes of human frailties. But sometimes Dasgupta's efforts are too forced. Like the passengers, the stories are set all over the world, predictably showcasing today's global citizens. Still, there's enough sparkle in this debut to make readers eager to read Dasgupta's next work.

nepal cracks down on pro-democracy student groups

2005-05-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

Activists press on despite campus arrests, strikes, and 2 deaths

By Shailaja Neelakantan/KATHMANDU

(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in May 2005).

Gagan Kumar Thapa, a graduate student at Nepal's Tribhuvan University, chats and laughs with a friend as he waits to discuss the government crackdown that has him on the run.

Clad in sweat pants and a T-shirt, the chubby, soft-spoken sociology student does not seem like a rabble-rouser or a revolutionary in the style of Nepal's Maoist rebels, whose violent, nine-year insurgency is aimed at replacing the monarchy with a communist regime. Mr. Thapa, an outspoken leader of the Nepal Students Union, is a different brand of rebel. He is a pro-democracy activist who strongly opposes the Maoists. But like a growing number of university students, he also strongly opposes the monarchy, and his strident calls to make the Himalayan kingdom a republic have made him a prime target for King Gyanendra and the army he controls.

Mr. Thapa was forced into hiding on February 1, when the king, a constitutional monarch, sacked Nepal's democratic government, assumed power, and declared a state of emergency, which was withdrawn late last month. The king said the elected parliament and Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba were incompetent and that without absolute control over the country, he would not be able to defeat the Maoists. Several political activists were then put under house arrest.

Mr. Thapa blames royalty for earlier failures to challenge the Maoist rebels, who say they are fighting on behalf of Nepal's poor. Since 1996 more than 10,000 people have died in the insurgency waged by the rebels' Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and its now-banned student wing. The Maoists' tactics have included killings, torture, abductions, strikes, roadblocks, and the conscription of child soldiers, according to human-rights groups.

"Nepal's youth have to fight the war on two different fronts, the monarch and the Maoists," Mr. Thapa says.

Students United

Most student associations in Nepal, except the banned Maoist group, have come to share that view. In March seven student unions affiliated with different political parties formed an alliance that has staged protests, distributed pamphlets, and burned effigies of the king. They have also demanded the withdrawal of security personnel from campuses.

The king has taken notice. Since the dismissal of the democratic government, the Royal Nepal Army has arrested thousands of human-rights and pro-democracy activists, many of them students and faculty members. It has also deployed soldiers, some in uniform and some in plainclothes, in most public places and on all university campuses. On February 1, the army, without warning, fired from helicopters on student protesters at Prithvi Narayan College, in Pokhara, about 125 miles northwest of the capital. Two students were killed and some 20 were injured.

Here in the capital, signs of the coup are not immediately evident except for an increased presence of armed police and army personnel. But in the bustling market streets filled with tourists and local people, there is a genuine fear of the security forces. People hush up when police officers pass by.

The king's actions have resulted in disruptions and tensions at Nepal's universities, which had already been crippled by frequent strikes staged by the Maoists and other student groups. Last year alone, Tribhuvan lost almost half of its 150-day academic calendar due to strikes and shutdowns.

At the Institute of Agricultural and Animal Sciences, in Chitwan, in east Nepal, "we lost close to two months of study in 2004," says Bikash Pandel, 24, now a graduate student at Tribhuvan. "They didn't finish teaching us the courses, and we were unprepared when the exams were finally held," he said. "The strikes called by the Maoists scared away the teachers and the students, and now we have all these students being arrested."

Guns on the Campus

Every couple of days since February 1, soldiers have entered university dormitories in the dead of night and arrested dozens of students, according to student groups.

Mr. Thapa managed to avoid being arrested immediately after February 1 because he was not at his home when the army came looking for him. A recent meeting with Mr. Thapa had to be arranged through a local journalist, who changed the location twice in an hour before the meeting. "He cannot be too careful," the journalist says.

The journalist's fears are valid. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have warned that Nepal has had an alarmingly high number of extrajudicial "disappearances" in recent years. Government security forces fighting the Maoists are alleged to be behind many of those, and local and international human-rights groups say abuses by security forces have intensified since February 1.

Government officials, appointed by the king after he sacked those appointed by the prime minister, refused to comment for this article, but have publicly defended the king's actions. In March Nepal's minister of foreign affairs told the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that King Gyanendra's coup was a drastic attempt to save democracy and human rights in Nepal, and he urged the international community to support the king's actions. The king, under increasing pressure from foreign nations and human-rights groups, has since agreed to allow the U.N. high commissioner for human rights to monitor the situation in Nepal . Many students remain gravely concerned.

"They came one night about a month ago and arrested several people, including me," says Chhabi Barat, a graduate student in geography at Tribhuvan. He was released in early April after being detained for 25 days, and only after he agreed to sign a document stating that he supported the king, he says.

Rupesh Khatiwada, secretary of the student union at Tribhuvan's campus in Kirtipur, outside the capital, believes he, too, will be arrested soon. A master's-degree candidate in politics, he points to the gun-wielding soldiers posted on the campus one recent afternoon. They did not stop him and 20 other college students from burning an effigy of the king later that day, as students chanted: "Shame on the royal proclamation, shame on the king, long live democracy."

Like Mr. Thapa, those students also feel stuck in the middle. "We don't want the Maoists with their guns, and we don't want the king with his guns," says Mr. Khatiwada.

"The minute the Maoists stop their violence, we will support them," Mr. Barat says "We understand their concern for the poor."

Faculty Arrests

Another student, 24-year-old Narayan Kharel, a vocal member of the Nepal Students Union, adds that the alliance of the seven students' unions is the best thing to happen in Nepal. He says he supports Mr. Barat and Mr. Khatiwada, even though they belong to another party.

"We are stronger together, and we will fight this together," he says.

Unlike their senior party leaders, who during the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s continued to back a constitutional monarchy, the student activists see royalty as a stumbling block to Nepal's progress. (King Birendra, brother of the current king, acceded to the demands of the pro-democracy movement in 1990. Gyanendra was crowned king in 2001, after Crown Prince Dipendra shot and killed his father, eight other members of the royal family, and himself.)

"There is a generational divide," Mr. Thapa says. "In 1990 the leaders campaigning for democracy felt it was OK to have a constitutional monarchy. For them, the king is still a symbol. But we young people don't believe in such things."

Since the royal takeover, even faculty members who vocally denounced the Maoists in the past for calling strikes and disrupting education are participating in protest marches and demonstrations, as their colleagues are also being arrested.
One day in early April, police and army officials posted outside Padma Kanya College here refuse to allow members of the Nepal University Teachers Association -- who have called a meeting to discuss the arrest of several academics -- to enter the campus. "They are refusing to let us in to hold a meeting, which is our basic right," Bhupati Dhakal, president of the association, told journalists who gathered outside the gates of the college. "How long will this go on? For how long can we be stopped like this at gunpoint? One day they will have to give up." Mr. Dhakal would be arrested two days later.

Undaunted, the association has released a statement condemning his arrest and those of several other faculty members. The statement accuses the king of complicating the political situation instead of trying to resolve it. "Such a condemnable act of the state, amid commitment to respect academic freedoms, has agitated the entire academic field," it states.

In and Out of Hiding

Although King Gyanendra withdrew the state of emergency on April 30, he has held on to major powers; has not released hundreds of detained political activists, including students and faculty members; and has continued to maintain press censorship and bans on political parties and public demonstrations.
The king has also extended the term of the Royal Commission for Corruption Control, a body he set up after removing the government. The commission has sweeping powers to arrest politicians and bureaucrats.

A day before the state of emergency was lifted, security forces fired on student protesters gathered in a college compound in western Nepal, seriously injuring four of them.

Mr. Thapa, the student leader on the run, appeared sporadically in the weeks after his meeting with this reporter, delivering fiery speeches against the king in different parts of the city before going back into hiding.

But his luck ran out on April 26. Police officers surrounded the house where he was staying, and Mr. Thapa, along with two colleagues, was arrested and taken into custody.

an american u. rises in afghanistan

2005-04-15T21:37:00.000-07:00

By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in April 2005).

The groundbreaking ceremony for the American University of Afghanistan, the country's first private, American-style university, took place in Kabul last month.

The university, which plans to open in 2006, is patterning itself after other American-style institutions abroad, such as the American University of Beirut. It will provide courses in management, communications, and the liberal arts for 1,100 undergraduates. All courses will be taught in English and will be open to students from Afghanistan and the region.

The university will aggressively reach out to young Afghan women, Afghan higher-education officials said. It plans to build appropriate facilities and housing for women, award scholarships to poor women, and hire female professors.

The U.S. government is supporting the university with a multiyear commitment of more than $15-million, Laura Bush, the first lady, said in a speech in Kabul last month. She visited a teacher-training institute, where she spoke of the importance of educating women.
Those pushing for the new university believe there is sufficient interest among Afghans and Afghan-Americans to sustain a private institution.

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan attended the groundbreaking ceremony, along with Sharif Fayez, Afghanistan's former higher-education minister, who is interim president of the new university. The Asia Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group, has signed a grant agreement with the U.S.

Agency for International Development to act as the new university's fiduciary agent for one year. During that time, it will develop a set of financial and administrative systems for the new university and help it raise grant money from AID and other donors.

india's supreme court rules against private colleges

2005-02-25T21:20:00.000-08:00

By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN

(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in February 2005).

India's Supreme Court quashed a provision of a state law this month that allowed the establishment of private universities in the State of Chhattisgarh, in central India. The court called the three-year-old provision "unconstitutional" and canceled the registrations of all 108 private universities in the state, Some 20,000 students are enrolled in the institutions.

Chhattisgarh has only two public universities to serve a population of 21 million. But the law's loosely written regulations, along with lax oversight, allowed dozens of storefront universities, offering dubious courses of study, to flourish. One listed a "shoe upper and maintenance" degree and a "garage and automotive" degree among its offerings.

The state government made it legal for virtually any entity to set up shop as a university, placed no limits on the number of universities that could be opened, and failed to establish a monitoring body to determine and maintain standards.

The court was acting on a petition filed by Professor Yashpal, an academic who uses only one name and who is a former chairman of India's main regulatory body for higher education, the University Grants Commission. In his petition, Mr. Yashpal questioned the legality of Chhattisgarh's having bypassed the commission's authority to examine proposed campuses and course offerings before granting university status to new institutions.

Since Chhattisgarh's private-universities law went into effect, he said, "the state government has been establishing universities simply by issuing notifications in the Gazette in an indiscriminate and mechanical manner." The Gazette is a bulletin published by the government.

Protection for Students

The court also directed the institutions whose registrations have been canceled to seek affiliations with the two government universities in Chhattisgarh -- Pandit Ravishankar Shukla University, in Raipur, and Guru Ghasidas University, in Bilaspur -- to protect students' interests.

"The Supreme Court has guarded the interests of the students," said Rajiv Tiwari, a spokesman for Rai University, one of the private institutions. "But the main worry for students is how long it takes for their institutions to gain affiliation to other universities."

In fact, Chhattisgarh, which in January 2004 elected a new government, amended the private-universities law to require all existing private universities to pay about $450,000 each by that June to create an endowment from which students would be reimbursed if their universities proved to be sham operations.

Of the 108 universities that had set up shop -- some operating out of one-room homes or storefronts in shopping complexes -- only 37 had fulfilled the fund requirements by the deadline. Even so, the Supreme Court's decision includes those 37 institutions, which plan to appeal to the court.

"The highest court of the land has passed this order," said Pradeep Kumar Maitra, a part-time journalism lecturer at Amity University, another of the private universities that was shut down. "It is unlikely they will review it."

India needs more universities to accommodate a growing number of college-bound students. The country's 300-odd public universities serve 9.3 million students, or about 7 percent of the 18-to-24-year-old population. The central government has said it wants to increase the college-going rate to 10 percent by 2007, a plan that would require it to find space for four million more students.

The Chhattisgarh experience, however, has served to make the atmosphere hostile for all private universities in India, not only because the government is cracking down, but also because the public has become more skeptical about them.

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Section: International
Volume 51, Issue 25, Page A39

Nepali army is said to fire on student protesters

2005-02-25T21:18:00.000-08:00

By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in February 2005).

The Royal Nepal Army fired without warning from helicopters on student protesters this month, injuring approximately 20 students, according to reports received by a Nepali human-rights activist in New Delhi and the Indian news media. The students were protesting the Nepali king's dismissal of the government.

All communication to and from Nepal -- including telephone, fax, and Internet access -- was blocked immediately after the dismissal occurred. It was restored a week later, but the government has not issued any statements since then about the alleged attacks.

The human-rights activist, who did not wish to be named, said she had received telephone calls from Nepalis who had crossed the border into India and who told her that the students were from Prithvi Narayan College, in Pokhara, about 125 miles northwest of the capital, Kathmandu. The students had gathered several hours after King Gyanendra sacked the prime minister, assumed power himself, and declared a state of emergency in the Himalayan kingdom. The army is controlled by the king.

The activist was also told that early on the day after the alleged shootings, the army had raided two dormitories at the college and picked up about 300 students, whose whereabouts are now unknown. "I have heard that they are being tortured in the army barracks at some unknown location," the activist said.

University students, she said, are a prime target of the monarch and his army because they have been at the forefront of the pro-democracy movement in Nepal.

In a statement, Gagan Kumar Thapa, a former general secretary of the Nepal Students Union, the student wing of the Nepali Congress-Democratic Party, said his life was "under severe threat" because he had advocated the creation of a republic in Nepal.

"My free movement has been curtailed. My family members are simultaneously receiving the threats and are passing through a mental trauma from the security personnel."

The king has said he assumed power because the government of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba had proved ineffective in dealing with Maoist rebels. More than 10,000 people have been killed in an insurgency begun in 1996 by the Communist Party of Nepal to achieve a communist republic. The party said in a statement that King Gyanendra sought to create a "medieval feudal autocracy."

Students and academics at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University held a public meeting to condemn the Nepali monarch and assured Nepali students present of full support of their cause.

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Section: International
Volume 51, Issue 25, Page A40

corruption, mayhem, and murder on india's campuses

2004-11-30T01:51:00.000-08:00

Student-government campaigns, following the lead of the national parties, take politics to a new low

By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in December 2004).

Lucknow, India

Rajpal Kashyap, a candidate for president of the Lucknow University Students' Union, arrived on the campus one sunny afternoon in October with an armed guard at his side.

Stepping out of a blue sport-utility vehicle, he walked confidently into a classroom and greeted about 40 supporters with a wide smile, his palms pressed together before him in the traditional Indian style.

A few paces away some 50 policemen, armed with rifles and long wooden staves called lathis, used for crowd control, stood near a jeep and a police van. The campaign season had already claimed two lives at Lucknow in three months -- including one just the night before -- and intimidation and harassment were rife on the campus. Elections were just 48 hours away.

Before the day was out, the officers had closed the campus to all nonstudents, locking the gates to prevent outsiders from entering. Then they checked ID's and allegedly roughed up at least one person who couldn't produce identification.

In India student-government elections are not for the faint of heart.

Beset with violence, intimidation, and corruption, campus politics have become increasingly dangerous. Historically, such problems have been most acute in the poorest states, like Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, where Lucknow is located. But even the wealthier regions are not immune.

On many campuses, it is not uncommon for student politicians to stay year after year, earning multiple degrees, so that they can continue to run for office. Nor is it rare to find candidates with lengthy criminal records involving illegal weapons and violence.

Clashes between student groups, and even murders, have become part of the political fabric during election season. Voter bribery is common, supported by the deep pockets of national political parties eager to make inroads among college students. It has gotten so bad that some states, in desperate attempts to restore order on campuses, have banned student elections.

Why have campus politics become so cutthroat? Primarily because throughout India, student elections are seen as steppingstones to national politics, and therefore a route to wealth and power. Scores of important political figures, including Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former prime minister, got their start in university campaigns.

That has been especially true since 1989, when the federal government reduced the minimum voting age for national elections from 21 to 18, the age at which most Indian students enter college. That made political parties even more interested in involving students, because they became a vital source of votes.

"The situation was already deteriorating on many campuses, and after that it really went downhill," says M.K. Desai, dean of N.M. College, in Bombay, where the Maharashtra State government banned campus elections in 1994, five years after the murder of a student leader.

Death Threats

One of 90 candidates for student body president at Lucknow, Mr. Kashyap, 28, a soft-spoken, mustachioed man of medium build, says he was provided an armed escort by the Lucknow police because rival candidates, and even rivals from within his own party, had threatened his life.

In July another student leader at the university, Upendra Singh was shot dead at point-blank range in a dormitory, apparently for reasons related to campus politics. His alleged killer, Aditya Mishra, another presidential aspirant, later surrendered to police. One day before Mr. Kashyap's campaign appearance with an armed guard, Manish Rai, a 23-year-old journalism student, was shot and killed when he was caught in the crossfire between supporters of two rival student leaders.

Mr. Rai's death marked the climax of three and a half months of fear unleashed on Lucknow by members of various student groups, who defaced public property, extorted money from businessmen and doctors at gunpoint, and forced the university to shut down classes with threats of violence. The only beneficiaries, it seems, were local suppliers of firearms.

Mr. Kashyap, who said he was worried but was not going to withdraw under threats, represents the Samajwadi Chhatra Sabha, which is affiliated with the Samajwadi Party, currently the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh.

With graduate degrees in social work and law, and currently enrolled in a graduate social-science program, Mr. Kashyap said his main goal was to end violence on campus. He plans to continue studying until he gets the nod from his parent party to stand for office at the state level.

Other candidates running for election also said they were campaigning for an end to the violence, as well as for better facilities. But in campaign speeches they rarely talked about those issues. Instead they engaged mainly in name-calling and criticizing their opponents about issues unrelated to the university. They also plastered building walls, buses, even private cars with posters, and traveled around the city in vans and buses with their supporters shouting into bullhorns.

Unlike Mr. Kashyap, many student-government candidates here have a history of run-ins with the police. Charges against them include attempted murder, rioting, illegal possession of firearms, and violations of the Uttar Pradesh Gangsters & Anti Social Elements Prevention Act and the Uttar Pradesh Control of Goondas Act. (Goonda is the Hindi word for thug or hooligan).

Like Mr. Kashyap, many other candidates here have received financial backing from major national political parties, which often provide muscle power for their activities, legal and otherwise.

"Politics is a full-time profession" in Uttar Pradesh, "and preparation for politics is a full-time profession in the universities here," says the Lucknow district's chief administrator, Aradhana Shukla. She should know. In the month leading up to the election, the feisty bureaucrat tried to stem criminal activity at Lucknow University by ordering raids on dormitories to confiscate arms and ammunition collected by some student leaders.

No Worries

Despite the bloodshed at Lucknow and on other campuses, India's politicians don't seem particularly worried. Though the annual ritual of student elections occasions soul-searching on television talk shows and in the local press, there has been no concerted effort to reform student politics.

In fact, last year, Mulayam Singh Yadav, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, ended a ban on student elections at Lucknow that had been imposed by a former chief minister in 1999. Speaking to a gathering of students, faculty members, and reporters, he said that he, too, had begun his political career as a student.

Turning to the university's vice chancellor, he asked rhetorically, "Do I look like a goonda to you?" It was a risky question, given that he, like many other politicians, has long been known to consort with suspected criminals.

If Lucknow officials had their way, they would ban elections on the campus for good. But that power, just as in the rest of India, is reserved for the state governments.

"When the [Uttar Pradesh] government banned elections, it was really peaceful on campus," says V.D. Mishra, the university's proctor, or president. "This year alone we have lost more than two months of study, as campaigning began at the beginning of the term itself in late July. ... But nobody asks us, of course."

While political corruption in the state is directly linked to poverty and low literacy levels, wealthier states, with higher literacy rates, are also plagued by campus violence. Kerala, the country's most literate state, finally forbade political activity on its campuses in July 2003.

Academics say the ban was long overdue. Since 1970 some 50 students have died and hundreds have been badly injured because of the violence endemic to campus politics in Kerala.

Meanwhile, party politics rules the day at universities in states without bans on campus campaigns.

In Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, an attack on a candidate and the murder of a former student-union leader in September forced the police to deploy more than 100 officers in riot gear until the elections were held.

This year, even in the Delhi University student-union elections, which are normally free of violence, campus officials were roughed up.

Though violence is rare, student campaigns at the elite university in India's capital are plagued by other problems. Financed by their national affiliates, student parties spend thousands of dollars on campaigns that disrupt campus life, mimicking the bribery and corruption that mar national politics.

Student elections "are a complete waste of money and time and other resources. I am not in favor of it. College life is meant for education," says Divya Dhar, a senior at the university's Sri Venkateshwara College.

Four years ago Rajiv Khanna, a Delhi law professor who is also the university's commissioner of student elections, helped create a code of conduct that declared that no candidate should spend more than about $200. Although the code was created in consultation with student groups, "that has not stopped anyone from spending much more than that," he says. In this year's elections, he estimates, the competing student groups spent a total of $133,000. "There is nothing we can do," he says.

During the September elections, Mr. Khanna says, he saw student groups giving away mobile-phone cards, chocolates, and coupons for liquor, among other freebies.

At Lucknow University, student leaders spent an estimated $444,000 on the elections this year.

Robbed of Educational Value

Despite such enormous sums in a country where the average annual urban family income is $2,800, student politicians in Lucknow and elsewhere deny that they receive outside assistance.

"We don't get money. We get support and nonmonetary resources to mobilize students," says Ashok Tanwar, president of the National Students Union of India, which is affiliated with the Congress (I) Party. "Candidates spend their own money." He was evasive as to what he meant by nonmonetary resources.

Mr. Khanna himself doesn't go so far as to condemn student politics. "We know that these students directly report to their political bigwigs and bosses and take directions and contributions from them, both of the monetary kind as well as strategic guidance," he says. "But we don't say anything, because then they would be disqualified from running for elections, and we don't want that. Elections are a healthy democratic process."

Others support university politics but believe that the money and violent tactics associated with student campaigns have robbed the experience of much of its educational value.

"Universities are nurseries for future politicians, and there is nothing wrong with them starting off at that level with the aim of joining mainstream politics," says Manish Tiwari, a doctoral student at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University who is conducting research on how voters' and candidates' castes influence election outcomes in the State of Rajasthan. "But, unfortunately, in the last decade the nurseries' crop has spoiled. Students' groups are blank in ideology and never address issues of national concern. These students have to ultimately deal with problems at the national level -- but they are woefully unequipped to do so."

Longtime observers say that in addition to money, outside political parties also give tacit approval to their student affiliates to indulge in extortion, as happened during the Lucknow elections. In return, the parties use their student wings during national and state elections, both for conventional canvassing and for more dubious purposes, like taking over polling booths to intimidate voters into choosing specific candidates.

Given their intimate connections with national politics, it is not surprising that student political parties pursue platforms virtually identical to those of their national counterparts. They rarely raise issues of direct concern to students, like housing shortages and the quality of cafeteria food. Instead, as national candidates do, they often urge students to vote for them because of their caste or religion. Indeed, student political parties often nominate candidates based on those attributes.

"In Rajasthan University's student-union elections, every nomination is decided on the basis of castes and even subcastes, just like in their state-level nominations," says Mr. Tiwari. "In the newspapers there, come election time you will see full-page advertisements by caste-based students' parties that are affiliated to political parties."

In 1990, in one of the more notorious incidents of caste-based politics on campus, a Delhi student, Rajiv Goswami, set himself on fire to protest the expansion of quotas to the backward castes. Mr. Goswami, who died last February after suffering over a decade of complications resulting from his burns -- and inspiring many copycats over the years -- won his campaign for a student-union post that year.

And if India's national parties don't seem to see anything wrong with known lawbreakers running for office -- in May's parliamentary elections, 16 percent of the candidates had criminal records -- why should students?

Bajrangi (Bajju) Singh, a presidential contender in Lucknow's student-union election, who represents a breakaway faction of the ruling Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, has eight cases pending against him, involving the detonation of crude bombs on the campus and attempted murder, according to police officials.

"I have taken part in serious students' struggles, and so I have been falsely charged," he says, echoing the defense commonly made by politicians at the national level. "That doesn't mean I am a criminal."

Likewise, Vijay (Tintoo) Singh, a candidate with a similar record, calls the charges against him "politically motivated."

Some Lucknow candidates have been at the university for as long as 13 years, earning not only bachelor's but also numerous master's degrees in order to continue their involvement in university politics while they wait to advance to the national level of their parties.

Once Idealistic

It was not always so. In the 1960s and the '70s, idealism pervaded campus politics. Just as in the United States, where the antiwar movement on campuses led to the building of public opinion against the Vietnam War, Indian students rose together in 1974 to protest corruption and the connections between politicians and black marketeers, who hoarded essential goods and sold them at exorbitant prices.

"The movement arose in the university dormitories of Gujarat and spread nationwide, so much so that former prime minister Indira Gandhi was forced to declare a state of emergency a year later, so threatened was she that she would be unseated," says Anand Kumar, a professor of political sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Mr. Kumar was president of the student union at Benaras Hindu University in 1972 and at Nehru in 1974.

The situation he refers to is considered by many to be Indian democracy's darkest hour. "It was classic anti-establishment politics then, because one political party, the Congress, dominated politics," says Mr. Kumar. "From 1977 onwards, when Indians voted in India's first non-Congress government, the quality of student politics began to decline. The classic anti-establishment position was no longer valid."

Ironically, then, the success of student idealism led indirectly to its decline, he says.

"Political parties, astonished by the students' successes, then started co-opting students to the point where students no longer represent a subculture," says Mr. Kumar. At the same time, he adds, nonpartisan solidarity has vanished over the years because of cleavages caused by caste politics, religious divisiveness, and the commercialization of education.

"The political parties are responsible for this," says Mr. Kumar.

And what of Mr. Kashyap? He won the election without harm befalling him or anyone else at Lucknow. Whether he can keep his promise to end election-related violence on the campus remains to be seen.

an american student gets an education in indian politics

2004-11-29T01:54:00.000-08:00

By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in December 2004).

Delhi, India

Last month Tyler Walker Williams, a 26-year-old graduate student who had earned his bachelor's degree at the University of California at Berkeley, campaigned to represent the School of Languages, Literature, and Culture Studies in the student union at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi.

Although he is American, Mr. Williams says he ran for office because he wanted to push for an increase in scholarships for deserving students and for improvements to the library. But he unwittingly kicked up a row at his university by entering the election, illustrating how closely student campaigns mirror national politics in India.

Just five months after the deposed Bharatiya Janata Party had protested the Congress (I) Party's possible selection of Italian-born Sonia Gandhi as India's prime minister, the party's student wing cried foul over Mr. Williams's nomination.

Arguing that the student union's constitution bars persons of foreign origin from seeking elected office, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad tried to block his campaign before it began. The student party also said it would file a case against Mr. Williams based on the Indian Constitution, which bars foreigners from competing in any elections.

Mr. Williams ran as a representative of the All India Students' Association, the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which calls for armed revolution to achieve class equality. His supporters brushed aside the protests, arguing that the student union did not bar any student, Indian or foreign, from campaigning for office.

In the end, the controversy fizzled out when Mr. Williams was defeated by the Parishad party's candidate. But he found his introduction to the hurly-burly of Indian politics an interesting learning experience.

"Although in the U.S. there are campus Republicans and Democrats, those groups are small and have virtually no involvement with national politics," Mr. Williams says. In India, however, the affiliation of student parties to national parties "is a good thing for the simple reason that politics on campus is connected to politics outside."

He cites the example of the Hindu-fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party government in India before it lost in May's national elections. "It wanted to and did change curricula and tried to get educational and cultural bodies running to its agenda," he explains.

In America, says Mr. Williams, students are not nearly as involved with the machinery of national politics as they are in India: "Students in the U.S. are difficult to mobilize. ... India is way ahead of the U.S. as far as student politics goes."

snap judgment: maximum city by suketu mehta

2004-11-01T06:05:00.000-08:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This brief review appeared in Newsweek International in November 2004).

Readers in the know have awaited this nonfiction paean to Mumbai, India's financial and film capital, since Mehta signed a two-book contract with Knopf in 1999. But they may be disappointed by his first full-length work. The winner of the Whiting Writers' Award and O. Henry Prize has written a well-researched but unsurprising account of what he considers Mumbai's eccentricities. But his self-centered, sometimes sanctimonious writing grows tiresome. Those looking for Mumbai's Dickens would do better to explore Salman Rushdie or Rohinton Mistry.

india fails to support disabled, says survey

2004-10-15T23:08:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in October 2004).

Indian higher-education institutions show scant regard for the educational rights of India's disabled, according to a recent survey of universities across the country by the National Center for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People.

Of 322 universities that were sent the research questionnaire, only 119 responded, and the survey found that only 0.1 percent of students enrolled at those universities had disabilities.

All higher-education institutions that receive financial aid from the government are supposed to reserve at least 3 percent of their seats for people with disabilities. The survey found that 24 universities were clearly violating this rule, while 7 categorically stated that they did not admit students with disabilities. All the universities surveyed receive government support.

According to Javed Abidi, founder of the center, there are approximately 24 million disabled young people in India.

"Of the total youth in India, 6 percent have access to higher education, which means 1.44 million disabled youth should also have access to higher education, but our survey found that only 1,635 disabled students were enrolled in the colleges we surveyed, which is way off the national average," Mr. Abidi said.

He added that it was not enough to have seats reserved for students with disabilities. "What's the point in having a quota if you don't have the facilities?" he asked. "I have found that even when disabled students do get admitted to universities, many drop out after a few months because it is just too difficult and inconvenient for them." Most universities are unaware of or decide not to take advantage of a government program that gives universities grants to make campuses accessible and to provide special equipment for disabled people, he added.

The survey found that only 18 universities reported that they provided appropriate desks and chairs for students with disabilities, 11 provided wheelchairs, 9 provided access to tricycles, 16 had special computer software, and 10 provided access to books in Braille.

no longer dreaming of america

2004-10-08T23:04:00.000-07:00

In India and China, far fewer students consider the U.S. the best place to go

By Paul Mooney and Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in October 2004).

