MUMBAI: Adlabs Films Ltd, part of the Reliance-Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (R-ADAG), has re-branded its Adlabs Cinemas across the country as BIG Cinemas, a top official said.
"Adlabs brand has now been replaced with BIG Cinemas. For example, Metro Adlabs will now be known as Metro BIG Cinemas," Adlabs Films chief executive Anil Arjun said.
The re-branding would come into effect from Oct 28, coinciding with Diwali, he said.
The new brand's signages, collaterals and promotional materials, designed by Singapore's Bonsey Design will reflect the vibrancy of BIG Cinemas, Arjun added.
Adlabs Films has 73 properties across the country, totalling 186 screens and 71,000 seats.
"The brand rollout for our 200 properties abroad, including the US and Malaysia, will also start shortly," he said.
He added that Adlabs Films would launch all its next level of cinemas under the brand name of BIG Cinemas in line with R-ADAG's aim to create one consumer entertainment brand, BIG.
Oct 25, 2008
Entertainment - India;Channels fight for 1 Vs 100
With reality shows scoring over soap operas both in terms of TRPs and ad rates, a battle has broken out between leading Hindi general entertainment channels (GEC) to acquire the rights of an international popular game show 1 Vs 100, created by production house Endemol.
It is learnt that Star Plus and NDTV Imagine are among the top contenders to acquire the rights for the show, some others have also expressed interest. Sources add that one of the contesting channels has already approached Amitabh Bachchan to host the show though there is no clarity yet on whether he is willing to sign on.
Viacom 18’s Colors was also in the race to acquire the rights for the show, but now, it is learnt, Colors is no longer a contender. When contacted, an Endemol India spokesperson said that the production house could not comment on details since the show is at the ‘pitch level’ currently. Star Plus executive V-P and GM Keertan Adyanthaya says: “We are not aware of any such show.” NDTV Imagine officials also refused to comment.
1 Vs 100 is an expensive format show. Questions are posed to one key contestant whose answers have to be matched with 100 others for the original contestant to win a cash prize. Going by the latest TAM ratings, Star Plus—which has ruled the segment for years—and relatively new-entrant Colors are now neck-and-neck for top slot in the GEC space. The latter’s reality-based programmes Khatron Ke Khiladi followed by Bigg Boss II were almost instant hits in terms of ratings.
All GECs, including Sony, Zee, NDTV Imagine and Sahara, are learnt to be aggressively looking at content line-up, including big-ticket reality shows, to notch up TRPs and prop up their ad rates. Broadcasters in the GEC space have been turning to expensive-format game shows to boost declining TRPs. Example: Star Plus’ KBC and Sony’s Dus Ka Dum.
Star’s Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hain, however, failed to make a mark despite being hosted by Shah Rukh Khan. The GEC space, dominated by Star Plus, Zee and Sony for long, is witnessing fierce competition. After two big launches, Colors is giving Star Plus a run for its TRPs. And that’s not the only competition. Already, there’s the Samir Nair-run NDTV Imagine. And the segment will get more crowded as new entrants—like Miditech, which has teamed up with Turner International for a Hindi GEC—join the bandwagon. All of this would put further pressure on ad revenues generated by the existing players.
It is learnt that Star Plus and NDTV Imagine are among the top contenders to acquire the rights for the show, some others have also expressed interest. Sources add that one of the contesting channels has already approached Amitabh Bachchan to host the show though there is no clarity yet on whether he is willing to sign on.
Viacom 18’s Colors was also in the race to acquire the rights for the show, but now, it is learnt, Colors is no longer a contender. When contacted, an Endemol India spokesperson said that the production house could not comment on details since the show is at the ‘pitch level’ currently. Star Plus executive V-P and GM Keertan Adyanthaya says: “We are not aware of any such show.” NDTV Imagine officials also refused to comment.
1 Vs 100 is an expensive format show. Questions are posed to one key contestant whose answers have to be matched with 100 others for the original contestant to win a cash prize. Going by the latest TAM ratings, Star Plus—which has ruled the segment for years—and relatively new-entrant Colors are now neck-and-neck for top slot in the GEC space. The latter’s reality-based programmes Khatron Ke Khiladi followed by Bigg Boss II were almost instant hits in terms of ratings.
All GECs, including Sony, Zee, NDTV Imagine and Sahara, are learnt to be aggressively looking at content line-up, including big-ticket reality shows, to notch up TRPs and prop up their ad rates. Broadcasters in the GEC space have been turning to expensive-format game shows to boost declining TRPs. Example: Star Plus’ KBC and Sony’s Dus Ka Dum.
Star’s Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hain, however, failed to make a mark despite being hosted by Shah Rukh Khan. The GEC space, dominated by Star Plus, Zee and Sony for long, is witnessing fierce competition. After two big launches, Colors is giving Star Plus a run for its TRPs. And that’s not the only competition. Already, there’s the Samir Nair-run NDTV Imagine. And the segment will get more crowded as new entrants—like Miditech, which has teamed up with Turner International for a Hindi GEC—join the bandwagon. All of this would put further pressure on ad revenues generated by the existing players.
Health - Link between Diabetes & TB found
WASHINGTON: Researchers at The University of Texas School of Public Health Brownsville Regional Campus say that patients with Type 2 diabetes may
be at increased risk of contracting tuberculosis because they generally have a compromised immune system, which results in life-threatening lung infections that are more difficult to treat.
The researchers said that three studied conducted by them had shown that type 2 diabetes, especially when it involves chronic high blood sugar, is associated with altered immune response to TB.
The said that their studied also showed that patients with diabetes and TB take longer to respond to anti-TB treatment, and that patients with active tuberculosis and Type 2 diabetes are more likely to have multi-drug resistant TB.
Writing about their findings in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, the researchers said that the immune systems of patients with Type 2 diabetes and tuberculosis could respond differently compared with patients with TB alone.
"This immune impairment may be what makes patients with diabetes so susceptible to TB," said Dr. Susan P. Fisher-Hoch, professor of epidemiology.
Dr. Blanca I. Restrepo, assistant professor of epidemiology, said that her team found that innate and type 1 cytokine responses were significantly higher in patients with tuberculosis who had diabetes than in the control group of patients with TB and no diabetes.
The effect was consistently and significantly more marked in diabetic patients with chronic hyperglycemia, or uncontrolled high blood sugar, said the researcher.
Diabetes results in the body's ineffective use of insulin. If left uncontrolled, the chronic high sugar in the bloodstream can affect the critical immune system and damage the body's systems, especially the nerves, the retina of the eyes and blood vessels.
"These findings are the opposite of what we were expecting. These innate and type 1 cytokines are typically associated with TB protection, but in patients with diabetes, it appears the cytokines are not effective. Diabetics may have more advanced TB with more bacteria, and hence, more stimulation for secretion of type 1 cytokines," Restrepo said.
The researchers wrote: "More detailed knowledge of the underlying mechanisms should focus on the effect of chronic hyperglycemia on the immune response to help in understanding the enhanced susceptibility of diabetic patients with tuberculosis."
The team said that their findings also showed that patients with diabetes were more at risk of developing multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.
The researchers said that they had observed that almost six percent of diabetics living along the Texas-Mexico border had TB that was resistant to rifampin and isoniazid, common medications for tuberculosis.
They further said that 30 per cent of those with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis also had Type 2 diabetes.
"It is possible that impaired immunity in Type 2 diabetes increases susceptibility to infection with resistant strains," they write in the online edition of the Scandinavian Journal of Infectious Diseases.
Dr. Joseph B. McCormick, the senior author of the three studies, said that the findings of the research cast new light on a long-known correlation between diabetes and tuberculosis.
"It opens a door to doing something about it. We can educate physicians and offer more TB screenings. We have an opportunity to make sure patients are diagnosed correctly and that there is no delay in diagnosis," said McCormick, the university's James H. Steele Professor.
Fisher-Hoch said the research could help diagnosis TB patients who previously would not be considered at risk for contracting the airborne, contagious disease.
"The classic TB patient in this country is a younger male in an urban setting who may have alcohol and drug abuse problems and be HIV-infected. Our research shows older female patients who have never been in jail and have no history of alcohol and drug abuse or HIV infection are at risk of contracting TB if they have diabetes," she said.
"I think we are illuminating a very important association between TB and diabetes that had pretty well been overlooked. The public health aspect is that we are trying to make sure we can prevent and treat these patients, and when they are TB-infected, treat them better," she added.
She suggested that doctors screen patients for TB if they have diabetes and a chronic cough, and that patients with Type 2 diabetes take precautions.
"If they are visiting an area where there is a lot TB, they need to be careful. TB spreads in crowded places with poor ventilation," she said.
be at increased risk of contracting tuberculosis because they generally have a compromised immune system, which results in life-threatening lung infections that are more difficult to treat.
The researchers said that three studied conducted by them had shown that type 2 diabetes, especially when it involves chronic high blood sugar, is associated with altered immune response to TB.
The said that their studied also showed that patients with diabetes and TB take longer to respond to anti-TB treatment, and that patients with active tuberculosis and Type 2 diabetes are more likely to have multi-drug resistant TB.
Writing about their findings in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, the researchers said that the immune systems of patients with Type 2 diabetes and tuberculosis could respond differently compared with patients with TB alone.
"This immune impairment may be what makes patients with diabetes so susceptible to TB," said Dr. Susan P. Fisher-Hoch, professor of epidemiology.
Dr. Blanca I. Restrepo, assistant professor of epidemiology, said that her team found that innate and type 1 cytokine responses were significantly higher in patients with tuberculosis who had diabetes than in the control group of patients with TB and no diabetes.
The effect was consistently and significantly more marked in diabetic patients with chronic hyperglycemia, or uncontrolled high blood sugar, said the researcher.
Diabetes results in the body's ineffective use of insulin. If left uncontrolled, the chronic high sugar in the bloodstream can affect the critical immune system and damage the body's systems, especially the nerves, the retina of the eyes and blood vessels.
"These findings are the opposite of what we were expecting. These innate and type 1 cytokines are typically associated with TB protection, but in patients with diabetes, it appears the cytokines are not effective. Diabetics may have more advanced TB with more bacteria, and hence, more stimulation for secretion of type 1 cytokines," Restrepo said.
The researchers wrote: "More detailed knowledge of the underlying mechanisms should focus on the effect of chronic hyperglycemia on the immune response to help in understanding the enhanced susceptibility of diabetic patients with tuberculosis."
The team said that their findings also showed that patients with diabetes were more at risk of developing multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.
The researchers said that they had observed that almost six percent of diabetics living along the Texas-Mexico border had TB that was resistant to rifampin and isoniazid, common medications for tuberculosis.
They further said that 30 per cent of those with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis also had Type 2 diabetes.
"It is possible that impaired immunity in Type 2 diabetes increases susceptibility to infection with resistant strains," they write in the online edition of the Scandinavian Journal of Infectious Diseases.
Dr. Joseph B. McCormick, the senior author of the three studies, said that the findings of the research cast new light on a long-known correlation between diabetes and tuberculosis.
"It opens a door to doing something about it. We can educate physicians and offer more TB screenings. We have an opportunity to make sure patients are diagnosed correctly and that there is no delay in diagnosis," said McCormick, the university's James H. Steele Professor.
