The conceit of India’s Republic is founded on one major premise: equality. It is this premise that underlies the thinking of our Constituent Assembly, and it is this premise that, perhaps in the interest of retaining its collective sanity, led the Constituent Assembly to believe that the elected representatives of the people who were to form Parliament would be not materially different from themselves: men and women of understanding, some learning, stature, maturity, committed, with a sense of purpose and public service, and also with the ability to laugh at themselves. » more
It’s a vision from hell or, at the very least, from Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale or Fahrenheit 451. An award-winning film is slated for its television premiere. At the last minute, the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting — it’s hard to think of a government authority with a more quintessentially dystopian moniker — pulls the plug and insists the telecast be moved to a late-night slot. We must protect our children, we are told. » more
When that voice boomed through the school, even at the noisiest of times, everybody listened. By her desk in her small cabin — not for her the large and plush corporate-style offices; this one could barely seat three visitors — there was always her handheld mike and she would swivel around and thunder her will. » more
O tempora! O mores! Thanks to the nature of these things, we can no longer say what we all know, and are forced into the needlessly elliptical. Therefore and thusly: the recent demise of the political career of a government spokesperson on accusations of his — for want of a better phrase — infelicitous conduct caught on some dull security camera videotape has generated all manner of controversies, from protestations of this being an entirely private matter to accusations of besmirching high office. » more
Hugh Lofting’s Dr Doolittle children’s books had many wonderful imaginary creatures. One of these was the pushmi-pullyu, a gazelle-unicorn hybrid with a head at either end of its body. When it moved, both ends headed off in opposite directions. » more
He has been on death row for years. Now, three days before he was scheduled to be put to death, the Central Government has stayed his execution. This particular case, Balwant Singh Rajoana, seems to be peculiar. He was convicted for the assassination of Punjab’s Chief Minister Beant Singh in 1995. He chose not to represent himself. He still does not seek a reprieve. He says he has no grounds to do so, and has no faith in our system. Instead, today, it is the ruling party in the state that urges clemency. » more
It is a scheme unlike any other: four times the capacity of China’s Three Gorges dam, five times the capacity of similar projects in America, six times that of existing projects in India. This is the Indian river interlinking project, one that four weeks ago received judicial benediction from the Supreme Court. » more
It would be comic if it wasn’t so insidious. Karnataka proposes to pass into law the Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Bill. This isn’t just to ensure the health of livestock (it does exactly the reverse) or control slaughter-houses. It targets specific communities and groups, particularly the poor, Dalits and Muslims. » more
Law, medicine and theology are said to be the three “learned” professions. Of their practitioners, lawyers have always been singularly unloved. They arouse public suspicion — they are, after all, defenders of criminals and the corrupt and, therefore, believed to be tainted by association. They invite derision and contempt: from popular lawyer jokes to real and imaginary accounts of bizarre courtroom exchanges portraying lawyers as people of limitless stupidity. » more
At the end of 2008, six people met at the Cardozo School of Law’s moot courtroom in New York. They included the free speech expert, Floyd Abrams; a sitting judge the United States Court of Appeals, Richard Posner; a judge of the New York state Supreme Court’s appellate division; a professor of law and novelist, Bernard Schlink; and a professor of literature. They were there to decide what appeared to be a simple case concerning a loan default. » more
In the run up to Mumbai’s municipal elections, of the many to-be-left-unfufilled promises made by political parties, two were common: less corruption and more “infrastructure”. The latter, in our peculiar notion of what makes a ‘world-class’ city, only means more roads, more bridges. No one promised to make our city more liveable. In my constituency, apart from the familiar talk-to-the-hand and offerings for lotus-eaters, there were many odd symbols for candidates: a sewing machine, an LPG cylinder and something that looked like a pasta machine cross-bred with a meat grinder. Not one had a tree or anything that looked like it. » more
It was the first thing that you noticed in her home. The books. There were books everywhere, on every surface, racked, stacked and piled, novels, histories, coffee table books, old books, new books. Even the furniture seemed to morph itself around books. Here was a sturdy old chair, a shaded lamp just so beside it, which could only be meant for reading. By its side another old piece of furniture, a revolving book stand. It was quiet here, as books demand. The books were visibly well-thumbed but undamaged, like good friends, and the furniture was lovingly restored. Books, as they say, are the spine of a house, and if there was one thing Sharada Dwivedi and the house she and her husband Bhagirath had, it was plenty of spine. » more
It was a typically squalid town in the heart of India’s cowbelt: the usual cats’ cradle of messed-up wiring, open sewers, cracked pavements, blaring horns, loudspeakers on every corner blaring something indecipherable, the air so thick with dust and grime and exhaust that even the sunlight seemed to have surrendered. I was here, against all better judgement, on a work trip and regretting every minute of it. Along the way, an unexpected possible refuge; inside, the bookshop was small and tired, pulp fiction potboilers and outdated magazines with curled covers, the paunchy proprietor, soaked in boredom, alternately picking his teeth with a matchstick and shouting at an assistant. On one shelf, facing out, was a thick book, its kitsch cover a challenge: buy me if you dare. » more
Jyoti Gupta, age 8, had never been inside a classroom when she started at the Sitaram Mill Compound Mumbai Public School this past June.