Sun Zhi graduated from China's prestigious Tsinghua University in 2002, one year after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Yet despite getting a scholarship from an American university, the computer-science major was turned down for a visa by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

"It's all because of 9/11," he says with a trace of anger in his voice. "Had I applied one year earlier, I'd have easily gotten a visa."

Rejected twice, Mr. Sun eventually gave up his dream of studying in the United States. "Many of my classmates have changed their plan to go to American universities to earn a Ph.D. due to the tightening of visa approvals," he says. "Since it has become so difficult, we think it's a waste of time to apply."

For more and more international students like Mr. Sun, studying in America seems to be a fading hope -- and a fading interest. China and India, which supply more than one-third of all graduate students to American universities, are being watched particularly closely by worried admissions officers in the United States.

The number of students from China applying to American graduate programs for the fall 2004 term plunged 45 percent from last year, according to a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools released in September. India experienced a 30-percent drop. (About 80 percent of Chinese and Indian students in the United States are enrolled in graduate school.) The total number of international graduate-student applications fell by 28 percent.

While concerns over visa delays and rejections seem to be the main reason for the dip in applications to American graduate schools, other factors come into play as well. The stagnant U.S. economy has shrunk the available pool of financial aid for graduate students and lessened students' prospects of finding good jobs in the United States after they earn their degree. China has pumped more money into its own graduate programs in recent years, making the idea of studying at home more appealing to students. In India, a booming economy has led many recent college graduates into the work force instead of to graduate school.

Competition Grows

One trend particularly troubles American universities: increased competition from other countries. Australia, Britain, and Canada are leading the pack, although some Asian and South Pacific countries, such as New Zealand, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore, also have their eyes on becoming regional hubs for international students.

"Earlier the default choice for most top students was the U.S.," says a spokesman for Infozee, a New Delhi-based visa-counseling center for students. "It isn't anymore."

While American institutions tend to market themselves individually or in small groups, other English-speaking countries that have largely public university systems use umbrella organizations to promote all of their institutions through university fairs and advertisements. By using a one-stop-shopping approach, they say, they make applying easier and less intimidating for students.

"The impression the U.S. universities give is that they aren't that interested in getting foreign students," says Pragyat Singh, office manager of Middlesex University in India, which helps students seeking admission to the British university.

"We, on the other hand, provide door-to-door service," says Mr. Singh. "We have a number of offices in India to counsel students right here. Students know me, they can meet me and sort out all their problems. Besides, I can take a spot decision. We are like an education shop and help with everything from accommodations to scholarships. I know of no U.S. universities that do so much."

Each competitor has also learned to play up its strengths. Australia and Canada stress that tuition and cost of living there are significantly less expensive than in the United States. Britain and New Zealand note that certain of their degrees take less time to earn than they would at an American institution. Canada and Britain have experimented with less-restrictive work regulations for students or recent graduates, which are more lenient than what the United States offers.

Boon to Canada

Students have paid attention. Qu Yuan, a sociology major who graduated from Peking University this year, says many of her classmates are turning away from American universities.

"Canada is cheaper and the U.K. requires a shorter time to get a Ph.D. degree," she says, "so many of my classmates are considering these countries."

Anecdotal evidence from admissions officers and academic organizations suggests that fewer international students may enroll in American universities this fall, while early signs indicate that the United States' main competitors expect to see an increase in international enrollments.

In Canada, universities and colleges say that applications from international students for both undergraduate and graduate schools were up for the fall 2004 term, although some campuses reported a significant drop in the number of applications from China.

University officials attribute the overall increase partly to September 11 fallout, but believe that active recruiting has been a bigger influence.

Six years ago the Canadian government created a marketing arm for colleges and universities to promote themselves jointly, and at least five major federally run programs put information into the hands of potential international students. The country has also pumped millions of dollars into university research, which has helped lure international graduate students. The government recently created 2,000 full scholarships for Ph.D. students and another 2,000 for master's students.

"There's a huge infusion of money. ..." says Frieda Granot, dean of graduate studies at the University of British Columbia, one of Canada's big research institutions. "That helps with recruiting the best students." Her institution's international-student enrollments have risen rapidly since 2001. "Last year it was almost unmanageable," she says.

Deepinder Singh, who recently graduated from University College of the Cariboo, opted for a degree in computer science in Canada after checking out Australia and the United States. He says he found that both the quality of education and the quality of life in Canada were uniformly good.

"Why not live in the best place?" he says. "I've found that the people who live here take the time to be friendly and listen to you." Plus, he says, studying in Canada was more affordable than other countries would have been.

Britain also expects international enrollments to rise this year. The number of students applying from China rose 4.5 percent for the fall 2004 term, to 8,261, according to the Universities & Colleges Admissions Service, the central organization through which all applications are processed. The number of applicants from India rose 8.5 percent, to 2,135.

Working Hard

Simon Willis, director of the international office at the University of York, which has seen a steady growth in international students in recent years, says many universities "have been working very hard to build their profiles. We visit countries that we recruit in, to build links with institutions."

Like Canada, Britain has also brought a more coordinated approach to international-student recruitment in recent years. In 1999 the government created the Prime Minister's Initiative, which brought universities and the government together to market higher education in Britain, and created a single Web site through which students can research academic programs, application procedures, and financial aid. It is currently developing an online scholarship database.

Australia's success in marketing itself as a higher-education destination to prospective students over the past 10 years is a matter of record. Among the English-speaking world's major education exporters, it has posted some of the past decade's heftiest gains, with Chinese and Indian student numbers driving much of the strongest growth.

Australian recruiters speak of their marketing style as a mix of strategies, including advertising, education events, Web-marketing, and, most importantly, aggressive follow-up for students who express interest in studying there.

According to IDP Education Australia, the umbrella organization responsible for marketing Australian universities abroad, the number of students from China grew 18 percent, to 26,400, between 2003 and 2004. The number of students from India rose 21 percent, to 14,870.

Abhilash Puljal, an Indian student who earned an undergraduate degree in commerce at DePaul University in 2001, opted for graduate school in Australia. He says the fallout from September 11, in which prospective employers in the United States were reluctant to hire him despite a one-year work option he had on his visa, persuaded him to look elsewhere.

"The world is moving to the Asia-Pacific region anyway, isn't it?" says Mr. Puljal, who now lives in Australia, where he expects to complete his master's degree in international business studies later this year at the University of Sydney.

Visa-issuance statistics from the State Department show a significant decline since 2001, when 32,867 visas were issued to Chinese students and 28,344 were issued to Indian students. As of mid-September 2004, those figures were 25,310 and 21,755 respectively. Given the ever-growing competition for foreign students, will the United States ever hit 2001-level figures again? "I would hate to have to predict the future with regard to student-visa applications," says an official at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, who did not want to be identified. "All told, I would think that we have passed the high-water mark."

Changes at Home

While students in China and India are looking elsewhere to study, that shift doesn't fully explain why fewer are interested in studying in the United States.

Many students in China are simply choosing to stay home. In recent years, the government has pumped a great deal of money into graduate education in the sciences, so that students who may not qualify for admissions to a top-tier American university are more likely to consider continuing their studies in China. The Ministry of Education reports that 330,000 Chinese students intend to enroll in graduate programs in China in 2004, up 20 percent from last year.

"There is no doubt that there are greater opportunities in China for both undergraduate- and graduate-level study than what existed a few years ago," says the U.S. Embassy official. "Furthermore, the quality of education offered at Chinese colleges and graduate schools has also improved, narrowing the differences between what is available locally and internationally."

Media reports have also shown that Chinese people returning home with graduate degrees are finding that their foreign credentials are no longer as valuable on the Chinese job market as they used to be. "This is causing a shift in the economic calculations about the value of a foreign degree," the official said.

India's situation is somewhat different. A robust economy, rather than improved graduate schools, has proved to be the main lure in keeping students from leaving.

India's economic liberalization of the early 1990s has boosted consumerism, leading to an increase in the number of restaurants, malls, multinational fast-food outlets, and mobile-phone companies. The boom in the outsourcing of IT services and customer-relations call centers means that high-paying jobs with upward mobility are readily available for young, inexperienced graduates.

The Job Factor

With all these options students are looking to get ahead in their careers rather than continuing to study. "Earlier if you didn't do a master's degree it was seen as a negative, but now parents are not averse to sending their kids out to the workplace," says Vijaya Khandavilli, educational adviser at the U.S. Educational Foundation of India.

K.N. Gupta, an engineering professor who oversees the training and placement division at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology's Bombay branch, has seen this play out in the institute's classrooms.

About 40 percent of the institute's graduates went abroad this year, which was significantly less than in previous years, he says. Next year he expects only 20 percent to go overseas.

"It's not that they are not getting visas," he says. "It's just that there are now a lot of technology companies, including MNC's [multinational companies], who have offices here, and decent jobs here are now almost guaranteed."

"The top, top students still go," he adds, "but the next level, who are also very good, just stay on here to work."

A richer India has also meant that more parents are paying for their children's education abroad. That means the absolute numbers of Indian students going abroad is climbing, but the new applicants are looking for cost-effective universities rather than chasing scholarships. That has been a boon to Australia and Canada.

Ms. Khandavilli says the U.S. economic slump has also affected Indian students. American universities have had to tighten their budgets and reduce the amount of financial aid they offer. Most Indians going to the United States rely on scholarships, and conventional wisdom is that a hefty scholarship can influence the visa department to look kindly on a student's application.

"Doctoral students are still getting funding, but scholarships have declined for master's students," says Ms. Khandavilli. "And U.S. students are also competing for these funds as, due to the economic downturn there, students are choosing to stay on" in school rather than enter the job market.

The weak economy in the United States also discourages students from going there to study because it prompts worries about their job prospects after graduation.

"The primary reason people went to the U.S. was because they had the chance of settling down there to the big American dream," says the Infozee spokesman. "That's looking pretty tough these days, and while there is a global economic downturn, the one in the U.S. is much more hyped."

Not That Bad?

While the United States may never regain the market share it once had, it is unlikely to lose its dominance, especially at the graduate level, according to educational advisers abroad. About 600,000 international students currently study in the United States. Britain enrolls less than half that figure. Australia and Canada enroll 130,000 and 106,000 respectively. (Canadian figures do not include the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 students in vocational schools or studying English as a second language in short-term programs.)

Two reasons why these advisers think the United States will remain the most popular choice among students are the quality and quantity of its academic programs, particularly in the sciences.

Thus, despite the perceived difficulties, America remains the top choice for many Chinese and Indian students, even if this means delaying their studies for a year or two until they feel it is easier to get a visa.

"Lots of people still want to go to the United States compared with other countries," says Julie Zhu, a Chinese student who hopes to study journalism in the United States, adding an often-heard claim that England and Australia don't offer Chinese students much in the way of scholarships, a major concern of many who often cannot afford the high cost of overseas study. "The U.S. is the biggest place offering financial aid, and U.S. universities have a better reputation."

There are a few positive signs already on the horizon for American universities. The number of student visas issued in China this year is above last year's figure, although the number issued to Indian students is down.

The New Oriental School, famous for its Graduate Record Examination cram classes, says student numbers were down last year, but are increasing again. During the Chinese Spring Festival break, classes were packed.

"There were 300 students in my class," says Ms. Zhu. "And everyone was on time all the time."

Karen Birchard, David Cohen, and Aisha Labi contributed to this article.

bangladesh university to investigate students' complaints of islamic content in physics course

2004-09-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2004).

A physics professor at a university in Bangladesh has been told to temporarily stop teaching after some students complained that he had asked women in his classroom to wear a veil and had given all students an assignment to write an essay glorifying Allah.

Some students at Jahangirnagar University, in Dhaka, also said that the professor, Obaidur Rahman, had threatened to stop teaching them physics if they did not accede to his demands.

The professor's supervisor said the accusations were being investigated. "The university has set up a committee to verify if these things are true because we don't know what actually happened," said Mir Akramuzzaman, the physics department's chairman. "In fact, today some students came out in support of that professor, saying he did not ask students to do these things." The chairman added that the committee is expected to make a decision next month.

Religion is a divisive issue in Bangladesh, which is about 83 percent Muslim and 16 percent Hindu, and the University of Dhaka, the country's largest higher-education institution, is often a focal point of sectarian conflict. Classes were suspended there in March, amid widespread protests and a faculty boycott that followed the stabbing of a literature professor who is an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalist groups..

According to local news reports, Jahangirnagar University's vice chancellor, Mustahidur Rahman, has expressed concern over the accusations against the physics professor, saying that no teacher has the authority to impose a dress code on students. The reports also said that the professor could lose his job if the allegations prove to be true.

teaching tech

2004-09-27T23:09:00.000-07:00

Why have so many Indian engineers succeeded around the world? The Indian Institutes of Technology may be one answer.

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal in September 2004).

KANPUR, INDIA -- "Welcome to the Machine," Pink Floyd's rock anthem, blares from a dormitory on the 1,055-acre Indian Institute of Technology campus here.

The song could well be the anthem of the school, and of the six other IITs in India that are churning out top-notch engineers with a regularity that thrills corporations around the world. The government-sponsored institutes are considered among the most demanding engineering schools anywhere, and their alumni can be found in top executive positions in companies around the world.

Rajat Gupta, former managing director of McKinsey & Co.; Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone Group PLC; Victor Menezes, senior vice chairman of Citigroup Inc.; Kanwal Rekhi, venture capitalist and founder of Excelan Inc.; Rono Dutta, former president of UAL Corp.'s United Airlines; Rakesh Gangwal, former chief executive of US Airways; and Vinod Khosla, partner in Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. -- all are graduates of India's IITs.

Global Presence

Such success is the reason IIT graduates have such a high profile globally. "The brand is, by now, so well established that in the future, too, IIT graduates will continue to be very successful. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy," says Nandan Nilekani, chief executive officer of the Indian software-services company Infosys Technolgies Ltd. and a 1978 IIT Bombay graduate.

At present, about 25,000 IIT graduates are working in the U.S., according to the Economic Times, an Indian financial newspaper. Over the years, Cisco Systems Inc., in San Jose, Calif., says it has hired more than 1,000 for its operations, and the director of a major U.S. research firm says the IITs are one of its most important sources of research talent, both in the U.S. and in Asia.

In the past, IITs graduated an average total of 2,500 engineers each year. But an increase in space of about 2,000 students over the past few years means that if all the students admitted in 2004 graduate -- 95% usually do -- the world will be nearly 4,500 IIT engineers richer in 2008.

If that number seems large, consider this: In 2004, 175,000 aspirants took the Joint Entrance Examination, or JEE, which governs admission to the IITs. Only 2.6% of those were admitted, and it's not uncommon for Indian applicants to fail to get into the IITs but win admission to top U.S. engineering colleges.

Tough Test

"The JEE is the toughest undergraduate entrance exam of its kind in the world, and it acts as a guillotine at the IITs' entrance," says Sandipan Deb, author of "The IITians" and a graduate of IIT Kharagpur. "So what you get are extremely high-quality engineers."

Ramanan Raghavendran, managing director at TH Lee Putnam Ventures, a New York private-equity firm, says: "For a technology company looking to quickly find 100 engineers, there really is only one place in the world to do it: India. There are just more engineers there than in the U.S." And these engineers are actually contributing to the long-term success of the U.S. economy, he says, because of the needed talent they
provide.

Best of the Best

"What you have at the end of the IIT filtering process, followed by the further filter of those who 'make it' to the U.S., is the creme de la creme of Indian engineers," says Mr. Raghavendran. "If you applied a similar filter in the U.S. -- find the best engineers from the top 10 engineering programs in the U.S. -- you'd find an equally brilliant and
qualified group of people."

IIT Kanpur has a particularly impressive record. Rated the top IIT by the domestic news magazine India Today for the past three years, the institute, like all the IITs, emphasizes technical creativity and innovation. "The importance is not in just getting the right answer, it is how you get the right answer," says Sanjay Dhande, Kanpur's director.

"Problem solving is the crux of training. We teach [students] to think creatively, independently, aggressively and provocatively." He adds that it is these qualities that make IIT graduates successful not just as engineers, but also as bankers and corporate executives.

But the Kanpur campus is also basking in the glory of the 2002 invention of a "primality algorithm" by Prof. Manindra Agrawal and two of his students. The algorithm, which enables a computer to determine quickly whether or not a number is a prime, is considered crucial to cryptography.

The technical education is formidable. "The course is extremely analytical and very math-based. Not everyone gets an A, only 10% of the class, perhaps, can get an A, so it is extremely competitive," says Mr. Nilekani, the Infosys chief executive.

Engineering, Always

But unlike engineering schools in the U.S., which often offer courses in the arts and humanities, the IITs focus on technical education and engineering basics to the exclusion of nearly everything else. So, while the number of credits or the course load might be the same as that in a U.S. program, the nature of the course load at an IIT is engineering,
engineering and more engineering.

Mr. Raghavendran says he scored well enough on the IIT entrance exam to let him choose his campus in the IIT system, but instead he decided to pursue an undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. "I view an American or even a British undergraduate degree as providing a far more well-rounded education, and also one that offers much flexibility," Mr. Raghavendran says.

That may be true, but for many Indians the IITs are a ticket to upward mobility. "Even freshman IITians often walk around with the attitude that they have made it -- a kind of arrogance, really," says Rukmini Bhaya Nair, a professor of English at IIT Delhi. "They are like motivated racehorses."

R. Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Tata Sons, a diversified group of companies in India, and an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, who has studied the "IIT brand," says that increasingly, even engineers from other Indian universities now do their master's degrees at the IITs. The result: more IIT-trained engineers.

"There is no doubt that we will only do better in the world," says IIT Kanpur's Mr. Dhande. "Our graph is always going up." But he is far from complacent. He believes the IITs need to focus more on research and enhance the nontechnical, creative skills of their graduates. "In the next 25 years, it is people with creative talent that will have more
opportunities," he says.

Mr. Raghavendran couldn't agree more. "The IITs need to turn out better-rounded graduates," he says, "not just better engineers."

unmelodious

2004-09-09T02:49:00.000-07:00

A much-hyped debut from a young Indian writer is a dud

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in September 2004).

The Last Song of Dusk by Siddharth Dhanvant Shangvi. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. £12.99 ($23.32)

"SHE LOVED MOST the lusciousness of his buttocks, their dimpled circumference, as though God had created them only so she might pull him farther into herself and then muffle her rapturous pleasure as she had, only a few hours back, muffled her anguish."

This sentence isn't, as you might imagine, from a newly discovered novel published by the estate of the late historical-romance pulp novelist Barbara Cartland. It is from the debut novel of Indian-born, 27-year-old Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, who is being hailed as the next Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Milan Kundera, depending on which press agent the reviewer has been listening to. It has also nabbed a Betty Trask Award in Britain, for first novels by authors under the age of 35.

Don't believe the hype. The Last Song of Dusk has no redeeming qualities. The book is inundated with purple prose, unconvincing period dialogue and all manner of couplings described in sentences that could occupy the first 20 spots of the British Literary Review's annual "Bad Sex" prize. Nobody in this novel is plain or ordinary, a little bit evil or a little bit good. Every character, by description, is the most beautiful and good or the most evil and hideous. But to the reader, all of them are most annoying.

The novel follows the married life of Anuradha Gandharva, née Patwardhan, a woman so beautiful (and unaware of it) that many young men in the Sonnets Society in her town claim her as their muse. As if that weren't enough, she also sings like a dream, so much so that "even the moon listens."

She marries Vardhaman, a doctor who is also an amazing storyteller. They have a son, who at the ripe old age of 18-or-so months, starts to sing songs of such sweetness that "the canary traders and the patrician widows, the females of flexible morals and the asexual philanthropists, upon gauging the first measure of his bizarrely sweet voice, would rush to the garden of Gandharva's Dwarika house and listen with their eyes closed, and without the slightest drift of concentration."

Inevitably, tragedy interrupts this idyll, and the Gandharvas' lives are never the same again. In steps Anuradha's orphaned cousin, Nandini, who at the age of 14 "was stunning any bloody way you looked at her."

She also walks on water, is an amazing painter and later has sex with man, woman and panther. One can accept all that with a little willing suspension of disbelief--here a very strong act of will indeed. But not even the most willing reader will believe her speech, which is supposed to reflect her English upbringing.

Shangvi has left nothing out of his story, which plunges from high melodrama into farce, skips through the dark passageways and torn bodices of the gothic, with a sickening dose of exoticism and bad writing thrown in along the way. Like a greedy boy given a huge sack of candy, he's snatched at everything--vanilla, coffee, lemon, kiwi, chocolate and peanut butter. The result, as expected, is a bad stomach.

indian official whose university reforms have irked the opposition faces defamation lawsuit

2004-09-07T23:13:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2004).

A Hindu-supremacist group has filed a criminal defamation lawsuit against India's minister in charge of education for suggesting that the group was involved in the 1948 assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the revered architect of Indian independence.

The group, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, known as the RSS, filed the lawsuit in Haryana State, which borders New Delhi, and has threatened to file similar suits across India, a step that would require the minister to make personal appearances in each court.

The minister, Arjun Singh, said last month that if the RSS's "biggest achievement was the killing of Gandhi, then you can expect what national purpose it can serve." The RSS, the ideological backbone of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which ran the previous government, first demanded an apology and then filed the lawsuit.

Mr. Singh, who as the minister of human-resource development oversees the Department of Education, did not apologize. Instead, he issued a written statement saying that the RSS's "philosophy of hate and violence" had killed Gandhi, who was shot to death by a Hindu fanatic.

Mr. Singh also said that his conviction that the RSS had played a role in the assassination had been strengthened over the years "because of the various acts members of this organization (RSS) inflicted on the society."

"I am aware of their (RSS) expertise in murder and mayhem," he added.

The RSS dismissed Mr. Singh's statement as "mere rhetoric."

"We still believe he is blaming the RSS, and that is a patent lie," said Ram Madhav, the RSS spokesman. "We won't take it lying down."

He added that the RSS had filed the lawsuit in criminal court because "this is not about monetary compensation." If found guilty, he said, Mr. Singh could be imprisoned.

The RSS and the Bharatiya Janata Party have taken aim at Mr. Singh because he has reversed a number of BJP policies since he took office following his Congress Party's victory in national elections in May.

Among other things, Mr. Singh has revoked a drastic tuition cut that the previous government forced upon the country's six prestigious management institutes; scrapped a controversial order, also issued by the BJP government, that required private donations to public universities to be routed through a special government agency; and allowed India's universities to seek collaborations with their foreign counterparts without obtaining the government's permission.

In addition, Mr. Singh has ordered the replacement of high-school history textbooks that the previous government had changed to reflect a Hindu-supremacist viewpoint.

The RSS's spokesman, Mr. Madhav, said that those actions were part of a "political vendetta" by Mr. Singh.

The case will be heard on November 11.

india's universities are given a free hand to seek foreign partnerships

2004-08-23T23:15:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in August 2004).

India's universities no longer must obtain permission from the education ministry to seek collaborations with their foreign counterparts. In yet another step to restore autonomy to the nation's higher-education institutions, the government on Friday withdrew a policy, established in 2003 by the previous government, that made such permission mandatory.

The policy shift comes as India prepares to join the World Trade Organization next year. As part of that move, India will be allowed to operate educational institutions abroad, but it will have to open up its education sector to foreign institutions.

Several countries have already approached the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management about forging partnerships.

The technology institutes are in talks with Singapore about collaborations with their counterparts there. Other countries said to be interested in partnerships are Mauritius, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates. Egypt is talking with the business schools about engaging their help to set up management institutes.

India's Ministry of Human Resource Development, which supervises education, has taken a series of steps to bolster the autonomy of universities since May, when a new government, led by the Congress Party, came to power. One of the first measures was to reinstate the authority of the Indian Institutes of Management to set their own fees. The new government also scrapped a controversial policy that required all private donations to public universities to be routed through a government agency.

indian government reverses practice of controlling donations to universities

2004-08-02T23:16:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in August 2004).

India's new education minister, Arjun Singh, has scrapped a controversial order, issued by the previous government in 2003, that said all private donations to public universities had to be routed through a special government agency.
The previous government's order had irked potential donors in the United States. The Indian expatriates there worried that the government would interfere in the use of funds that they had donated for specific purposes. They also said that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service would have denied them tax deductions for the donations because it did not recognize a foreign government as a charitable cause.

In the year of its existence, the Indian government agency collected only $37.
Top engineering and business institutes in India rely heavily on their alumni for donations. At the Indian Institutes of Technology, for instance, as much as 10 percent to 15 percent of the budget is covered by gifts from expatriates.
Scrapping the old policy "will remove misgivings" among potential donors, said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys, a software-services giant here. Mr. Nilekani has contributed $4.9-million to IIT's Bombay campus, his alma mater.
Some critics of the old policy have said that its real purpose was to enable the government to keep tabs on funds from abroad that were flowing to Islamic schools, called madrassas.

Others said the old policy was an attempt to use donations to promote the previous government's Hindu fundamentalist brand of education and research.

new official rescinds tuition cuts imposed on top indian business schools by previous government

2004-07-16T23:18:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in July 2004).

India's new education minister has revoked a drastic tuition cut forced upon the country's six prestigious management institutes by the previous government.

The cuts had been widely protested, with opponents arguing that they would lead to a decline in academic quality due to a loss of revenue at the Indian Institutes of Management.

India elected a new government in June, and Arjun Singh, the new minister in charge of education, reassured academics that he had no intention of continuing the previous government's higher-education policies, which many critics considered intrusive and controversial. He also introduced a loan program for needy students at the institutes.

"If we had to cut fees, then our revenue would have been affected and in the process our dependence on government grants would have increased," said Bakul Dholakia, director of the IIM campus in Ahmedabad. That was clearly an indirect mechanism of establishing control over us."

The previous government had said that annual tuition and living costs at the institutes were "exorbitant," and ordered that annual tuition be reduced to $660, from $3,320. Institute administrators, students, alumni, and Indian businesses said the loss of that revenue would hurt the quality of instruction and facilities at the institutes.

The institutes are technically public institutions, but over the years they have developed into semiautonomous bodies administered by a board of governors.

international canvas

2004-07-08T23:20:00.000-07:00

With new records set by international auction prices, coupled with heists and forgeries, the verdict is in: Indian art is sizzling hot.

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in July 2004).

AT CHRISTIE'S New York auction last September, Indian painter Tyeb Mehta's Celebration went for a whopping $317,500, while 89-year-old maestro Maqbool Fida Husain sold his painting of bulls for $107,550. That's not all. At Sotheby's March auction in New York this year, the late Francis Newton Souza's Mystic Repast sold for $153,600. Closer to home, 76-year-old Akbar Padamsee's Head brought in $68,000 at Christie's March auction in Hong Kong. And in May, 82-year-old abstract painter Sayed Haider Raza set a new domestic record when his Bindu Bija-Mantra was sold for 6.8 million rupees ($147,800) in an on-line auction on Saffronart.com, a Mumbai-based art portal and trading company.

With half a dozen Indian artists crossing the $100,000 barrier, thieves and forgers have also sprung into action. In the latest heist, in mid-May, burglars removed more than 30 canvases stocked at Sahitya Kala Parishad's New Delhi art gallery from their frames, rolled them up and escaped. Earlier, two paintings sold by a Mumbai gallery as the work of 64-year-old revered painter Anjolie Ela Menon's were found to be forgeries. The discovery shook the Indian art scene. Gallery owners, however, say these are the growing pains of a budding art industry that lacks the documentation of artistic works found in more developed markets. And the incidents have helped to generate the kind of buzz that money can't buy, making Indian artwork "hot property" in more ways than one.

Why now? The obvious answer, in India, is the economy. The middle class is growing fast and has more disposable income than before. Also, says Sonia Ballaney of New Delhi's Vadehra Gallery, "there is a better, upper-middle class, where the awareness and interest is much more."

But as the Christie's and Sotheby's auctions demonstrate, international interest in Indian art is also growing. "International interest in Indian art began with auctions in the mid-1990s in London and New York by both Christie's and Sotheby's," says Mallika Sagar, Christie's representative in India. Since then, adds Sagar, there has been a continuing effort by both Christie's and Sotheby's and several smaller auction houses in the international market, as well as more gallery and museum shows.

"Over the last five years there have been many international exhibitions," echoes Dinesh Vazirani, founder of Saffronart.com. That has resulted in an increased international awareness of Indian art, he says. Nonresident Indians, or NRIs, "have accumulated wealth, and art seems to be a bridge to them to their home country." Sagar agrees, commenting that "NRIs are the strongest sector of the market in numbers and dollars spent," and noting that there are important collectors in the United States, Britain, Hong Kong and Singapore. But interest isn't limited to ethnic Indians. The buyer of Mehta's Celebration, for instance, was not of Indian origin.

Business is also being helped by greater openness in the market. In the past, collectors found it difficult to buy Indian art as the domestic scene was governed by "who knows whom," says Sagar. Tough foreign-exchange rules also hindered purchases. "Now [buyers] have access to works on the open market. It's a more transparent process, they can look at good-quality work, a range of work and the logistics of buying are easy."

The Internet has played a big role in making the process more transparent, says Vazirani, and has given buyers access to data that drives home art's value as an investment. As there are usually more collectors than connoisseurs in the art world, it's no surprise the surging interest in modern Indian art is at least partly fuelled by financial considerations.

"Because of hard public-auction data, people are convinced it's a good investment," says Vazirani. "[Prices for] Indian art increased about 20%, compounded annually, over the last 40 years . . . We've been approached by many wealth-management companies to find out how they can put a percentage of their clients' money into art, like they do into commodities or stocks."

So far, almost all the works that have approached or broken the $100,000 barrier are by artists from the Progressive Group, which emerged at the time of India's independence in 1947 and began the modernist movement in India. The group's founding members include luminaries like Souza, Raza, Husain and the late Krishnaji Howlaji Ara and Hari Ambadas Gade, who sought to break away from realism. The second-generation members include Mehta, Padamsee and Ram Kumar, who transform landscapes into abstract shapes. Like Europe's modernists, the progressives rebelled against traditional techniques. "Today we paint with absolute freedom for content and technique," reads the group's 1948 manifesto.