Fisher-Hoch said the research could help diagnosis TB patients who previously would not be considered at risk for contracting the airborne, contagious disease.
"The classic TB patient in this country is a younger male in an urban setting who may have alcohol and drug abuse problems and be HIV-infected. Our research shows older female patients who have never been in jail and have no history of alcohol and drug abuse or HIV infection are at risk of contracting TB if they have diabetes," she said.
"I think we are illuminating a very important association between TB and diabetes that had pretty well been overlooked. The public health aspect is that we are trying to make sure we can prevent and treat these patients, and when they are TB-infected, treat them better," she added.
She suggested that doctors screen patients for TB if they have diabetes and a chronic cough, and that patients with Type 2 diabetes take precautions.
"If they are visiting an area where there is a lot TB, they need to be careful. TB spreads in crowded places with poor ventilation," she said.
World - Report;Bin laden writing his memoirs
ISLAMABAD: World's most wanted fugitive, al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden is reportedly writing a book on the struggle of his terrorist network that
dispenses money, logistical support and training to radical groups in over 50 countries.
The book, being written in Arabic, will later be translated into English. Bin Laden decided to write the book to counter "propaganda" against al-Qaida, Geo News channel reported.
Bin Laden is writing the book with the assistance of a "young man with a Middle Eastern background who will later translate the text into English", the channel reported. The book will reportedly highlight atrocities allegedly being committed on Muslims by the Western world.
Bin Laden will also discuss how the medieval Crusades greatly impacted the growth of Western influence in world affairs and ultimately helped the US to control the oil reserves of the Muslim states.
The book will shed light on the evolution of al-Qaida and 9/11 terror attacks on the US.
Bin Laden, who was born in Riyadh on March 10, 1957, is a member of the prominent bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia.
The al-Qaida leader has been indicted in a US federal court for his alleged involvement in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and is on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of 10 most wanted fugitives.
Though bin Laden has not been indicted for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, he has reportedly claimed responsibility for the strikes. Reports suggest he earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, or a degree in public administration in 1981.
Bin Laden also operated from Pakistan for a brief while in the 1980s as part of the Mujahideen movement against the Soviet forces that had occupied Afghanistan
dispenses money, logistical support and training to radical groups in over 50 countries.
The book, being written in Arabic, will later be translated into English. Bin Laden decided to write the book to counter "propaganda" against al-Qaida, Geo News channel reported.
Bin Laden is writing the book with the assistance of a "young man with a Middle Eastern background who will later translate the text into English", the channel reported. The book will reportedly highlight atrocities allegedly being committed on Muslims by the Western world.
Bin Laden will also discuss how the medieval Crusades greatly impacted the growth of Western influence in world affairs and ultimately helped the US to control the oil reserves of the Muslim states.
The book will shed light on the evolution of al-Qaida and 9/11 terror attacks on the US.
Bin Laden, who was born in Riyadh on March 10, 1957, is a member of the prominent bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia.
The al-Qaida leader has been indicted in a US federal court for his alleged involvement in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and is on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of 10 most wanted fugitives.
Though bin Laden has not been indicted for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, he has reportedly claimed responsibility for the strikes. Reports suggest he earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, or a degree in public administration in 1981.
Bin Laden also operated from Pakistan for a brief while in the 1980s as part of the Mujahideen movement against the Soviet forces that had occupied Afghanistan
Lifestyle - A lot can actually happen over coffee
A lot can happen over a cup of hot coffee, say researchers, who have found that people judged others to be more generous and caring if they had
just held a warm drink in their hand.
The study led by Yale University psychologists suggests that simply handling a hot cup of coffee can change one's attitude toward a stranger. "The basic scientific implication is about exploring the link between the physical world and the psychological world," said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Lawrence E. Williams.
"It's at the same time subtle and very powerful, a repeated association of physical warmth that is learned over a lifetime," he added. Psychologists have long noted the importance of warm physical contact with caregivers in developing healthy relationships as adults.
Williams and John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale and co-author, decided to test the impact of warmth on the perceptions of adults.
During the study, the researchers casually asked that the undergraduate test subjects briefly hold either a warm cup of coffee or iced coffee as they wrote down information. The subjects were then given a packet of information about an individual, and asked to assess his or her personality traits. The participants assessed the person as significantly "warmer" if they had previously held the warm cup of coffee rather than the iced cup of coffee.
In a second study, they showed people are more likely to give something to others if they had just held something warm, and more likely take something for themselves if they held something cold.
The participants held heated or frozen therapeutic packs as part of a product evaluation study, and were then were told they could receive a gift certificate for a friend or a gift for themselves. Those who held the hot pack were more likely to ask for the gift certificate, while those who held the frozen pack tended to keep the gift.
"It appears that the effect of physical temperature is not just on how we see others, it affects our own behaviour as well," said Bargh.
"Physical warmth can make us see others as warmer people, but also cause us to be warmer – more generous and trusting – as well," he added.
just held a warm drink in their hand.
The study led by Yale University psychologists suggests that simply handling a hot cup of coffee can change one's attitude toward a stranger. "The basic scientific implication is about exploring the link between the physical world and the psychological world," said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Lawrence E. Williams.
"It's at the same time subtle and very powerful, a repeated association of physical warmth that is learned over a lifetime," he added. Psychologists have long noted the importance of warm physical contact with caregivers in developing healthy relationships as adults.
Williams and John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale and co-author, decided to test the impact of warmth on the perceptions of adults.
During the study, the researchers casually asked that the undergraduate test subjects briefly hold either a warm cup of coffee or iced coffee as they wrote down information. The subjects were then given a packet of information about an individual, and asked to assess his or her personality traits. The participants assessed the person as significantly "warmer" if they had previously held the warm cup of coffee rather than the iced cup of coffee.
In a second study, they showed people are more likely to give something to others if they had just held something warm, and more likely take something for themselves if they held something cold.
The participants held heated or frozen therapeutic packs as part of a product evaluation study, and were then were told they could receive a gift certificate for a friend or a gift for themselves. Those who held the hot pack were more likely to ask for the gift certificate, while those who held the frozen pack tended to keep the gift.
"It appears that the effect of physical temperature is not just on how we see others, it affects our own behaviour as well," said Bargh.
"Physical warmth can make us see others as warmer people, but also cause us to be warmer – more generous and trusting – as well," he added.
Lifestyle - Seven ways to woo your man
Monika Rawal
Pole dancing
Salsa and ball room dancing are passé! Be a pole dancer and make sure you get every move right, from the jazzy costumes to the most sensuous dance steps. This alluring act will leave your lover begging for more. "I feel my wife looks sexiest when she is dancing. Though, it depends on the dance form she tries out. Pole dancing is a sure way to turn me on, provided the pole dancer has curvaceous body to flaunt. As far as my wife is concerned, she has tried pole dancing a couple of times and has successfully seduced me," says 29-year-old Karan Gabha, married for the past two years.
Word of caution: Don't go overboard with your dancing, as it may leave you tired and sleepy. "Beginners avoid trying any complex dance steps, as it may carry the risk of injuring yourself. Excess climbing on the pole without maintaining a proper balance or trying out a complicated posture can do more harm than good," warns Abha, a Delhi based choreographer.
Bikini clad welcome
It's official! The 'scantily clad effect' is sure to turn on your man! Put on a revealing pink bikini or sexy red lingerie and just as you hear him knock; open the door in a seductive posture to grab his attention. Your man will love the temptation and this naughty welcome is sure to get him geared for more. "I am aware of my husband's fantasies, especially his fetish for transparent bikinis. I thought surprising him with by being clad in such an attire that too when he was least expecting it will turn him on and, needless to say, it worked. On spotting me in this sexy avatar, he forgot all his exhaustion and immediately got into a naughty mood. I couldn't believe how this acted as such a wonderful foreplay act. Though, initially I was hesitant, but to get him into the mood, I made the bold move," confesses 27-year-old Sheeba Mehra (name changed on request) who got married recently.
Word of caution: Be sure that it's your hubby 'only' standing outside the door and not someone else. A peep through the magic eye or confirming his identity by asking before you open the door outright is advisable. After all, you don't want to be caught prancing in a bikini before your neighbourhood grocer!
Porn is 'okay' sometimes
It's commonly believed that 'men' love watching porn, acting like porn stars and wanting their respective partners to play in similar mode. Women, on the other hand might not enjoy the act as much, but it's no big deal coming out of the closet once in a while. Try flattering your hubby in the most seductive style which he's always desired for. Add that 'porn' flavour in every act of seduction. "My wife never liked the idea of watching a porn clip sitting with me, and if I insisted much, she would create a fuss. But after realising that it is one of the many ways through which we can spice up our love life, she herself agreed to it. Not only did she buy a porn video for us to watch together, she herself was keen to try out new acts and moves like never before," shares 35-year-old Vineet, an advertising professional.
Word of caution: Porn may induce a certain level of discomfort or hesitation, as you've never tried it earlier. "Do not take it for granted that watching visually stimulating experience together will act as quick fix to spice up your sex life. Unless you share a high level of comfort with your partner, such explicit acts can cause lot of misconceptions and induce negative connotations about sex," feels Dr. Vikas Mohan Sharma, consultant psychiatrist based in Bangalore.
Play out your fantasies
Think beyond sleazy conversation. Let your hidden fantasies and out-of-the-box sex stir-ups add an extra pinch ofWoo him tonight! (Getty Images)
romance into your sexual relationship. Try being innovative – plan a game, pen down your fantasies and let him pick a chit one-by-one, as you both leisurely perform them in bed. It's a great way to woo your man, even if he initially displays some 'not-tonight-honey' signs. "I was never open with my husband about my sexual desires, as I feared his reaction. But now, having tried to be a little more forward, I feel it's much better to be forthcoming in my expression," says 32-year-old Nitu, an engineer by profession.
Word of caution: Be realistic about your sex fantasies and do not share or expect anything, which you are not comfortable performing. "Expressing all your fantasies might not a good idea, as some may disclose a weaker side of yours. So make a conscious decision about which ones to share," suggests Dr. Aruna Broota, clinical psychiatrist.
Recreate the first night magic
Make efforts to enjoy every night as if it's your 'first night' and do not let the initial charm fade with time. Play with the décor of your bedroom and try positioning things in the same manner as they were on your first night. To accentuate the aura, a satin bed-sheet, several heart-shaped pillows and finally some rose petals can do the magic. "I made sure that everything reminded by hubby of our first night. The moment he came home, I blindfolded him and took him to our bedroom, which I had decorated with flowers and scented candles. I started off with a romantic conversation, talking about things which we hesitated doing then and which we now enjoyed. Such an open conversation eventually set the mood right for us to have a rocking time ahead," recalls Sarika, 31, a housewife.
Word of caution: Recollect all major incidents beforehand that happened on your first night, especially those which your hubby didn't like much. By no means, repeat any of those acts.
Spa effect at home
"I remember how my husband used to feel fatigued and sorry for not making love to me. On being guided by a friend, I tried giving him a spa experience at home and it was more than just rejuvenation. It was a complete add-on to our sex life, as it gave us a reason to come close to each other," asserts Mahima, 37, married for four years.