When she started, she was a very naughty and unresponsive child, her teachers say. She routinely disobeyed teachers and ignored homework assignments. After six months of regularly attending the school, however, Jyoti has learned how to read and write basic English words and is now one of the brightest and most motivated students in her class, they say. » more
Even Mohandas K. Gandhi, the architect of the Indian obsession with the hunger strike, did not always succeed in his fasts — although success was, admittedly, measured by Mr. Gandhi’s own standards.
He considered, for instance, a 1918 fast in Ahmedabad a moral failure. He had stopped eating in solidarity with striking mill workers, and three days into his fast, the factory owners agreed to raise worker wages by 35 percent. » more
It’s not the ball drop, but for tens of thousands of people, Phish’s annual run of shows at Madison Square Garden, which winds up on New Year’s Eve, is the more significant year-end event in Manhattan. Always an immediate sellout (but still available for pay per view at livephish.com), the concerts are both a tradition and a challenge. Phish has to provide its familiar joys but vary them enough to surprise fans who are obsessively meticulous tabulators.
Thursday night’s concert was Phish in crowd-pleasing mode: uptempo, playing familiar songs and ready to keep fans dancing — never getting too abstract or experimental. Its two sets were both CD-length, just under 80 minutes each, with the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup” as a splashy, gospelly encore.
This was the Phish that’s so light-fingered that its remarkable musicianship is often taken for granted; after all, things just keep bubbling along. The camaraderie of musicians who have been playing together since 1983 (with two major breaks) was acted out in the way each player’s improvisations peeked out and then tucked themselves back into the band. » more
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka—THE Sri Lankan government’s defeat of the separatist Tamil Tigers in 2009 ended a three-decade war that took tens of thousands of lives. But only now is the government beginning to acknowledge its huge human cost. Two weeks ago, a government-appointed reconciliation commission released a long-awaited report, giving voice to the war’s civilian victims for the first time.
From August 2010 to January 2011, hundreds of people appeared before the commission in tears, begging for news of their loved ones, many of whom had last been seen in the custody of security forces. A doctor spoke of how they managed to survive under deplorable conditions in places “littered with dead bodies and carcasses of dying animals.” » more
HYDERABAD, India — For more than two decades, M. A. Hakeem has arguably done the job of the Indian government. His private Holy Town High School has educated thousands of poor students, squeezing them into cramped classrooms where, when the electricity goes out, the children simply learn in the dark.
Parents in Holy Town’s low-income, predominantly Muslim neighborhood do not mind the bare-bones conditions. They like the modest tuition (as low as $2 per month), the English-language curriculum and the success rate on standardized tests. Indeed, low-cost schools like Holy Town are part of an ad hoc network that now dominates education in this south Indian city, where an estimated two-thirds of all students attend private institutions. » more
It is not hard to argue that we live in a youth-centric culture, one in which young age and beauty are almost synonymous. And that obsession does not end with humans. Puppies and kittens melt hearts; images and videos of baby animals flood the Internet. But rarely does an image of an animal in old age ignite the same interest and adoration.