Apart from its intrinsic qualities, art by the Progressive Group is increasing in value as the members age and their productivity wanes, creating a shortage of supply as demand heats up. Several members have already died and the rest are in their 70s and 80s. Another reason for the increased value is that the buyers' profile has changed, says Vazirani. Since the late 1990s, more young buyers have emerged with more daring tastes.

Beyond the Progressives, gallery owners are excited about artists like 67-year-old Arpita Singh, who is concerned with female identity, and Anjolie Ela Menon, who was trained in Mumbai and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Also attracting interest are Jogen Chowdhury, seen as a "magical realist," and K.G. Subramanyan, who have sold works for as much as $25,000. Younger buyers, looking for investments that could potentially generate a high return for a smaller initial outlay, are paying "aggressive" prices for works by artists who are now in their 30s and 40s, says Vazirani.

Outside India, Talwar Gallery in New York promotes avant-garde Indian artists to a global contemporary audience and counts major museums and Western art collectors amongst its clients. "Art has to stand on its own to engage in a wider dialogue with a global audience and not get quarantined by the passport of the artist," says Deepak Talwar, who opened the gallery six years ago in Manhattan. Talwar points to the way that works by Indian artists, such as the distilled minimalism of Nasreen Mohamedi, "resonate with issues that traverse cultural barriers and have found an audience in the West at affordable prices. An entire exhibition of these artists can be collected for the price of a single work of their contemporaries in the West." Talwar Gallery's exhibitions attract mostly non-Indians and the visitors include curators from The Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Museum, The Hirschorn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art.

This is just the beginning, if other Asian markets are anything to go by. According to Sagar at Christie's, the major established artists from India's Progressives are still hovering around the $100,000 barrier, while their counterparts in the older art markets of the region--like China and Southeast Asia--are selling works for $250,000-750,000. Chinese and Southeast Asian art commands higher prices, Sagar says, "because they have been in the auction circuit much longer than Indian art," and "developed strong and long-standing support from Indonesian and Chinese collectors." That's a good sign for collectors of Indian art.

india's quiet revolution

2004-06-17T23:24:00.000-07:00

The growing popularity of mortgage financing in India will do more than just enable millions to become first-time homeowners. It will deepen the financial market, boost the housing and construction industries and spur economic growth

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in June 2004 ).

SURESH VARMA, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who runs a small advertising company, recently splurged on a 3.5 million rupee ($77,000) home in the upmarket New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon, for which he took a home loan of 2.5 million rupees. Varma began his career living in a two-room house and driving a beaten-up scooter. Now, he owns a (financed) fancy Honda City car and a plush three-bedroom apartment. His father, who is a retired central-government employee, isn't too happy at the amount of debt his son has taken on. "What if his business goes through an extended downturn?" he wonders.

Sunila Awasthi, a 35-year-old New Delhi lawyer who earns a little over 100,000 rupees a month, had always dreamed of a top-of-the-line car. So, recently, she decided to buy a 1.5 million rupee Honda CRV, a model just introduced in India, becoming probably one of the first owners of the luxury sport utility vehicle in the city. To buy the car she borrowed approximately 800,000 rupees from a bank, something her mother's generation would never have dreamed of doing. Credit was considered evil and creditors devils incarnate.

But times and attitudes have changed. Varma, Awasthi and millions of others of the same age group or younger, don't believe in waiting for tomorrow to buy a house or a car or expensive home-entertainment system. Unlike their parents they don't believe in saving up for decades. They want the good life now--and that desire is driving a revolution in consumer finance that will help millions of Indians become homeowners.

"The traditional value system involved saving for the future and for one's children," says K. Cherian Varghese, chairman and managing director, of the Corporation Bank. "But there is a shift in the thinking of the middle class. They want a better quality of life today and things like a scooter and a refrigerator, which were once considered luxuries, are now considered necessities. Also, more and more people are graduating from the low-income group to the middle class," he adds.

BORROW AND SPEND

Following India's economic liberalization since the early 1990s, consumers not only have a mind-boggling array of goods and services to choose from, but also the means to acquire them. And housing finance is probably the fastest-growing segment in consumer lending. "Borrowing today in India is a means of achieving independence and success and borrowing for a home is looked at very positively," says Rajan Sastri, research head at Indiaproperties, a property-listing-services company.

Ten-or-so years ago, housing and other personal loans carried interest rates of 19%-21%, but now housing loans come as low as 7%. And with the government offering tax rebates on the principal and interest, the effective rate for the customer can be as low as 5%-6%. While rates aren't expected to fall further--in fact they are expected to rise in the near term, especially in the context of rising oil prices--the housing-finance sector will continue to flourish because there is still surplus liquidity in the market and the tax rebates will stay in place, at least until the next budget.

It is no wonder that the housing-finance market has grown by leaps and bounds. It is estimated that housing loans worth between 450 billion rupees and 500 billion rupees were approved in fiscal 2003-04. Last year, approvals for home loans rose 42% on the back of a 40% increase the year before, says Sandesh Savant, a Pune-based property consultant. Savant expects the same if not higher growth this year, even if rates rise.

With interest rates for fixed deposits and savings accounts declining in the past decade--they are currently at almost at a 30-year low--there is no advantage to saving or paying rent. Property is also cheaper now compared to 10 years ago. "Back then, a house would cost 10-15 times someone's annual income. Today it is only about five times a person's annual income. For five years until 2003, property prices on average have come down 20%-40%," says V.S. Rangan, general manager, corporate planning and finance, at HDFC, India's largest home-loans company.

One reason for the drop in property prices is that many states in India have repealed the Urban Land Ceiling Act, which limited the amount of land people could sell or develop. They had to get permission from the government to do so, and the government had the right to acquire any land in excess of the ceiling and could compel the owner to use it for purposes it specified.

In addition, 10 years ago, it would have been extremely difficult to get large loans of the kind Varma and Awasthi have taken. It was not easy to get a mortgage as a bank would not lend based on a lien on the property, but on the borrower's financial status and whether he could get a co-signatory, or a guarantor, for the loan. "Banks would come and interview you before you got anywhere close to even making an application. And foreclosing a property was not easy. That has changed in the past three years. Now the Indian government has enacted certain foreclosure laws which make it easier for banks to foreclose," says Sastri of Indiaproperties.

Mortgages constitute just 2% of India's GDP compared to 20% in some other Asian countries and 51% in the United States, according to ENAM, an equity-research agency. So India's market has enormous potential to grow. After all, less than 20% per cent of Indians currently own their own homes. If present trends continue, analysts believe the number of urban, middle-class Indians who own homes could triple in a decade.

"Provided economic activity continues to grow, we have targeted the home-loan segment to be in excess of 650 billion rupees by next year," says Sastri, even though banks today only provide mortgages for a home to a home buyer. Banks are reluctant to lend to property developers, largely because their projects aren't very transparent and often involve black money, he says. Thus large land developments are still privately funded, and as a result, building large rental condominiums is nearly impossible. "Once banks start funding mortgages to investors, we shall see yet another segment of the mortgage business opening up," he adds.

VERY COMPETITIVE

As it is, the lending market, especially for homes and vehicles, has become extremely competitive. HDFC is the leader in the housing-finance segment but snapping at its heels is ICICI bank, which is known for its aggression and wide reach. In fact, it is probably the biggest player in the vehicle-loans segment. "We started four years ago and today we have about 40% of the car and two-wheeler loans market and about 22% of the commercial-vehicle loans market," says Sachin Khandelwal, head of vehicle financing at ICICI Bank.

With interest rates at an all-time low, a spurt in lending volumes could lead to shrinking margins, but this doesn't seem to be a concern for housing financiers and banks. "Margins may shrink but look how much volumes are rising. Besides, margins are a function not just of interest rates but also of operating costs, which are declining as volumes increase," says Rajiv Sabharwal, chief operating officer at ICICI Home Finance.

Housing financiers, banks and analysts believe that the government needs to do more to stimulate the sector, as ENAM and the National Building Organization estimate that there is a demand-supply gap of 20 million homes. They believe that stamp duties, which are currently at a high 8%-14% of transaction value, should be reduced to 3%-5%. "The cost for first-time buyers should be lower and people should also be able to graduate to bigger houses without having to pay such massive stamp duties each time," says ICICI's Sabharwal. He adds that foreign direct investment inflows should also be encouraged to develop the property sector. Currently, a foreign developer is only allowed to operate in the country if the company has a minimum of 40 hectares of land at its disposal.

Nevertheless, several foreign companies have already jumped in. Westport of Malaysia has a 10% stake at an undisclosed premium in the New Delhi-based Feedback Ventures Group. Kontur Bintang, another Malaysian company, along with G. Gnanalingam, a Malaysian citizen, have agreed to contribute $1 million each towards the share capital of a Gurgaon residential township. Singapore-based Ascendas has a joint-venture agreement with Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corp. for developing information-technology parks in Chennai. Indonesia-based Universal Success Enterprise and Unitech, a New Delhi-based real-estate and construction company, are involved in a joint venture to promote an information-technology park and housing project near Calcutta.

"India will have to go through a legal revolution in order to able to scale up its opportunities and its ambition to provide housing for all," concludes Sastri of Indiaproperties. "All reforms that make housing more affordable will definitely increase home ownership."

india struggles to meet demand for higher education

2004-06-14T23:21:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in June 2004).

The campus of Mewar University, one of 108 private universities established in the underdeveloped state of Chhattisgarh during the past two years, is a two-room house on a busy thoroughfare. One room is empty, except for a telephone; the other -- also a tiny, empty cell -- has "library" painted on the door. There is not a teacher, student, or book in sight.

At nearby Anna Technical University, housed in a slightly larger two-room apartment, a young woman identifies herself as the office manager to a visitor inquiring about course offerings. From beneath a stack of files, she digs out a long list that includes a "shoe upper and maintenance" degree and a "garage and automotive" degree.

Across town sits Shri Rawatapura Sarkar International University. It is palatial in comparison, boasting several rooms spread out over three floors, a few computers, and a huge office that houses the dean and a single board member. According to its prospectus, printed on expensive paper, Sarkar International offers more than 30 degree programs, but the dean admits that only a nursing program is currently available. When asked where classes are held, the board member, Ravinder Sharma, says something that sounds familiar: "Our centers are in another building, nearby only, but right now you can't go because some construction is going on."

Two years ago Chhattisgarh, located in central India, passed a law allowing the creation of private universities. It seemed like a smart move at the time: Chhattisgarh has only two public universities to serve a population of 21 million people. Instead, the law's loosely written regulations and lax oversight have allowed dozens of storefront universities to flourish, tainting the handful of legitimate educational institutions that were established.

The state government has since enacted stricter legislation, and today the fly-by-night universities are in danger of being shut down. But the story of their rise and imminent fall demonstrates the scope and complexity of the problem facing the development of private higher education in India.

Overwhelming Demand

India desperately needs more universities to accommodate a growing number of college-bound students. The country's 300-odd public universities serve 9.3 million students, or about 7 percent of the 18-to-24-year-old population. The central government has said it wants to increase the college-going rate to 10 percent by 2007, which means that it needs to find space for four million more students.

India's public higher-education system, however, is already overwhelmed. Last year the University of Delhi had to print more than two million application forms, even though it was offering admission to just 45,000 students. The cash-strapped government, which has been steadily reducing funds earmarked for education, cannot afford to expand the system further. To fill the gap between demand and supply, many educators feel India needs the private sector.

"There are many institutes of excellence in India's public higher-education system, but the real problem is there aren't enough of them for a country that has a billion people. And with the government diverting funds for the much-needed increase in primary education, private investment in higher education needs to be encouraged," says Rajiv Tewari, spokesperson for Rai University, one of the few legitimate private universities set up in Chhattisgarh.

The market is ripe for exploitation, as Chhattisgarh's experience demonstrates, and neither the central nor the state government is prepared to police the industry. "The government should regulate universities rather than run them," says Ashis Nandy, a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, a New Delhi-based think tank. "As it is, the government is too overloaded."

The lack of a clear plan for the development of a private higher-education sector has caused problems for both students and legitimate private universities -- domestic and foreign -- seeking to set up programs in India.

Not counting the ones in Chhattisgarh, there are just four privately financed and run universities approved by the University Grants Commission, India's main higher-education regulatory body.

Currently, the state legislatures also have the authority to grant approval to anyone who wishes to establish a university in India. In Chhattisgarh, the law passed by the state government made it legal for virtually anyone to set up shop, placed no limits on the number of universities that could be opened, and failed to establish a monitoring body to determine and maintain standards at those universities, according to Ved Prakash, a top official at the University Grants Commission.

After the Chhattisgarh fiasco, the University Grants Commission established new rules that will require all private universities to meet minimum standards of quality. Until now, the commission has regulated only public universities. Chhattisgarh, which in January elected a new government, also amended its private-universities act to require all existing private universities to pay about $450,000 each by the end of June for the creation of an endowment fund so that students would be reimbursed if the universities failed to actually operate. It also announced plans to create a state regulatory body for private universities. This body has yet to be set up, and several private players plan to go to court to protest the endowment-fund requirement.

A Hostile Environment

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- these new government efforts to regulate private universities, the development of a significant private higher-education sector is still in doubt. The Chhattisgarh experience has made the atmosphere hostile for all private universities, in part because the government is enacting stricter regulations, but also because the public has become more skeptical about private institutions.

Foreign universities that see potential in India are trying to figure out a way to get in, but it is difficult to gain a toehold in a country with one of the most complicated and burdensome government bureaucracies in the world. In February, Sylvan Learning Systems, now known as Laureate Education Inc., closed its year-old campus, South Asia International Institute, saying that the regulatory climate there for a for-profit, non-Indian university had become "much less welcoming" in the past year.

"The government should come up with some specific definitions for private universities to function and then should leave it to market forces like in the U.S.," says Dr. K. Anantha Padmanabhan, who was vice chancellor of the Sylvan campus.

Instead of establishing stand-alone campuses in India -- a risky, complicated, and expensive proposition -- most foreign universities here collaborate with an existing Indian institution to start what are called "twinning" programs. Indian students take courses designed and monitored by the foreign partner, but run by the local institution. In some cases, students may study for two years in India and then apply to the foreign university to complete their degree. If accepted, they transfer some or all of the credits they earned in India to the foreign university. If they complete their degree abroad, it is in the name of the foreign university. If they don't, they are awarded a degree in the Indian university's name.

Most of these twinning programs focus on business or engineering, two growing fields in India. Purdue University-Calumet, for example, began a joint program two years ago to offer bachelor's degrees in engineering with Amity University, one of the larger and more respected private institutions set up after Chhattisgarh allowed such universities. Students study for three years in India, then, if they meet admissions criteria, switch to Purdue for their final year.

In 2002 Fairleigh Dickinson University established a joint M.B.A. program in global management with the Institute of Management Technology, a business school based in Ghaziabad, near New Delhi. Under the agreement, students will divide their time between the two campuses.

Michigan Technological University guarantees admission to all students who complete two years of study at the Institute for Integrated Learning in Management, in New Delhi, a private institution that offers business degrees. Several British universities have also set up joint degrees with Indian institutions. While there are no official numbers, observers say 50 to 60 such partnerships exist between foreign and Indian universities.

Skeptical Students

While such partnerships are growing, many Indian students are still quite skeptical of their offerings, in part because of the damage done by disreputable operators. The most sought-after degrees here are still those offered by the state-run Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Management, and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, followed closely by degrees -- in any discipline -- at top institutions like the Universities of Delhi and Bombay, among others.

"I am not interested in private universities' courses because they haven't proven themselves yet," says Nithya Ravi, 17, a journalism major at the University of Delhi. Even if Harvard or Columbia Universities offered programs in India, she says, she would not give up a place in one of the University of Delhi's prestigious colleges to attend a lesser-known program with a famous affiliate.

Private universities appeal primarily to students who don't score high enough on their high-school graduation examinations to win a place at one of the top universities and to those who failed rigorous entrance exams for engineering or medicine programs. Students interested in studying management at the undergraduate level often choose private institutions, as such programs are not available at public universities.

Administrators at several private universities say they are undeterred by the limited market so far, and believe there is a place for them in India. "The competition in India is fierce, and there are not enough seats in these government universities," says K.B. Powar, director of the Amity Foundation, which runs Amity University.

Students who attend private universities say they prefer them because the instruction is more practical and project-based, not theoretical, like in the public universities. "Our teachers are from the industries and companies that we would eventually like to get jobs with. Besides, there is a lot more flexibility in the number of courses we can choose per term and what time of day we can take them, unlike in public universities," says Smriti Malhotra, an M.B.A. student at the New Delhi-based Western International University, one of the few foreign universities to set up an independent campus in India. It is a joint venture between the Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, and a private Indian investment group.

Enrolling in a good private university is also a better option than attending a less-than-stellar public university. In some public universities, professor absenteeism is rampant, teaching methods are outdated, and classes are overcrowded.

"We have only 20 people to a class, get personalized attention, and learn in a very interactive environment. I cannot imagine that in a government university," says Nishant Gupta, an M.B.A. student at Western International, which offers bachelor's and master's degrees in business and finance. The university's main building -- it would be a stretch to call it a campus -- is centrally air-conditioned, a rarity in India. The institution, which enrolls 350 students, has more than 20 computers, and its classrooms, each with a slide projector, are more like conference rooms. In contrast, at public universities many classrooms have creaking fans and old-fashioned chalkboards, and there is perhaps one computer to a college.

Luring Students Overseas

These amenities come at a cost. The average annual tuition at Western International is $2,000, while the prestigious University of Delhi charges less than $200. Still, the price tag at private institutions is a lot lower than what students would find at an American campus, something that foreign universities hope will be a key selling point for their India-based programs.

International students at the American campus of Michigan Technological University's Center for International Education pay an estimated $26,000 a year in tuition and living expenses, according to James P. Cross, the center's executive director. Students at the New Delhi campus pay only about $6,000 a year, largely because the cost of living in India is so much lower. The benefits are mutual, says Mr. Cross in an e-mail message. Students get a less expensive education, while Michigan Tech increases its revenue, is able to hire more faculty members, and improves its research capacity. Some students may even continue on to earn graduate degrees.

Foreign-university officials also hope that their programs in India will eventually lure some students to their universities abroad. "No one can sit in glorious isolation. Educational institutions have to be linked up, and they will work out joint degrees, etc.," says John Nance, head of the education department at the British Council in New Delhi. "Education is being internationalized like never before."

Mr. Nance points to the University of Nottingham's Malaysian campus, which attracts many Indian students. "This is the pattern for the future," he says.

Meanwhile, private universities are trying to sort out a slew of new government regulations that promise to weed out fly-by-night institutions, particularly those that prey on the growing demand for technical degrees. While they welcome the initiatives in theory, they say the standards established so far focus more on quantitative measurements than qualitative ones.

"The government is trying to be conscious and cautious, but the quality of people on its decision-making bodies leaves a lot to be desired," says Rajiv Gupta, the Indian head of Resource Development International, a private consulting company that facilitates partnerships in higher education between Britain and India. "To build a policy that says private institutions should have x acres of land or infrastructure isn't enough."

Amity's Mr. Powar agrees. "I don't know how they will check on standards," he says. "Even public universities don't comply with any standards. If they want strict regulations, the regulations should apply to all universities and the University Grants Commission needs to do a better job monitoring them."

Government officials are unapologetic about their stricter regulations. "To reach the goal of 10-percent enrollment in higher education, we realize private universities have to play a big role and we are all for it," says Mr. Prakash, of the University Grants Commission. "But they have to follow procedure and meet certain standards."

india struggles to meet demand for higher education

2004-06-14T02:45:00.000-07:00

nationwide strike and violence shut down higher education in nepal

2004-06-10T23:23:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in June 2004).

A nationwide education strike called by student allies of Maoist rebels in Nepal this week has closed all levels of instruction, from elementary schools to universities, and on Wednesday rebels blew up school buses outside Kathmandu, the capital, to enforce the shutdown.

This is the latest of several similar strikes called by the All Nepal National Independent Students Union-Revolutionary over the past four years. The student group supports the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which has been fighting to overthrow the monarchy and establish a communist state since 1996. Fear of rebel attacks is keeping students and professors away from their campuses.

"In the past two months, we have already lost 17 days of study, and last year, of 200 working days, we lost 40 to 50 days," said Tirtha Khaniya, a linguistics professor at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan University.

The student group said it had resorted to a strike when the Nepalese government reneged on several promises. "Some months ago, the government had negotiated with us and agreed that they would remove the terrorist tag from our students union, reduce fees in schools and universities, and release seven student leaders," said Shailendra Ghimire, a high official of the student group. "They have not done any of these things yet, and that is why we have called a strike. And we don't plan to go for any negotiations until they stop calling us terrorists."

The rebels have recently taken to kidnapping teachers and students, to spread both Maoist ideology and fear of the rebels. "They kidnap them for four or five days and try to train them to their way of thinking and their program of education, called janwadi shiksha, which is community-oriented, communist-based education," said Mr. Khaniya.

In addition, the rebels bomb schools and colleges that do not close when they call a strike. On Wednesday bombs exploded in seven buses belonging to a private school on the outskirts of Kathmandu. The police believe rebels planted the explosives.

Nepal's new prime minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, who was appointed last week almost a month after his predecessor resigned and whose government still lacks key officials, met on Tuesday with school and university leaders. He assured them that his government would try to come to some agreement with the rebels.

But Mr. Khaniya is not optimistic about the prospects for a settlement. "Even if there was no political turmoil at the center, the government has shown in the past that it is helpless," he said.

The continuing turmoil has placed Nepalese education in grave danger, Mr. Khaniya added. "The effect on teaching and learning is immense because of the sheer frequency of such strikes," he said.

As a result, more and more Nepalese students are going abroad for their higher education. "Most parents who can afford it," he said, "are more than ever looking to send their children to neighboring India and other countries."

nationwide strike and violence shut down higher education in nepal

2004-06-10T02:47:00.000-07:00

new education minister in india wins praise from academics

2004-05-27T23:25:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in May 2004).

Academics in India breathed a sigh of relief this week as the country's new minister in charge of education, Arjun Singh, reassured them that he had no intention of continuing the previous government's controversial higher-education policies.

"The future of higher education lies in autonomy," said Mr. Singh, a member of the Congress Party, at a news conference on Monday.

In an election this month, the Congress Party shocked pollsters when, with the support of India's other liberal parties, it ousted a coalition government led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The BJP, as it is known, has enraged academics over the years with what many call its heavy-handed attempts to promote Hindu supremacy and denigrate other religions, particularly Islam. Among other things, government officials altered high-school textbooks to cast Hindu history in a positive light and removed members of the prestigious Indian Council of Historical Research in order to replace them with proponents of Hindu superiority (The Chronicle, February 5, 2002).

Mr. Singh, who is considered a secular liberal, has been appointed minister of human-resource development, and in that role he will oversee the Department of Education. It is a familiar position: He held the same job when the Congress Party led India in the early 1990s.

Although he did not lay out a specific agenda during his news conference, Mr. Singh alluded to the previous government's ideologically driven policies by stating that he is "not starting with prejudice" and that "we want detoxification without a witch hunt." He also said that he is "trying to understand why priorities in education have changed in the last five years."

Prabhat Patnaik, an economics professor at the Center for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said Mr. Singh is well suited for the post. "In the past, he has shown he is above petty party politics," Mr. Patnaik said. "He lets institutions function on their own, like they should."

Administrators at the Indian Institutes of Management, India's most prestigious business schools, also praised Mr. Singh. Earlier this year, government officials ordered the institutes to lower their tuition and fees, which they said were too costly for most Indian students (The Chronicle, February 20).

But administrators saw the move as a way for the government to gain more control over the institutes, by making them more dependent on government funds. In 1993, when he was minister of human-resource development, Mr. Singh approved an independent committee's recommendations that the institutes be more financially independent.

At the news conference, Mr. Singh said he plans to meet with the institutes' directors this week.

wonder woman

2004-05-12T02:51:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in May 2004).

On Balance by Leila Seth.Penguin Books India/The Viking Press. $11.15

In 1959, Leila Seth became the first woman to top the London bar exam's pass list. When she returned to India and sought apprenticeship with a (male) barrister, he told her, "Instead of joining the legal profession, young woman, go and get married."

"But sir, I am already married," replied Seth. "Then go and have a child," he said. "I have a child," Seth, countered. "It is not fair to the child to be alone, so, young lady, you should have a second child," Sachin Chaudhuri, the barrister persisted. "Mr. Chaudhuri, I already have two children," Seth continued. The barrister gave up. "Then come and join my chambers, you are a persistent young woman and will do well at the bar," he said. Not only did Leila Seth do well, she eventually became the first woman chief justice of a high court in India.

On Balance, Seth's autobiography contains many such anecdotes, told without rancour, and with honesty and humility, qualities that are rare in extremely successful people. Seth, now retired at 73, was highly accomplished in her field. But she was an accidental lawyer. When she went to England in 1954 with her husband who had been transferred there, she planned to do a Montessori course. Instead she chose law, because she needed a course where the attendance requirements were not too strict so she could look after her son, Vikram. She didn't do too badly: This is the same Vikram who has authored, among other works, A Suitable Boy.

Being a woman, and a lawyer at that, wasn't easy anywhere in the world then, but especially in India. Seth doggedly fought prejudice to take up complex cases that her male counterparts tried to keep her away from. She writes that her husband, Premo, to whom her book is dedicated, has always been the rock in her life. "Premo is not like other men I know or meet, who are apprehensive of their wife's success," she writes. "He has given me the space to grow and not held me back; rather, he has encouraged me."

There were lighter moments. Once, while she was intently reading a judgment, she heard a buzz of voices and shuffling of feet and looked up to see the courtroom suddenly packed with people staring at her. On enquiring, she was told, "The crowd is a group of farmers . . . invited to Delhi to see the sights. They have just visited the zoo: and now they have come to see the woman judge in the Delhi High Court."

Seth often worried whether her children were getting enough attention. It was difficult balancing work and home, but once, a very young Vikram said to her, "Mama, I am so glad you work and use your mind and don't talk to me only about the price of onions and the stupidity of servants." Spoken like a Seth. In Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, the close-knit Seth family inspires many characters and jokes. Vikram took six years to finish this novel, most of which was written in his parents' house in Delhi. At one time during those six years, Leila Seth writes that the family driver told a friend of the family that Vikram "sits upstairs just reading and writing and sleeping and eating and living off his parents."

While Leila Seth is anything but partisan in writing about her three children, her autobiography has enough tales to satisfy those who admire the writings of Vikram Seth as well.

trespassing in pakistan

2003-11-27T02:52:00.000-08:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in November 2003).

Trespassing by Uzma Aslam Khan. Flamingo. $26.85

In Trespassing, Uzma Aslam Khan's deft second novel, Daanish, a young Pakistani man studying journalism at a university in Boston, cannot resist pointing out the prejudice behind the headlines of American newspapers reporting on the 1991 Gulf War. He refers to one such headline--"More Than a Madman"--about Saddam Hussein, and remarks, "The irony is that the top of the article begins with a photograph of schoolchildren in front of a photograph of Saddam and the caption reads: From birth, Iraqis are taught to obey their supreme leader's every command. The caption could easily read: From birth, Americans are taught to obey their ruling troika: the White House, Pentagon and the Media."

His professor, who has been teaching the class about objectivity in journalism, shows him the door. Daanish feels he does not belong in an increasingly jingoistic United States. But, later, back in Karachi for his father's funeral, Daanish's "Amreeka-returned" status makes him an outsider at home, too.

Khan, like fellow Pakistani English-language authors Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie, grew up in Pakistan in the 1980s and went to the U.S. for graduate studies. She writes about contemporary Pakistan and its problems, but she is more overtly political. She makes Daanish a left-leaning character who realizes that America isn't as free as it pretends to be.

At home, Daanish meets Dia, a liberal college student whose life is circumscribed by society's restrictions on women. Daanish and Dia fall in love but have to keep their relationship a secret, because society frowns upon nonarranged relationships.

In Trespassing, everybody is a transgressor rebelling against the confines of society and history.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, Salaamat, a son of a fisherman is heckled and harangued for being a Sindhi. "Everything about him--his looks, accent, language, carriage--was mocked and shredded by the 30 or so workers who poured their lives out on bus art." Salaamat is the most disenfranchised of Khan's characters. In a sense, he is the embodiment of Pakistan's problems.

Khan's descriptions of Karachi are vivid, vibrant and violent. It is easy to picture the garishly painted buses, see the boys playing cricket on every street corner and sense the terror of violent hatreds lurking everywhere.

Khan sketches a world where the weak are shoved around by the strong and the strong are dominated by "Amreeka." Trespassing is a chilling reminder of U.S. realpolitik gone horribly wrong.

food for thought

2003-09-18T02:54:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in September 2003).

Monsoon Diary: A Memoir With Recipes, by Shoba Narayan. Villard. $24.95

Western publishers' love of "ethnic" material has prompted a wave of new writing about food, much of it by Asian expatriates and first-generation Americans and Britons who've used food as a touchstone to evoke memory and reclaim their heritage. In her first book, Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, the transplanted Indian food and travel writer Shoba Narayan has added her reflections.

Narayan writes about the test her family puts her through to decide whether she would be allowed to go to the United States to attend college, a test that involved cooking an elaborate meal for her extended family. "'America is full of muggers and rapists.' Nalla-pa said. 'Why did you apply there? No unmarried girl should venture into such a promiscuous society,' Nalla-ma added." Then her uncle says, "Cook us a vegetarian feast like this one. If we like it, you can go to America. If we don't, you stay here." Narayan passed and was allowed to go.

But she is too quick to accept the disturbing prejudice that is entangled in her relationship with food. In the same way, she engages in little soul-searching about her arranged marriage, which she once opposed but has grown happy in, or her observation that she learned to cook traditional south Indian food because she wanted to "dazzle" her husband. The same acquiescence is more disturbing in her throwaway mentions of India's noxious caste system, which she says is "an important part of the way Indians define themselves." These observations lack the one element that would lend the writing more philosophical muscle: a critical eye.