It's very likely that your man is too exhausted to have sex after he comes back from work. Think of a way you can help him relax his tired muscles. A spa setting in the midst of your living area can be a good idea. With scented oils and flower petals making for a romantic setting, let the warmth of your hands reach his body and let the heat build on.
Word of caution: Be cautious of fragrances (of aromatic oils) that your spouse likes and the ones he's allergic to. "Be extra careful about the techniques that you use during the spa massage because pressing the wrong pressure points may lead to backache and back problems, thus marring the whole mood," shares a spa expert.
Wild tigress act
Why let your man be the master and initiate sex every time? Turn the tables to spice up your love life. Get into a wild tigress mode and take charge in your own hands. Even if it means being assertive to get him to into the act, do not hesitate. After all, men love to see their partners initiating a sexual session and if it's wild, they couldn't be asking for more! "I never liked the idea that my wife always expected me to initiate sex, as if it was only me looking forward to it. But one night, when she started the foreplay, I was amazed. She seemed eager to enjoy some deeply pleasurable moments and it was indeed a gratifying feeling," shares 30-year-old Prakash (name changed on request).
Word of caution: Understand that becoming wild doesn't mean behaving dim-witted. Make sure you carry a skilled attitude in your wild acts, so that the man doesn't lose his interest. "Women should not be cautious all the time thinking about male reactions. There is no harm if his wife initiates the love making process," adds Dr. Aruna.
Pole dancing
Salsa and ball room dancing are passé! Be a pole dancer and make sure you get every move right, from the jazzy costumes to the most sensuous dance steps. This alluring act will leave your lover begging for more. "I feel my wife looks sexiest when she is dancing. Though, it depends on the dance form she tries out. Pole dancing is a sure way to turn me on, provided the pole dancer has curvaceous body to flaunt. As far as my wife is concerned, she has tried pole dancing a couple of times and has successfully seduced me," says 29-year-old Karan Gabha, married for the past two years.
Word of caution: Don't go overboard with your dancing, as it may leave you tired and sleepy. "Beginners avoid trying any complex dance steps, as it may carry the risk of injuring yourself. Excess climbing on the pole without maintaining a proper balance or trying out a complicated posture can do more harm than good," warns Abha, a Delhi based choreographer.
Bikini clad welcome
It's official! The 'scantily clad effect' is sure to turn on your man! Put on a revealing pink bikini or sexy red lingerie and just as you hear him knock; open the door in a seductive posture to grab his attention. Your man will love the temptation and this naughty welcome is sure to get him geared for more. "I am aware of my husband's fantasies, especially his fetish for transparent bikinis. I thought surprising him with by being clad in such an attire that too when he was least expecting it will turn him on and, needless to say, it worked. On spotting me in this sexy avatar, he forgot all his exhaustion and immediately got into a naughty mood. I couldn't believe how this acted as such a wonderful foreplay act. Though, initially I was hesitant, but to get him into the mood, I made the bold move," confesses 27-year-old Sheeba Mehra (name changed on request) who got married recently.
Word of caution: Be sure that it's your hubby 'only' standing outside the door and not someone else. A peep through the magic eye or confirming his identity by asking before you open the door outright is advisable. After all, you don't want to be caught prancing in a bikini before your neighbourhood grocer!
Porn is 'okay' sometimes
It's commonly believed that 'men' love watching porn, acting like porn stars and wanting their respective partners to play in similar mode. Women, on the other hand might not enjoy the act as much, but it's no big deal coming out of the closet once in a while. Try flattering your hubby in the most seductive style which he's always desired for. Add that 'porn' flavour in every act of seduction. "My wife never liked the idea of watching a porn clip sitting with me, and if I insisted much, she would create a fuss. But after realising that it is one of the many ways through which we can spice up our love life, she herself agreed to it. Not only did she buy a porn video for us to watch together, she herself was keen to try out new acts and moves like never before," shares 35-year-old Vineet, an advertising professional.
Word of caution: Porn may induce a certain level of discomfort or hesitation, as you've never tried it earlier. "Do not take it for granted that watching visually stimulating experience together will act as quick fix to spice up your sex life. Unless you share a high level of comfort with your partner, such explicit acts can cause lot of misconceptions and induce negative connotations about sex," feels Dr. Vikas Mohan Sharma, consultant psychiatrist based in Bangalore.
Play out your fantasies
Think beyond sleazy conversation. Let your hidden fantasies and out-of-the-box sex stir-ups add an extra pinch ofWoo him tonight! (Getty Images)
romance into your sexual relationship. Try being innovative – plan a game, pen down your fantasies and let him pick a chit one-by-one, as you both leisurely perform them in bed. It's a great way to woo your man, even if he initially displays some 'not-tonight-honey' signs. "I was never open with my husband about my sexual desires, as I feared his reaction. But now, having tried to be a little more forward, I feel it's much better to be forthcoming in my expression," says 32-year-old Nitu, an engineer by profession.
Word of caution: Be realistic about your sex fantasies and do not share or expect anything, which you are not comfortable performing. "Expressing all your fantasies might not a good idea, as some may disclose a weaker side of yours. So make a conscious decision about which ones to share," suggests Dr. Aruna Broota, clinical psychiatrist.
Recreate the first night magic
Make efforts to enjoy every night as if it's your 'first night' and do not let the initial charm fade with time. Play with the décor of your bedroom and try positioning things in the same manner as they were on your first night. To accentuate the aura, a satin bed-sheet, several heart-shaped pillows and finally some rose petals can do the magic. "I made sure that everything reminded by hubby of our first night. The moment he came home, I blindfolded him and took him to our bedroom, which I had decorated with flowers and scented candles. I started off with a romantic conversation, talking about things which we hesitated doing then and which we now enjoyed. Such an open conversation eventually set the mood right for us to have a rocking time ahead," recalls Sarika, 31, a housewife.
Word of caution: Recollect all major incidents beforehand that happened on your first night, especially those which your hubby didn't like much. By no means, repeat any of those acts.
Spa effect at home
"I remember how my husband used to feel fatigued and sorry for not making love to me. On being guided by a friend, I tried giving him a spa experience at home and it was more than just rejuvenation. It was a complete add-on to our sex life, as it gave us a reason to come close to each other," asserts Mahima, 37, married for four years.
It's very likely that your man is too exhausted to have sex after he comes back from work. Think of a way you can help him relax his tired muscles. A spa setting in the midst of your living area can be a good idea. With scented oils and flower petals making for a romantic setting, let the warmth of your hands reach his body and let the heat build on.
Word of caution: Be cautious of fragrances (of aromatic oils) that your spouse likes and the ones he's allergic to. "Be extra careful about the techniques that you use during the spa massage because pressing the wrong pressure points may lead to backache and back problems, thus marring the whole mood," shares a spa expert.
Wild tigress act
Why let your man be the master and initiate sex every time? Turn the tables to spice up your love life. Get into a wild tigress mode and take charge in your own hands. Even if it means being assertive to get him to into the act, do not hesitate. After all, men love to see their partners initiating a sexual session and if it's wild, they couldn't be asking for more! "I never liked the idea that my wife always expected me to initiate sex, as if it was only me looking forward to it. But one night, when she started the foreplay, I was amazed. She seemed eager to enjoy some deeply pleasurable moments and it was indeed a gratifying feeling," shares 30-year-old Prakash (name changed on request).
Word of caution: Understand that becoming wild doesn't mean behaving dim-witted. Make sure you carry a skilled attitude in your wild acts, so that the man doesn't lose his interest. "Women should not be cautious all the time thinking about male reactions. There is no harm if his wife initiates the love making process," adds Dr. Aruna.
Sport - Cricket;NRI Industrialist keen to buy Deccan Chargers
MELBOURNE: NRI industrialist Vikas Rambal, who is sponsoring Champions League Twenty20 side Waca Warriors, has expressed interest in owning Indian Premier League (IPL) side Deccan Chargers. ( Watch )
The exact plans of Rambal, who brought Tom Moody to Western Australia Cricket Association (WACA) as coach by spending a huge sum and now sending Waca Warriors to India in December for the Champions League T20, is not yet known but he said he wants to share a pie of the cash-rich IPL.
"I am looking to buy an IPL team and will be working out the modalities. The IPL has been a huge success. We can build a brand value in Australia and at the same time work for community development," he was quoted as saying by the media.
"Apart from these, we will also be generating revenue from the venture," he added without divulging how much he would spend to buy the IPL team.
Perth-based Rambal, chairman of the North West Chemicals and Fertilizers, got into cricket sponsorship last year and has signed a three-year sponsorship deal with WACA Twenty20 team Waca Warriors.
The agreement also meant that the Champions League Twenty20 side will bear his name -- Rambal Warriors -- during the December 3 to 10 tournament in India.
Last year, he entered a landmark agreement to sponsor former Australian cricketer Tom Moody to stay at WACA as coach-cum-manager.
Rambal also feels that with players like Mike Hussey and Shaun Marsh in the ranks, his team have a good chance to win the league.
According to recent media reports, the owners of Deccan Chargers were exploring the possibility of partly or wholly putting the franchise on sale though no official was willing to confirm the development as yet.
This has led to intense speculation that Rambal may indeed make an effort to buy Deccan Chargers which almost finished at the bottom of the table in the inaugural edition of the IPL.
The exact plans of Rambal, who brought Tom Moody to Western Australia Cricket Association (WACA) as coach by spending a huge sum and now sending Waca Warriors to India in December for the Champions League T20, is not yet known but he said he wants to share a pie of the cash-rich IPL.
"I am looking to buy an IPL team and will be working out the modalities. The IPL has been a huge success. We can build a brand value in Australia and at the same time work for community development," he was quoted as saying by the media.
"Apart from these, we will also be generating revenue from the venture," he added without divulging how much he would spend to buy the IPL team.
Perth-based Rambal, chairman of the North West Chemicals and Fertilizers, got into cricket sponsorship last year and has signed a three-year sponsorship deal with WACA Twenty20 team Waca Warriors.
The agreement also meant that the Champions League Twenty20 side will bear his name -- Rambal Warriors -- during the December 3 to 10 tournament in India.
Last year, he entered a landmark agreement to sponsor former Australian cricketer Tom Moody to stay at WACA as coach-cum-manager.
Rambal also feels that with players like Mike Hussey and Shaun Marsh in the ranks, his team have a good chance to win the league.
According to recent media reports, the owners of Deccan Chargers were exploring the possibility of partly or wholly putting the franchise on sale though no official was willing to confirm the development as yet.
This has led to intense speculation that Rambal may indeed make an effort to buy Deccan Chargers which almost finished at the bottom of the table in the inaugural edition of the IPL.
India - Market Mayhem;How much poorer have Indian Billionaires become
Vijay Gaurav
MUMBAI: The next time Forbes announces its list of billionaires (assuming it dares to do so even amid a massive wealth destruction globally),
chances are that many Indian tycoons will find to their dismay that their rankings have slipped a few notches.
Even if they managed to retain their slots, or even climb up a few rungs, it would still be cold comfort, as few billion of their wealth would evaporate amid the ongoing turmoil in the stock market.
As the late British financier Sir James Goldsmith remarked when congratulated for cashing out before the stock market crash of 1987, "It is like winning a game of bridge on the decks of the Titanic."