In an unusual project, Isa Leshko, a fine-art photographer who lives in Philadelphia, set out to capture glimpses of animals at a time when they rarely attract much admiration or media attention — in their twilight years. The photographs, part of a series called “Elderly Animals”, are intimate and at times gripping. In one, a thoroughbred horse named Handsome One, age 33, stands in a stable, his hair wispy and his frame showing signs of time. In another, a pair of Finn sheep at the advanced age of 12 embrace as an elderly couple on a park bench might. And in another, a geriatric chow mix named Red lies with his paw under his chin, the signs of glaucoma apparent in his onyx-colored eyes. » more
ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.
A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”
Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.
Has it really come to this?
In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight. » more
For 15 years, Joseph Proietto has been helping people lose weight. When these obese patients arrive at his weight-loss clinic in Australia, they are determined to slim down. And most of the time, he says, they do just that, sticking to the clinic’s program and dropping excess pounds. But then, almost without exception, the weight begins to creep back. In a matter of months or years, the entire effort has come undone, and the patient is fat again. “It has always seemed strange to me,” says Proietto, who is a physician at the University of Melbourne. “These are people who are very motivated to lose weight, who achieve weight loss most of the time without too much trouble and yet, inevitably, gradually, they regain the weight.” » more
Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force.
“I was working part-time at Starbucks for a year and a half,” said Laura Baker, 24, who started a master’s program in strategic communications this fall at the University of Denver. “I wasn’t willing to just stay there. I had to do something.” » more
Sam Rivers, an inexhaustibly creative saxophonist, flutist, bandleader and composer who cut his own decisive path through the jazz world, spearheading the 1970s loft scene in New York and later establishing a rugged outpost in Florida, died on Monday in Orlando, Fla. He was 88.
The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Monique Rivers Williams said.
With an approach to improvisation that was garrulous and uninhibited but firmly grounded in intellect and technique, Mr. Rivers was among the leading figures in the postwar jazz avant-garde. His sound on the tenor saxophone, his primary instrument, was distinctive: taut and throaty, slightly burred, dark-hued. He also had a recognizable voice on the soprano saxophone, flute and piano, and as a composer and arranger. » more
What is about judges that so upsets politicians and political columnists? A couple of days ago, one politician referred to High Court and Supreme Court judges as the “laziest” layer of the judiciary. That’s a curious statement coming from someone who’s made a career and an exceedingly good living out of that “laziness”. On television, a self-anointed political pundit was even more waspish, suggesting that judges “get off their butts” and saying that the judiciary was thoroughly useless, or words to that effect. » more
LONDON — It would be Europe’s worst nightmare: after weeks of rumors, the Greek prime minister announces late on a Saturday night that the country will abandon the euro currency and return to the drachma.
Instead of business as usual on Monday morning, lines of angry Greeks form at the shuttered doors of the country’s banks, trying to get at their frozen deposits. The drachma’s value plummets more than 60 percent against the euro, and prices soar at the few shops willing to open. » more
More than 70 years ago, the M.I.T. electrical engineer Harold (Doc) Edgerton began using strobe lights to create remarkable photographs: a bullet stopped in flight as it pierced an apple, the coronet created by the splash of a drop of milk.
Now scientists at M.I.T.’s Media Lab are using an ultrafast imaging system to capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than two-trillionths of a second.
The project began as a whimsical effort to literally see around corners — by capturing reflected light and then computing the paths of the returning light, thereby building images coming from rooms that would otherwise not be directly visible. » more
There’s a word for it, this feeling of wanting to say something biting and nasty when you catch the day’s news, triggered by a constant sense of absurdity overwhelming logic, of contradictions without consistency, of shifting sands. The word is snark, and it has two origins, one perhaps from Low German or Swedish, meaning a snide remark, and the other from Lewis Carroll. » more
Few words have the immediacy of this one. In its first known usage in English, it’s nearly 400 years old, going back to the mid-1630s. Its roots are probably from the very similar Germanic, schlappe, and both are onomatopoeic, suggestive of the sound they make. » more
NEW DELHI — Every three months, India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, meets with a special panel assigned the ambitious task of figuring out how to produce 500 million skilled workers over the next two decades.
The panel is a cross section of India’s power elite, including many of the usual figures like the education minister, the finance minister and the former chief executive of the country’s biggest software outsourcing company. Then there is a more curious choice: Manish Sabharwal.