Monsoon Diary is light, fluffy and tasty just like the idlis--or rice cakes--that Narayan writes about. To be sure, her descriptions of the food, the smells and the characters of India are as delectable as the recipes that accompany the chapters. "Almost every station in India sells a regional specialty that causes passengers to dart in and out of trains. My parents have woken me up at 3 a.m. just to taste the hot milk at Erode Station in Tamil Nadu. North of Delhi we could buy thick yogurt in tiny terracotta pots. The earthenware pots sucked the moisture from the yogurt, leaving it creamy enough to be cut with a knife. Kerala, where my father spent his childhood and still leaves his heart, is where I've eaten the best banana appams, fried in coconut oil on the platform."

Some of the characters in the book are instantly endearing and identifiable to anyone who grew up in India: Raju, the milkman who has named his cows after his various wives (he calls one Tiger); Chinnapan, the ironing man who could pick up red hot coals with his bare hands; and Natesan, the garbage collector, who Narayan (in another instance of willful blindness) reveals was invited into the house for coffee but always drank it "in a cup that was not used by anyone else." Narayan does not mention the reason: he was from a once "untouchable" caste.

Monsoon Diary is at its best when its realm is the India of Narayan's childhood. The latter half of the book, which is set in America, is unfortunately filled with cornball anecdotes and descriptions that could have used some judicious editing.

About America, she writes, "Everyone was moving, searching, asking for more. People were changing spouses, changing jobs, changing homes, changing sexes. It seemed like the more choices people had, the more they searched for something else, something new, something different." So don't expect any insightful commentary in this light memoir, but make sure you do not read it on an empty stomach, as Narayan's culinary writing will give you an attack of the munchies.

bollywood's tarantino and his band of outsiders

2003-08-27T05:44:00.000-07:00

Director and producer Ram Gopal Varma (aka "RGV") has revolutionized India's tradition-bound film biz, rejecting classic costume musicals and weepy melodramas for gritty, urban, low-budget realism.

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Salon in August 2003).

POOLSIDE at the Sun-n-Sand Hotel, where the coolest film stars of 1970s Bollywood once hung out, a group of young, slightly nerdy Indians is guzzling beer and joking about sending Father's Day bouquets to Ram Gopal Varma. The innovative and unconventional film director, known as "RGV" to the public and "Ramu" to his fans and friends, is Bollywood's answer to Quentin Tarantino.

India's Hindi-language film industry, known internationally as Bollywood, produces 150-plus movies a year that are widely popular across South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, the Middle East and the large Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom and North America. Varma has been thumbing his nose at Bollywood and its traditions since he entered the industry 12 years ago. In that time he has built up a band of young guerrilla filmmakers, who revere him for being the antithesis of everything Bollywood seems to stand for. He has personally directed 20 or so films (such definitions are not always clear in Bollywood) and also serves as a producer for young directors he hand-picks to work with him.

The group I'm sitting with at Sun-n-Sand, at 1 o'clock in the morning, includes Samir Sharma, the writer of RGV's latest directorial venture, "Bhoot," and American Shimit Amin, the editor of "Bhoot," who made the move to Bombay from Los Angeles when he was offered a chance to work with RGV. The song-free horror flick has scared the pants off a country that is sick of juvenile candy-floss romances, opulent family sagas about loving one's parents and terrible rip-offs of Hollywood action films.

"Bhoot" ("Ghost"), which was released in late May, became Bollywood's first real hit after a disheartening series of flops that had producers gasping for breath. Last year, the industry racked up losses of more than 3 billion rupees ($63 million) on an investment of 10 billion rupees. Only one in 25 films made a profit. So "Bhoot's" success arrived as something of a shock. Bollywood is finally realizing it doesn't have to spend millions on shooting song-and-dance sequences in Switzerland, as "Bhoot" -- set in a middle-class Bombay apartment -- has proved. The film has more than recovered the 65 million rupees it cost to produce.

People outside India are noticing. Last year, three nonresident Indian businessmen zeroed in on RGV to start a film company called Que Sera Sera Productions. Then 20th Century Fox India signed a distribution deal with RGV's Varma Corp. "Ramu is one of the few people who is up there in quality and content," says Aditya Shastri, managing director of 20th Century Fox India. "He is very progressive, which we like, and also competent and uncomplicated. He isn't convoluted like the other egotistic characters in Bollywood. He is a precious client for us."

RGV's obsession with making script-oriented, low-budget, quick-turnaround movies is unheard of in chaotic Bollywood, where films always go over budget, are always behind schedule and rely too much on overpaid stars. RGV rarely chooses huge stars to work with him. Like Tarantino, he is so confident of his scripts that he gets new actors -- or actors whose careers are on the skids -- to star in his films. In the process he has become something of a starmaker, much like Tarantino, who in "Pulp Fiction" resurrected John Travolta from Hollywood's dustbin, and in "Jackie Brown" brought Pam Grier's sexy cool blaxploitation persona to the 1990s mainstream.

Vivek Oberoi, currently Bollywood's hottest star, proved his worth in Varma's taut 2001 film "Company," about Bombay's underworld gone international. (He is currently up for a leading role in Roland Joffe's forthcoming "The Invaders.") In "Satya" (1998), another film about the underworld set at a more local level, RGV generated fantastic performances from Manoj Bajpai and J.D. Chakravarty, both until then relegated to small roles in Bollywood. Audiences went berserk over "Satya" and Bajpai began to be called "Bhikhu Mhatre," his name in the film. No such movie had ever previously been made in India.

"I had heard that someone got shot by the Mafia," says Varma, sitting in his temporary office in north Bombay. "And as people like to do, they recounted all the details of the man who was killed. How his day started, what he ate, what he was wearing, where he was going, etc. It got me thinking about the killer's day. What was that like? What did he eat or wear or do? I spoke to the police, the intelligence agencies, and I realized that they [the underworld] are like anyone else really. Something pushes them over the edge and in that sense they too are victims."

The articulate 41-year-old, who ditched his glasses and discovered the gym a couple of years ago, is a muscled, mustachioed man with penetrating eyes and a calm demeanor that belies his boundless energy. He is a pro at multitasking. In between answering my questions, he fields phone calls, sends text messages and eyeballs promotional items for his various films.

RGV loathes the namby-pamby love stories and family dramas that Bollywood churns out, so much so that he often includes cutting comments about them in his own films. In "Company," one of his characters makes a pointed reference to the Bollywood smash "Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham" (or "K3G"), a ghastly, opulent movie with the tag line, "It's all about loving your parents." A character in "Company" sardonically remarks, "It's all about loving your loving."

RGV says he has no interest in saccharine movies or the characters who inhabit them. "I don't want to make a 'Devdas,'" he tells me, referring to last year's big hit, probably the most expensive Hindi movie ever made, about a man so obsessed with his first love that he dies grieving because he can't have her. "I have no patience for that character," Varma snorts. "If he can't get her, he should go find someone else."

"His films are more intellectual than the others but they aren't pretentious," says film analyst Amod Mehra. "They are all different and he always tells a good story."

RGV also doesn't care about following trends. In Bollywood, where if one family drama succeeds, 20 others follow, directors and producers make all sorts of false assumptions about audience taste. "I make movies that I want to see," he says. "I'm interested in everything. Fear, desire, greed, violence. They are all present in all people and they all are an inspiration for me. Why should I assume that the audience wants just one particular kind of film? They are not cattle. Ninety-five percent of our films flop. That should tell people they know zilch about the audiences. Audiences will watch anything that entertains them."

Varma is extremely critical of Bollywood and its methods. "I think directors and producers make movies for distributors [who fund their projects] rather than for the audience. I don't. I put my money where my mouth is and don't join the bandwagon."

RGV's films follow no identifiable pattern and adhere to no template. "Rangeela" is a musical about a chorus girl with movie star aspirations who gets her big break and finds her leading man has fallen in love with her. "Daud" is a road movie. "Kaun" is a murder mystery with only three characters. "Darna Mana Hai" is an episodic supernatural thriller. "Jungle" is inspired by the case of a notorious sandalwood smuggler and "Mast" is about a young lad's obsession with a movie actress, and is loosely based on RGV's own admiration for erstwhile Bollywood superstar Sridevi.

Of his upcoming productions, "Ab Tak Chhappan" is about police "encounters" in Bombay -- a term used when specialized officers are sent to kill dangerous criminal suspects rather than arrest them -- "Nimmi" is about a child trapped in a forest, and "Chala Vinod Tiwari Film Banane" is about a small-town man who comes to Bombay with a script, hoping to make the kind of films he loves to see.

RGV is said to be stubbornly unbending with his crew. "If someone doesn't agree with him, and I don't mean just creatively, he won't drop the subject and leave it at that. He gets extremely vindictive," says a young writer who has worked on some of RGV's successful films and has vowed to never work with him again. "He has gone out of his way to fuck me up in the industry. And I am a nobody, so people will tend to believe him. He has made it personal. He calls up people I'm working for -- he's putting his finger into my projects and trying to screw things up." This writer asked not to be identified in this article.

RGV may be a "power-tripper," as one Indian newsmagazine called him, but he is also his own worst critic. He calls some of his movies "pretty lousy," but can never be accused of making clichéd films. He doesn't brood about box office failure. He learns from his flops. "I don't get emotional about these things," he says. "I hate when people call their films their 'babies.' They are not anyone's babies. I am affected by the box office only to the extent that I continue to have the freedom to make my next film. And making my films the way I want to has never been a problem. Not in the last 12 years."

This kind of dissection seems to come easily to RGV. The man lives, eats and breathes films and has been doing so, he says, since he was 8 years old. He was deeply influenced by the Hollywood films he watched in his childhood, from "Mackenna's Gold" to "The Guns of Navarone" to "The Sound of Music" to "Jaws." As a student at engineering college in the Telugu-speaking southern state of Andhra Pradesh, he took in eight to 10 films a week, with an indulgent uncle and friends subsidizing his obsession.

"I studied films in the theaters," he says. "Once, I saw a movie seven times, and the eighth time I watched it with my eyes closed so I could absorb the musical score. I knew the story, I knew the characters, but I wanted to know how the background score worked." He would narrate movie stories to his friends, but would substitute the bits he didn't like with what he would have liked to see. Often, his friends would come back to him saying they liked his version better than the movie. "Maybe it was around that time that the germ of making movies was planted in my brain. It still wasn't a conscious desire, though."

After engineering, which he failed twice -- he hated studying -- RGV started shopping around ideas for movies. "I tried to tell stories to producers but they just couldn't understand what I was talking about," he recalls, smiling perhaps a little smugly. At that time, many Indians were going off to the Persian Gulf or African countries to find better-paying jobs. The young Varma decided to go to Nigeria to make some money and finance his own filmmaking career. On the way to acquire documents for his journey, he and his friend happened to stop at a video library.

"That gave me an idea," he says. "I knew so much about movies that I thought I should open a video library that would be different." He didn't go to Nigeria, and thank God for that. At his new video store, he stocked movies that few had seen. He described them to his customers and soon he had a fan club. If he happened not to be at his store, customers would leave and return only when he was back.

In 1990, at the age of 28, Varma finally found someone who understood him: Nagarjuna, a star of Andhra Pradesh cinema. The actor loved his story for "Shiva" and decided to give him a break. RGV wrote and directed the film, despite lacking any prior experience behind the camera. "I have always believed direction is about visualizing," he says. "A director is the one who has to use the talents of the cameraman, the dialogue writer, the music director, etc., and amalgamate all the talents into a cohesive whole."

"Shiva," which was about student violence on university campuses and the nexus between the local Mafia and student bodies, broke all box office records in Andhra Pradesh. Nagarjuna's faith in Varma was justified, as the actor was catapulted to superstar status.

When Varma made it to Bollywood in the mid-'90s, people in the industry knew about him already. For his first full-fledged Hindi film, "Rangeela" (1995), he managed to cast big-name stars like Aamir Khan and Jackie Shroff. (Khan, incidentally, later became the producer of "Lagaan," the Bollywood film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2001.) "Rangeela" was a smash. Urmila Matondkar, the heroine, until then only known for her lousy hairstyles, horrific dress sense and dubious acting skills, became movie-mad India's sex symbol. Maxim magazine featured her as one of the world's sexiest women. RGV was responsible for this mind-blowing makeover.

His next directorial outing will be a big-budget international film, shot mostly in America with an American crew, and featuring Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan. Did RGV feel he needed to prove he could do a big-budget extravaganza? He denies it. "This movie demands a big budget. I don't sit here and say, 'Now I want to make a big-budget film.' I don't work like that." This one too is sure to be different.

"He experiments like nobody does," says analyst Amod Mehra. "In the process he has had his share of flops, but that doesn't deter him. His style is more Hollywood than Bollywood."

One of RGV's young acolytes, 31-year-old director Chandan Arora, talks about how gutsy he is. "There are no prefixed rules or norms with him. Most people want to be safe but he wants to explore new things. He involves everyone in his project. I may be editing the film, but I have the creative space to suggest anything. Anyone working on the set can make a suggestion. As a result everyone gets involved and interested in the project."

No wonder intelligent young writers, editors and aspiring directors go to great lengths to track him down. RGV's office receives dozens of phone calls every day from newcomers wanting to pitch him ideas. Word has gotten around that he's open to suggestions from anyone in his crew, including grips, electricians, lighting technicians. Six of his seven upcoming projects as a producer are being directed by first-timers. In patronage-ridden Bollywood, Varma is the only person who gives a chance to such raw aspirants.

"Here you have to have a father, grandfather or uncle in the business to make it," says film critic Deepa Mehta. "It's great that he gives newcomers a chance."

RGV scoffs at any suggestion that he's being altruistic. "This is a mutually beneficial relationship," he says. "In fact, I can say I'm exploiting them. They are pure, uncorrupted by the industry and have passion." Varma once famously said that he is to Bollywood what al-Qaida is to America. "I was joking," he stresses. "But the point I was trying to make is that I am raising an army to put a dent in the system that makes movies like 'K3G.'"

Ramu's band of outsiders knows that and loves him for it. While I dine with some of his crew at Rain, an upscale new bar in Bombay's Juhu district frequented by Bollywood stars, a Varma Corp. executive producer comes bounding up to us with his latest tale. He claims he had RGV frothing at the mouth by suggesting he make a garish family drama like "K3G." Everyone at the table looked aghast. One said, "How could you even suggest something like that?"

The story was false, an elaborate joke. The producer guffawed into his beer for the rest of the evening. But the incident is a testament to how well RGV's 20- and 30-something protégés understand him. If he is huffy, they respond indulgently, as they would to a beloved uncle. They imitate his quirks -- like his habit of saying, "Correct, correct," if he agrees with something -- and they laugh at his paranoia when he says, "Now you can all go and sit in Barista [India's version of Starbucks] and talk about me."

He's right, of course. Nobody in Ramu's circle talks about much else.

pressing engagement

2003-08-07T05:34:00.000-07:00

History comes alive on the plate in Kerala, where the pain of making idiyappam is exceeded only by the pleasure of eating it

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in August 2003).

MY SISTERS AND I always looked forward to idiyappam on Sundays, but not without a little trepidation. The whole family was in good spirits as my mother dry-roasted the parboiled rice flour to make the dough.

Then the trouble began. My father would bring out the presser--a device that looked like something out of a medieval torture chamber--to turn the dough into thin white noodles, and my mother would volunteer to turn the rickety machine's crank. But soon, with a sigh, my father would take over while my mother wrestled to keep the presser pinned to the ground. Much sweating, much cursing, and by the end they were vowing never to make idiyappam again.

Thankfully, their memories were short, and like most families in the southern India state of Kerala, we regularly feasted on these light and fluffy steamed noodles.

Idiyappam is native to Kerala but may have its roots in contacts with China that go back 2,000 years. More recently, says Praveen Anand, a food historian and chef at Dakshin restaurant in Chennai, the Chinese concept of steaming food took root in India after traders from the court of Kublai Khan arrived in the 14th century.

Rice, though, goes back much further in Kerala. Unlike most Indians, who generally eat polished rice, Keralites prefer unhulled rice, which--soaked, steamed and dried--is the basic ingredient in idiyappam. Anand says the custom of eating these reddish-coloured grains may come from Kerala's ancient medical system of Ayurveda, which stresses relaxation and healthy eating.

No Keralite could do without idiyappam, especially for breakfast. The combinations are endless, but one of the most popular is idiyappam with ishtoo, a coconut-milk curry with peppercorns and vegetables or meat. Or there's lemon idiyappan--noodles with grated coconut and a squeeze of lemon. Or tamarind idiyappam--noodles with tamarind pulp, ginger and green chillies.

Not long ago, my parents decided to end their long-running battle with the idiyappam presser. Now they buy packaged idiyappam, which can be boiled like any other dried noodle. Still, every now and then they admit that it doesn't taste as good as the idiyappam from the machine. And they're right.

Idiyappam can be found in restaurants specializing in southern Indian cuisine. In New Delhi try Sagar in the Defence Colony Market. Tel.: (91 11) 2433-3658. Open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

india turns to private funds

2003-07-17T05:18:00.000-07:00

Rising life expectancy and an increasingly prosperous middle class create fresh opportunities for private pension-fund managers in India

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review in July 2003).

NEW DELHI RESIDENTS Deepti and Kunal Varma, both 42 years old, are a husband-and-wife team who make documentary films and want to continue doing so for the rest of their lives. They have two children who are below the age of 10. Having been badly burnt in the stockmarket and with the interest rate on the government-run Public Provident Fund, or PPF, plummeting to 8% from 11% three years ago, the Varmas, who had recently sold a plot of land, were in a bind about where to invest. "We first thought of an insurance plan, but at our age the premiums were too high and our retirement kitty would have amounted to [very little], so we chose a pension plan that has more flexibility," says Varma.

Indians like the Varmas are fuelling the nascent private pension-fund industry here. The industry, including the state-run Employee Provident Fund, or EPF, and the PPF, is currently valued at 560 billion rupees ($12 billion) and is expected to grow to an estimated 1.8 trillion rupees in 2025. Private companies began to launch pension plans in 2002 following the opening of the insurance market in 2001 and they have already grabbed a 33% share of the overall pensions market.

Still, the potential for growth is huge. The pension market in India accounts for less than 1% of the insurance market, while in the United States, pension plans make up 49% of insurance policies sold. Almost all the 12 private-sector, life-insurance companies in India have introduced or plan to introduce pension products to cash in on what they see as a boom time.

That's not surprising in a country where only 11% of the working population has any form of guaranteed post-retirement income. A large proportion of the population--the self-employed, unorganized labour, farmers--have no provision at all. Individuals working in the private sector depend on group superannuation plans or on individual schemes run by the state-owned Life Insurance Corp. of India, or LIC.

They make mandatory contributions of 12% of their basic salary to the EPF. Government workers participate in a derived-benefit pension scheme, under which retirees receive a certain proportion of the salary they earned at retirement as a lifelong pension. But for neither private-sector nor government employees is the amount accrued ever enough to sustain the lifestyle the individual enjoyed before retirement.

Besides, these pension plans place a huge onus on the government because even when interest rates come down, the payouts, a guaranteed 9% for all employees under the EPF, remain the same. In fact, the government has recently said it is working on a defined-contribution pension plan for employees who will join after October 2003. This will place a lighter burden on the government, as returns to employees will be based on contributions and will not be fixed as they are under the defined-benefit plan. With the crash of the state-run mutual fund, Unit Trust of India, the government is now wary of offering guaranteed returns.

The state-run plans also present other practical limitations for the beneficiaries. "The state-run LIC's Jeevan Suraksha pension plan doesn't offer much flexibility," says a treasury manager at the Federation of India Chambers of Commerce and Industry. "Even if you fail to pay your premium, private pension funds can adjust your plan. They give you the flexibility to withdraw and change your plan as you age and as your risk-taking ability goes down. They also have professional, seasoned managers."

However, the state will still mandate how these private pension funds invest. Today most pension funds must invest as much as 40% in government securities, but few companies see that as a limitation. "We currently don't feel the need to invest more in equities. We think this is the right pattern of investment for a retirement plan, which needs to be conservative," says Shikha Sharma, managing director of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance.

Kapil Mehta, vice-president for business development and strategic planning, at Max New York Life Insurance agrees: "We prefer a conservative approach. If the government says 40% in government securities, we will invest 40%-plus." In the present interest-rate environment the private pension-fund players have a point. With interest rates having fallen 400 basis points in the last two years, yields on 10-year government bonds have fallen to 5.6%-5.8%. So there has been a significant capital appreciation on these bonds.

What the private pension players would like are more tax breaks. "The financial sector in this country opened up much later than in other countries and now it isn't fashionable to give tax breaks. In this initial period, the government should be encouraging people to look at pensions as investment and needs to give them more tax breaks," says Deepak Satwalekar, the managing director and chief executive of HDFC Standard Life Insurance. For now, there is only a 10,000-rupee tax-deduction limit and insurance players want that raised to 30,000 rupees.

The average premium size of a pension policy for private players is a mere 13,000 rupees. "The reason for that is most people have still to learn that pension plans are not just tax-benefit vehicles, they are investment vehicles," says Mehta. HDFC's Satwalekar also believes the 12% mandatory investment in the state-run EPF is hampering people from putting aside more money in voluntary private pension funds.

Nevertheless, with only 11% of the market covered, private pension players are looking forward to raking it in. Life expectancy in India has risen. A person who is 40 years old today is likely to live to the age of 80, according to ICICI Prudential. The number of people above 60 in 2001 is estimated at 71 million, or about 7% of the total population. By 2016, this number is expected to rise to 113 million, or nearly 9% of the population. To pension salesmen, that's good news.

While the life insurance business deals with the fear of "dying too soon," the pensions business deals with the fear of "living too long." Living longer after retirement means that provisions have to be made for higher expenses for a longer time, including for health care. Moreover, "over the next 20 years, the overall cost of living is expected to [significantly] increase," says ICICI's Sharma.

Ordinary Indians, too, are becoming more aware of these issues. "This market is large enough for any number of players," says Satwalekar. "Pension plans account for 20% of our business already and we only see it growing," he says. Since its inception in February 2002 HDFC Standard has collected 410 million rupees as premiums on the Personal Pension Plan.

ICICI Prudential, India's largest private life insurer, has captured 73% of the private-sector pensions market and 24% of the overall pension market, as of January 2003. "There was some talk of restricting the number of private pension players, but that wouldn't be good for the market. We need more players to expand," says Mehta of Max New York Life.

The Indian government hasn't yet set up a separate pensions regulator and all the private plans now fall under the supervision of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority, or IRDA. India does plan to have a separate regulator, after which experts expect even more stand-alone private pension fund companies to set up shop. But the private insurance companies that offer pension plans will then have to deal with two regulators, the IRDA and the pensions regulator. "This will be a huge administrative burden and we are trying to convince the government to allow insurance companies that offer pension funds to continue to report to the IRDA," says Mehta.

getting high on danger

2003-07-17T02:55:00.000-07:00

Investigative journalist Aniruddha Bahal has set a thriller in Kashmir, in a world rife with drugs, arms deals and corruption

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in July 2003).

Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24

"YOU HAVE SOLDIERING BOOTS stuck between your teeth so that you don't maul your tongue . . . You are increasingly feeling that you needn't have got into the shit you find yourself in right now, tabbing 20 kilometres with a 20-kilogram rucksack burning your back." Aniruddha Bahal's novel Bunker 13 begins with a bang.

But soon you tire of the pretentiousness of the second person "you" and wish the author had opted for the first-person instead. Bahal is arguably India's best-known journalist, and his book had the makings of a ripping thriller before he developed more literary aspirations.

Nevertheless, Bunker 13 is a refreshingly different Indian novel. It is one of the few thrillers written in a country that has produced a surfeit of exotica.

Bahal is a co-founder of a news Web site and is famous for his investigative journalism. Posing as arms salesmen, he and a colleague caught on hidden camera Indian Army officers, bureaucrats, a defence minister and a high official of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party accepting bribes. The BJP, however, is still in power, and Bahal's Web site has been shut down. Often fiction says what it's too risky to write as fact.

The author's experiences as an investigative journalist form the backdrop to Bunker 13. The novel's hero, or anti-hero, is Minty Mehta, also known as "MM", a reporter with a reputed national daily. MM has no conscience. He likes expensive whisky, Armani suits and fancy digs. And he gets high on danger. "The bigger the risk, the bigger your addiction."

On behalf of a group of corrupt Indian army officers, he goes to embattled Kashmir where he becomes enmeshed in a plot to sell drugs and weapons to the Russian mafia.

The faction-ridden army has more than one group of corrupt officers and MM is caught in the middle of their fight. The rival faction kidnaps a woman he is dating, his house is trashed and the large quantity of high-grade heroin he has stored in his office's air-conditioner vent is stolen. The book is packed with action: Paratrooping, spying and even an attempt to hijack a train filled with nuclear missiles.

But the story is too fantastic--not because armies and journalists aren't corrupt, but because MM and the gang are involved in so many scams and double-crosses, it's hard to believe the characters don't trip up or overdose sooner.

It is complicated by numerous sub-plots and confused by characters who all speak like MM, in staccato, tough-guy, smart-alec dialogue. "You feel things happening to you. You watch your hair standing on end. You want to rip the leather off the front seat, but Jaspreet's reading your palms, mumbling prophecies about your sexual affairs, playing seduction games that have the firepower of BB guns," muses MM.

The leader of the gang that trashes his apartment sounds similar: "Man, you have enough alcohol in here to launch a polar satellite vehicle. Johnnie Walker Blue Label! The only time I have seen the bottle is in a Star TV ad, the one with that slinky blonde in it that blows her skirt in the ventilator."

Like all good thrillers, this book ends with a startling twist. It suggests that neighbouring Pakistan's infiltrations into Kashmir are more complex and insidious than even the Indian press would have us believe.

rewriting indian history

2003-07-03T02:56:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in July 2003).

In Times of Siege By Githa Hariharan. Viking. $22

Githa Hariharan's new novel, In Times of Siege, is a disturbing fictional portrait of the ideological polarization and sectarian conflict that in recent years have permeated every facet of life in India. This is the story of Shiv Murthy, a college history teacher whose life is thrown into chaos when a lesson he writes runs afoul of the Itihas Suraksha Manch (Forum for the Protection of History). The novel is a strong commentary on recent disgraces perpetrated in the writing of Indian textbooks.

In September last year, India's highest court cleared the way for changing the country's core history curriculum to suit the fundamentalist ideology of the ruling Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The textbooks have been rewritten to cast India's history as mainly a struggle between "native" Hindus and Muslim "invaders." The new texts seek to justify the repressive Hindu caste system and even omit to mention the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi in 1948. (The assassin was a Hindu fanatic who belonged to a group that was the progenitor of the BJP.)

In Hariharan's novel, the protagonist becomes the focus of fundamentalist ire over his description of a 12th-century poet and social reformer, Basava, who believed that Hinduism's rigid and oppressive caste system needed radical reforming. The fundamentalists object to the humanizing of Basava, whom they consider a saint. And the mere suggestion that Hinduism needs reforming has the Manch frothing at the mouth. They want the lesson retracted and an apology from Shiv.

The fictional Shiv's experience is similar to that of a real-life playwright, H.S. Shivaprakash, whose play on Basava was condemned by self-appointed protectors of history some years ago. The novel draws from India's present, however, in which the BJP government controls financing and appointments at institutions engaged in historical research and textbook writing.

The effort to polarize Hindus and Muslims through "history" has already had consequences. In 1992, the "historical" claim that the 400-year-old Babri mosque was built on the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram spurred Hindu militants to destroy the mosque, sparking nationwide religious riots and planting the seed for the Godhra massacre in Gujarat in March last year. The novel's Manch is a clear analogue of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), which, as the ideological backbone of the BJP, sees history as a tool in its campaign to construct a Hindu nation.

Hariharan's protagonist is a quiet man who prefers to stay away from controversy. "Shiv's own campaigns are minor rebellions; secretive mutinies," the author writes. But events take on a momentum of their own as left-wing university students, including Shiv's ward, organize protest rallies and demonstrations. The Manch retaliates violently, destroying Shiv's office. "I never thought my little lesson on Basava would grow to such epic proportions," says Shiv to his ward, Meena. Now convinced the controversy won't just go away, he resolves to take a stand. He tells his boss that he won't apologize to the Manch.

Hariharan captures Shiv's besieged existence with just the right amount of angst, confusion, polemic and humour. "Shiv sees his lesson sent to the corner in disgrace . . . there is a warning sign that quarantines it from the other booklets, a sign like the ones on those ominously shaped vehicles carrying dangerous chemicals. Caution! Highly Inflammable Medieval History. Only known antidotes: 500 mg of blissful ignorance or 250 mg of unadulterated lies."

Hariharan, whose first novel won the Commonwealth Prize in 1993, has written another persuasive work that tells of the perils of sectarianism and silence in the face of oppression.

beware of indian brides bearing gifts

2003-06-21T05:17:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Asia Times in June 2003).

On May 11, minutes before her wedding, 21-year-old Delhi resident Nisha Sharma called the police and reported that her prospective groom was demanding Rs 12 million in cash (US$257,733) in addition to the dowry being given to him. The international media swooped on the story that had made page one of most Indian dailies. In two days, Nisha Sharma was an international superstar. She was in The New York Times, on CNN and on the BBC.

Where she could really have been is behind bars. "Both Sharma's parents and the groom's parents should have been arrested, according to the law, because they had already given in to the demand for dowry, with all those 'gifts' they claim weren't dowry," says Rajinder Singh, a Delhi lawyer who is also on the Delhi Commission for Women.

In India, the punishment for demanding a dowry is imprisonment for not less than six months and up to two years, and/or a fine that is up to 10,000 rupees (US$215). The punishment for giving or taking dowry is worse: imprisonment for not less than five years and a fine of 15,000 rupees, or the value of the dowry, or more.

Photographs show Sharma, 21, surrounded by boxes of electronic goods, including two sets of refrigerators, two television sets and two stoves - one for the groom and one for his brother - that her father had bought for her dowry. Not in these pictures was a new car, also bought for the same purpose. The Rs 12 million cash (US$257,733) being demanded just before the marriage ceremony was in addition to all these items.