The Sensex recorded the second-biggest single-day fall in absolute terms on Friday when it crashed by 1,071 points, or 11%, to close at 8,701. With this, the index has crashed more than 12,000 points, or nearly 60%, since its peak of 20,873 achieved on January 8, 2008.
Market cap of all the companies traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) has evaporated by a staggering Rs 46 lakh crore, or $940bn during the period. So, how poorer have top industrialists like the Ambanis, Tatas and Birlas become after the meltdown in the share prices of their companies?
An ET analysis of promoter wealth loss between January 8 and October 24, 2008, shows that the two Ambani brothers bore the brunt of the stock market mayhem, witnessing the highest wealth erosion among promoters of the top business houses in the country.
Though still dominating the market cap ranking, RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani saw his personal wealth crash from $57.6bn as on January 8 to $14.4bn as on Friday, a fall of 75% since January 8.
A major part of the wealth erosion happened in the flagship company, RIL, whose market cap has declined by Rs 2.8 lakh crore, or $57bn. The market cap of two other group companies Reliance Petroleum and Reliance Industrial Infrastructure fell by $15.3bn and $0.7bn during the period.
Mukesh’s younger brother Anil Ambani of the ADAG group saw his wealth tumble from $48.4bn to $8.4bn, a loss of 83%. His five companies, Reliance Communication, Reliance Capital, RNRL, Reliance Infrastructure and Adlabs Films, recorded an aggregate market cap loss of $53.7bn.
Realty major DLF is the third-biggest loser where the promoter wealth has eroded from $44bn to as low as $6bn. DLF is followed by Tatas who saw their wealth in 27 listed companies plunge from $38.2bn to $12.8bn, a loss of 67%.
TCS, Tata Motors, Tata Power, Tata Communications and Tata Teleservices are among the key companies in the Tata group to have taken a big hit on market cap during January 8 to October 24 2008.
MUMBAI: The next time Forbes announces its list of billionaires (assuming it dares to do so even amid a massive wealth destruction globally),
chances are that many Indian tycoons will find to their dismay that their rankings have slipped a few notches.
Even if they managed to retain their slots, or even climb up a few rungs, it would still be cold comfort, as few billion of their wealth would evaporate amid the ongoing turmoil in the stock market.
As the late British financier Sir James Goldsmith remarked when congratulated for cashing out before the stock market crash of 1987, "It is like winning a game of bridge on the decks of the Titanic."
The Sensex recorded the second-biggest single-day fall in absolute terms on Friday when it crashed by 1,071 points, or 11%, to close at 8,701. With this, the index has crashed more than 12,000 points, or nearly 60%, since its peak of 20,873 achieved on January 8, 2008.
Market cap of all the companies traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) has evaporated by a staggering Rs 46 lakh crore, or $940bn during the period. So, how poorer have top industrialists like the Ambanis, Tatas and Birlas become after the meltdown in the share prices of their companies?
An ET analysis of promoter wealth loss between January 8 and October 24, 2008, shows that the two Ambani brothers bore the brunt of the stock market mayhem, witnessing the highest wealth erosion among promoters of the top business houses in the country.
Though still dominating the market cap ranking, RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani saw his personal wealth crash from $57.6bn as on January 8 to $14.4bn as on Friday, a fall of 75% since January 8.
A major part of the wealth erosion happened in the flagship company, RIL, whose market cap has declined by Rs 2.8 lakh crore, or $57bn. The market cap of two other group companies Reliance Petroleum and Reliance Industrial Infrastructure fell by $15.3bn and $0.7bn during the period.
Mukesh’s younger brother Anil Ambani of the ADAG group saw his wealth tumble from $48.4bn to $8.4bn, a loss of 83%. His five companies, Reliance Communication, Reliance Capital, RNRL, Reliance Infrastructure and Adlabs Films, recorded an aggregate market cap loss of $53.7bn.
Realty major DLF is the third-biggest loser where the promoter wealth has eroded from $44bn to as low as $6bn. DLF is followed by Tatas who saw their wealth in 27 listed companies plunge from $38.2bn to $12.8bn, a loss of 67%.
TCS, Tata Motors, Tata Power, Tata Communications and Tata Teleservices are among the key companies in the Tata group to have taken a big hit on market cap during January 8 to October 24 2008.
World - I have given up on talks with China says Dalai Lama
DHARMSALA: The Dalai Lama said on Saturday he has given up on efforts to convince Beijing to allow greater autonomy for Tibet under Chinese rule.
The Tibetan spiritual leader said he would now ask the Tibetan people to decide on how to take the dialogue forward.
China has repeatedly accused the Dalai Lama of leading a campaign to split Tibet from the rest of the country. The Dalai Lama has denied the allegations, saying he is only seeking greater autonomy for the Himalayan region to protect its unique Buddhist culture - a policy he calls the "middle way."
"I have been sincerely pursuing the middle way approach in dealing with China for a long time now but there hasn't been any positive response from the Chinese side," he said in Tibetan at a public function.
"As far as I'm concerned I have given up," he said in an unusually blunt statement.
"The issue of Tibet is not the issue of the Dalai Lama alone. It is the issue of 6 million Tibetans. I have asked the Tibetan government-in-exile, as a true democracy in exile, to decide in consultation with the Tibetan people the future course of action," the Dalai Lama said.
His speech was translated by his spokesman, Tenzin Takhla. The spiritual leader's comments come ahead of a new round of talks between his envoys and Chinese government officials at the end of October. Those talks are still on track, according to Chhime R. Chhoekyapa, another spokesman for the Dalai Lama.
Most Tibetans have supported the Dalai Lama's push for autonomy for the region. The Tibetan Youth Congress is the only major activist group that is advocating full independence for Tibet.
Beijing insists Tibet has belonged to China for centuries. Many Tibetans, however, say the region was effectively an independent nation until Chinese Communist troops invaded in 1950.
Phone calls to China's United Front Work Department, the Communist Party agency that handles contacts with the Dalai Lama, rang unanswered Saturday.
The Dalai Lama has been living in Dharmsala since fleeing Tibet after an unsuccessful uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
The Tibetan spiritual leader said he would now ask the Tibetan people to decide on how to take the dialogue forward.
China has repeatedly accused the Dalai Lama of leading a campaign to split Tibet from the rest of the country. The Dalai Lama has denied the allegations, saying he is only seeking greater autonomy for the Himalayan region to protect its unique Buddhist culture - a policy he calls the "middle way."
"I have been sincerely pursuing the middle way approach in dealing with China for a long time now but there hasn't been any positive response from the Chinese side," he said in Tibetan at a public function.
"As far as I'm concerned I have given up," he said in an unusually blunt statement.
"The issue of Tibet is not the issue of the Dalai Lama alone. It is the issue of 6 million Tibetans. I have asked the Tibetan government-in-exile, as a true democracy in exile, to decide in consultation with the Tibetan people the future course of action," the Dalai Lama said.
His speech was translated by his spokesman, Tenzin Takhla. The spiritual leader's comments come ahead of a new round of talks between his envoys and Chinese government officials at the end of October. Those talks are still on track, according to Chhime R. Chhoekyapa, another spokesman for the Dalai Lama.
Most Tibetans have supported the Dalai Lama's push for autonomy for the region. The Tibetan Youth Congress is the only major activist group that is advocating full independence for Tibet.
Beijing insists Tibet has belonged to China for centuries. Many Tibetans, however, say the region was effectively an independent nation until Chinese Communist troops invaded in 1950.
Phone calls to China's United Front Work Department, the Communist Party agency that handles contacts with the Dalai Lama, rang unanswered Saturday.
The Dalai Lama has been living in Dharmsala since fleeing Tibet after an unsuccessful uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
Health - Binge drinking weakens bones
Researchers have uncovered how alcohol disturbs genes necessary for upkeep of bones, potentially opening up new ways of targeting bone loss in alcohol abusers or those at risk of osteoporosis.
"Of course, the best way to prevent alcohol-induced bone loss is to not drink or to drink moderately," said bone biologist John Callaci, Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine. "But when prevention doesn't work, we need other strategies to limit the damage."
Callaci is a co-author of the study. His other co-authors are Frederick Wezeman, a professor and Ryan Himes, a research assistant in the Burn and Shock Trauma Institute of the university.
The National Osteoporosis Foundation says that many people who abuse alcohol do not get enough calcium. Alcohol also can affect the body's calcium supply. And drinking too much can increase the risk of falls and broken bones. The foundation advises people to have no more than two drinks per day.
Loyola's Alcohol Research Program was among the first centres to demonstrate that rats given an amount of alcohol equivalent to binge drinking show significant decreases in bone mineral density and bone strength. In humans, binge drinking is defined as a woman having at least four drinks or a man having at least five drinks in two hours. But surprisingly little was known about the mechanisms responsible for these effects.
In the new study, researchers injected rats with an amount of alcohol equivalent to binge drinking for three days or to chronic alcohol abuse for four weeks. Control groups received injections of saline.
Researchers focussed on genes responsible for bone health. They found that alcohol affected the amounts of RNA associated with these genes. (RNA serves as the template for making proteins, the building blocks of bones and other tissue.)
With some genes, alcohol increased the amount of RNA. With other genes, alcohol decreased the RNA, according to a press release of Loyola University. These findings were published recently in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Changing the amounts of RNA disrupted two molecular pathways responsible for normal bone metabolism and maintenance of bone mass.
"Of course, the best way to prevent alcohol-induced bone loss is to not drink or to drink moderately," said bone biologist John Callaci, Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine. "But when prevention doesn't work, we need other strategies to limit the damage."
Callaci is a co-author of the study. His other co-authors are Frederick Wezeman, a professor and Ryan Himes, a research assistant in the Burn and Shock Trauma Institute of the university.
The National Osteoporosis Foundation says that many people who abuse alcohol do not get enough calcium. Alcohol also can affect the body's calcium supply. And drinking too much can increase the risk of falls and broken bones. The foundation advises people to have no more than two drinks per day.
Loyola's Alcohol Research Program was among the first centres to demonstrate that rats given an amount of alcohol equivalent to binge drinking show significant decreases in bone mineral density and bone strength. In humans, binge drinking is defined as a woman having at least four drinks or a man having at least five drinks in two hours. But surprisingly little was known about the mechanisms responsible for these effects.
In the new study, researchers injected rats with an amount of alcohol equivalent to binge drinking for three days or to chronic alcohol abuse for four weeks. Control groups received injections of saline.
Researchers focussed on genes responsible for bone health. They found that alcohol affected the amounts of RNA associated with these genes. (RNA serves as the template for making proteins, the building blocks of bones and other tissue.)
With some genes, alcohol increased the amount of RNA. With other genes, alcohol decreased the RNA, according to a press release of Loyola University. These findings were published recently in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Changing the amounts of RNA disrupted two molecular pathways responsible for normal bone metabolism and maintenance of bone mass.
Health - Green Tea good for Type-1 diabetes
A powerful antioxidant in green tea may prevent or delay the onset of type-1 diabetes, according to a study.
Researchers were testing EGCG, green tea's predominant anti-oxidant, on a lab mouse with type-1 diabetes and primary Sjogren's syndrome, which damages moisture-producing glands, causing dry mouth and eyes.