Mr. Sabharwal runs TeamLease, a Bangalore-based agency that has created thousands of jobs by fielding temporary workers for companies in India that want to expand their work force while skirting India’s stringent labor laws, which businesses say discourage the hiring of permanent employees. Many labor leaders and left-leaning politicians accuse him of running the nation’s largest illegal business.
He does not completely disagree.
“We should not exist,” Mr. Sabharwal, a 40-year-old graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said about his company, which has 60,000 employees. “The genius of India is to allow us to exist.” » more
We find television shows about lawyers, law firms and crime detection so compelling because we perceive court rooms as arenas for a civilized form of gladiatorial combat. ‘Courtroom’ TV serials show feisty lawyers trading verbal blows against each other and sometimes even against awkward judges. Witnesses are the hapless victims fed to legal lions. Every now and then an ‘expert’ witness — a scientist or a doctor, perhaps — is trundled out; sly lawyers try to tie them in knots, usually saying something like “so you can’t say for sure”, to which the witness responds “of course not; that’s just the most likely answer, in my professional opinion.” » more
It is hard to imagine our childhoods without him. We lost ourselves in his world. We laughed at the crazy things his friends did, but his struggles and ultimate triumphs were always our own. » more
Unless I am very wrong, the date this article appears in print is one of only three such dates every century; and each one is special. 11-11-11, like 10-10-10 and 01-01-01 are all binary in appearance. (Of course, should you have the luck to read this at eleven minutes past an hour before noon, you should consider yourself twice blessed: 11-11-11-11-11). » more
It’s one of the three oldest professions known to man. The other two, prostitution and smuggling, are on the wrong side of common social acceptance; and law — criminal law in particular — has always existed in a slightly murky twilight zone between good and evil, right and wrong. The fact that lawyers make a living out of something as basic as justice makes them a favourite butt of jokes (“why won’t a shark attack a lawyer? Professional courtesy”), and the best always seem to echo a truth. Given the legal penchant for ‘maxims’, there’s a Latin phrase for this: in joco veritas. In jest there is truth. » more
Mumbai matters. How can it not? The sixth most populous city and one of the largest urban regions on the planet, it is home to over 20 million people. It’s a city that speaks over a dozen different languages, each one uniquely filtered, adapted and adopted: only here will you hear an irate bus conductor bellowing at a passenger “aage chal, khaali-peeli bichme khada hain khamba ke mafak” — an absolutely delicious phrase that melds Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and Mumbai into one unmistakable linguistic bhel-puri that still gets the message across. » more
It took six hours to wound, maim and finally kill the tigress. She was already trapped in a net. The handful of forest officers present could not control the 5000-strong mob. The tigress, they said, had killed their cattle, and even a villager. And so they stoned and clubbed her to death. And then rejoiced in their bloodlust with a victory parade. » more
Indian youth make a human pyramid to reach and break the ‘Dahi Handi,’ an earthen pot filled with yogurt, as they celebrate Janamashtami, the birth anniversary of Hindu God Krishna in Mumbai, India, August 22. (Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press)
In early 1977, Jacobo Timerman, the publisher of a liberal newspaper in Argentina, was arrested by the military junta. For some time previously, he had used his newspaper to publish accounts of government brutality and human rights violations. After his arrest, Timerman was kept in isolation, blindfolded for long periods and subjected to brutal torture with an electric cattle prod. He was finally released in 1979 and his 1981 book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number is a harrowing account of his years of imprisonment. Never sentimental, the book has the dispassion of a professional journalist; this only makes it the more horrifying. But Timerman was a Jew, and his captors were anti-Semitic, and what troubled Timerman most, what he could not understand or reconcile, was the unreasoning hatred for his being a Jew. » more
Of all the opening words of the Preamble to our Constitution, the most difficult is one that wasn’t even originally there. Till 1977, we were a sovereign democratic republic, recently turned gloomy with Mrs G in the middle of her run up to pole-vaulting us into bananadom. In that year, we became both socialist and secular; and, as the Aston Martins and Bentleys on our potholed roads, and repeated outbreaks of sectarian violence show, we have honoured both ideals. » more
Our existing systems for tackling corruption are catastrophic failures. Prosecuting public servants needs prior sanction. It seldom comes. Prosecutions drag on for years. Relative to the (intangible) result, the effort is monumental. If the comparisons to cancer are accurate, is the solution to administer a mild sedative and only address the symptoms, which is what many say is all that the Government Lokpal Bill does, or is it to use a treatment many feel is so severe that it risks killing the body, the charge made against the Jan Lokpal Bill? In a time to heal, we must have something effective but not fatal. » more