Despite the heroic aura that now surrounds her, Sharma isn't against dowry. She didn't seem to have a problem with dowry until that additional demand. In fact, her comments after the case was lodged suggest that if the groom's family had asked nicely instead of slapping around her father, she would probably be now ensconced in her husband's house with her new car and all the appliances - except for the goods meant for her husband's brother. Sharma is being hailed as a modern Indian heroine for having stood up against a patriarchal tradition that treats women as commodities to be bought and sold. She is not.

India's Dowry Prohibition Act has for the most part not failed because it is too weak or because the courts have not enforced it. As Nisha Sharma's case shows, it has failed because Indian society still believes in dowry. The law is moot. Indians don't oppose dowry, they just oppose extortion after marriage. News reports highlight the failure of the law only when women are killed (usually by burning) by their in-laws, when they fail to meet additional demands for money after the marriage. More than 9,000 Indian women are killed every year in dowry-related crimes, and between 1990 and 2000, there was a 38 percent increase in dowry deaths in India.

Couples and their families have to refuse dowry, even in the form of "gifts", if this problem is to go away. Sharma and her family should never have offered a dowry in the first place. If the prospective groom refused to marry her on those grounds, so be it. At an awards function, some women in the audience asked Sharma why her dowry complaint came so late in the game. Her response, "My parents only gave me gifts out of their own will and that cannot be construed as dowry. It was only when they [the groom's family] made additional demands that I put my foot down." Gifts? For the groom's brother as well? What is that if not dowry? Why did all the "gifts" come from the bride's parents, and not the groom's? This didn't strike anyone as ridiculous. The media just lapped it up.

Sharma's story was splashed, and more importantly, followed up, by the international media. In India, where international recognition is worshipped, Sharma continues to be felicitated by women's groups, citizen's groups and political parties. She has appeared at functions wearing a sash that says, "Miss Anti Dowry". No surprise that, in a country where people relate better to their Miss Worlds and Miss Universes wearing crowns and sashes. All the news reports, both international and Indian, gave prominence to the fact that Sharma was a student of computer engineering. No one questioned why an educated woman and her middle class family, who should have known better, thought it was proper and necessary to pay a dowry in order to see a daughter married off - until negotiations went awry.

India has experienced unbridled consumerism since its economic liberalization in the early 1990s, and naturally, dowry demands are escalating. Families disguise dowries as gifts to the newlyweds. Television advertisements for big-ticket items like washing machines, new-fangled refrigerators and microwave ovens, show parents gifting these items to their daughters, the advertisements imparting a none-too-subtle message about what these "gifts" really are.

In this atmosphere, Sharma deserves support, but making a feminist heroine of her (with her television sets and refrigerators,) trivializes an insidious problem that claims lives. And in not highlighting that Sharma and her family are also culpable under the anti-dowry law, the media have willfully worn blinders. Nisha Sharma wasn't ever against dowry. So what's all the fuss about?

of pox and puppets

2003-06-14T03:55:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Asia Times in June 2003).

The Brainfever Bird by I. Allan Sealy

At the beginning of The Brainfever Bird, a Russian specialist in biological warfare arrives in Delhi to sell a briefcase full of deadly secrets. On the way to his hotel, unknown robbers ambush the scientist's taxi and steal his terrible creations. Once this might have been the setup for a juicy thriller. But with the region's safest cities still reeling under quarantine conditions, and the specter of anthrax and smallpox never quite forgotten, this is hardly territory for escapism. These are interesting times.

Suitably, I Allan Sealy, the Indian author of The Brainfever Bird, infuses the conventional scenario with the philosophical seriousness, the moral dilemma, that separates literature from pulp fiction. Lev Repin, Sealy's protagonist, is at once villain and hero. His career scuttled by the end of the Cold War, Repin's pride compels him to resort to selling his disastrous secrets. In Russia, he was reduced to working as a chauffeur.

The destruction of his world leaves him with little guilt about the threat his treasures represent to the one that replaced it. "You do some plague, some anthrax. Then maybe some virus. Smallpox, Ebola, Marburg," he explains callously. Yet he remains tormented by nightmares of his colleague, Meschersky, who inadvertently infected himself with the virus Kurile-D, "the living face of death". Even his ruminations about his past are filled with the metaphors of disease. "Youth is a country," he reflects. "I used to live there. The inhabitants are determined to emigrate, exiles long to return. But the borders are sealed, as if the plague had broken out there and the United Nations had sent highly paid soldiers to patrol the passes."

Lepin and Meschersky are characters inspired by the real-life players Ken Alibek and Nikolai Ustinov in author Richard Preston's 1998 New Yorker article "The Bioweaponeers". Alibek has a Doctor of Sciences degree in anthrax and was a deputy chief of research and production for the Soviet biological-weapons program known as Biopreparat. He defected to the United States in 1992 and is quoted in the article as saying that the diaspora of biologists who came out of Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union could have ended up anywhere: in Iraq, Syria, Libya, China, Iran, perhaps Israel, perhaps India. In the article Alibek also talked about the terrifying death of his colleague Nikolai Ustinov, who was accidentally infected with the Marburg virus. Taking off from this event, Sealy, with his vivid metaphors and distinctive prose style, spins a grim, modern tale reflecting the zeitgeist.

Repin strives to pinpoint the moment he went wrong, recasting his education as a descent into death and decay. "Sometimes he returns in his mind to those jars of soused organs, diseased tissue on display: the riddled liver of a serf who wrestled for Tsar Nicholas; a Decembrist brain withered in dementia to a coral; a pair of eyes that saw defeat at Mukden reddened to maraschino cherries. A lung in cross-section with asbestos deposits rich as marrowfat peas ... As if it was there, by the jars, that they took him up, into militant biology."

While Repin's thoughts on economic and moral decline drive the novel, the setting, a fetid, pulsating Old Delhi, provides the perfect landscape. Here is a place that is constantly reinventing itself, even as it carries with it the burden of history. Sealy has immortalized the walled city of masseurs, Unani practitioners, wrestling matches, Karim's kebabs, puppet shows and sidewalk book sales in a way no one has ever done in English.

In the midst of Repin's quest to get to the Defense Ministry, a plague breaks out in the walled city of Old Delhi. The epidemic subsides, having taken its toll, but mysteriously, the needle of suspicion, as it were, points to Repin. Urchins on the even call him "plague-master". Lepin is now being followed by a masseur who he suspects is more than just that and he narrowly avoids being castrated by an adolescent who lost his brother to the plague. While watching a puppet show, Repin is called aside and told his life is in danger and that he should go home. On the way, a man on a scooter chucks a jar full of acid on Repin's face, disfiguring him. He's taken to hospital, from where he suddenly disappears.

Unlike his deceptively calm 1998 Booker Prize short-listed novel The Everest Hotel, Sealy's new book crackles at a furious pace. In the novel, United Nations weapons inspectors have been cleverly put off the scent of Repin's biological weapons, and if that hits too close to home, the account of the plague (much like severe acute respiratory syndrome) that sweeps Delhi is pure novelistic foresight. The Brainfever Bird is a story about the often scary world we now inhabit.

The Brainfever Bird, by I Allan Sealy, Picador 2003. ISBN: 0330412051. Price US$26, 320 pages.

the juggler of ramanathapuram

2003-06-04T05:14:00.000-07:00

The District Collector of Ramanathapuram, S.Vijayakumar, cleaned up an infamous asylum, started self-employment schemes for the mentally ill and worked –on a PhD.

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Man's World in June 2003).

In August 2001 S. Vijayakumar was less than two months into his new job as District Collector of Ramanathapuram in Tamil Nadu, when a deadly fire in an unauthorised mental asylum in Erwadi killed 28 mentally challenged people who had been chained to their beds. Within two days Vijayakumar sent detailed reports to the Tamil Nadu government, urging a complete ban on all such asylums in the state. The ban was instituted on August 10, four days after the deadly fire and by the 13th, Vijayakumar shut the 15 illegal asylums in Erwadi. He then personally oversaw the handover of 406 patients to their families and the transfer of 165 abandoned patients to trained hands in the Institute of Mental Health in Kilpauk and the Government Hospital in Ramanathapuram.

After a job well done, Vijayakumar could have gone back to reacquainting himself with the perks and niceties of being a district collector of a small town. He didn’t. Rehabilitating the Erwadi victims was just the first step taken by the shocked 33-year-old IAS officer, for whom the battle had only just begun. “In India, the uneducated -- and even the educated sometimes -- tend to think that the mentally ill are a matter of shame. What shocked me most was that despite the advances in the field of psychiatry and rehabilitation, something like Erwadi happened,” says Vijayakumar.

Vijayakumar, a deeply religious man, least expected to confront such atrocities in a place like his new district. Ramanathapuram is surrounded by god and populated with places associated with Rama and Sita, from the mythological story of the Ramayana. Rameswaram, a small island in the Gulf of Mannar, is home to the Ramanathaswamy temple. This is the place where Rama, on his return from Sri Lanka, is said to have offered thanks to Shiva and purified himself of the sin of killing the demon king Ravana. The site of the Satchi Hanuman Temple is where Hanuman is said to have told Rama that Sita was alive in Lanka.

Not far from Rameshwaram, In Erwadi in Ramanathapuram, lies another holy site: the tomb of Sultan Ibrahim Syed Aulia, also called Sultan Syed Ibrahim Shaheed Valiyullah. He was a Moroccan who was traveling in India propagating Islam when he died in 1198. According to legend, he made an appearance in a dream of one of his descendants asking him to build a tomb for him at a particular spot. The dargah was built and according to another story, the king of Ramanathapuram, Vijaya Regunatha Sethupathy, prayed here for a son and heir to his throne. He is said to have drunk the “holy” water of the dargah for over a month and his wife eventually bore a son. The king then gave the dargah 2,400 hectares of land. Since then, it has been believed that the holy water and oil from a lamp in the dargah can cure all ailments.

Vijayakumar says people of all faiths have been coming to the dargah for the last 200 years in search for various cures, but mostly for mental illnesses. Several spurious mental institutions had sprung up around the dargah starting around 15 years ago. It took the fire in Erwadi for the Tamil Nadu government to implement sections of the long-ignored Mental Health Act of 1987, Section 6(1) of which prohibits the running of a home for the mentally ill without a licence. Section 11(1b) says the licensing authority can revoke a licence if the running of the "home is being carried on in a manner detrimental to the moral, mental or physical well-being of the inpatients." Having implemented the act, the state government set up a District Mental Health Programme in Ramanathapuram to create awareness about mental health.

Vijayakumar was in charge of the programme, but he took it 20 steps ahead, right from the start. "We realised that unless the community is involved, the stigma attached to mental illness won’t go away,'' he says. Vijayakumar roped in the Madurai-based M.S.Chellamuthu Trust and named its founder Dr. C. Ramasubramaniam the coordinator of the programme. "Treating the mentally ill does not stop with medicines. It involves a multi-dimensional approach including rehabilitation and integration into the family and society," says the doctor. So, together they conducted a complete household survey of the district and created a database of the mentally and physically handicapped persons. Then they categorized them based on the level of their needs and conducted 80 camps throughout the district. The aim, as Vijayakumar told the staff of all the departments of the district administration, was to work out a rehabilitation programme for all the people identified and provide them with at least one form of government assistance, if not more.

Department officials were present at all of the camps so the physically and mentally handicapped were immediately provided with identity cards and some form of relief aid. No long drawn out paperwork or signatures in triplicate were required. Doesn’t sound like the bureaucracy. “I feel that being a bureaucrat is an asset and not an obstacle because when the right ideas are put forth and followed up closely anything can be achieved ‘because’ I’m a bureaucrat. As the planning was done so meticulously with all
the officials and NGOs who were involved in the rehabilitation programme, there was no major obstacle in the implementation of the programme. The only thought in the minds of everyone involved in this effort was that the mentally challenged and physically
handicapped people should get their due benefits from the government without any omission,” says Vijayakumar.

The district set up mobile psychiatry units, gave free bus passes to the handicapped, got cleft palate patients treated, arranged for corrective surgeries for 125 physically handicapped people and got more than a thousand children admitted to school. The administration also set up eight vocational training centers in the district, provided each center with a continuous physiotherapy wing and trained 100 village health nurses. All this with no additional funds from the government. “The funds for the centres have been dovetailed from the available schemes in District Rural Development Agency and other departments and with the active support of NGOs and nationalised banks,” says Vijayakumar. The M.S. Chellamuthu Trust and the Pioneer College of Physiotherapy also gave him a great deal of help. When there was a need for even more funds for wheelchairs and surgeries, Vijayakumar decided to seek help from various hospitals by appealing to their conscience. After witnessing the strides being made by the district, the National Institute of Mental Health gave its mental health programme a whopping Rs. 30 lakhs. Even the state chief minister who is known to be stingy with praise commended his efforts at a conference of district collectors.

“Ramanathapuram is a different place now, compared with what it was two years ago,” says Dr. Ramasubramaniam, who recalls being amazed at the speed with which Vijayakumar’s office got things done. “He is quite a visionary, not your usual kind of IAS officer,” he says, as we enter one of the vocational training centres in the district. These centers are Dr. Ramasubramaniam’s pride and joy. To get the community involved the doctor set up monitoring committees for each centre, with the committee comprising panchayat leaders and family members. “This is how the mentally ill can get a feeling of self worth. Families of the mentally ill would resent them for being a burden and a lot of these people would become seriously depressed. But by actively producing things these patients now have smiles on their faces,” the doctor says. The chorus that greets him upon entering the center is proof enough. He discreetly informs me that some of the Erwadi survivors are at the center. It’s hard to tell who they are, as they’ve been well rehabilitated. “They were depressed for months after the tragedy and the smiles on their faces now are reward enough,” he says. The patients at these centers are trained to make housecleaning products, paper bags and ornamental knick-knacks from seashells. ``We make sure the products have a market. So that the proposition is commercially viable, and the patients keep the money from sales,'' says Dr. Ramasubramaniam.

Vijayakumar couldn’t have found a better ally than the good doctor. Ramasubramaniam’s Chellamuthu Trust was judged the best NGO working amongst persons with mental disabilities in Tamil Nadu in 1999-2000 and was named a “recognized research center” by the Government of India’s Department of Science and Technology. Ramasubramaniam is committed and Vijayakumar is dogged. Having provided relief to close to almost 11,000 people, the District Collector is making sure that follow up programs are being regularly conducted even as the scope of the mental health programme broadens. “We can’t afford to become complacent, this is an ongoing project as long as mental illness exists in society,” he says, adding that even now patients coming to the Primary Health Centres for medicines, pay a visit to the dargah. ‘I am not about to interfere with anyone’s faith, I am just happy that the dargah visit is a ‘supplement’ to the medicines,” he grins.

And that’s not all Vijayakumar is focused on. He is also attempting to overhaul the education, sanitation and drinking water sectors in the district. He has already instituted major rainwater harvesting measures in the drought prone district and is close to completing his Ph.D. in Watershed Management at the Gandhigram Rural Institute in Dindigul. How does he find the time to do all this ? “I see myself as a juggler with three to four balls in the air. I get a lot of satisfaction from doing all these things so I find time to do them, that’s all,” he says.

a keehn eye

2003-05-04T05:10:00.000-07:00

It was the mid-1950s when Tom Keehn brought his young family to India. His work was to promote handicrafts, but he ended up being the first signficant foreign collector of Indian modern art.

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the May/June 2003 issue of Span, a magazine published by the Public Affairs Section of the American Center in New Delhi on behalf of the American Embassy).

In 1956, Thomas Keehn made a trip to Madras to research handicrafts for the Indian Cooperative Union. He also planned to call on a young man, Krishen Khanna, who he had heard about from an upcoming artist called M.F. Hussain. Khanna, who was then working at Grindlays Bank, apparently painted in his spare time. Keehn went over to his house where Khanna showed him one of his paintings called “Quartet.” Keehn offered to buy it, but Khanna didn’t want to sell, as that would imply he was making a commitment to painting. Khanna then had no intention of leaving banking.

Keehn had loved the painting and returned to Delhi disappointed. Some months later, Khanna arrived in Delhi at the Keehns’ household with “Quartet” rolled up under his arm, this time for sale. Keehn and Khanna started to squabble about the price, not because Khanna was bidding it up, but because he refused to say how much and told Keehn to pay him whatever he wanted to. Exasperated, Keehn gave him a signed, blank check. “In later years, Krishen told me that he had filled in Rs. 350,” recalls Keehn, poised at the perch of the sofa, to indicate he hadn’t finished with his story. Keehn eventually donated that painting to World Education, a not-for-profit organization that he worked for. “You know how much World Education sold that painting for?” he asks, his eyes twinkling. “$12,000 and that was over five years ago. Now, that painting is worth about $25,000,” he said and chuckled. In 1956, Rs. 350 would have been about $80.

Keehn was an accidental collector, but one can safely assume that he was the first collector, or at least one of the first collectors, of modern Indian art. Chester Herwitz, Charles Saatchi and Masanori Fukuoka came later and unlike them, Keehn has some of the formative works of India’s great artists like Krishen Khanna of course, and also M.F. Hussain, V.S. Gaitonde, S.H. Reza, Ram Kumar and Jamini Roy.

Keehn and his wife Martha McKee Keehn collected not just Indian paintings but lifelong Indian friends, during their stay in India from 953 to 1961. In fact, when SPAN met Thomas Keehn in March, he was staying at the house of Gopal Jain, the son of Lakshmi Jain who was one of the first people the Keehns met when they moved to Delhi. Lakshmi Jain was then executive director of the Indian Cooperative Union. This time, Keehn was on one of his frequent trips to India, to meet up with friends and to spread the word about a book called INDIA INK, a collection of letters written by his late wife Martha, to her family in the U.S., during the eight years the Keehns lived in India.

Keehn is not just an accidental art collector but also an accidental Indophile. In the late 1940s, he was what he calls a “do gooder” working for a church-related organization in Washington D.C. That was also the time when Harry Truman had became U.S. president and propounded what came to be called The Truman Doctrine, which loosely meant that the U.S. would participate in world affairs by helping countries with economic and military aid. Truman appointed Nelson A. Rockefeller, son of the philanthropist John D Rockefeller Jr, to oversee a committee to recommend Asian and African countries that the U.S. government could provide aid to. Keehn was interested in the committee, and when Rockefeller held the first National Conference on International Economic and Social development in 1952, Keehn was made executive director. Then Rockefeller decided to expand his philanthropic organization, American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) to Asia, and he decided to appoint Keehn as its representative in India.

“I was being sent here without any qualifications and I said yes without even consulting my wife. But she was the adventurous kind and said, ‘Let’s Go’ and the next thing you know, here we are with our two children,” Keehn, now 88 years old, recalls as if it were yesterday. Keehn’s mandate in India was to help market Indian handicrafts and to provide supervised loans to small farmers. He developed projects in collaboration with the Indian Cooperative Union (ICU) that was headed by Kamladevi Chattopadhyaya with Lakshmi Jain as its executive director. That Union has now blossomed into the highly successful Cottage Industries group of emporiums “During the British rule, all the nawabs, etc were urged to develop crafts as a means to keep them out of politics and so post-independent India had these great crafts that the government decided to encourage the marketing and sale of,” Keehn says. He traveled the length and breadth of India by train to do market surveys and discover new crafts persons.

Rockefeller had also told Keehn to promote the emerging modern art movement of independent India. “Find out what is happening in the modern art and culture field. Not classical Indian art and sculpture. Many people are paying attention to that,” was Nelson Rockefeller’s specific mandate. Rockefeller had a deep interest in modern art and was the main supporter of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Keehn readily admits that as far as Indian art was concerned, he had no idea where to begin. But Keehn had made so many friends in a short time, that he soon found three key people to guide him: P. Neogy, an art historian who later taught at the University of Hawaii, Som Benegal, a journalist and Richard Bartholomew an art critic. “(M.F.) Hussain was one of the first artists I met. When I saw his work it was clear this was something special. Then, he (Hussain) was in transition from painting billboards for films and making wooden toys for children. We had so many of his toys, many of which are unfortunately broken now,” says Keehn. A painting by Hussain, of the Keehns’ eldest daughter Deborah on her 10th birthday, and one of the entire Keehn family, still has pride of place at the Keehns residence in Forest Hills, in Queens New York. Hussain and many other artists are still friends with the Keehns who supported them long before they became popular among the glitterati. “All these artists were part of our household when we lived in India,” says Keehn.

In 1956, Keehn was the prime mover in organizing Delhi’s first ever exhibition of Indian contemporary art, titled “Eight Painters.” Years later, M.F. Hussain would remark that this exhibition was as critical a moment for Indian art, as the 1913 Armory exhibition had been for modern art in New York. Then in January 1959, Keehn was involved in organizing an exhibition, “Trends in Contemporary Painting from India,” which opened at the Graham Gallery in New York. It included artists from the “Eight Painters” exhibit. The timing was propitious because it preceded the 1959 Sao Paulo Biennial and a considerable portion of the Graham Gallery exhibit was sent to the Biennial in Brazil.

By then there was a tiny amount of interest in contemporary Indian art. In the early 1960s Chester Herwitz and his wife Davida began visiting India and by 1966, they began collecting contemporary Indian art. Over the next thirty years, the Herwitzs acquired more than 3,000 paintings and drawings from India. But the earliest works of Hussain, Ram Kumar and other Indian artists were with the Keehns.

By 1959, the Keehns, who were now a family of six, were aware of the growing tensions between India and the US on political and economic issues. In 1961, they decided to return to the U.S. taking with them, the memories of their friends, and some 35 pieces of Indian art. By then, they had become acquainted with Welthy H. Fisher, an educationist, who had been inspired by Gandhi to move to India and start ‘Literacy House” in Lucknow, for the advancement and independence in "new India" through education. Literacy House was a small, non-formal school that would combine literacy with agricultural training. The success of “Literary House” made Welthy and other literacy pioneers realize that they could replicate their Indian model worldwide. Fisher started World Education in 1951 in New York City, to provide literacy training to those who needed it most throughout the world. Upon their return to New York, Tom and Martha Keehn began to work for World Education, which they did until the late 1980s. Thomas Keehn was president of World Education from 1969 until 1981 and he’s still on the board of the organization. “Over those years we used the experience of Literacy House in India to extend our programs to Nepal, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, several countries in Africa, and even in the U.S.,” says Keehn.

During this time they often visited India to keep up with their old friends. The last painting Keehn bought was in the 1970s. “We had so many that our house was quite full,” says Keehn. But they wanted to continue with their engagement with India in some form and every now and then discussed “doing something” with the letters that Martha had written home during their years in India. She thought it could become part of a book, which she said should be called “India Ink.” But the book was still a concept until two events occurred. The first was that in June 1995, for the first time, modern Indian paintings were included in a major Sotheby’s art auction in New York and London. The auction included paintings from the Herwitzs’ charitable trust and had works by Hussain, Ram Kumar, Reza, and Jamini Roy, many of whose early paintings adorned the walls of the Keehns’ Forest Hills House. These were followed by auctions at Christie’s and another one by Sotheby’s in 1996.

The second event was tragic: Martha Keehn was diagnosed with cancer. “One of the last things my wife and I did together was to go to that first auction. When the prices for some of the Indian paintings were bid up to the tens of thousands, we were trembling. We were delighted for our artist friends and we also realized how valuable our collection, even though small, was,” says Keehn. When his wife died in April 1996, a devastated Keehn came to India to reflect on his life and develop new priorities.

That’s when he decided to gift some of the collection to World Education. The gift to the Foundation specified that some paintings would be retained in their Boston headquarters and some could be sold and the proceeds used to support program activities in India or for publications, “both of which were special concerns for Martha.” At the formal presentation of the gift to the Foundation, Keehn spoke about the “fortuitous” circumstances under which he and Martha acquired the art works in India forty years ago, and the consternation they felt after the Sotheby’s auction in New York when they discovered the value of the collection. “We were worried,” Keehn said. “Would we have to get insurance?” And then he added that by accepting the gift and taking some of the artwork off his hands, World Education was doing him a great favor!

Keehn also exhibited the collection at a New York art gallery focusing on contemporary Indian art. Deepak Talwar, who now runs the New York-based Talwar Gallery for modern Indian art, describes that exhibition as, “a carefully nurtured collection of formative works from the foremost artists in the Indian contemporary art scene.” Talwar suggests that it isn’t luck, but a “discerning eye that consistently saw something unique and lasting in the artists whose works he (Keehn) acquired.”

By then, Keehn was determined to publish Martha’s letters. “My wife wrote long letters from the moment we arrived in India. She wrote on an old fashioned typewriter with carbon paper. My children and I had a valuable legacy of hers and I was going to find a way to publish the letters,” says Keehn. In 1998, Keehn and Arun Vadehra, his friend who owned an art gallery in India, decided to combine Martha Keehn’s letters with reproductions of the Keehns’ collection of art.

In March 2000, INDIA INK was born. This gorgeous hardbound book encases a wonderful slice of history. Martha McKee Keehn wrote vivid letters describing the Keehns’ day-to-day family life, as well as their daily interaction with people from all strata of society. The tone is affectionate, the letters are informative and witty and the writing is informal yet elegant.

Here she describes meeting with Monroe Wheeler, then director of exhibitions at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “Monroe is a very nice guy but I AM intimidated slightly. … He says, ‘(Jean) Cocteau said last week when I was lunching with him on the Riviera…(He lost me right there. I was so busy conjuring up the picture of lunching with Cocteau on the Riviera that I never did hear what it was he said.) And he tells me. …Evelyn Waugh (is)….’Quite the nastiest man alive.’ ” Incidentally, It was Monroe who suggested to the Keehns start their international art efforts for India by identifying selected international events where modern Indian art could be included. The rest is of course history.

Keehn, meanwhile, hasn’t sold any paintings from his collection. He has mostly kept them or given them away. The one he regrets parting with the most, is a 1962 V.S. Gaitonde abstract that Talwar eventually bought from a World Education auction. “I love that painting. What made me gave it away?” says Keehn, who jokes with Talwar about buying it back from him. “Gaitonde was one of the few painters of that period who did abstracts and he was stubbornly and consistently fantastic. I wish I could have it back,” says Keehn.

Talwar isn’t selling and as Keehn says, “I probably couldn’t afford to buy it now.”

a tale of two women

2003-04-21T03:56:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in April 2003).

A Married Woman by Manju Kapur

Manju Kapur's second novel, A Married Woman, is set in the time leading up to the destruction of the Babri Masjid in India in 1992. It deals with the crisis of a middle-class woman from Delhi caught in an unhappy marriage.

Aastha has had her share of schoolgirl heartaches, but once over them, she looks forward to married life with a nice, romantic dream boy. She happily agrees to an arranged marriage with an America-returned MBA (master of business administration), Hemant, who seems the complete antithesis of a traditional Indian man. When Aastha is pregnant, the couple inform her mother, who hopes the child will be a son. "But Ma, I want a daughter ... In America there is no difference between boys and girls. How can this country get anywhere if we go on treating our women this way?" says Hemant, to Aastha's (and her mother's) amazement.

Aastha does have a daughter and the family prospers until her husband inexplicably transforms into a cliche of the male chauvinist pig, in one throwaway sentence: "Somewhere along the way Hemant's attitude to Aastha changed. She told herself it was only slightly, but it oppressed her." Hemant now wants the second child to be a son. When Aastha tells Hemant that his mother has engaged a priest to perform rituals to ensure she gives birth to a son, Hemant sees nothing wrong with it. Aastha wonders aloud what would happen if she has another daughter. "Don't worry, sweetheart, then we will try again, it's perfectly all right," he says. She protests, saying she can't keep trying because it would be difficult for her to continue her teaching job if she were constantly pregnant. "Oh-ho, what is there in teaching? Hardly a serious job, you just go, talk to some children about poems and stories, organize a few clubs and come back. If you do feel it is so important, all the more reason not to mind if Mummy does some puja. Who knows, it may yield good results."

Women caught in the traditional-versus-modern bind are familiar terrain for Kapur, whose debut novel, Difficult Daughters, has a rebellious heroine who becomes the second wife of a man she loves, even though her family turns against her. That novel, which won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the best first book (Eurasia), has a fluid narrative, vivid historical details and a credible protagonist. Unfortunately, Kapur's second book has a tardy narrative, no believable characters and spotty grammar.

When Hemant transforms into a bad guy, Aastha starts to feels unappreciated, condescended to, and bored. Aastha, like Gloria Steinem once said, doesn't breed well in captivity. But Aastha's angst is tiresome and problematic to the plot. Aastha was never the rebellious sort and all she wanted to do was marry a romantic, rich guy. Her father is more of a feminist than she is. Even more troublesome is Aastha's sudden makeover into a political animal, by virtue of her meeting a political activist, Aijaz Akhtar Khan, who alerts her to the growing religious fundamentalism in India. Aijaz and his street-theater troupe are burned alive by a fundamentalist mob and the incident makes Aastha more committed to the cause. Her transformation into a flag-waving, protest-marcher fighting sectarianism is farcical. Virmati, the heroine of Difficult Daughters, is a consistent character. Aastha isn't.

It gets worse. In a strange plot twist, Aastha and Aijaz's widow Pipeelika start having a torrid affair. Pipeelika keeps taunting Aastha for not leaving her husband and says more than once, "Why did I think it would be different with a woman?" Why indeed? In the brief description the reader gets of Pipeelika's married life, there seems nothing chauvinistic about Aijaz. Pipeelika was annoyed that Aijaz delayed telling his parents they were married (he is Muslim and she Hindu), but that is hardly gender-specific behavior. Aastha's and Pipeelika's affair ends, as does, thankfully, the book.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid as the backdrop to the novel is ineffective, because it is inconsequential. Long tracts about Hindu-Muslim relations make their appearance in the novel, but they are stilted and seem out of place. Some of the paragraphs sound as if they have been lifted straight out of a pamphlet.

A Married Woman, at its best, is a weak, proto-feminist novel, and at its worst is a pulp romance. Gloria Steinem once said, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." Steinem got married three years ago. Aastha returns to her husband.