"Our study focused on Sjogren's syndrome, so learning that EGCG also can prevent and delay insulin-dependent type 1 diabetes was a big surprise," said Stephen Hsu, molecular cell biologist at the School of Dentistry, Medical College of Georgia (MCG). The study was published Friday in Life Sciences.
In the mouse, EGCG reduced the severity and delayed onset of salivary gland damage associated with Sjogren's syndrome, which has no known cure.
"EGCG modulates several important genes, so it suppresses the abnormality at the molecular level in the salivary gland. It also significantly lowered the serum auto-antibodies, reducing the severity of Sjogren's syndrome-like symptoms," Hsu said. Auto-antibodies are antibodies the body makes against itself.
Both type-1 diabetes and Sjogren's syndrome are autoimmune diseases, which cause the body to attack itself. Autoimmune disorders are the third most common group of diseases in US and affect about eight percent of the population, an MCG press release, quoting Hsu, said.
Researchers were testing EGCG, green tea's predominant anti-oxidant, on a lab mouse with type-1 diabetes and primary Sjogren's syndrome, which damages moisture-producing glands, causing dry mouth and eyes.
"Our study focused on Sjogren's syndrome, so learning that EGCG also can prevent and delay insulin-dependent type 1 diabetes was a big surprise," said Stephen Hsu, molecular cell biologist at the School of Dentistry, Medical College of Georgia (MCG). The study was published Friday in Life Sciences.
In the mouse, EGCG reduced the severity and delayed onset of salivary gland damage associated with Sjogren's syndrome, which has no known cure.
"EGCG modulates several important genes, so it suppresses the abnormality at the molecular level in the salivary gland. It also significantly lowered the serum auto-antibodies, reducing the severity of Sjogren's syndrome-like symptoms," Hsu said. Auto-antibodies are antibodies the body makes against itself.
Both type-1 diabetes and Sjogren's syndrome are autoimmune diseases, which cause the body to attack itself. Autoimmune disorders are the third most common group of diseases in US and affect about eight percent of the population, an MCG press release, quoting Hsu, said.
Columnists - Barkha Dutt;The Renaissance Man (G.Read)
The media cliché of the season is inspired by a man who seems all set to become the first Black President of the United States. An Obama for India is a liberal lament that we have now heard more times than we can count. But what is India really looking to emulate?
Moving past his slogans for change, his innate charisma and his buttery charm, Barack Obama’s biggest achievement may already be the fact that instead of using his Race as a perennial calling-card, he appears to have transcended it. The political debate has long since moved from whether White America is ready for Obama to ask instead whether all of Black America will stand by him. No wonder then that Obama — who was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan diplomat and a White woman from Kansas — has been subjected to merciless scrutiny on whether he is “Black enough”. The American media has drawn parallels between him and Tiger Woods. Woods, who is now glorified as an iconic, breaking-the barriers, Black Hero, was often derided in his early years for being more at home in the chi-chi and predominantly White world of professional golf than in Black society.
So the question now is whether inner-city Black America — the more radical and resentful voters — will see him as one of their own or a sell-out to the enemy. It’s a risk that the Presidential candidate has been willing to take. Race has hardly been the centerpiece of Obama’s campaign; he has made just one definitive speech on the racial divide through the entire election year. And when he disowned his own pastor’s incendiary remarks (among them a church sermon that declared 9/11 to be just punishment for America’s “terrorism”) and acknowledged that resentment in White America had its own legitimacy, Obama knew that he was risking a backlash among his own followers. Jesse Jackson — once America’s best-known Black politician, who also made a failed bid for President — was famously caught on an open mike saying he wanted to “cut Obama’s nuts off”.
But in the end, the gamble appears to have paid off and it has redefined American politics as well. A deeply racist society is now focusing on which Presidential candidate will deliver them from the economic meltdown and the administration’s foreign policy suicide missions, rather than on whether White is better than Black. This is Obama’s historic contribution: he has refused to keep his people locked into the role of victims.
And it is precisely this that India can and must learn from: find us a politician who will terminate the politics of victimhood. Our public debates on religion and caste continue to be polarised by rehearsed and predictable dogmas. Anything to do with religious minorities ends up being discussed only in banal, over-simplified, for- and-against frameworks.
We only have to look at the how our political parties responded to two recent controversies: the attacks on Christians in Orissa and the Jamia Nagar encounter in Delhi. At a meeting of the National Integration Council — the BJP audaciously and unapologetically declared the Bajrang Dal to be a “nationalist organisation”. But the statements from some of the Congress and Left politicians were just as provocative. If a judicial probe was not ordered into the Delhi encounter, warned one leader, India’s Muslims were in danger of being alienated from the mainstream. Who can defend the hooliganism and the organised, targeted and communal violence of the Bajrang Dal? Equally, should one contentious police encounter — in which the truth is hazy and neither innocence nor guilt can be pronounced till the courts decide the case — be used to define the so-called mood of India’s Muslims? If the debate around banning the Bajrang Dal is motivated by party politics, so is the controversy around the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (Simi). Right-wing lunacy is a disservice to the Idea of India.
But Left-wing fundamentalism does it no favour either. The secular debate is sadly mired in stale rhetoric. One side makes India’s minorities feel like outsiders in their own country; the other side keeps them trapped in a siege mentality that is just as destructive.
If caste is to India, what race is to America — well then — we have more reason to worry about our inability to reinvent our political agendas. No matter what you think of her, Mayawati’s meteoric rise is indisputably the stuff that history is made of. The BSP alliance with Brahmins in the last assembly elections could have been a dramatic opportunity for breaking down traditional divides, had it ever gone beyond cynical arithmetic. Now Mayawati is reaching out to so-called upper caste voters again by promising economic reservations. But, why should someone who could well be India’s next Prime Minister need to react at all when Rahul Gandhi spends time with Dalit villagers? The patently untrue suggestion that the Congress leader would “cleanse” himself every time he met a Dalit, is clearly designed to play into age-old insecurities. The subtext is clear: only a Dalit politician can ever be free of caste bias. And once again, the political strategy is the same: victimhood makes for an excellent vote-bank.
Perhaps the reason that Indian politics remains trapped in complicated caste mathematics instead of ever expanding to become genuinely issue-based is the risk-averse attitude of our netas. Neither caste nor religion can ever be irrelevant in a society as diverse and unequal as ours. But, perhaps one day, India will find a politician willing to gamble on the possibility of transcending both caste and religion while still giving them their place.
This is why India loves Obama.
(Barkha Dutt is Group Editor, English News, NDTV)
Moving past his slogans for change, his innate charisma and his buttery charm, Barack Obama’s biggest achievement may already be the fact that instead of using his Race as a perennial calling-card, he appears to have transcended it. The political debate has long since moved from whether White America is ready for Obama to ask instead whether all of Black America will stand by him. No wonder then that Obama — who was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan diplomat and a White woman from Kansas — has been subjected to merciless scrutiny on whether he is “Black enough”. The American media has drawn parallels between him and Tiger Woods. Woods, who is now glorified as an iconic, breaking-the barriers, Black Hero, was often derided in his early years for being more at home in the chi-chi and predominantly White world of professional golf than in Black society.
So the question now is whether inner-city Black America — the more radical and resentful voters — will see him as one of their own or a sell-out to the enemy. It’s a risk that the Presidential candidate has been willing to take. Race has hardly been the centerpiece of Obama’s campaign; he has made just one definitive speech on the racial divide through the entire election year. And when he disowned his own pastor’s incendiary remarks (among them a church sermon that declared 9/11 to be just punishment for America’s “terrorism”) and acknowledged that resentment in White America had its own legitimacy, Obama knew that he was risking a backlash among his own followers. Jesse Jackson — once America’s best-known Black politician, who also made a failed bid for President — was famously caught on an open mike saying he wanted to “cut Obama’s nuts off”.
But in the end, the gamble appears to have paid off and it has redefined American politics as well. A deeply racist society is now focusing on which Presidential candidate will deliver them from the economic meltdown and the administration’s foreign policy suicide missions, rather than on whether White is better than Black. This is Obama’s historic contribution: he has refused to keep his people locked into the role of victims.
And it is precisely this that India can and must learn from: find us a politician who will terminate the politics of victimhood. Our public debates on religion and caste continue to be polarised by rehearsed and predictable dogmas. Anything to do with religious minorities ends up being discussed only in banal, over-simplified, for- and-against frameworks.
We only have to look at the how our political parties responded to two recent controversies: the attacks on Christians in Orissa and the Jamia Nagar encounter in Delhi. At a meeting of the National Integration Council — the BJP audaciously and unapologetically declared the Bajrang Dal to be a “nationalist organisation”. But the statements from some of the Congress and Left politicians were just as provocative. If a judicial probe was not ordered into the Delhi encounter, warned one leader, India’s Muslims were in danger of being alienated from the mainstream. Who can defend the hooliganism and the organised, targeted and communal violence of the Bajrang Dal? Equally, should one contentious police encounter — in which the truth is hazy and neither innocence nor guilt can be pronounced till the courts decide the case — be used to define the so-called mood of India’s Muslims? If the debate around banning the Bajrang Dal is motivated by party politics, so is the controversy around the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (Simi). Right-wing lunacy is a disservice to the Idea of India.
But Left-wing fundamentalism does it no favour either. The secular debate is sadly mired in stale rhetoric. One side makes India’s minorities feel like outsiders in their own country; the other side keeps them trapped in a siege mentality that is just as destructive.
If caste is to India, what race is to America — well then — we have more reason to worry about our inability to reinvent our political agendas. No matter what you think of her, Mayawati’s meteoric rise is indisputably the stuff that history is made of. The BSP alliance with Brahmins in the last assembly elections could have been a dramatic opportunity for breaking down traditional divides, had it ever gone beyond cynical arithmetic. Now Mayawati is reaching out to so-called upper caste voters again by promising economic reservations. But, why should someone who could well be India’s next Prime Minister need to react at all when Rahul Gandhi spends time with Dalit villagers? The patently untrue suggestion that the Congress leader would “cleanse” himself every time he met a Dalit, is clearly designed to play into age-old insecurities. The subtext is clear: only a Dalit politician can ever be free of caste bias. And once again, the political strategy is the same: victimhood makes for an excellent vote-bank.
Perhaps the reason that Indian politics remains trapped in complicated caste mathematics instead of ever expanding to become genuinely issue-based is the risk-averse attitude of our netas. Neither caste nor religion can ever be irrelevant in a society as diverse and unequal as ours. But, perhaps one day, India will find a politician willing to gamble on the possibility of transcending both caste and religion while still giving them their place.
This is why India loves Obama.
(Barkha Dutt is Group Editor, English News, NDTV)
Columnists - Khushwant Singh;For the love of food
As a person ages, of his five senses, four decline with the years; only one, the sense of taste for food outlasts the others. I know this to be true in my case. The older I grow, the more I think of what I will eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Of the three meals, the first two are nominal: a buttered toast with a mug of tea in the morning, a bowl of soup or dahi (yoghurt) at mid-day but dinner, I insist, must be a gourmet’s delight. It comprises of only one main dish with a salad to match, topped off with pudding or ice-cream. I have also discovered that in order to enjoy that one meal I must be hungry and have a clean stomach. It is best enjoyed alone and in complete silence. Dining in company or with members of the family may help bonding friendships and keeping the family together, but it takes away much of the taste out of tasty food. Talking while eating, one also swallows a lot of air with the food. This is how our Hindu ancestor patriarchs ate their evening meals. They had good reasons for doing so; I follow the precedent set by them. I also have the pattern of drinking and dining from my role model Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. He took a bath every evening and got into fresh clothes before he fished out his bottle of Scotch Whisky, poured out his measure in a tumbler, added scented surahi water to it — and drank in absolute silence while writing immortal couplets in praise of wine and women. He does not record what he ate for dinner.
