December 2011
19 posts
In Indian Slum, Misery, Work, Politics and Hope →
In the labyrinthine slum known as Dharavi are 60,000 structures, many of them shanties, and as many as one million people living and working on a triangle of land barely two-thirds the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Dharavi is one of the world’s most infamous slums, a cliché of Indian misery. It is also a churning hive of workshops with an annual economic output estimated to be $600 million...
Pause For Reflection →
You know those National Geographic documentaries with the 3D animation of how neurons behave, with the whooshing of electrical impulses across the central nervous system? Something like that ensued and suddenly I had a vision. No, not of me cradling a brood of babies (it’s surprising how many babies one can cradle at the same time in ones imagination), but of my mother saying - “See,...
An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry →
When Arunachalam Muruganantham decided he was going to do something about the fact that women in India can’t afford sanitary napkins, he went the extra mile: He wore his own for a week to figure out the best design [via @supremus].
“Always the Tenzing Norgay, never the Edmund Hillary. #DesiProverbs”
– Twitter / @bhalomanush
Hastinapur, the city of wisdom, in Argentina →
Hastinapur has a total area of twelve acres. Its population consists of a dozen Indian gods and an equal number of Argentine human beings. Some of the Indian gods reside in authentic temples filled with the scent of Indian agarbatties while others stay outdoor enjoying the fragrance of the flowers from the garden. Some are sitting or standing on the pedestals and others hang on the sides of...
The Ugly Indian →
Choose wisely.
The Face of Lakshmi →
Merill Lynch says that there are over 126,000 Indians with investable assets of over 1 million dollars. Based on people I’ve met in the last 1.5 years, I believe that even with the most conservative estimate, they are off target by a factor of 5. There are hundreds of thousands of dollar-millionaires in India who would never catch the eye of a white-collar professional.
No survey can...
Virender Sehwag and what we don’t know →
Those of us who are lucky to watch him bat know he’s great. But those who come after may be lucky enough to understand his greatness, to put his mighty body of work in perspective and to celebrate how one man changed the course of cricketing history.
As usual, Sidvee is excellent on Sehwag after his ODI double-ton. I loved the first comment by Sagar too.
Tomorrow’s battles →
In 2009, the Congress got as propitious a mandate as any party could have expected. There was hope and expectation. The opposition, both on the left and right, was decimated. But what did India gain? It frittered away the good times. Instead of using growth to lay a secure foundation for the future, and create conditions where the scourge of poverty can be removed, we undermined the prospects...
Wal-Mart Hears a Familiar Complaint in India →
Late last month, as part of a push to modernize his nation’s notoriously inefficient retail economy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that for the first time big foreign companies like Wal-Mart and the British company Tesco could open retail stores in India. Until now, foreign companies have been restricted to serving only as wholesalers in India. That has already helped create more...
Oye Kapil Kapil Oye →
You know why that fan fell on Sharad Pawar’s head? Because your government hit it with so much shit that it couldn’t take it anymore. You should know there’s a problem when your own fucking furniture starts rebelling against you. The Internet is not the Congress where everything needs to get approval from high command before it can be said. It has its own checks and balances – something you...
The Rotten State of India’s Media →
What is broken about the news media in India is self evident on the front pages of the dailies in the mornings and on the nightly news on television in the evenings.
Fragments of news, a significant portion lazily strung together from press agency clippings, are what a careful newspaper reader can sift out between a series of full-page advertisements peddling products, and images of women...
The FOB who became an ABCD →
It did not seem like some 30 hours since she had labeled her name on the newly acquired American Tourister suitcases, checked her flight timing for the eighteenth time to avoid any am versus pm confusion, touched her grandparents’ feet, promised her parents she will never marry a “foreigner”, loaded the rental Tata Sumo with the suitcases while the neighbors from every balcony watched with...
Amit Gupta and the South Asian Bone Marrow Deficit →
When the 32-year-old Indian-American tech entrepreneur was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia last month, he extended a call for help. Gupta’s tech cred—he started launching web startups while still in college—ensured that his message swept across social media platforms. But Gupta is now battling more than cancer: Because he is South Asian, the people most likely to match his bone marrow are...
Trivial Pursuit →
Consider Jacques Kallis who, after 16 years at the top, has a Test batting average higher than Tendulkar’s. He also has 271 Test wickets to Tendulkar’s 45 and 169 catches to Tendulkar’s 110. If I was a mindless South African fan looking for numbers to prove that my man was the best, I could legitimately argue that you would need to merge Sachin Tendulkar with Zaheer Khan to come up with Jacques...