A Married Woman by Manju Kapur, Faber and Faber, 2002. ISBN: 0 571 21566. Price: US$17.29; 272 pages.

coming to a wall near you

2003-04-03T05:06:00.000-08:00

As a child, Neville Tuli connected with India through Hindi films. Now he believes film posters could be a cultural link for all Indians

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in April 2003).

IT WAS A SCENE straight out of a Hindi film. In early 2001, Neville Tuli walked out of his Bombay office and was approached by two men. They told him that their widowed mother was suffering from breast cancer and couldn't afford treatment. They had heard that Tuli was interested in buying old Indian film memorabilia. Would he take a look at their late father's collection?

Tuli was used to being pestered by cranks. After all, wasn't he the foreign-returned paagal--"mad one"--who was actually paying money for old movie posters and booklets (collections of song lyrics and movie images that once accompanied Indian films releases)? But Tuli decided to go along; he had vaguely heard of the men's father, Husainibai, whose passion had earned him the nickname "Bookletwallah."

TULI'S TIPS

Buy posters made for the original movie release, not reprints
Collect an entire set from a single film, or a particular period
Preserve your posters as soon as you buy them
A bad film can have a great poster: Don't think about the quality of the film, think about the poster

Once Tuli walked into the tiny 300-square foot Bombay hovel, his heart jumped. "There were 80 lockers in that tiny space where a family of four lived," he recalls. "All the lockers were filled with old movie booklets and posters." It was a gold mine and Tuli paid $20,000 for the lot. The mother recovered and the sons set up a small store. All's well that ends well, as the old Hindi films would say.

The incident was just the beginning for the 38-year-old, who now has more than 250,000 items in his collection of Indian film posters and memorabilia. Tuli, an ethnic Indian, was born and brought up near London, where his only connection with India was film. "They were key emotional vehicles that kept me in touch with India," says Tuli. "I love them."

A development expert by training, Tuli believes that by encouraging individual creativity, the arts are key to economic growth. That's why in 1994 he relocated to India to try to develop a new infrastructure for Indian art. His main vehicle now is Osian's, a combined arts archive and auction house.

But are movie posters art? Yes, says Tuli, who points out that several famous Indian artists of today, like M.F. Hussain, painted film posters early in their careers. "All these posters have timeless iconic images. The graphic quality of these posters stands out."

Tuli assembled his horde by buying entire collections from individuals ("we are a nation of hoarders") and from railway warehouses, where posters were often stored in the past and sometimes sold for scrap. "All these posters had been junked!" says Tuli. "Can you imagine that?" Tuli reckons on spending at least 15,000 rupees ($313) on fixing up each poster. "Because of India' s humidity and the poor quality of the paper, they are so frail; one touch and they would fall apart."

Last March, Tuli decided to test the market by holding possibly the world's first auction of Indian film posters. Despite Tuli's low expectations, he says just over 60% of the items were sold. That success, he believes, is an encouraging sign that Indians are beginning to value this overlooked part of their heritage. "Unless you attach financial value to something," he says, "nobody will respect it."

the capitalist case for india

2003-03-08T03:58:00.000-08:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in March 2003).

The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change by Gurcharan Das

Gurcharan Das is a novelist, playwright, venture capitalist, Harvard graduate and former chief executive of Procter & Gamble India. But more than anything else, he is an unabashed capitalist who believes privatization is the panacea for all of India's social and political ills. "In the short term, the [economic] reforms will have little impact on the poor - let's admit this honestly," he writes in his new book, The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change.

Das's paradigm is right-wing Thatcherite economics. Here is Das, former chief executive of a multinational, at his best: "It is more important, I believe, to raise the living standards of the poor than to worry about inequality. We have to realize that economic reforms are bound to increase inequality that comes from open and free competition, but that does not mean that they will worsen the situation of the poor and the most disadvantaged." And again, Das, the patronizing proselytizer: The ordinary citizen in India "does not understand how economic reforms will help improve his life".

Corporations too, as far as Das is concerned, can do no wrong. The Maharashtra power plant Dabhol and its owner Enron (now bankrupt) were vilified, rightly, for selling extremely expensive power. But apparently, "we should not waste our energies in blaming Enron but in reforming the MSEB" (Maharashtra State Electricity Board), says Das, cavalierly dismissing Enron's malfeasance.

In his last book, India Unbound, Das's thesis was that the problems of India arose because unlike in other parts of the world, democracy here preceded capitalism. In fact, in a recent interview in a local newspaper, Das categorically said, "So I personally think, what slows us down is democracy and, to some extent, tradition. We have an ambivalence about money, [we are] very religious," expressing a none-too-hazy preference for undemocratic models such as China and South Korea.

The Elephant Paradigm is a compilation of the 200-odd columns Das has written in the years since he quit his job at Procter & Gamble. Thankfully, the book is not entirely a hodgepodge of disparate ramblings. Das has attempted to link the articles by theme - a bit of a difficult task - given that he has covered a wide range of subjects, including the Panchayati Raj system (local self-governance), India's information-technology success, the power sector's problems, religious fundamentalism and women's rights. The title of the book implies that while India may never roar ahead like the Asian tigers (no doubt because it is a democracy), it will advance like a wise pachyderm, moving steadily and surely.

Das is a decent writer but his ponderous philosophizing always gets in the way. Some of his dime-store philosophy includes this gem: "I am convinced that the world is divided into two types of people: The minority who are dedicated to happiness and the majority who are dedicated to unhappiness. Those in the happy minority ... are content with getting on with their lives ... In contrast, those in the unhappy majority ... define their identity in relation to others and believe they can only be happy by making someone else unhappy." Whom is he kidding?

To his credit, Das doesn't shy from criticism even at the risk of sounding politically incorrect. While he doesn't support the Hindu fundamentalists in India, he blames India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's notion of a secular India as responsible for sowing the seeds of religious sectarianism. "Nehru's secularism failed because it was too intellectual and empty of content ... Today, there is an unfortunate polarization between an influential and articulate minority of secularists and the vast majority of silent, religiously minded Indians. Neither takes the trouble to understand the other, and what we have as a result is a dialogue of the deaf."

But then he says, "Having lost Nehru's age of innocence we are now resigned to a world without ideology and continue to grope for a new set of beliefs that will help us cope with our frustratingly pluralistic society."

Along the way, Das informs us of the breadth of his literary, philosophical and academic readings. He drops a ton of names and cites a ton of quotes. In an unintentionally hilarious bit, in a chapter titled "A Sentimental Education", he writes: "We Indians are verbose, and need to be reminded that human beings were born with two ears and two eyes, but with only one tongue so that we should see and hear twice as much as we say. Shakespeare too, I think, must have had us in mind when he wrote in Richard III: 'Talkers are no good doers.' Hence he offers us this advice in Henry V: 'Men of few words are the best of men.'"

Das should heed the bard's words.

The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change, by Gurcharan Das, 2002 Penguin. ISBN: 0-143-02910-X. Price: US$25.24, 430 pages.

fair is lovely?

2003-02-14T05:04:00.000-08:00

Some dark attitudes linger from the past

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Asian Wall Street Journal in February 2003).

Hmm, "Pink Glow, no, Pearly Glow, no. Aha! This one for you, for dark, erm, dusky skin. Yes, yes dusky skin," said the woman behind the counter at my neighborhood chemist, smiling apologetically for her supposed faux pas. I was buying face powder to sop off my face the oily afterglow of an hour out in desert-like New Delhi, where this year the monsoons had failed, but the humidity hadn't. I frankly didn't expect to find something for my dark, erm dusky skin. All I'd ever seen in India were compact powders of a diseased pink color. But I was back in India after almost ten years in New York, and after all the Indian women whod been crowned Ms. World and Ms. Universe, I thought, Maybe things have changed.

When the saleswoman handed me the face powder, I was cautiously optimistic. It still had a bit of pink in it, but was close enough to my color. At least I didn't look like the Indian actresses of yore; pink face with dark brown neck below.

But I soon found that, even though there were now cosmetics designed specially for Indian skin, in other ways, ideas about beauty hadn't changed at all. One day when I was flipping channels, my remote control digit stalled on a curious advertisement. An elderly gentleman was grumbling to his wife that he had to work even in his dotage, because his daughter, no, his dark daughter would never find a job and be able to support the family. If only you had had a son, he tells his wife, conveniently absolving his part in the procreation. The ad cut to the dark daughter, who'd overheard the conversation, looking stricken. Naturally, she rushed for advice to a fair friend, who advised her to use Fair & Lovely cream. She rubbed on the solvent, her pigmentation changed from dark to light. And voila, hey presto, suddenly transformed from dark daughter to fair daughter, she got a job, as a stewardess no less. Papa was proud.

Fair & Lovely. That rang a bell. In the 1980s, when I was a teenager, I was an ace ping-pong player. At a competition at the club in the small town I grew up in that included boys and girls my age as well as adults, I won prizes in five categories. A boy my age matched my record; we had partnered in the mixed doubles matches. He won what any teenager covets: comic books, a Monopoly set, and some cool puzzle books. I won five tubes of a cream called Fair & Lovely. I remember being bewildered and giving them away to the domestic help.

Back then, few middle-class Indian women worked, and for those who had jobs working was more something they did to pass time while they waited to get married. And fair skinned women stood a better chance of landing a good husband. India was still unused to the idea of women in positions of power. Most of the films, even the independent films, showed women as secretaries or detergent-selling saleswomen. It's different now. Women have high-ranking and high-paying positions in extremely competitive fields, both in India and abroad. But Fair & Lovely remains.

Many still seem to believe that for a woman, being fair is more important than anything else. A recent newspaper advertisement seeking an arranged marriage drove the point home. Seeking alliance for Punjabi girl, very fair, really beautiful, the ad ran, and then, as if an afterthought, MBA working at MNC, drawing six-digit monthly salary. Another ad, for a girl less white-looking, reserved its comment on her complexion for last: Seeking alliance for Gujarati girl, very slim, beautiful, homely, convent-educated, fluent in English, wheatish complexion. It's no wonder the fairness products market in India is worth US$150 million, and estimated to be growing at 10-15 percent a year.

I comforted myself with the assurance that at least my sophisticated friends were immune to color prejudice. But at a party an old friend from my New York days hosted, even that illusion was shattered. When the latest catwalk-walker my rakish buddy was dating came in, my supposedly liberal, foreign-educated friend remarked viciously: Can you believe Sunil is dating that woman? I mean, shes a model and all but doesnt she look kinda tribal ? So dark and junglee! As I've been doing a lot lately, I called it an early night.

are you talkin' to me?

2003-02-13T05:01:00.000-08:00

India's old-style movie business may be on the ropes, but a dynamic group of directors is winning fans with films that speak to younger audiences in their own language--English

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in February 2003).

IN THE 1982 HINDI FILM Namak Halal, a character played by Indian movie idol Amitabh Bachchan is asked if he can speak English. In a heavy, comic accent, he replies: "I can talk English, I can walk English, I can laugh English, because English is a very phunny language." In real life, Bachchan speaks English perfectly, but you wouldn't know it if you only watched his Bollywood films. There, English has traditionally been the language of the oppressor, the colonizer, the villain and the vamp.

Not any more. India is now making English-language films for Indian audiences and even Bollywood--long the home of formula-ridden technicolour spectaculars--has started showing its heroes and heroines spouting "Hinglish," a mix of Hindi and English. What's happened?

"English has become an Indian language, appropriated by the younger generation," says Dev Benegal, a 42-year-old Indian film-maker whose popular 1995 movie English, August helped spawn the growth of Indian films in English. Over the past four years, more than 20 such films have been released. This year alone as many as 15 will open on Indian screens.

True, those numbers represent only a tiny fraction of the 150-or-so Hindi films that Bollywood will release this year. However, many in the industry believe they are a sign of things to come, as Indian film-makers respond to the changing interests and tastes of increasingly middle-class audiences tiring of the traditional Bollywood extravaganzas filled with song-and-dance routines.

"This is a phenomenon that will only grow," says Komal Nahta, editor of Film Information, a Mumbai-based entertainment trade magazine. "There is enough space for Bollywood, Hollywood and Indian films in English. Look at the size and variety of our population."

In some senses, that very variety is one of the factors fuelling the rise in English-language films. With India's constitution recognizing 18 major languages and around 400 lesser tongues, "English becomes the link language," says Benegal. Take Aparna Sen's 2002 film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The movie, which won awards at Switzerland's Locarno Film Festival, tells of the relationship between a married South Indian Hindu woman and a Bengali Muslim photographer. Their common language? English, or rather "chutney" English--a mix of English and another Indian language, such as Hindi, Tamil or Punjabi.

But the differences in these movies go beyond just language. Unlike most Bollywood flicks, the new English-language films often take a serious approach to social issues, such as infidelity, crime, drugs and homosexuality. Let's Talk, directed by Ram Madhvani and released early this year, is about a married woman who must tell her husband that she's become pregnant while having an affair. Another film, the soon-to-be-released Boom, directed by 34-year-old Kaizad Gustad, depicts the links between the fashion world and the underworld in Mumbai (and, perhaps surprisingly, features one-time Hollywood pin-up Bo Derek playing herself). "My movies are in Hinglish because I think in English but curse in Hindi," says Gustad. "That means my mind is English, my heart is Indian."

The growing popularity of these films doesn't mean Bollywood movies--commercial films made in various Indian languages--are on the way out, though the recent slew of flops from mainstream film-makers may signal that tastes are changing.

There's little doubt that tastes are broadening. Through cable television, India's expanding middle class now has far more access to foreign entertainment than it once did. "People have seen a lot more non-Indian films compared to 10 years ago, and they see how these movies are different from the usual Bollywood stuff," says Film Information's Nahta. "So they are more open to English-language films even from India."

The rise of English-language films is also being driven by the industry's changing economics. "Multiplexes have changed the whole sector dramatically," says Ashish Jindal, senior consultant at research firm Colliers Jardine India. In the 1990s, a slew of state incentives encouraged developers to build multiplexes. "Before, the single big theatres would be 1,000-seaters, but now there are three to four screens that seat between 150 and 300 people. It is much easier to fill up a small theatre."

Those new freedoms are being exploited by companies like Shringar Films, which runs a chain of multiplexes in Mumbai and became an early champion of Indian movies in English by taking on their distribution. It started when Shringar Director Shravan Shroff saw Nagesh Kukunoor's 1998 film, Hyderabad Blues, which tells the story of an Indian who returns home after many years of studying abroad only to find he feels like an alien. That struck a chord with the 31-year-old Shroff, who at the time had just recently returned from business school in Australia. He decided to distribute the film.

"We make money on some, we don't on others. But I like the genre and it gives me creative satisfaction as I can target and market these movies differently," Shroff says. Film-makers, too, are happy with the surplus of multiplex screens. "There's oceans of time and space for our kind of films," says 35-year-old actor-turned-director Rahul Bose.

'OUR KIND OF FILMS'

The titles of the films scheduled for release this year are indicative of what Bose means by "our kind of films." They include Dance Like a Man, Freaky Chakra, Big City Blues and For Real. Unlike Mira Nair's art-house Hinglish film Monsoon Wedding, which was geared more towards Western film-festival audiences, these new Indian films in English are being made for Indian audiences--albeit Indian audiences that are comfortable speaking English. Bose's recent film Everybody Says I'm Fine, for instance, was set in a posh Mumbai salon "so I can't possibly have my characters speak in Bihari," says the director. "The way I look at it, a particular story calls for a particular language. I doubt any of us think 'let me make a film in English' and then think of a story."

Director Benegal agrees: "I just wanted to talk about my generation, and make a film that I and many like me identified with," he says. "My generation grew up in free India and is free of the ideological baggage that those before us had. India is and has always been a multicultural country and Bollywood hasn't recognized that."

bollywood blunders

2003-02-13T04:57:00.000-08:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in February 2003).

For decades, the success of India's Mumbai-based movie industry was as predictable as the plot lines of its song-and-dance spectaculars. Churning out hundreds of movies a year to fanatically loyal audiences, Bollywood could do no wrong.

Lately, things have turned sour. Last year, just one in 25 Bollywood films made a profit, analysts estimate, and the industry racked up losses of more than 3 billion rupees ($63 million) on an investment of 10 billion rupees. Even Devdas, a love story based on a much-filmed novel that was one of only two big hits from Bollywood last year, failed to match the success of previous smashes, according to Amod Mehra, a Mumbai-based film industry analyst.

What's gone wrong? "Every film does the same thing," says Mumbai-based film critic Deepa Gahlot, echoing the belief of many that audiences are tiring of the same old formulas. "Everyone speaks the same way, wears the same clothes, the writing is terrible. They are completely capable of screwing up a great idea."

Bollywood, though, is in no mood to innovate. In recent years, the industry has seen an influx of new investors determined to shake up this traditionally disorganized business and milk it for all it's worth.

"Creativity went out the window and it became a cash-flow game," says Shravan Shroff, director of distributor and multiplex operator Shringar Films. "Instead of making one good film, they made five terrible films."

Audiences are striking back: Rising ticket prices and local-language soap operas are keeping television viewers glued to their sofas. And if they do want to see Bollywood's latest, they need only tune into cable TV, where new releases often show up--illegally--within days of their big-screen release.

Against such a background some analysts say 2003 will be a make-or-break year for Bollywood. Says analyst Mehra: "If we don't have at least four big hits this year, we are finished."

a resounding voice

2003-02-08T03:59:00.000-08:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in February 2003).

The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces by Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is of that rare breed of writers for whom the personal is the political and vice versa. His novel The Shadow Lines was informed by the profound effect that the horrendous massacre of Sikhs in the Delhi riots in 1984 after the assassination of Indira Gandhi had on him. In an Antique Land, his memoir about his fieldwork in Egypt, includes anthropological essays and a vignettes about the ancient and the modern, the old East and the new West, and the responses of individuals to change.

Until now, however, much of Ghosh's eclectic production - his journalism, scholarly essays, travelogues and genre-defying pieces written for various magazines and journals - had disappeared into the void. At long last, Permanent Black, an art-house Indian publisher, has collected many of Ghosh's prose pieces in The Imam and the Indian. The sheer variety of these pieces - ranging from the 1984 riots to a fundraising dinner in New York for the Tibetan cause - may leave some readers confused, grasping for a theme to give them cohesion. A close reading, however, shows these works are bound together by Ghosh's abiding concern for the political, whether it takes him to India, Myanmar, the US or Egypt.

The self-critical, perceptive title essay relates an incident from his time doing fieldwork in Egypt. He argues with an intolerant village imam over the relative merits of cremating the dead, as Indian Hindus do, and the Egyptian Muslim practice of burying them. The imam calls the Hindu custom "primitive" and argues that the "advanced" West doesn't burn dead bodies.

Ghosh, soon incensed, lashes out, saying that even Western countries burn their dead: "They have special electric furnaces meant just for that." Both sides are stung. The imam accuses Ghosh of lying, with the logic that the West cannot be so ignorant, as they "have guns, tanks and bombs". Ghosh retorts that India not only has those heavy armaments but also nuclear weapons: a response that shocks Ghosh himself. "So there we were," Ghosh concludes, "the imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilizations vying to lay claim to the violence of the West."

This subtle, all encompassing worldview is vintage Ghosh. His historian's eye takes in the breadth of peoples' experiences, and his anthropologist's mind makes connections between their religions, wars, cultures and ways of life. Above all, he describes these complex connections with simple profundity - with the skill of the novelist that he is.

Ghosh can be jocular, too, without being trite. His essay "Four Corners" about a road trip in the US illustrates his keen observational powers and ability to relate the commonplace to history. America's recreational vehicles (RVs), are, in his words, "if not quite palaces, then certainly midtown condos on wheels". He notices their curious names, Native American words like Winnebago and Itasca. "The names of the dispossessed tribes of the Americas hold a peculiar allure for marketing executives of automobile companies. Pontiac, Cherokee - so many tribes are commemorated in modes of transport," Ghosh observes. And then, as always, the summing up: "It is not a mere matter of fashion that so many of the cars that flash past on the highways carry those names, breathing them into the air like the inscriptions on prayer wheels. This tradition of naming has a long provenance: Did not Kit Carson himself, the scourge of the Navajo, name his favorite horse Apache?"

Why doesn't Ghosh come off as a know-it-all? With disarming frankness, he acknowledges that he doesn't have all the answers, or even explanations, for the fascinating quirks of culture he describes. In a short essay about a New York fundraising party for Tibet, for instance, Ghosh confesses that as an undergraduate, he and his friends would get drunk when they went to eat Tibetan food at a Tibetan refugee camp in Delhi. "You couldnt help doing so it was hard to be in the presence of so terrible a displacement." As Ghosh muses thus in the trendy Manhattan restaurant, he catches the eye of the sole monk at the gathering and finds that "... his smile seemed a little guilty: the hospitality of a poor nation must have seemed dispensable compared to the charity of a rich one." Or perhaps he was merely bewildered, Ghosh continues. "It cannot be easy to celebrate the commodification of one's own suffering."

Despite the mysterious omission of Ghosh's marvelous essays on Cambodia The Imam and the Indian is one collection that should be on the bookshelves of all who call themselves readers.

The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces by Amitav Ghosh, Ravi Dayal & Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2002. ISBN: 8175300477. Price: Rs 495 (US$10), pp 361.

impact partners

2003-01-30T23:33:00.000-08:00

A venture capital firm that puts street kids on the Magic Bus to betterment has significant success not only in Mumbai, but in New York City

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the January/February 2003 issue of Span Magazine, published by the Public Affairs Section of the American Center on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi).

In March 1999, U.K. national Matthew Spacie had a life-changing experience. Spacie, then chief operating officer at Cox & King, Indias largest travel company, took some children from Mumbais slums and pavements for a weekend at a local hill station.

The children, most of whom had never been anywhere beyond their immediate environs, were overwhelmed with joy and that was a revelation for Spacie. He had already been volunteering with street children and coaching them in rugby, and so had become familiar with their issues and problems, but he only understood the magnitude of their poverty-stricken surroundings on that trip. "For those children it was a journey away from their current existence. All it took was a bus ride away. It was a life changing moment for me," he says.

Spacie started to organize monthly trips in association with Mumbai-based educational agency Akanksha, but wanted to become more involved. "It wasnt convenient because of job pressures. It made me realize that this was a common restriction that potential volunteers from corporations faced."

In February 2001, a public service venture firm, Impact Partners, then recently started by New York-based venture capitalist Ramanan Raghavendran, persuaded Spacie to give up his for-profit job and concentrate exclusively on setting up Magic Bus. "A decision I will never look back on." Magic Bus, one of Impact Partners first social investments, now helps more than 3,500 marginalized children in Mumbai. It has collaborations with 15 other NGOs and over 250 volunteers.

Impact Partners found Spacie, rather than the other way around. "They were looking for innovative and sustainable models to grow on and I think our particular niche inspired them. They have been fully instrumental in the early stages of development in many ways," says 32-year-old Spacie.

Impact Partners encouragement has paid rich dividends. Maru, a two-year-old abandoned girl spoke her first words, an expression of joy, on a Magic Bus camp in the middle of a swimming session at the paddle pool. "She surprised not only the volunteers but also all the other girls with her enthusiastic outbursts to all the fun she was having on Marve beach! She made us all realize the value of just letting her play and grow up with a smile," says Spacie.

This is the kind of success story that Impact Partners cherishes. Founder Ramanan Raghavendran, 33, prefers to call what he does "societal venture capital." Raghavendran has been a venture capitalist for 11 years and is currently Chairman and Chief Executive of Connect Capital (India). His unique perspective on aid and social work has informed Impact Partners activities from its inception.

Sitting in on a board meeting of Impact Partners is like watching a corporate board meeting in progress. Performance metrics, investment return ratios and accountability are just some of the issues being discussed. This could be a board meeting of Infosys, except, Impact Partners isnt a corporation. It is a public service venture firm, the first of its kind in India, that manages investors and investments in the social work field in a "for-profit" manner, with no expectations of financial returns.

Just like in any corporation, Impact Partners looks for transparency, innovation, effectiveness, and scalability. It holds one-on-one meetings, round-table discussions, conducts regular site visits, and, as necessary, participates as a board member of organizations involved in Impact projects.

When Raghavendran decided to start a venture capital firm in India in early 2001, he decided to found a public service venture capital firm as well. "When I created Connect Capital in India I knew I would be spending a lot of time here and since I had always wanted to focus on the Indian community, the time seemed just right. I have a hard core for-profit background and I know what it takes to scale an organization," he says. "At the same time, I met some people who had quit high profile jobs at global investment banks to immerse themselves in non-governmental voluntary work. They had built a wealth of experience in that field so I decided it would be a great combination of my skills and theirs."

The main financial backer of Impact Partners is Connect Capital a venture capital firm that is New York-based Insight Partners Asia investment vehicle. There are three other investors who are non-resident Indian entrepreneurs based in the U.S. "They wouldnt want their names disclosed but what I can say is that Impact started with a pool of over a million dollars and that was two years ago," says Raghavendran.

Having grown up in India, Raghavendran is acutely aware of how hard it is for the least privileged of society to eke out a living. "For the most part, Impact Partners is focused on children women, literacy and hunger. We are not involved in anything to do with any of the middle classes. We want to provide the infrastructure for the implementation of ideas that will lead to positive and systemic social change in India," he says.

"We believe we must earn the right to advise or invest in social entrepreneurs. Whether that means strengthening their strategic planning, accessing talented individuals, building sector networks, or assisting in fundraising beyond our own commitment, we know it takes more than money to build successful, groundbreaking organizations," he says.

Raghavendrans first serious exposure to philanthropy came in 1992 when he worked at U.S. venture capital firm General Atlantic Partners, which set up an NGO called Echoing Green, a pioneering effort in venture philanthropy. "It was very successful, but they were very focused on individual founders. They gave the founder a stipend and said Dont worry about your bills, do what you have to do. At Impact I have taken that several steps further. From my venture capital work Ive come to the conclusion that organization building is important. To that end, we actually go on the boards of organizations we fund, just like we do when fund a business entrepreneur. That is why Impact partners doesnt have huge volumes, we just fund a few organizations but our commitment is total," says Raghavendran.

Impact Partners invests capital, calls down capital and reports back to investors on performance. "I cant report back to my investors unless I drive my NGOS in a for-profit, metric manner. We have driven NGOs on concrete metrics on performance; things like, the number of children served, the cost-per-child and other NGO-specific metrics that we have derived. We work with the NGO to help them define their own metrics. So they dont produce numbers merely to satisfy investors," he says.

Impact Partners also believes in building a visible brand around Impact and select portfolio organizations so they can mobilize creative and young people to consider social entrepreneurship as an exciting and serious career option.

Another unusual approach is Impact Partners proactive "outbound" approach to identify capable and distinguished social entrepreneurs. For example, an organization looking for financial help could well approach Impact Partners, but what is more likely is that Impact Partners will pick out the best NGOs in their space. "We pick the sectors we want to operate in, do a detailed review of NGOs working in that sector and narrow down who suits our needs best. This ensures we get the best NGO in that space and I dont mean the largest or most visible one. I mean (we get) one that has all the ingredients for being scalable and effective."

Mumbai-based Akanksha was one of those investments that had the right ingredients.

The organization, which provides under-privileged children with a balanced education that focuses on both intellectual and emotional development, was founded eleven years ago by Shaheen Mistri, then a college student. "We saw around us thousands of slum children who needed and wanted to be educated. We were part of the thousands of college students who had the energy, enthusiasm and time to teach these children. And we noticed the pockets of available spaces located in schools that seemed ideal teaching environments. The simple idea then, was to bring together the three kids, student volunteers and spaces. And the first Akanksha center was born."

Today Akanksha reaches out to as many as 1500 children in 27 centers in Mumbai and Pune. While it built a great product, Akanksha was having problems retaining teachers and good volunteers. Impact Partners for-profit vision pushed Akanksha into building itself up as a brand and improving its metrics to determine how to retain teachers, and volunteers and to change its operating model, if necessary. Impact Partners urged Akanksha to consult with McKinsey to develop Akanksha-specific metrics like teacher performance and drop-out rates.

"We plan to further refine our metrics, increase the number and quality of our teacher training programs, redesigning our curriculum with more focus on employability, and focusing on moving each center closer to our vision of the Akanksha model center," says Mistri.

Raghavendran says Impact Partners will always be on the lookout for organizations focused on children. "The ripple effect of changing one childs life is huge. Catch a child in his or her teens, or younger, change the life of that child, and that child could change a thousand lives," he says.

Suruchi Foods, with a Mumbai based kitchen run by street adolescents, is another Impact Partners project that is children-focused. Impact Partners is developing this homegrown organization into a profitable business that caters quality food to leading corporate clients. The street adolescents are trained by experts in the catering business and in hotel management and they graduate from Suruchi Catering College as qualified professionals with entrepreneurial skills. "We ensure that they find good jobs that allow them to grow professionally as well as individually," says Raghavendran.

Impact Partners is also looking to assist the South Asian community in other countries. Its first overseas investment is New York-based South Asian Youth Action, or Saya, founded in 1996, that provides support services to newly immigrated South Asian children from the ages of 11 to 19, to ease their entrance into the American school system and American society. "They (Impact Partners) contacted us, they just cold-called us, and said wed like to help," says Annetta Seecharan, Saya executive director. The timing couldnt have been more opportune.

"When I joined SAYA in September 2001, I didnt know that just one week after starting my job, the community with which I work would be facing one of its biggest collective crises. The events of September 11, 2001 had a devastating impact on the lives of South Asian youth and their families. Following the initial sock many South Asian youths and their families, found themselves subjected to bias attacks, employment and housing discrimination and racial profiling," says Seecharan. Saya had to strengthen and expand its programs. "But the need for our services is larger than what we are able to respond to. Our ability to reach every needy South Asian youth in New York city, will depend on organizational development and a strong individual donor base in South Asian American community, both of which Ramanan and Impact Partners have begun to help us strategize."

Impact Partners provides funds, experience and even the manpower to many of the organizations it invests in. It is on the board of several of its investments and has played a role in recruiting and promoting people who can take a lot of administrative burden off the founders of these organizations. "Most agencies stop their involvement once the check is written. We dont. We get involved at the board level of these investments and thats why we dont make 25 investments. We just make a few," says Raghavendran.