When I drink alone on an empty stomach, I can feel the whisky warming its way down my entrails. I do not get that feeling when drinking in company. Likewise, when eating in company, I scarcely notice the taste of what I keep shoveling in my mouth. When eating alone, I shut my eyes and turn my inner gaze to what I am chewing and munching bit by bit till it dissolves and goes down my throat. I feel I am doing justice to my food as the food I eat is doing justice to me. Never be in a hurry to get over your meal; take your time over it and relish it.
I like to vary my food. My trusted cook of over 50 years is now too old to try his hand at new recipes. So I keep menus of eateries that deliver food handy. I try them in turns — Chinese, Thai, French, Italian, South Indian. I also have phone numbers of ladies who specialise in different kinds of food they cook in their homes and cater to people who place orders in advance. So I have a Mrs Dhupia who makes excellent Quiche Lorraine and chocolate cakes. And I have Claire Dutt who makes excellent anything I fancy.
“Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are,” claimed Savarin. If I told him of the varieties of food I eat, he would probably call me a pig. But I do not hog myself. What I take is in measured quantities. For me it is the same as Savarin claimed : “the discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of man than the discovery of a star." Like Lord Byron I look forward to my evening meal as I used to look forward to meeting my dates in younger days. To quote: “That all-softening, over powering knell//The tocsin of the sod - the dinner bell.’
One final word of caution: make sure you never over-eat. An upset stomach ruins the pleasure of eating.
When I drink alone on an empty stomach, I can feel the whisky warming its way down my entrails. I do not get that feeling when drinking in company. Likewise, when eating in company, I scarcely notice the taste of what I keep shoveling in my mouth. When eating alone, I shut my eyes and turn my inner gaze to what I am chewing and munching bit by bit till it dissolves and goes down my throat. I feel I am doing justice to my food as the food I eat is doing justice to me. Never be in a hurry to get over your meal; take your time over it and relish it.
I like to vary my food. My trusted cook of over 50 years is now too old to try his hand at new recipes. So I keep menus of eateries that deliver food handy. I try them in turns — Chinese, Thai, French, Italian, South Indian. I also have phone numbers of ladies who specialise in different kinds of food they cook in their homes and cater to people who place orders in advance. So I have a Mrs Dhupia who makes excellent Quiche Lorraine and chocolate cakes. And I have Claire Dutt who makes excellent anything I fancy.
“Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are,” claimed Savarin. If I told him of the varieties of food I eat, he would probably call me a pig. But I do not hog myself. What I take is in measured quantities. For me it is the same as Savarin claimed : “the discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of man than the discovery of a star." Like Lord Byron I look forward to my evening meal as I used to look forward to meeting my dates in younger days. To quote: “That all-softening, over powering knell//The tocsin of the sod - the dinner bell.’
One final word of caution: make sure you never over-eat. An upset stomach ruins the pleasure of eating.
Lifestyle - India;Diwali in Kolkata?Fly to London instead
Siddharta Roy
If you are planning to fly to Kolkata for Diwali, be prepared to shell out four times the money you usually do. In fact, flying to Kolkata for Diwali is as costly as a flight to London.
After trains to Kolkata were cancelled following the unrest in Bihar, passengers are thronging airline counters to buy tickets. The huge demand has resulted in the ticket prices skyrocketing.
While normally a one-way air ticket to Kolkata costs Rs 5,000, the lowest tickets now are priced at minimum of Rs 20,000. A one-way ticket to London costs Rs 19,500.
Shreya Bannerjee, a 50-year-old housewife, had to visit Kolkata with her family for her niece’s wedding. After the Howrah Rajdhani on Wednesday got cancelled, she decided to travel by air.
“I was shocked to see the ticket fares. Even tickets of low cost airlines were selling for more than Rs. 20,000,” she said.
“I would have to shell out close to Rs 1 lakh if I travel with my husband and two daughters. This is insane.”
Bannerjee had no choice but to miss the wedding. “I will visit Kolkata next week and have booked train tickets,” she said.
Dwiraj Bose, a business manager with an MNC, is in an even desperate situation.
“I have to go to Jamshedpur to see my ailing mother. However, I was simply stranded after the trains got cancelled,” he said.
Bose tried booking air tickets to Kolkata, from where he would have taken a train, but discovered the prices were prohibitive.
“The tickets that were usually priced at Rs 5,000-6,000, were available for Rs 10,000 on Wednesday evening. By next morning, the prices rose to Rs 20,000 and more,” he said. “How can airlines that call themselves low cost, hike ticket prices so much?” Bose said.
Bose was planning to drive down to Jamshedpur in his Santro when Rajdhani services were resumed. He now has an unreserved ticket but is determined to leave.
“Prices are all about demand and supply. With trains cancelled and soaring demand, airlines hiked fares,” said Dhruv Shringi, CEO of travel portal Yatra.com. “Airlines, even low cost ones, are allowed the flexibility to do so,” he added.
An Air India spokesman said, “There is an overall surge in demand due to Diwali.”
“Even executive class seats are all full. We have seen 800 more passengers per day in the last two days,” he said.
If you are planning to fly to Kolkata for Diwali, be prepared to shell out four times the money you usually do. In fact, flying to Kolkata for Diwali is as costly as a flight to London.
After trains to Kolkata were cancelled following the unrest in Bihar, passengers are thronging airline counters to buy tickets. The huge demand has resulted in the ticket prices skyrocketing.
While normally a one-way air ticket to Kolkata costs Rs 5,000, the lowest tickets now are priced at minimum of Rs 20,000. A one-way ticket to London costs Rs 19,500.
Shreya Bannerjee, a 50-year-old housewife, had to visit Kolkata with her family for her niece’s wedding. After the Howrah Rajdhani on Wednesday got cancelled, she decided to travel by air.
“I was shocked to see the ticket fares. Even tickets of low cost airlines were selling for more than Rs. 20,000,” she said.
“I would have to shell out close to Rs 1 lakh if I travel with my husband and two daughters. This is insane.”
Bannerjee had no choice but to miss the wedding. “I will visit Kolkata next week and have booked train tickets,” she said.
Dwiraj Bose, a business manager with an MNC, is in an even desperate situation.
“I have to go to Jamshedpur to see my ailing mother. However, I was simply stranded after the trains got cancelled,” he said.
Bose tried booking air tickets to Kolkata, from where he would have taken a train, but discovered the prices were prohibitive.
“The tickets that were usually priced at Rs 5,000-6,000, were available for Rs 10,000 on Wednesday evening. By next morning, the prices rose to Rs 20,000 and more,” he said. “How can airlines that call themselves low cost, hike ticket prices so much?” Bose said.
Bose was planning to drive down to Jamshedpur in his Santro when Rajdhani services were resumed. He now has an unreserved ticket but is determined to leave.
“Prices are all about demand and supply. With trains cancelled and soaring demand, airlines hiked fares,” said Dhruv Shringi, CEO of travel portal Yatra.com. “Airlines, even low cost ones, are allowed the flexibility to do so,” he added.
An Air India spokesman said, “There is an overall surge in demand due to Diwali.”
“Even executive class seats are all full. We have seen 800 more passengers per day in the last two days,” he said.
Lifestyle - US;Palin,McCain spent $52,000 on makeup
After Sarah Palin came under scrutiny for her wardrobe expenses, new details have emerged, which show that US Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign paid 3 makeup artists a total of $52,000 over 6 weeks.
According to records filed with the Federal Election Commission, the McCain campaign paid Amy Strozzi, Palin’s travelling makeup artist, $22,800 for the first two weeks of October. Strozzi received $13,200 for her work in September.
Records have revealed that McCain's makeup artist, Tifanie White, received $8,512 in September and $7,368 during the first two weeks of October.
The Republican National Committee paid a third makeup artist, Tracy Thorp, $980 for work in September.
The total makeup expense for a six-week period beginning September 1 comes down to $52,000.
A spokesman for McCain-Palin, Ben Porritt, refused to discuss the makeup expenses. "Our campaign is focused on talking about the issues," the New York Daily News quoted him, as saying.
The payments to Strozzi make her the highest paid person in the McCain-Palin presidential campaign during the first half of October.
Earlier this week, records showed the Republican National Committee spent $1,50,000 - including more than $75,000 at Neiman Marcus and nearly $50,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue - to outfit Palin in designer duds.
According to records filed with the Federal Election Commission, the McCain campaign paid Amy Strozzi, Palin’s travelling makeup artist, $22,800 for the first two weeks of October. Strozzi received $13,200 for her work in September.
Records have revealed that McCain's makeup artist, Tifanie White, received $8,512 in September and $7,368 during the first two weeks of October.
The Republican National Committee paid a third makeup artist, Tracy Thorp, $980 for work in September.
The total makeup expense for a six-week period beginning September 1 comes down to $52,000.
A spokesman for McCain-Palin, Ben Porritt, refused to discuss the makeup expenses. "Our campaign is focused on talking about the issues," the New York Daily News quoted him, as saying.
The payments to Strozzi make her the highest paid person in the McCain-Palin presidential campaign during the first half of October.
Earlier this week, records showed the Republican National Committee spent $1,50,000 - including more than $75,000 at Neiman Marcus and nearly $50,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue - to outfit Palin in designer duds.
World - $60mn NY Apartment for Sale
Edward Helmore
Property markets may be crashing worldwide, but in the world of New York real estate one building remains apparently untouched: 740 Park Avenue.
This week Courtney Ross, widow of the funeral parlour director-turned legendary Time Warner entertainment mogul Steve Ross, quietly put her 32-room apartment in 740 on the market for in excess of $60m.
“It’s going to be the most expensive apartment ever sold in New York,” predicted the sales agent. The property, Edward Lee Cave said, was not officially for sale and would be shown to just 10 prospective buyers “because there will only be 10 people who are appropriate to see it.”
The building is considered so exclusive that last year it saw the publication of its own biography, 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building, by the New York society writer Michael Gross.
Indeed, the building — described as the “noblest of all” New York apartment buildings by Vanity Fair — is a road map of American wealth and society since it was built in 1929.
Where it was once home to Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Chryslers — Jackie Kennedy, then Bouvier, grew up there — it now houses the new-monied elite of banking, hedge funds and private equity: Henry Kravis, David Ganek, Saul Steinberg, John Thain and Stephen Schwarzman.
The Ross apartment, while not considered the most elegant, is the largest in the building. But scraping together $60m plus is no guarantee of entry. Under New York’s co-op vetting system, applicants will have to go undergo rigorous background checks. At a minimum, a buyer must put at least half down in cash and prove he or she is liquid to at least three times the total value of the sale — and that’s even before a stringent social evaluation is undertaken by the building’s board members.