If there exists popular perception that this is a government with an embarrassment of vices — an inexhaustible capacity for corruption, inventive mendacity (the dementia defence), and, it now seems, even gross political ineptitude — the Congress-led UPA has only itself to blame. Arresting Anna Hazare, then offering to release him, imposing conditions on his right to protest and then launching personal attacks all tell of a rudderless government bent on committing political suicide by ritual disembowelment. » more
It is a remarkable milestone when any single institution anywhere can claim to have functioned for a full 150 years without interruption. When that institution is a court of law, it affords all of us — not just the lawyers and judges — a very special opportunity. » more
Last Monday’s so-called “public hearing” on the Peddar Road flyover project seems to have been designed for failure. There is no logical reason why a large group of Nationalist Congress Party members should have felt it necessary to disrupt it — apart from the fact that the NCP controls the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, the project proponent. It’s unlikely that these fine, dedicated party workers will be found swanning back and forth along this road. The only reason why any road and bridge building contractor would love such a project is, of course, its monumental cost. There’s money to be made here, lots and lots of it. » more
A few hundred yards down the road from Nana Chowk to Tardeo, next to Sunkersett Mansion on the road’s left, there stands a small temple. It has a handsome arched entrance and clear space on three sides. This is not one of the over-built modern temples that substitute spirituality with size and commerce; this is an old, quiet place of worship that appears ageless. It also looks like a last act of defiance against the towering monstrosities that surround it. A little further on is another, an agiary. That, too, has withstood the steady onslaught of commercial high-rise development. » more
The city’s police are an unhappy lot. It’s bad enough they’ve been forced to pirouette endlessly over the murder of the journalist Jyotirmoy Dey. To show that they’re not completely left-footed, they’ve decided to teach the city how to dance and, in their usual subtle fashion, detain 31 youngsters at a Malad lounge bar for what they call ‘dirty dancing’. This throws up all kinds of interesting possibilities. Perhaps we can look forward to some terpsichorean initiatives from the city’s finest—arangetrams, perhaps, at the Police Gymkhana. Or the Malad mazurka, the Charni Road cha-cha-cha, the Salsette Salsa and the Titwala tango. » more
What kind of government, what kind of system allows suffering like this? Very early in Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram comes this reaction to a first view of Mumbai slums. It is a reaction fuelled by shame, guilt and rage, and it is the view of an outsider. We who live here have passed beyond such feelings. We simply do not even notice them any more. Perhaps this has to do with our ‘culture’ of the philosophical shrug and the always-reliable excuse of karma. But karma and justice are uneasy bedfellows. » more
At a sprawling manufacturing complex here, hundreds of Chinese laborers are now completing work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Next month, the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field — will be loaded onto a huge ship and transported 6,500 miles to Oakland. There, they will be assembled to fit into the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge. » more
In the fall of 2003, Anil Kumar, a senior executive with the consulting firm McKinsey, and Raj Rajaratnam, the head of a multibillion-dollar hedge fund called Galleon, attended a charity event in Manhattan. They had known each other since the early eighties, when, as recent immigrants, they were classmates at the Wharton School of Business, in Philadelphia. Their friendship, intermittent over the years, was based on self-interest rather than on intimacy. Kumar, born in Chennai, formerly Madras, India, was fastidious and morose, travelling at least thirty thousand miles a month for work, and seldom socializing. Rajaratnam, a Tamil from Colombo, Sri Lanka, was fleshy and dark-skinned, with a charming gap-toothed smile and a sports fan’s appetite for competition and conquest. Kumar was not among the group whom Rajaratnam took on his private plane to the Super Bowl every year for a weekend of partying. “I’m a consultant at heart,” Kumar liked to say. “I’m a rogue,” Rajaratnam once said. Kumar had the more precise diction and was better educated, but Rajaratnam was one of the world’s new billionaires and therefore a luminary among businessmen from the subcontinent. In an earlier generation of immigrant financiers, Kumar would have been the German Jew, Rajaratnam the Russian. Kumar might have felt some disdain for Rajaratnam, but Rajaratnam’s fortune made him irresistible. » more