And like any other venture capital project, Impact Partners has an exit strategy too, but without the financial payoff of a venture capital investment in business. "We dont want our investments to only depend on us for financial assistance. We are a majority of the NGOs budget for the first couple of years, after that our funding commitment becomes a matching commitment."

Like in business, Raghavendran believes this strategy strengthens the organizations it invests in.

broken taboos

2003-01-30T04:01:00.000-08:00

William Dalrymple tells the previously unwritten history of the love of pre-Victorian Englishmen for India and Indian women

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in January 2003).

White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, by William Dalrymple. HarperCollins. £20 ($32)

IN THE PRE-VICTORIAN 18th century, at least half the Englishmen in India had relationships with Indian women and a third of them left money in their wills to their Indian wives or girlfriends. Several East India Company officials converted to Islam or adopted Hindu rites and rituals, and never left the Subcontinent. But we rarely hear of these people.

"It is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonizing not only India, but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo-British encounter," writes William Dalrymple in his study of interracial relationships in colonial India, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India.

This book is about those Englishmen who "went native" and its centrepiece is the love affair and marriage of James Kirkpatrick, a Briton living in the late 18th century at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, a wealthy provincial ruler, and Khair un-Nissa, the granddaughter of a first cousin of Hyderabad's prime minister.

Dalrymple chanced upon this fascinating bit of history in 1997, while he was walking around the ruins of the old British Residency in Hyderabad. Intrigued, he decided to pursue the story. On the last day of his final research visit to Hyderabad, he hit the mother lode. He found an autobiography by Khair un-Nissa's first cousin written right after the marriage of Kirkpatrick and the young woman.

White Mughals is well-researched--so much so that it reads like a novel, ironically, a Victorian one. But nothing in the book is made up. Dalrymple's exhaustive research of documents, letters and diaries from the 18th century puts him squarely inside the world of his subjects.

The writing is crisp and the footnotes resonate with Dalrymple's acerbic wit. He writes, for instance, that one of the contraception methods used in Hyderabad then was "smearing the entire penis with tar." His footnote: "It is unclear from the sources at what temperature the tar was meant to be applied. One presumes that if applied hot it would make a very effective contraceptive indeed."

Dalrymple includes true stories about a host of Englishmen whose lives became inextricably bound to the Subcontinent. Among them was the British Resident in Delhi, David Ochterlony, who preferred to be addressed by his full Mughal title "Nasir-ud daula," loved smoking his hookahs and would take all 13 of his Indian consorts out for an evening stroll, each on the back of an elephant. The equally eccentric Charles "Hindoo" Stuart walked every morning from his house to bathe in and worship the Ganges, according to Hindu custom.

Many Englishmen had liaisons with Indian women, but Kirkpatrick got into trouble for his affair. From the 1780s a sterner morality had replaced the sexual openness of the preceding decades. The East India Company, once a band of traders, was becoming a dominant, repressive, colonial force and Lord Wellesley, governor-general from 1798-1805, exemplified these changing attitudes. Wellesley was enraged by the behaviour of Kirkpatrick, whom he suspected might be a double agent for Hyderabad's ruler.

Intriguing as all these episodes are, White Mughals leaves some issues unexamined. British men bedded and wedded Indian women, but British women (at least in Dalrymple's book) didn't do the same with Indian men. Besides, all this intermingling seems to have occurred in the principalities of rich nawabs and maharajahs. For a servant of the East India Company, an India posting was the route to riches.

And who wouldn't want to live the lavish life of the nawabs and maharajahs with their gorgeous clothes, platoons of elephants, bevies of Nautch girls (dancer courtesans) and armies of servants? Kirkpatrick himself fathered a son with a "dark girl," as he refers to her, by which he means a woman who was not from the nobility, unlike Khair un-Nissa. She, and presumably the child from his affairs, received no legacy or any mention in his will.

To be fair, Dalrymple does state that Kirkpatrick's extreme emotional attachment to Khair un-Nissa and their children "illustrates how far the British brought with them to India a morality that was determined as much by class as by race." He could have explored this aspect further. But Dalrymple wants to make a point: The theory of the clash of civilizations is simplistic, convenient, racist and untrue. He does this spectacularly well.

history stranger than fiction

2003-01-27T04:03:00.000-08:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in January 2003).

A Princely Imposter? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal, by Partha Chatterjee

In the early 1920s, an ash-smeared sanyasi, or holy man, clad only in a loincloth, appeared in the Bengal town of Bhawal, in India. Despite his protests, he was declared to be Ramendra Narayan Roy, the heir to the estate of the Bhawal zamindars - a man thought to have died 12 years earlier. The prince's sister accepted the man as her brother, and the tenants who lived on the estate also supported him, believing that a holy man would not be as rapacious a landlord as his predecessors.

But the former prince's wife and the British government contended that the man was an impostor. Both the "widow" and the government had an interest in denying the legitimacy of the sanyasi. After the apparent death of the second kumar, or prince, in 1909, the Bhawal estate was taken over by agents of the British.

The arrival of the mysterious man, who came to be called "the Bhawal sanyasi," gave the former owners a renewed claim to the land, threatening both the British stake and the generous stipend received by the prince's widow, who had been forced out of the family after his supposed death.

A protracted legal battle ensued, featuring an array of the country's eminent lawyers and more than 1,500 witnesses. Stories circulated that the prince was profligate and a sexual philanderer, that his wife was having an incestuous affair with her brother, and that the family squandered its wealth. Both the Dacca District Court and the Calcutta High Court declared the sanyasi the real prince. But the case was not resolved until, on appeal by the princes wife, it reached the London Privy Council, which upheld his legitimacy in 1946. Two days after the verdict, the man who'd appeared from the jungle to become the talk of two continents suffered a fatal stroke. His wife was a widow once again.

Visiting professor of anthropology at Columbia University Partha Chatterjee's book about the case, A Princely Imposter?, proves that history can be more compelling than fiction. In essence, this is a mystery that - as the question mark in the book's title of the book indicates - even Chatterjee cannot solve. Like a good mystery novel, the book is a gripping read, racy and full of suspense.

Chatterjee recreates the Bengal of the mid 20th century with Dickensian flair. But this is also a serious work of history. Without ever losing his grip on the taut narrative, Chatterjee uses the case to discuss the issues of nationalism, gender, caste and colonial oppression.

He argues that the Bhawal sanyasi became a "focus of anti-colonial sentiments" and claims that the case reveals the "secret history of Indian nationalism". Anti-colonial sentiment gained strength during the protracted legal battle, Chatterjee writes, so that by 1946 India wasn't the acquiescing colony it was in 1921. Educated, middle-class Indians now held important positions in the judiciary.

According to the author, "... there is no mistaking the nationalist location of the legal-political thinking" of the two Indian judges who were instrumental in declaring the sanyasi as the bona fide prince. "[The judges] represented the generation of Indians who had discursively, ideologically, often institutionally prepared themselves for a transfer of power."

And, since the British government claimed the sanyasi was an imposter, the Indian judges' verdict was an act of nationalist self-assertion. What better way to cock a snook at their colonizers? The local British received another slap in the face when on appeal the London Privy Council, the final arbiter for the case, upheld the Indian judgment.

The decision sent a signal that Britain had begun to believe that Indian affairs were now best left to the judgment of Indians, Chatterjee argues. Though the possibility of a tacit conspiracy of "secret" nationalism in the Indian courts is intriguing, Chatterjee leaves too many questions unanswered. Why would men whom Chatterjee describes as "stalwarts among nationalist lawyers" defend a debauched feudal lord who represented an exploitive system the nationalist movement abhorred?

The prince had not been an exemplary human being. As an affluent zamindar (landowner), he had taken a child bride and devoted his life to hunting and womanizing, rather than the improvement of his estate - much less the lot of its tenants. Far from being ignorant of his decadent life, these stalwart nationalists called the prince's old mistresses to the stand to prove that he suffered from syphilis.

In the final analysis, Chatterjee doesn't supply enough convincing reasons to explain why the choice of a domestic oppressor over a foreign one amounts to a secret history of India's nationalist movement.

A princely imposter? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal, by Partha Chatterjee, April 2002, Princeton University Press, ISBN: 0-691-09031-9, Price US$19.95, pp 429.

with malice aforethought

2002-08-08T04:05:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in August 2002).

Truth, Love & a Little Malice, By Khushwant Singh. Viking, 450 pages, $9.24

KHUSHWANT SINGH'S autobiography, Truth, Love & a Little Malice, has some truth and love, but a whole lot of malice, like the popular weekly gossip column he once wrote, "With Malice Towards One and All."

Singh, now 87 years old, is one of India's best-known columnists and journalists. He has also worked as a lawyer and as a diplomat (to Canada, London and later to Paris). He was a member of the Indian parliament for six years, editor of several publications, and a writer. Among his published work is the two-volume History of the Sikhs.

"Do not expect too much from it," Singh advises readers of his life story. With a good deal of self-deprecation, he writes that it is "some gossip, some titillation, some tearing up of reputations, some amusement -- that is the best I can offer."

Nevertheless, the autobiography was much anticipated by Singh's many fans as well as his detractors. His fans looked forward to the gossip, written in vintage Singh style, while his detractors have been drawn to this book because of Singh's close ties to prominent politicians. For those unfamiliar with Indian political life, this book is a light and sometimes witty introduction to the topsy-turvy world of Subcontinental politicking.

The book was due to be published six years ago, but was delayed because Maneka Gandhi, estranged daughter-in-law of former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, took Singh to court for violation of her privacy: A chapter in the book details her melodramatic expulsion from her mother-in-law's house.

Aside from scurrilous details about the Gandhi family, Singh has anecdotes about scores of other well-known and lesser-known personalities. While age has not clouded his memory, it has made his judgments more than fuzzy. So, while flagellating others for name-dropping, currying favour and betraying confidences, Singh acknowledges, gleefully, that he has done the same.

Singh's honesty is commendable. He admits that he looked forward to a reward for his support of Indira Gandhi during the emergency rule she imposed in 1975.

"I expected to be rewarded by the Gandhi family," he writes. "Sanjay asked me if I would be interested in a diplomatic assignment. He had the post of High Commissioner in London in mind. I turned it down without hesitation. Then he offered me a nomination to the Rajya Sabha (upper house of parliament) and the editorship of The Hindustan Times," both of which he accepted.

Singh's writing shows sparks of sensitivity and nuance, but he doesn't cultivate them. The opening chapters of the book that recount his childhood in a village called Hadali, in what is now Pakistan, and his school years in New Delhi, are evocative, witty and nostalgic without being mushy.

"We spent most of the day indoors gossiping, or drowsily fanning away flies," Singh says of the long summer months. "It was only late in the afternoon that camels and buffaloes were taken to the tobas for watering. The buffaloes were happiest wallowing in the stagnant ponds. Boys used them as jumping boards. At sunset the cattle were driven back, the buffaloes milked and hearths lit. The entire village became fragrant with the aroma of burning camel-thorn and baking bread."

His other chapters are merely salacious gossip, not particularly well written. His unrelenting put-downs of those he doesn't like and constant adolescent references to bottoms and breasts and Scotch are tiresome. His short, four-word sentences, punchy at first, become trite. Then again, he writes in his prologue: "I have no pretensions of being a craftsman of letters ... I did not have the time to wait for inspiration, indulge in witty turns of phrase or polish up what I wrote. I have lost the little I knew of writing good prose."

Too bad, because Singh was capable of good prose. His unforgettable novel, Train to Pakistan, about the bloody partition of India, remains one of the Subcontinent's finest novels.

"My only chance of not being forgotten when I am dead and rotten is to write about things worth reading," he says. Singh will not be forgotten for sure.

a mystery revealed

2002-07-30T23:32:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in July 2002).

In 1985, at the age of 26, David Davidar set up Penguin's Indian publishing programme. Now, aged 43, he still runs Penguin's Indian business and despite the success he's enjoyed with his first novel, The House of Blue Mangoes, he has no plans to give up his career in publishing.

The publication of his novel this year has made Davidar "more empathetic" as a publisher, he says. "Until I had done it I hadn't realized how hard it is to get a novel down on paper. It's an enjoyable experience, but really hard work."

Until 1998, no one except his wife knew Davidar was working on a novel. The next person to know was Vikram Seth. The acclaimed author of A Suitable Boy had read a story Davidar had written for a newspaper and encouraged him to write more. "He didn't know I had been fiddling around with a manuscript for years," Davidar says.

Seth read the first 200 pages of the manuscript and urged Davidar to continue. But finishing wasn't easy. "I woke up extremely early in the morning for years," he says. In all, it took him more than a decade to write the book.

Davidar's career in publishing undoubtedly gave him insider knowledge and access to people most likely to be interested in his book. But he was careful not to disclose himself as the author until after the book had been accepted on its merits. He told one of London's most successful literary agents, David Godwin, that he had custody of a first novel by a S.H. Jeyakar -- an anagram of Davidar's own middle name -- that Vikram Seth had liked. Godwin flew to New Delhi without knowing what he'd find. He read the manuscript and told Davidar he liked it. "He said this while we were having lunch . . . still not knowing the identity of the author," Davidar says. When Davidar revealed himself. Godwin was "electrified," he says.

Davidar wrote his pre-independence saga to explore his Tamil roots and common people's responses to major historical events. "I guess those of us who are deracinated, because of education, background and domicile are afflicted from time to time with a desire to discover more about our place of origin. This was the primary reason I wrote the book," he says.

a life in black and white

2002-07-25T04:12:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in July 2002).

The Impressionist, By Hari Kunzru. E P Dutton, $24.95

WHEN HARI KUNZRU turns Orientalism on its head, the effect can be hilarious. "Ah, the mystic Occident! Land of wool and cabbage and lecherous round-eyed girls!" his protagonist reflects en route to England.

Hari Kunzru can spin a yarn. The hero, or anti-hero, of his debut novel, The Impressionist, has a gorgeous face, several names and no core character. He starts out as Pran Nath Razdan, the child of a mixed-race union between a wandering Englishman and a Kashmiri woman on her way to Agra to get married. The Englishman dies immediately after the encounter, and Pran's mother dies in childbirth, leaving the boy to be raised by her husband.

When a servant reveals who Pran's father is, he is thrown out of the house at the age of 15 to make his own way on the streets of India. The boy spends the remainder of the novel trying to pass off as white, only to realize that his quest to become the most pukka sahib of them all has left him neither black nor white -- just empty.

Pran first seeks refuge in a brothel. The Nawab of Fathepur buys him to use as bait, to trap the paedophiliac Major Augustus Privett-Clampe, an officer of the British Crown. Privett-Clampe rapes the boy, names him Clive, dresses him up as a schoolboy and makes him recite poems like Casabianca and Gunga Din.

"You've got some white blood in you," Privett-Clampe says. "The thing is, boy, you have to learn to listen to it. It's calling to you through all the black, telling you to stiffen your resolve. If you listen to what the white is telling you, you can't go wrong."

Pran escapes to Bombay and, heeding Privett-Clampe's advice, passes himself off as an English lad called Pretty Bobby. When an Englishman called Jonathan Bridgeman dies in a riot, our hero takes not only his name but also his whole identity, and travels to England to claim his inheritance. He goes on to study at Oxford, finally becoming a "proper" Englishman. "How easy it is to slough off one life and take up another!" he ruminates.

Things begin to go wrong for Jonathan when Astarte Chapel, the woman he loves, rejects him because he's too English. A dilettante, she is in love with a black man called Sweets. ". . . He actually shot someone once . . . Things like that happen to Negroes. That's why they have soul," she says. When Jonathan asks her if she would love him if he "wasn't so -- white," she replies, "But you are, Johnny," proving his lie an unfortunate success. Astarte Chapel finds him boring.

Readers too will find the protagonist's apparent blandness problematic. Kunzru takes pains to emphasize that the protagonist's lack of personality is purposeful. He writes that the impressionist "hints at transparency, as if on the other side, on the inside, there is something to be discovered."

But the impressionist is soulless. Even when he travels to the "heart of darkness" in Fotseland, Africa, to study his "whiteness," the darker inside we discover is hardly worth the journey.

Most of the attendant characters are not fully drawn, given -- like Privett-Clampe -- to shouting "Tally Ho," "On! On! On!" and "View Hallooo" in the throes of sexual passion. This cartoonish levity may fall flat with some readers, as might some of the banal wink-and-nudge Orientalisms uttered by a drug-addled playboy, Prince Firoz, who, for example, says, ". . . if Mohammed cannot go to the Riviera, then the Riviera must come to Mohammed."

There are funny moments, however, particularly when Kunzru shows us the West through Eastern eyes. For instance, when the person charged with organizing a tiger hunt for a group of Englishmen cages and drugs two tigers before the hunt, another character chortles, "When the Angrezi (English) come to hunt there are some things it is better not to leave to chance."

"This degree of predestination might disappoint some of the guests," muses the hunt's organizer in response. "However, their hosts take the view that politics demands certain sacrifices from sportsmanship."

A more experienced novelist would have lent muscle to these sly takes on colonialism and colour, which appear only in glimpses in the novel. The Impressionist, which lacks a coherent theme or a character of compelling humanity, is entertaining but strangely empty.

great takeoff, disappointing arrival

2002-07-04T04:08:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in July 2002).

The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, By Ruchir Joshi. Flamingo 6.99 ($10.35)

Ruchir Joshi's debut novel begins in post-apocalyptic 2030 when India is at war with a Pakistan-Saudi Arabia alliance. That might seem prophetic, given recent posturings and warmongering in both India and Pakistan, but those familiar with the long, fractious history of the Subcontinent will not be surprised by Joshi's vision of the future.

In Joshi's 2030, helicopters are a common mode of transport, Japanese corporations sponsor religious rituals, and all around the world the water is contaminated, possibly because a country or a group of people exploded a "device."

But although the novel begins in the future, it spans the 100 years from 1930 to 2030 and follows, albeit nonchronologically, the course of three generations of an Indian family, through the eyes of 70-year-old photographer Paresh Bhatt. He has returned home to Calcutta after many years in Paris. His memories and ruminations begin when he realizes that a local newspaper is preparing his obituary.

Bhatt reminisces about the pre-independence love affair of his intellectual parents, Mahadev and Suman, and their non-violent agitation against British rule in India in the 1930s and 1940s. He fast-forwards to 2030 and his aeroplane-obsessed half-German daughter -- a complete antithesis to his peace-loving parents -- who is a crack fighter pilot in the forefront of the war against Pakistan. Bhatt himself is terrified of flying but has travelled widely, won acclaim as a photographer and has loved and lost several times.

The book uses the Bhatt family and actual historical events to pour scorn on war; to show that technological advancement leads to moral debasement, not progress; and that violence begets violence.

The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is divided into four sections, of which the first two are breathtaking. The book whirrs dizzyingly back and forth and sideways through time and space. The prose is crackling, the language energetic, evocative and entertaining, the narrative taut, the dialogues and the detail rich. The wit is bright, but with dark undertones.

It is no wonder the book was reportedly bought for a whopping 130,000. ($192,530), based on just a few chapters.

But The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is memorable only for the first 150 pages, after which it becomes shambolic. Joshi has overreached. Too many events and incidents, which in themselves are charming, weigh down the book with loose ends. Engaging treatises make enchanting appearances but are not followed through.

Still, the novel's scintillating first two sections promise a superb new talent as Ruchir Joshi pushes the boundaries of language and imagination.

speaking out under threat

2002-06-13T04:13:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in June 2002).

My Girlhood: An Autobiography, by Taslima Nasrin. Kali for Women. 250 rupees ($5.10)

Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin fled her country in 1994 after a newspaper quoted her as saying the Koran should be revised to give women more rights. She said she was misquoted, but religious extremists in Bangladesh--already incensed by her sympathetic portrayal of Hindus in her novel Lajja (Shame) and by her outspokenness about women's rights--imposed a fatwa, or religious order, against her and put a $5,000 price on her head.

Nasrin fled to Sweden, where she stayed until 1998 when she made a courageous return to Bangladesh to be with her mother who had cancer. The death threats and the reward were renewed, but Nasrin remained in hiding. After her mother died in January, 1999, she fled again to Sweden amid increasingly strident calls for her head.

Seven months after her second flight, the Bangladesh government, which outlaws fatwas, banned her book Amar Meye Bela (My Girlhood), published in Bengali in Calcutta. "The import, sale, distribution and preservation of all copies of Taslima Nasrin's Amar Meye Bela have been banned because its contents may create adverse reactions and hurt the religious sentiments of Muslims," a government statement said.

Now the maverick Indian publishing house, Kali For Women, has published a superb English translation of the book. The book illustrates, subtly and effectively, how Nasrin grew up to become a passionate supporter of free speech and unfettered thought--ideas abhorred by Bangladesh's fundamentalist elements.

Translated by Gopa Majumdar, My Girlhood is an almost tender and wry description not just of Nasrin's childhood but also her country's ravaged history. More in the vein of an autobiographical novel, it begins with the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, when East Pakistan broke away after a bloody civil war. Nasrin and her family had to flee amid a mass exodus from cities to villages when the war started to take its toll.

At the age of about 10, Nasrin became aware that boys and girls were treated differently; that boys had considerably more freedom. "Girls stay at home in villages. They don't go out," she was warned.

The family's story is told layer by layer. The endless political intrigue that is the backdrop to the saga is effortlessly woven in. Nasrin's memories are vivid and while she is the protagonist, her presence is never intrusive. Her eye takes in events and characters that don't necessarily have an immediate connection to her, adding rich detail to the book.

My Girlhood is a mature, compassionate reflection of Nasrin's life before adulthood. The story of her adult life is awaited keenly.

recipe for bollywood success

2002-01-24T04:16:00.000-08:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in January 2002).

Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story, By Nasreen Munni Kabir. Channel 4 Books, 495 rupees ($10.23)

While India's art cinema has a worldwide following due to directors like Satyajit Ray and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, its commercial cinema -- or Bollywood, as it is known -- has been taken seriously almost nowhere except Russia, the Middle East and some African countries.

But that's changing.

Lagaan, a film about a cricket match between a peasant community and a team of rapacious British overlords, won international acclaim; Asoka, a film about an Indian emperor in the third century B.C., directed by ace cinematographer Santosh Sivan, is getting rave reviews on the festival circuit; and Mira Nair's The Monsoon Wedding, very much inspired by Bollywood fare, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival recently.

If Bollywood conjures up only images of lavish song-and-dance sequences and you're still unsure what all the buzz is about, the essential Bollywood primer is here. Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story by Nasreen Munni Kabir is a perfect introduction to the world's largest film industry, which makes 800 movies a year.

The book is divided into chapters covering the ingredients that make the Bollywood mix. Just as masala is a mixture of basic spices, a Bollywood film is a mix of some essential ingredients: a larger-than-life hero, a pretty and playing-hard-to-get heroine, a sacrificing mother, a villain and his moll, songs and dances, a wet sari song sequence and absolutely no on-screen kissing or coupling. Hence the wet sari, for that dash of sexuality.

Shah Rukh Khan, one of Bollywood's contemporary idols quoted in the book, couldn't have described it better: "A {Bollywood} film is like Titanic, everything is told to you. This is going to happen, the ship will hit an iceberg and just in case you don't know it, let me show you at the beginning of the film how it happened."

poison in the night

2001-11-29T04:18:00.000-08:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in November 2001).

It was Five Minutes Past Midnight in Bhopal, By Dominique LaPierre and Javier Moro. Full Circle, 250 rupees ($5.20)

AT FIVE PAST MIDNIGHT in Bhopal, India, on December 2, 1984, a Union Carbide plant leaked a noxious chemical into the winter air. The wind, blowing from the north, swept deadly methyl isocyanate across the slums of the city, killing between 20,000 and 30,000 people and poisoning as many as 500,000. It was the world's worst industrial disaster, and in much of the world it has already been forgotten.

Carbide said it was sabotage. But it was obvious that poor safety conditions and dangerous cost-cutting measures led to the tragedy at the plant the company had deemed "as inoffensive as a chocolate factory." Carbide never apologized.

The U.S. has yet to extradite to India Carbide's then chairman Warren Anderson. Meanwhile, the company paid a measly $470 million in compensation, on the condition the Indian government press no further legal charges, and very little of that money reached the victims. Seventeen years later, women still give birth to diseased and deformed babies and 160,000 people are still awaiting treatment.

It was Five Minutes Past Midnight in Bhopal, written by Frenchman Dominique LaPierre and Spaniard Javier Moro, uses novelistic and journalistic techniques to tell the story of the tragedy through the experiences of a young girl, Padmini and her family, who lived in Bhopal at the time.

The book opens in the eastern state of Orissa where black aphid insects have devastated the crop on a small piece of land owned by Padmini's family. This misfortune, the authors say, was just one tiny episode in a tragedy affecting the entire world. The black aphids were among 850,000 varieties of insects that had been devastating crops for centuries.

For decades, companies and laboratories around the world had been looking for the perfect pesticide that would exterminate these insects. The authors say that scientists realized in the mid-1960s that only the chemical industry could come up with an effective pesticide, and this is where Union Carbide makes its entrance in the book. Carbide played a major role in the two world wars, was a huge global presence and with 14 factories in India was a well-known name to millions of Indians as well.

LaPierre and Moro alternate between accounts of Carbide's growing involvement in the pesticide industry and the progression of Padmini's life. Her family, not knowing what lies ahead, moves to Bhopal after the crops are destroyed. They become part of the itinerant labour force that is building a railway line there, and live in Bhopal for many years. It is on the night of Padmini's wedding that the deadly gas leak occurs. She's half blinded and falls unconscious in a stampede and is mistaken for dead. As she's about to be cremated a volunteer notices Padmini's hand moving and she is saved. But her father perishes.

The authors have talked to a variety of people, including a local journalist, Rajkumar Keswani, whose painstaking and prescient reports of security breaches in the Carbide plant went largely ignored. Keswani managed to obtain a copy of a 1982 report on the Bhopal plant that itemized roughly a hundred breaches of operational and safety regulations

LaPierre and Moro have tracked down interesting sources, but unfortunately, the novelistic turns the book takes are not that successful. "Novelizing" the tragedy could have exposed its human dimensions powerfully, but here melodrama and orientalism glamorize the victims.

The incongruous cover art -- a photo of a beaming, bejewelled girl -- betrays the authors' eye for the exotic. The book is packed with orientalist descriptions, purple prose and unfortunate metaphors. The authors never fail to refer to their characters as Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian. There are long non sequiturs about beggars, pimps and lepers. And completely egregious details of decadent soirees held by Bhopal's former royalty.

It is hardly surprising then that the book has become a runaway bestseller in Europe. Oliver Stone is planning to film the novel, with Penelope Cruz -- of all people -- playing Padmini. This is all familiar terrain for LaPierre, whose City of Joy, also set in India in Calcutta, was made into a maudlin film starring Patrick Swayze.

Meanwhile, no court of law ever passed judgment on Union Carbide. The book quotes a Carbide defence lawyer who argued that an American court was not competent to assess the value of a human life in the Third World: "How can one determine the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?"

If nothing else, at least It was Five Past Midnight in Bhopal brings the tragedy to centre stage again. Bhopal should not be forgotten.

behind the facts

2001-11-08T04:21:00.000-08:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in November 2001).

Riot, By Shashi Tharoor, Penguin India. 295 rupees ($16)

Shashi Tharoor's new novel, Riot, opens with the killing of an American social worker, Priscilla Hart, in northern India in 1989, when Hindus and Muslims clashed in bloody riots. The object of controversy is a 400-year-old mosque, the Babri Masjid, that Hindu militants eventually destroyed in 1992.

The official verdict suggests Priscilla was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Tharoor is more interested in unofficial versions. He presents his story as a series of newspaper clippings, journal entries written by the characters and transcripts of conversations, revealing much more than the official version.

The married District Magistrate V. Lakshman, with whom Priscilla had been having an affair, agonizes in his journal about the state of his affair and affairs of state. Randy Diggs, a journalist from the New York Journal, has transcripts of several boozy interviews with the magistrate's old college mate who heads the town's constabulary. A secular Muslim academic and a militant Hindu bigot also espouse their causes to the journalist.

Riot weaves a whodunnit with contemporary history. But, most of all, it is a polemic for reason and peace. Tharoor's conflicting and colluding sub-texts suggest that Hindus and Muslims have generally coexisted peacefully in India, that history is manufactured in the service of ulterior motives and that economic deprivation leads to sectarianism.

In his day job in the United Nations Department of Public Information, Tharoor probably knows reality is more multi-layered, but this is literature. Tharoor's earlier two novels showed he is a master at fiction grounded in history. Priscilla's father, a former Coca-Cola executive in India, says, "I'll tell you what your problem is in India. You have too much history. Far more than you can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history like a battle-axe, against each other. Whereas we at Coke . . . don't worry too much about the past. It's your future we want to be part of."

For Tharoor, understanding the past is the way to the future.

in the spotlight: howzzat, bollywood?

2001-09-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in September 2001).

In what British tabloids are calling the "Summer of Hate" because of violent attacks there on South Asian immigrants, Lagaan -- a Bollywood film about cricket -- has been one of Britain's top-grossing films for 10 weeks running.

The Hindi film is doing for Bollywood what Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did for Chinese cinema. Crossing over. West End theatres screening the film are packed with Asian and non-Asian Britons.

Lagaan, meaning tax, is uniting sports lovers and fans of good old-fashioned narrative and pure entertainment. Defiantly released uncut by actor-producer Aamir Khan, the movie is almost four hours long and includes six of Indian cinema's trademark song-and-dance routines.

Set in 1893 in British India in the fictional Champaner village, Lagaan is an Escape to Victory-like yarn. Peasants impoverished by drought are pitted against their villainous British rulers in a high-stakes cricket match. The peasants must win to avoid paying double tax.

The 75-minute climax, the cricket match, has all the nail-biting tension of a real, modern game. "The cricket really works. Its pace is perfect and it's wonderfully shot," says Shimit Amin, a Los Angeles-based film-maker who's spent time in Bombay's film industry.