While the rest of Manhattan considers a property crash — as many as 80,000 luxury flats were built during the boom and hardly any are selling — agents are confident the Ross apartment will find a buyer. “It’s not going to be ‘at least’ $60m,” Cave said. “It will be over $60m.” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008
Property markets may be crashing worldwide, but in the world of New York real estate one building remains apparently untouched: 740 Park Avenue.
This week Courtney Ross, widow of the funeral parlour director-turned legendary Time Warner entertainment mogul Steve Ross, quietly put her 32-room apartment in 740 on the market for in excess of $60m.
“It’s going to be the most expensive apartment ever sold in New York,” predicted the sales agent. The property, Edward Lee Cave said, was not officially for sale and would be shown to just 10 prospective buyers “because there will only be 10 people who are appropriate to see it.”
The building is considered so exclusive that last year it saw the publication of its own biography, 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building, by the New York society writer Michael Gross.
Indeed, the building — described as the “noblest of all” New York apartment buildings by Vanity Fair — is a road map of American wealth and society since it was built in 1929.
Where it was once home to Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Chryslers — Jackie Kennedy, then Bouvier, grew up there — it now houses the new-monied elite of banking, hedge funds and private equity: Henry Kravis, David Ganek, Saul Steinberg, John Thain and Stephen Schwarzman.
The Ross apartment, while not considered the most elegant, is the largest in the building. But scraping together $60m plus is no guarantee of entry. Under New York’s co-op vetting system, applicants will have to go undergo rigorous background checks. At a minimum, a buyer must put at least half down in cash and prove he or she is liquid to at least three times the total value of the sale — and that’s even before a stringent social evaluation is undertaken by the building’s board members.
While the rest of Manhattan considers a property crash — as many as 80,000 luxury flats were built during the boom and hardly any are selling — agents are confident the Ross apartment will find a buyer. “It’s not going to be ‘at least’ $60m,” Cave said. “It will be over $60m.” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008
World - Time to rescue the real economy
Juan Somavia
This is not simply a crisis on Wall Street; it is a crisis on all streets.
The current crisis has hit the financial sector hard. But what about people and the real economy?
Though we don’t know how long and how serious the financial crisis will be, we do know that if we fail to act decisively, the impact on the lives, working conditions and hopes of millions of people will be strong, global and systemic.
The current search for better financial regulation and a global surveillance mechanism of checks and balances is a welcome step. But we must reach beyond the financial system. This is not simply a crisis on Wall Street; it is a crisis on all streets.
We need an economic rescue plan for working people and the real economy, with rules and policies that deliver decent work and productive enterprises. We must better link productivity to salaries and growth to employment. People must have trust that the economy is working for them.
This message is urgent. The International Labour Organisation has completed a first estimate of how this crisis is going to impact the day-to-day lives of people at all levels of society.
We project that world unemployment could increase by 20 million by the end of 2009 — surpassing the 200 million mark of global unemployed for the first time. People working in such sectors as construction, automotive, tourism, finance, services and real estate will be hit hardest first.
What’s more, the number of working poor living on less than a dollar a day could rise by some 40 million — and those living on two dollars a day could rise by more than 100 million.
And grim as these numbers are, they could prove to be underestimates if the effect of the current economic contraction and looming recession are not quickly confronted.
Above all, we must focus on people, on enterprise, on the real economy. What does that mean? Four things:
First, get credit flowing. Emergency measures have been and are being taken.
Second, support those who are most vulnerable. That means a variety of measures including pension protection, unemployment insurance and credit for small and medium enterprises, which are a primary source of jobs today.
Third, decisive public policies and smart regulation that rewards hard work and enterprise once again. We are battered by the whirlwind of a financial system that lost its moral compass. We have to come back to the basic legitimate function of finance, which is to promote the real economy — to lend so that entrepreneurs can invest, innovate, produce jobs and products. Let’s get back to what finance is meant to do — to finance the real economy.
Fourth, and critically, we must address the underlying challenges. Long before the current financial crisis, we were already in a crisis of massive global poverty and growing social inequality, rising informality and precarious work — a process of globalisation that had brought considerable benefits but for many had become unbalanced, unfair and unsustainable.
We need to get the balance right and concentrate on rescuing people and production. It’s about saving the real economy.
Let’s remember that people judge their lives and their futures mainly through their life at work. Now more than ever, we must focus on making sure the policies and support are in place to meet people’s core demand for a fair chance at a decent job.
In order to keep economies and societies open, relevant international organisations must come together to develop a new multilateral framework for a fair and sustainable globalisation.
Trade talks are stalled, financial markets are on the brink, climate change continues, any reconstruction will have to find ways to integrate financial, economic, social, labour and environmental policies within a sustainable development approach.
We cannot respond to the sub-prime crisis with sub-prime policies. This is the time to think and act in bold and innovative ways to confront the huge challenges before us.
(The writer is Director-General of the International Labour Organisation.)
This is not simply a crisis on Wall Street; it is a crisis on all streets.
The current crisis has hit the financial sector hard. But what about people and the real economy?
Though we don’t know how long and how serious the financial crisis will be, we do know that if we fail to act decisively, the impact on the lives, working conditions and hopes of millions of people will be strong, global and systemic.
The current search for better financial regulation and a global surveillance mechanism of checks and balances is a welcome step. But we must reach beyond the financial system. This is not simply a crisis on Wall Street; it is a crisis on all streets.
We need an economic rescue plan for working people and the real economy, with rules and policies that deliver decent work and productive enterprises. We must better link productivity to salaries and growth to employment. People must have trust that the economy is working for them.
This message is urgent. The International Labour Organisation has completed a first estimate of how this crisis is going to impact the day-to-day lives of people at all levels of society.
We project that world unemployment could increase by 20 million by the end of 2009 — surpassing the 200 million mark of global unemployed for the first time. People working in such sectors as construction, automotive, tourism, finance, services and real estate will be hit hardest first.
What’s more, the number of working poor living on less than a dollar a day could rise by some 40 million — and those living on two dollars a day could rise by more than 100 million.
And grim as these numbers are, they could prove to be underestimates if the effect of the current economic contraction and looming recession are not quickly confronted.
Above all, we must focus on people, on enterprise, on the real economy. What does that mean? Four things:
First, get credit flowing. Emergency measures have been and are being taken.
Second, support those who are most vulnerable. That means a variety of measures including pension protection, unemployment insurance and credit for small and medium enterprises, which are a primary source of jobs today.
Third, decisive public policies and smart regulation that rewards hard work and enterprise once again. We are battered by the whirlwind of a financial system that lost its moral compass. We have to come back to the basic legitimate function of finance, which is to promote the real economy — to lend so that entrepreneurs can invest, innovate, produce jobs and products. Let’s get back to what finance is meant to do — to finance the real economy.
Fourth, and critically, we must address the underlying challenges. Long before the current financial crisis, we were already in a crisis of massive global poverty and growing social inequality, rising informality and precarious work — a process of globalisation that had brought considerable benefits but for many had become unbalanced, unfair and unsustainable.
We need to get the balance right and concentrate on rescuing people and production. It’s about saving the real economy.
Let’s remember that people judge their lives and their futures mainly through their life at work. Now more than ever, we must focus on making sure the policies and support are in place to meet people’s core demand for a fair chance at a decent job.
In order to keep economies and societies open, relevant international organisations must come together to develop a new multilateral framework for a fair and sustainable globalisation.
Trade talks are stalled, financial markets are on the brink, climate change continues, any reconstruction will have to find ways to integrate financial, economic, social, labour and environmental policies within a sustainable development approach.
We cannot respond to the sub-prime crisis with sub-prime policies. This is the time to think and act in bold and innovative ways to confront the huge challenges before us.
(The writer is Director-General of the International Labour Organisation.)
Science - Is there water really on the Moon ?
N. Gopal Raj
A paper by a team of Japanese scientists is bound to fuel the controversy further.
Whether or not water in the form of ice exists on the Moon is a hotly debated issue. In fact, India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which was launched on Wednesday, is carrying a U.S.-built radar that is specifically intended to look for water-ice at the lunar poles.
Meanwhile, a paper from a team of Japanese scientists that is coming out this week is bound to fuel the controversy further. Based on images from a camera on Japan’s Kaguya lunar probe that was launched last year, their findings question whether such ice does indeed exist.
On the Moon’s surface, any water would be rapidly vapourised by the heat of the Sun’s rays and lost to space. But since the early 1960s, it has been argued that some water might have been transported to the polar regions. There, over millions of years, the water could have accumulated as ice at the bottom of craters that are permanently in shadow. Indeed, two U.S. spacecraft that went to the Moon in the 1990s found indications of water-ice in the permanently shadowed areas at the poles.
Now, Junichi Haruyama of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and other scientists have studied images taken by Kaguya’s Terrain Camera of the Shackleton crater at the lunar south pole, which is one of the prime locations on the Moon where it is believed water-ice could be found.
Imaging the interior of the crater, which never receives any direct sunlight, is not easy. “Our observation was based on the idea that the [permanently shadowed] area is weakly lit by sunlight scattered from nearby higher terrain,” said Dr. Haruyama and the others in a paper being published this week on Science Express, the advance electronic publication wing of the journal Science. For their analysis, the scientists examined images captured at the end of 2007 when illumination of the area around the Shackleton crater was maximum.
The team found that the temperature of the crater floor was low enough to hold ice, said Dr. Haruyama in an email to this correspondent. “However, the images show lack of water-ice deposits.”
Dirty ice
In their paper, the scientists wrote, “there is no extensively exposed pure water-ice deposit occupying a larger area than seen in the [Terrain Camera’s] spatial resolution [of 10 metres].” It could be that the ice was “dirty” by being mixed with lunar soil.
Also, the water-ice may be buried under a thin layer of lunar soil, said Dr. Haruyama in his email.
The Japanese are not the only ones to cast doubt on there being water-ice on the Moon. Three years ago, a team of U.S. astronomers led by Donald Campbell of Cornell University used two radio telescopes in the United States like a radar to bounce radio signals off the Moon.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, Prof. Cambell and others reported that the distinctive polarisation properties of the returning radio signals, which are normally associated with icy surfaces in the Solar system, had been found not just in the Shackleton crater but also in sunlit areas where ice would not exist. They argued that the polarisation properties they observed were “strongly correlated with the rock-strewn walls and ejecta of young craters.”
But Paul Spudis, a proponent of the view that water-ice is likely to be found on the Moon, is unmoved. Dr. Spudis, who is currently with the Lunar and Planetary Institute at Houston in the United States, is the principal investigator for the Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar (MiniSAR) that the India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is carrying to the Moon.
The Japanese team was claiming that it did not see any evidence of ice inside the Shackleton crater, remarked Dr. Spudis who was at Sriharikota for the launch of Chandrayaan-1. “But the simple fact is no one that I know of ever predicted that there would be pools of ice visible to imaging from a camera if you were able to illuminate the [crater] floor. So effectively they have knocked down a straw man of their own creation,” he told this correspondent.
Dr. Spudis was deputy leader of the science team for the Clementine mission that the U.S. sent to the Moon in 1994. The team improvised an experiment in which the satellite beamed radio waves at the lunar south pole and picked up the return signals back on Earth. The Clementine team argued that water-ice in the permanently shadowed region at the south pole was the probable explanation for the polarisation response seen in the radar echo.