"The song and dance has broken through with films like Moulin Rouge, whose director incidentally cited Bollywood as an inspiration," Amin adds.

"It was real good entertainment that celebrated the strength of people's will. It was impossible not to jump up and down when the villagers scored good runs or bowled well," says Harriet Lamb, director of London-based Fairtrade Foundation. She and her two children saw the film without subtitles in Pune, India, and she plans to see it again, with subtitles, in London. "The kids and I were riveted despite the length and only understanding 10 words of Hindi."

Lagaan's period look is authentic thanks to Aamir Khan, one of Bollywood's most successful and more cerebral actors, who's known for his fastidiousness. He was so convinced by the script that he decided to turn producer with Lagaan, which at $3 million has become Bollywood's costliest film ever.

self-publishing has never been easier

1999-12-30T23:25:00.001-08:00

A budding "e-publisher" gets a big boost from Barnes & Noble investment

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Forbes in December 1999).

Hemingway wannabes, sharpen your pencils.

Or more accurately, turn on your computers. Thanks to the Internet, budding Emile Zolas and Victor Hugos can get published with a click of the mouse, bypassing such fuddy-duddy concerns as getting an agent, selling the idea to a publisher and marketing.

Technologies like print-on-demand - the ability to publish a single copy of a book as opposed to a huge print run - have made the proposition of becoming a published author more economical. And the kind of marketing muscle necessary to tout Stephen King's next thriller is being replaced by the connectivity of the World Wide Web and the word-of-mouth capabilities the Internet affords.

Slowly but surely, "e-publishers" are beginning to tout themselves as the next best thing to a royal benefactor. With thousands of rejected authors out in the world, electronic publishers have a ready, disgruntled audience to target. They unashamedly even call themselves "vanity publishing portals."

Companies such as Hard Shell Word Factory, E-Bookpress.com, NewWriters.com and iUniverse.com are the early entrants in what looks like it may become a multi-million-dollar electronic book publishing industry. Of these companies, one that stands out by sheer weight of its backer - the gigantic Barnes & Noble - is iUniverse.com. Last month, Barnes & Noble bought a 49 percent stake in San Jose-based iUniverse. The company charges between $99 and $299 (depending on the suite of services an author uses) for publishing a new title.

That price may seem a bit hefty, but at iUniverse, authors get Barnes & Noble as a partner, which means some of the author's books will be available not just through iUniverse.com, but also through Barnes & Noble's stores and its Web site, both of which will feature the titles prominently. In addition, iUniverse's books will be available at other traditional and online bookstores, including Barnes & Noble rival Amazon.com.

Adding spiffiness to its partnership is iUniverse's technology that enables it to actually print quality paperbacks of the manuscript if a reader prefers that to an electronically downloadable version. All this within 30 days of submitting a manuscript.

"It sounds irresistible," said Charles Gerlach, an analyst at Boston-based Mainspring Communications Inc. "They will be able to hook you up to all these distribution channels and then there's their relationship with Barnes & Noble, which is just huge."

What's in it for the writers? They will get 20 percent royalties if they choose the print-on-demand option and a whopping 50 percent for choosing the electronic book option. While the books can currently be read online, they are not in the most reader-friendly format, something iUniverse has done on purpose.

If You Write It, They Will Buy

"The idea is that just like in a traditional book store, where you can go and read a few pages to see if it grabs your attention, you can do so here too," said Richard Tam, president and chief executive of iUniverse.com.

The company has not started offering electronic books yet, but expects to do so in the next quarter after Microsoft makes its Microsoft Reader available. The Reader is a new software application for PCs and hand-held devices that delivers an on-screen computer reading experience that approaches the quality of paper.

iUniverse expects to publish 80,000 titles by 2001. In comparison, the traditional industry publishes about 60,000 titles a year. iUniverse's Tam says that while the mix of out-of-print versus new titles is 60-40 currently, he expects it be 50-50 by 2001.

The company says it has the capacity to publish 2,000 titles a month, which amounts to revenue of $80,000 a month, based on the lowest price end of $99, and a 60-40 ratio of out-of-print versus new books.

One concern that analysts have about this business model is that free, electronically-downloadable books are expected to become readily available in the marketplace. In this case, Tam's counting on the traditional reader, if not the "traditional" author.

"We are the only ones that can print and bind an actual book so it looks like any other traditional book and we can do it cheap," said Tam. He also expects there to be more demand for printed books. "Current statistics show that the book that sold the most was also the one that the most people had read parts of online," Tam said.

Writing 101

What about the quality of writing, though? Can just anyone, with a crummy manuscript have their "masterpieces" published? Tam says "yes," but adds that iUniverse offers various editorial guidelines and services on its site.

"If it's a bad book we offer classes, tell the writers that there is an editing zone on our site and if they have even higher aspirations, they could use some of our more high-end programs," Tam said.

The company has affiliated itself with a Web site called the Writers Club University (http://www.iuniverse.com/learnonline/wcuintro.asp), which claims to have 50 courses, including "Adding Depth and Texture to Your Novel" and "Writing Tips: Advice & Know-How for Money." They also offer the provocatively-titled course, "Strip Tease Writing(Show - don't tell)."

Classes are held via message board and e-mail and cost $60 for four weeks, $80 for six weeks and $100 for eight weeks.

But iUniverse is a "vanity publishing portal" and vanities run deep in the creative community. What if the author doesn't care for all this suggested learning and just wants to get a book out there?

"Then we'll publish it," sighs Tam, taking to the pulpit again, for the cause of "millions of ignored, talented writers."

self-publishing has never been easier

1999-12-30T23:25:00.000-08:00

spinoff to success

1999-11-30T05:16:00.000-08:00

Barnett Inc. has long been a fast-growing company. Now free from its parent, the hardware distributor can shine.

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Forbes in November 1997).

CALL IT A JEWEL IN A JUNKYARD. Barnett Inc. was part of wholesale distributor Waxman Industries. Through its mail-order catalogs Barnett distributes plumbing, electrical and hardware products--such stuff as faucets, showerheads and paintbrushes--to small and midsize contractors. It has long been profitable. Says Barnett Chief Executive Officer William Pray, "We were growing 15% a year for five years running, even under Waxman. But most of our cash flow went to our parent."

On its own since its April 1996 IPO, Jacksonville, Fla.-based Barnett is busting out all over. "Now we are finally able to act on our growth strategy, which we developed years ago but weren't able to implement."

In the last fiscal year Barnett added 1,800 new items to the product line, hired more telesales support staff and stepped up mailings. When the company went public, it was mailing 2.5 million fliers a year; in fiscal 1997 it mailed 4.5 million.

The mailings obviously paid off. Barnett has increased its customer base by 13,000, to 51,000. "Fliers are critical to us," Pray says. He plans to increase their number to 7 million in the next fiscal year and to tap into new markets, such as hotels, hospitals and schools.

Barnett's customer retention rate is remarkable--84%, versus the direct-mail industry average of 65%. Telemarketers are normally a fickle bunch, but Barnett's tend to stay because they earn higher-than-usual commissions.

"This is a highly energetic, highly focused company," says Jeffrey Germanotta, analyst at Robert W. Baird in Milwaukee.

"You could say Barnett has an edge because of its national distribution network, favorable pricing and customer orientation."

Barnett's earnings rose 68% in 1996, to $12 million from $7.2 million. Sales rose 26%, to $160 million from $127.4 million.

But how many faucets do Americans need? Barnett's brass has thought of that. They are expanding overseas. International sales last year were 6% of revenue; this year they should be 10%.

"Our strategy is a successful one," says Pray. "All the expansion is from our cash flow. We have no debt."

an interview with salman rushdie

1999-10-30T05:20:00.000-07:00

Proud papa Salman Rushdie anxiously awaited a phone call. No, it had nothing to do with the death sentencethe Iranian fanatics have imposed upon him.

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Forbes in October 1997).

INDEPENDENT India turned 50 this summer, and so did author Salman Rushdie. When we interviewed him recently in Manhattan he was focused on both anniversaries- his own and that of his native land, whose birth he celebrated in his splendid 1981 novel Midnight's Children.

"It's serious, 50 is serious," says Rushdie somberly. "It tells you there may not be that much time. It makes you conscious of that, but that's constructive."

Rushdie, of course, already had a fair amount to be anxious about, courtesy of the death sentence pronounced upon him by the fanatical Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 for his book, The Satanic Verses. Rushdie has lived in hiding in the United Kingdom since, protected around the clock. When he does get out, as he did during his recent visit to New York, every reservation must be made under a false name.

We are meeting in New York City, two fellow Indians, long residents abroad, yet feeling a common bond. He looks rumpled in a literary sort of way, in blue T shirt, baggy pants and red shoes. We are speaking quietly. "Nobody talks like this in India," smiles Rushdie. "They either shout or whisper." We both pause, exchange a knowing look and say almost in unison: "More likely shout."

He goes on: "India is one of those odd places where there is no middle register, there are only extremes." Including extremes of wealth and poverty. American liberals like to bemoan what they see as a growing gap here between the rich and those just getting by, but they don't have a clue as to how wide that gap can get. India is developing fast, becoming richer by the day, but at least half the population is left way behind. "If there was a failure of trickle-down economic theory in any country, it was India," he says. "There is a cliche about Bombay: the hovel and the high-rise. There are people who live on the 40th floor and come down only to get into their chauffeur-driven cars and go on to another elevator and up to another 40th floor. Then there is the humanity that lives in the gutter."

The gutter, of course, is a breeding ground for demagoguery. India is so rich in demagoguery that its supposedly secularist government has bowed to Iranian pressure and prevents Rushdie from returning home.

Though Muslim, his parents remained in Bombay rather than flee to Pakistan in 1947 when British India was split into Islamic Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India. The resulting exchange of population led to the deaths-by violence or disease-of at least 500,000 people.

Oddly, Rushdie, bigotry's victim, believes that Islamic fundamentalism is more benign than it appears. "It's a mistake in the West to think that when the mullahs speak they speak with the 'true' voice of Islam, and that dissidents are a minority. There is a liberal voice in these [Islamic] cultures saying ... modernize."

Rushdie is not about to go around cringing. "I'm not waiting for the Iranians to hand me back my freedom-it was never theirs to take away." He has just married for the third time, to Elizabeth West, the mother of his 3-month-old baby, and with whom he has recently coedited an anthology of Indian writing titled Mirrorwork. "Of course there is a need for caution, but it's one thing to be cautious and another to hide under the bed."

Just then the cell phone rings. Rushdie jumps. The news is good. His son got into the college of his choice. (Rushdie won't say which one for security reasons.) Suddenly the literary figure is just another proud papa. "Thank God, two years of tension are over," he says, wiping his brow in mock relief.

picking his targets

1999-08-30T05:18:00.000-07:00

Claudio Osorio is the man to watch in computer wholesaling--in good part because he deliberately stays out of the world's richest market.

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Forbes in August 1997).

CLAUDIO OSORIO, 38, entered computer wholesaling only in 1985 and has already expanded his revenues 33 times, all while avoiding the fattest market of all, the U.S. This country has 41% of the PCs on the planet. Osorio's Miami-based company, CHS Electronics, wants no part of it. He peddles PCs, software, networking equipment and peripherals like printers and modems to resellers in Europe and Latin America.

In the U.S., computer retailing is shifting to direct sellers like Dell and to large national chains like CompUSA, neither of which have a need for a wholesaler to stand between them and a manufacturer. But smaller markets still have fractured distribution systems that offer opportunities to smart wholesalers who understand the quite different local markets. Osorio has the cosmopolitan flair to stitch all these pieces together. He was born in Venezuela, studied law and business and speaks five languages. He learned the wholesale business young. At the age of 16 he was wholesaling sporting goods for a firm he cofounded. In 1985 he got out of sporting goods and switched to a product with a little more action: computers. He started by assembling PCs for Venezuelan and then German markets.

Merisel, the publicly held, number two computer equipment distributor, never got the knack of running a multinational wholesale operation. It could not make its European outfits profitable. So in September 1996 Osorio bought Merisel's European and Latin American operations for a song, 0.8 times revenue. That one acquisition kicked his revenues from $937 million in 1995 to $1.9 billion last year. Merisel's European unit was so mired in losses that no one would touch it. Osorio took it on the condition that he would also get Merisel's profitable Latin American unit. Merisel would probably have made more money selling the pieces separately, but it accepted Osorio's deal, glad to be finally rid of Europe.

In January 1993 Osorio acquired a German distributor of Hewlett-Packard products. It proved a prize catch: HP now makes up 34% of all CHS' sales. CHS paved the way for HP's entry into untapped markets like the Czech Republic and other Eastern European countries. All told, Osorio has since acquired some 20 companies throughout Europe and Latin America, the latest (announced on June 23) a Swiss firm that should add $1 billion in annual revenue.

Osorio characterizes the buyouts as "earnouts" because in most cases he keeps the original owners on as salaried employees, also compensating them on the basis of future earnings. "My army of entrepreneurs," he calls them.

In another business Osorio's pace of acquisitions would border on reckless. In the fast-moving computer industry it is a defensive strategy. Even though it operates in relatively small markets, CHS' combined heft gives it clout with suppliers and economies of scale. Talk about slim margins. CHS will probably net a mere $28 million, or $1.70 a share, this year on revenues of $4 billion. But this isn't bad for a distributor that can turn over its inventory nine times a year. Though its return on sales may look skinny, its return on capital is most impressive.

How does this young company finance its acquisition binge? Osorio used to get capital from venture capitalists in Switzerland and Germany. A year ago he raised $56 million in a secondary stock offering, selling 40% of the company. The stock has climbed from its offering price of 12 to 31--much to the credit of its underwriter, Raymond James & Associates. With its stock at a healthy 20 times trailing earnings, CHS now has the wherewithal to expand. Most of its deals these days are paid for with a mix of cash and stock.

CHS is now the fourth-largest in the business, after Ingram Micro, Tech Data and Germany's Computer 2000. Don't be surprised, however, if it continues to move up the list. The recent Swiss acquisition includes an Asian subsidiary; Osorio says he will further expand into Asia this year. Now there's a market he can really sink his teeth into.

freemail

1999-08-30T04:43:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Forbes in August 1996).

DESPITE ALL THE HYPE about the World Wide Web and interactive gaming, E- mail remains the one thing people really want from an on-line service. So why not offer it neat, with no frills, at no charge, and get your revenue from advertising? That's the strategy of two new companies, and it looks like a winner.

Freemark Communications and Juno Online Services started offering their dial-in services in April, and so far they have grabbed about 200,000 subscribers and 50 advertisers-all for a combined initial investment of only $22 million.

"With all the exotic Internet uses, the humble E-mail is what people

always come back to," says Charles Ardai, 26, president of Juno Online. The Yankee Group, technology consultants, reports that 64% of America's 12 million on-line subscribers say E-mail is important to them; 28% say E-mail is the only thing that's important to them.

You don't need fancy equipment to send or get E-mail. If you have an ibm-compatible machine with at least a 386 chip and a modem that can handle 2,400 bits per second, Freemark and Juno will send you free software you can use to compose mail off-line. When your message is finished, you dial a local number to send it off. While you do, you get bombarded with advertising for such products as Lands' End clothing and Nabisco's LifeSavers. Freemark and Juno each hope to have from 3 million to 5 million subscribers by the end of 1997.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Freemark's founder and president, Robert Young, 33, used to be vice president of business development at Delphi Internet Services and was one of the people responsible for repositioning the company as one of the first nationwide Internet services. He realized then that advertising revenue is the model for on- line services.

Ardai, who has managed a content area for Quantum Computer Services, left in 1992 to join D.E. Shaw & Co., a technology-oriented investment bank in New York City. There he participated in the company's various Internet-related ventures.

Juno is backed by D.E. Shaw. Freemark got its venture money from cmg Information Services, Ameritech Development, Transnational Services Group and Winstar Communications. Of course, both companies could very well go public one of these days.

The companies have different marketing strategies. Freemark has back- scratching arrangements with Citibank, whose San Francisco branches distribute the software, along with the bank's own on-line product, to their clients. Juno advertises its service in magazines and newspapers and on billboards.

Some advertisers prefer E-mail over Web sites. Why? Broader coverage. If you post an ad on the Web, you reach only those browsers who hit the site, but if you post an ad on an E-mail service, every subscriber sees every ad. That's why Columbia House, a direct marketer of home entertainment products, which has its own Web site, has chosen to advertise on Juno.

There's every reason to expect these two startups to snap up many of the big on-line services' customers, who are famously fickle. America Online and CompuServe have churn rates as high as 50%, and many subscribers who leave do so to save a buck. They won't leave a free service; there are no bills for them not to pay. "It's conceivable that these companies could be near break-even in about 18 months," says Paul Merenbloom, vice president of technology research at brokerage house Piper Jaffray.

To be sure, there is nothing to stop a long distance company from horning in on this business, but, says David Shaw, chief executive of D.E. Shaw, "Being first, we are capturing digital shelf space."

easy rider

1999-07-30T05:23:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Forbes in July 1997).

ORACLE'S Lawrence Ellison has one. The Engelhard family of Engelhard Corp. fame have four. Not just any old horse, but one of the oldest originals -- an Icelandic. What's so special about the horse? The smooth ride. You can go up to 35mph on one of these things while scarcely being nudged from the saddle. "It rides like a Mercedes," says Janine Gordon, a weekend rider from New York City.

Iceland's first Viking settlers brought horses with them, circa A.D. 800-900. Since then no horse has been permitted to enter Iceland, and any horse that leaves can't return. This has kept the local breed pure.

So the Icelandic has retained its distinctive size (smaller than most horses) and ride.

Garden-variety horses have three gaits: walk, trot and canter. The Icelandic has a five-speed transmission. You get the usual three gaits plus the tolt (a four-beat gait somewhat similar to a walk but much faster and much more animated) and the pace, a fast two-beat movement.

The pacing horse at full speed looks like it's flying -- its legs tucked under in an equine equivalent of all-wheel drive.

"I'm not an experienced rider, but I have come to the opinion that there is something special about them," says John Everist, a real estate developer in Sioux Falls, S. D. who bought one in 1995.

One early U.S. fan of this foreign breed was Daniel Slott, a former senior managing director at Bear, Stearns who left the firm in 1989 to devote himself to his 800-acre horse farm in Ancramdale, N.Y. Slott, now 52, encountered his first Icelandic horse on a tour of Iceland in 1985.

"No one knew much about the Icelandic horse 12 years ago, when I showed it at the National Horse Show in Madison Square Garden," says Slott.

Since then he's sold close to 100 of them, at $15,000 to $40,000 apiece.

That's more than you'd pay for just any old horse -- the kind Icelandic fanciers dismiss -- but it is much less than you would pay for a top-notch Thoroughbred racehorse or an Arabian.

The Viking horse is an interesting animal. Iceland's harsh climate weeded out the weaker animals. The survivors are strong and surefooted but have the undemanding temperament of a loyal sheepdog. The Icelandic even looks like one, in a horsey kind of way: Its thick and shiny coat, generous mane and a tail that almost sweeps the ground give it a Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale look. A nearly full-grown four-year-old Icelandic stands 131/2 to 141/2 hands (a hand equals 4 inches) high at the withers, or the top of the shoulders. Most horses you see these days range from 141/2 to 17 hands high.

There's a reason for this. Centuries ago all horses once had smaller dimensions -- until people figured out that a bigger animal might come in handy when they went out raping and pillaging in war, at which point horses were bred for military muscle and height. The rougher gait of a modern horse is one consequence of all this.

The Icelandic horse is also more even-tempered. "Most people are afraid of taking their horse riding, as one little disturbance like a rabbit crossing the path makes horses freak out," says Slott. Adds Kristjan Kristjansson, a native of Iceland and Slott's partner: "The other day I went out on a ride, and a heron came close to us in flight. My horse just shuddered slightly and continued."

It is said that Caligula's intention to appoint his horse consul was a final act of madness that brought the nutty emperor one step closer to assassination. Had the horse been an Icelandic, Caligula might have died in his bed.

here comes the kingfisher

1999-07-30T05:13:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Forbes in July 1997).

JAMES BERNAU can't stop smiling. His Nor'Wester Brewing Co., based in Portland, Ore., was teetering on the brink of disaster when he received a call from Vijay Mallya, who was driving around the Napa Valley scouting vineyards. Bernau didn't know Mallya but Mallya told him he wanted to buy his company.

Mallya, 42, is chairman of India's United Breweries Group, which sells $1.2 billion worth of booze and beer in India, the U.K. and the U.S. For $5.5 million in cash, a 22% discount from book value, United Breweries is getting a 40% stake in Nor'Wester and its partly owned subsidiaries--Bayhawk Ales, Mile High Brewery and Aviator Ales. The name has been changed to United Craft Brewers; Bernau will be president and 10% owner. Nor'Wester's old public shareholders will own the remaining 50%.

United Craft is also acquiring Mendocino Brewing Co., of Hopeland, Calif., and Humboldt Brewing, based in Arcata, Calif.

So-called craft brews are immensely popular. From almost nothing they have gone to 2.5% of the $58 billion U.S. beer market, and some people think that number could become 6% in a few years. Unfortunately, it is very easy to get into the business, and so many of the entries, like Nor'Wester, are in trouble (see table below). Mallya sees this as an opportunity. "I'm going to make many, many more acquisitions," he says. "Put a lot of them together into a network, and you get economies of scale."

Mallya has a strategy: operate nationally, but sell locally. Each micro-brewer will sell in a local market but buy raw materials and consolidate orders on a national scale. "The prices at which Bernau was buying glass bottles were ridiculous. If I control 15 or 20 microbreweries, I can negotiate better prices," Mallya insists.

But beer is a tough business. Can a newcomer hack it? If self-esteem will do it, Mallya's got it. When we interviewed him, he was sitting, lordlike, in an ornate chair on his 165-foot yacht, Indian Achiever, moored at the Chelsea Piers in New York. He proved himself at an early age, after becoming chairman of his family's United Breweries at 28. India was then dotted with small breweries, and Mallya set about acquiring as many of them as possible. In 1992 he bought the U.K.'s Wiltshire Brewing Co., then on the brink of receivership, refinanced it with his own money and sold out at a handsome profit.

Meanwhile, he was pushing his company's Kingfisher beer outside India. In the U.S., 15,000 barrels a year are sold by about 115 distributors. "It's my baby," he says, thumping his chest on a shirt that bears the Kingfisher logo.

But is he ready to tackle the likes of Anheuser-Busch and Philip Morris? There's little similarity between beer distribution in India and the U.S. Unlike India, in the U.S. there are no government-owned shops that carry all brands. "Busch usually wants to put the brakes on distributors, saying 'You have to sell only our products,'" says Thomas Dalldorf, editor of Celebrator Beer News, based in San Francisco. "The microbreweries suffered, because distribution is essential to microbrewery survival."

Mallya waves aside such objections. "I'll have a lot more clout going in with five or six brands, each distinct and not similar. I'll make sure of that," he says. Mallya, cocky as ever, is already thinking beyond microbreweries. He has plans to start what he calls microdistilleries in this country. In the works are flavored gin, rum and an exotic liqueur made of herbs from what Mallya claims is a 500-year-old royal recipe. He says he has original recipes for East India Rum, Calcutta Dry Gin and India Pale Ale. "I'm going to bring all this to the U.S.," he vows.

Lots of luck, Vijay.

snakes and ladders

1999-06-30T04:54:00.000-07:00

India, the land of opportunity? A lot of foreign investors think so. Indian-born writer Gita Mehta does, too.

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article appeared in Forbes in June 1997).

"SIT DOWN, for God's sake," Gita Mehta demands, interrupting her phone conversation to light a British Silk Cut cigarette. My eyes run down the bookshelves: Mann, Twain, Okri, Rushdie, Anais Nin.

Gita Mehta is the modern Indian, at home anywhere in the world but definitely Indian. Her first book, Karma Cola, published 18 years ago, is a wicked look at the West's encounter with India: gurus, charlatans, incense, yoga, meditation. "The hippies loved India, hated the Indians," is how Mehta, who is finally off the phone, describes it.

But times change. Mehta's newest work, Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India (Doubleday; $22.95, hardcover), is a collection of essays about an India that the West looks to for software rather than mysticism. "The new enlightenment is money," the loquacious lady declares.

Born in New Delhi in the early 1940s, Mehta has lived in New York for the past ten years. Her new book is a patchwork of anecdotes that support her conviction that India can rise above the incompetence and venality of the provincials who rule it. "Anyone who doubts India is changing should cast a quick glance around our cities," she writes. "Whole families dressed in shiny synthetic fabrics squash onto scooters driven by men with pomade hair wearing shades and Terylene trousers....If you've got it, flaunt it. In the old days if you had it, you hid it."

The water is boiling. She scampers off, a lithe figure casually dressed in trousers and a T shirt. I peek at her CD collection. Edith Piaf nestles next to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Marianne Faithfull and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Phew. She's back with a pot of tea.

In Germany last March to promote her book, Mehta was asked why Germans should be interested in India. "Just remember," she responded, "the next century is ours, and you will become interested because it will matter to your pocketbooks. Gates knows it."

We pour out the tea. It's a trifle weak. Mehta moves on: "The two great countries of the next century are China and India, and India will win the race, because of its culture of ongoing debate." That's a rather polite way of describing India's elections--which tend to be chaotic and sometimes bought rather than won--but still, India is a democracy while China remains a dictatorship.

India's dynamism, she says, shows in its contrasts. She marvels at the rapid growth of the Indian computer industry while much of the population remains illiterate; she's struck by the sight of cell phones in the hands of poor rural Indians; she delights at meeting traditional folk balladeers in the state of Rajasthan singing about telecom scams.

"Once it was the dream of educated Indians to be hired by government. The dreams are changing," she writes. "[Indians] can sense that the wind is now blowing from another direction."

On the elevator down, I read what she inscribed in my copy of Snakes and Ladders, a message to a fellow Indian: "With many thanks and don't rush with the Green Card. The next century is ours."

mole people reveal new york's great divide

1999-06-30T04:47:00.000-07:00

By Shailaja Neelakantan
(This article was distributed by Panos in June 1996).

Deep below the towering apartment blocks of Manhattan, the crime-ridden streets of New York City conceal a secret few want to know -- the mole people.

They are the battered and bruised of this bustling megalopolis -- a thousand-odd people pushed by poverty and violence into the subway tunnels that criss-cross the financial capital of the world. Living in dark, unventilated and rat-infested burrows, the so-called mole people of New York City emerge only to grab at half-empty plates of food thrown out by restaurants or to collect water from petrol stations, drink from fire-hydrants and sell tin cans at five cents apiece.

Unknown to the world above, they reveal another side of development in the rich cities of the North -- a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.

While income disparity has been historically high in Manhattan, it widened in the 1990s. In 1990, New York City ranked fifth among U.S. cities with large income gaps, compared to 11th place in 1980.

The top fifth of the households in the city currently make s 32 times more money than the bottom fifth of the population.

"The tunnel people resist relocation because they went underground very purposefully," says Mike Harris, a spokesperson of the Coalition for the Homeless, an organization that is trying to rehabilitate the underground people.

A section of the homeless first took refuge in the tunnels in the 1980s when New York's shelters for the homeless became "horrid," says Harris. "Not only were they homeless, but they were forced into shelters that were extremely violent, drug-ridden and crazy."

In 1994, America's housing chief went down the tunnels to take a look. He described what he saw: "People covered in soot, scratching their bodies from dust and lice, the air clammy, the trains, the fumes...its the England of Dickens or worse."

Equally, it is a world set apart from other miseries of life above ground. Just as there are drug-addicts, alcoholics and criminals on the run among the tunnel people, there are those who come from broken homes, have been cast out by a competitive society or simply have nowhere else to go.

To them, the smell of excrement, the bitter cold of the winter and even the company of rodents is a preferred existence. "Some of them have been down there so long that they are afraid to come out into the real world," says Harris.

According to him, promised housing for the tunnel people in the past never materialized. But things did move in 1994, when the federal government gave $8.7 million to non-profit organizations to relocate the tunnel people. This led a decrease, but not an elimination of the problem.

Just last week, Harris went down to the tunnel to talk to 15 new people who had just moved in. "I asked one why he wanted to live down there. He turned around and asked me why I live where I do.

I answered saying its cheap and safe. He retorted that he lived in the tunnels for the same reasons."

Like in any developing country of the South, in New York widespread budget cuts invariably strike first at the root of social investment. "New York City plans budget savings on the basis of how many people they can get thrown out of welfare," says Jean Bergman, a senior policy analyst at Housing Works, a non-profit organization that houses the homeless.

Of the city's population of 7.3 million, twenty percent live below the poverty line. But in December 1994, the city's Republican mayor Rudolph Guiliani unveiled a program calling for large cuts in health and benefit programs: $900 million in reduction in medical aid and $300 million in reduction on public assistance. "Whatever a third world urban economy is, New York is it," says Bergman. "Like urban centers of the third world, this city has reached the pinnacle of homelessness...it possesses the international border between the rich and the poor."

The tunnel or mole people are at one end of the debate over the problem of exclusion in many Northern cities.

"What New York has which Lagos and say Mexico City don't have is financial control," says Douglas Massey, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and President of the Population Association of America.

"There are unbelievably rich and poor people in both places, but the absolute amount of wealth in New York is much more which makes the disparity really stark," Massey added.

He points to problems associated with globalization in dealing with habitat issues.

With technological advancement leading to globalized production, people were increasingly inhabiting a similar world. Immigration into the developing world like in New York and the movement of factories to developing countries pointed to a "new era of global exploitation of natural resources and labor."

"The capitalist economic system is the only system left, and that affects life in Lagos as well as in New York," he added.

According to Stan Bernstein, a senior adviser at the United Nations Population Fund, some of the issues of habitat that are being addressed globally are also being actively addressed in the political arena in New York.

"There has to be serious attention paid to basic social services, health, education and women's empowerment," Bernstein said. "Who is the best provider of these services varies in different contexts? The role of government is to create enabling environments to ensure that these services are provided."

(PANOS, with offices in London, Paris and Washington, D.C., is an information organization that works with media and NGOs in highlighting development issues that are misunderstood and underreported.)