“Now, if you go back and look at the paper that we wrote in 1996 when we talked about the Shackleton crater, we basically said that the ice, if there was ice in the crater, it was patchy and dirty,” said Dr. Spudis. “And effectively that is exactly what you see in this [Japanese] image. ... There is no reason to suppose that ice inside a lunar polar crater would be smooth and mirror-like or even white, because it is all going to be coated and mixed in with dirt.”
As for the findings of Prof. Campbell and his team, Dr. Spudis thinks they were incorrectly interpreting their Earth-based radar data. In a 2007 article in The Space Review, an online publication, he said that the same factor need not have been responsible for the distinctive radar polarisation seen from the dark Shackleton crater and the sunlit Schomberger G. crater. Ice as well as surface roughness could both produce that same radar signature. If the radar signature came from a spot in sunlight, it must be due to surface roughness. “But, if it’s in permanent darkness, ice cannot be ruled out,” he noted.
MiniSAR data
In the wake of all this controversy, the data from Chandrayaan-1 MiniSAR will be even more eagerly awaited. After the satellite enters lunar orbit and begins to circle the Moon from pole to pole, the radar will be able to look down into the permanently shadowed polar areas up to a depth of a few metres.
With the MiniSAR, “for the first time, we will map the dark areas of the poles using an appropriate radar, but also at the optimum viewing geometry,” said Dr. Spudis. The MiniSAR “will map both poles at a uniform resolution, at uniform illumination conditions and look for the signature of the possible presence of water-ice.”
But even the MiniSAR data may not prove that water-ice exists. “But what we hope to do is to collect enough data such that we will create candidate sites so that we will know where to look in the future when we actually land on the Moon and sample the material,” he added.
A paper by a team of Japanese scientists is bound to fuel the controversy further.
Whether or not water in the form of ice exists on the Moon is a hotly debated issue. In fact, India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which was launched on Wednesday, is carrying a U.S.-built radar that is specifically intended to look for water-ice at the lunar poles.
Meanwhile, a paper from a team of Japanese scientists that is coming out this week is bound to fuel the controversy further. Based on images from a camera on Japan’s Kaguya lunar probe that was launched last year, their findings question whether such ice does indeed exist.
On the Moon’s surface, any water would be rapidly vapourised by the heat of the Sun’s rays and lost to space. But since the early 1960s, it has been argued that some water might have been transported to the polar regions. There, over millions of years, the water could have accumulated as ice at the bottom of craters that are permanently in shadow. Indeed, two U.S. spacecraft that went to the Moon in the 1990s found indications of water-ice in the permanently shadowed areas at the poles.
Now, Junichi Haruyama of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and other scientists have studied images taken by Kaguya’s Terrain Camera of the Shackleton crater at the lunar south pole, which is one of the prime locations on the Moon where it is believed water-ice could be found.
Imaging the interior of the crater, which never receives any direct sunlight, is not easy. “Our observation was based on the idea that the [permanently shadowed] area is weakly lit by sunlight scattered from nearby higher terrain,” said Dr. Haruyama and the others in a paper being published this week on Science Express, the advance electronic publication wing of the journal Science. For their analysis, the scientists examined images captured at the end of 2007 when illumination of the area around the Shackleton crater was maximum.
The team found that the temperature of the crater floor was low enough to hold ice, said Dr. Haruyama in an email to this correspondent. “However, the images show lack of water-ice deposits.”
Dirty ice
In their paper, the scientists wrote, “there is no extensively exposed pure water-ice deposit occupying a larger area than seen in the [Terrain Camera’s] spatial resolution [of 10 metres].” It could be that the ice was “dirty” by being mixed with lunar soil.
Also, the water-ice may be buried under a thin layer of lunar soil, said Dr. Haruyama in his email.
The Japanese are not the only ones to cast doubt on there being water-ice on the Moon. Three years ago, a team of U.S. astronomers led by Donald Campbell of Cornell University used two radio telescopes in the United States like a radar to bounce radio signals off the Moon.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, Prof. Cambell and others reported that the distinctive polarisation properties of the returning radio signals, which are normally associated with icy surfaces in the Solar system, had been found not just in the Shackleton crater but also in sunlit areas where ice would not exist. They argued that the polarisation properties they observed were “strongly correlated with the rock-strewn walls and ejecta of young craters.”
But Paul Spudis, a proponent of the view that water-ice is likely to be found on the Moon, is unmoved. Dr. Spudis, who is currently with the Lunar and Planetary Institute at Houston in the United States, is the principal investigator for the Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar (MiniSAR) that the India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is carrying to the Moon.
The Japanese team was claiming that it did not see any evidence of ice inside the Shackleton crater, remarked Dr. Spudis who was at Sriharikota for the launch of Chandrayaan-1. “But the simple fact is no one that I know of ever predicted that there would be pools of ice visible to imaging from a camera if you were able to illuminate the [crater] floor. So effectively they have knocked down a straw man of their own creation,” he told this correspondent.
Dr. Spudis was deputy leader of the science team for the Clementine mission that the U.S. sent to the Moon in 1994. The team improvised an experiment in which the satellite beamed radio waves at the lunar south pole and picked up the return signals back on Earth. The Clementine team argued that water-ice in the permanently shadowed region at the south pole was the probable explanation for the polarisation response seen in the radar echo.
“Now, if you go back and look at the paper that we wrote in 1996 when we talked about the Shackleton crater, we basically said that the ice, if there was ice in the crater, it was patchy and dirty,” said Dr. Spudis. “And effectively that is exactly what you see in this [Japanese] image. ... There is no reason to suppose that ice inside a lunar polar crater would be smooth and mirror-like or even white, because it is all going to be coated and mixed in with dirt.”
As for the findings of Prof. Campbell and his team, Dr. Spudis thinks they were incorrectly interpreting their Earth-based radar data. In a 2007 article in The Space Review, an online publication, he said that the same factor need not have been responsible for the distinctive radar polarisation seen from the dark Shackleton crater and the sunlit Schomberger G. crater. Ice as well as surface roughness could both produce that same radar signature. If the radar signature came from a spot in sunlight, it must be due to surface roughness. “But, if it’s in permanent darkness, ice cannot be ruled out,” he noted.
MiniSAR data
In the wake of all this controversy, the data from Chandrayaan-1 MiniSAR will be even more eagerly awaited. After the satellite enters lunar orbit and begins to circle the Moon from pole to pole, the radar will be able to look down into the permanently shadowed polar areas up to a depth of a few metres.
With the MiniSAR, “for the first time, we will map the dark areas of the poles using an appropriate radar, but also at the optimum viewing geometry,” said Dr. Spudis. The MiniSAR “will map both poles at a uniform resolution, at uniform illumination conditions and look for the signature of the possible presence of water-ice.”
But even the MiniSAR data may not prove that water-ice exists. “But what we hope to do is to collect enough data such that we will create candidate sites so that we will know where to look in the future when we actually land on the Moon and sample the material,” he added.
India - Kashmir's failed uprising
Happymon Jacob
Elections to the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly have been announced, and are scheduled to be held in seven phases spread over five weeks. The decision to go ahead with the elections on schedule was taken following intensive discussion, punctuated by numerous disagreements, from both the Election Commission and the mainstream political parties in J&K. The dissidents have made it clear that they will not only boycott the elections, but will also actively campaign against the electoral process itself.
Even as the debate about the political wisdom of conducting elections at this point in time rages on, now is an opportune moment to take a close look at the recent uprising in Kashmir, and ask why it has failed to achieve anything substantial. After almost four months of anti-India slogans and sustained agitation, and despite limited moves towards unity by the Srinagar-based dissident camp, the current uprising in Kashmir seems to have reached a dead-end. Calls by the Prime Minister and the Hurriyat Conference (Mirwaiz) chief for dialogue to resolve the Kashmir issue, indicate that the recent uprising, which garnered nationwide attention, seems to have lost its momentum.
Indeed, Kashmir’s latest experiment with dissidence did appear to have the right mix of all the necessary ingredients for success: mass participation, willingness to defy state crackdown, emotive slogans striking the right Kashmiri chords, timely political alliances and the ever-green romanticism of azadi. More importantly, unlike during the 1990s, the Indian intelligentsia was more sympathetic to the Kashmiri cause this time around, while militants kept away from the scene, not wanting to malign the mass movement. Yet the uprising seems to have fizzled out. It has quite obviously failed to reach any logical conclusion, although its reverberations will continue to impact on the state’s polity for a very long time to come.
What explains its failure?
What then explains its failure? Have dissenting Kashmiris grown disillusioned, sceptical as to the fruits of their struggle against the Indian state, and resigned themselves to submission? Or, can its failure be attributed to successful handling of the situation by the governments of New Delhi and Srinagar? Has the Indian state, after all, learned to contain dissidence in its frontiers? Not really.
An ex post facto analysis of the recent events in Kashmir reveals a clear set of factors responsible for the failure of the Valley’s latest uprising. First of all, the dissident leadership in the Valley did not have a common minimum programme. The lack of an understanding of their political endgame rendered them incapable of negotiating effectively with New Delhi.
Secondly, this lack of common understanding was augmented by acute dissent and leadership struggles within the dissident camp. Hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s claim to ‘sole leadership’ failed to resonate with the other leaders, who have since sought to distance themselves from him. Opposition became all the more serious when Mr. Geelani began questioning the credentials of other dissident leaders to lead the Kashmiris.
Many meanings of azadi
In addition to the aforementioned factors, differences of opinion within the dissident camp represent more than a mere leadership struggle. They stem from something fundamentally ideological: differing conceptions of the very meaning of azadi. That the camp did not have a commonly agreed upon programme, and was stalled by leadership quarrels, underscores the fact that there are many meanings of azadi in the Kashmir Valley. To the one extreme there are those who, like many of the mainstream parties within J&K (such as the National Conference), argue that the word points to greater autonomy and additional political rights. And to the other are those (represented by the JKLF and Mr. Geelani) who typically seek complete independence from India, and see azadi as embodying this desire. Somewhere between these two divergent views are those who argue that it is the Kashmiris’ demand for self-respect, dignity and their inalienable democratic rights, which constitute the true basis of azadi.
The two most important pro-azadi leaders in the Valley, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mr. Geelani, have radically different views as to what azadi entails. Consider, for example, that Mirwaiz has been an important moderate voice, whereas Mr. Geelani harbours no such illusions of temperance. A close reading of Mirwaiz’s statements, taken at various points in time, makes clear that he is more pro-Kashmir than anti-India, willing to talk to and reason with New Delhi, and is flexible in relation to what self-determination entails; his ‘United States of Kashmir’ proposal does not seek complete independence for Kashmir. In other words, the Mirwaiz is willing to make adjustments and seek balance when talking to New Delhi. But Mr. Geelani has made it clear that the resolution to the Kashmir problem lies in nothing short of Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan, and rejects the need to converse with New Delhi.
Most importantly, however, azadi needs to be understood as the rallying cry of a large number of an aggrieved people. For them, the word means something more tangible, something that pertains to their daily lives, than anything so fundamentally ideological: it means freedom from the fear of militants and security forces, as well as dignity, and the absence of New Delhi’s political high-handedness. Moreover, one would have to concede that it is a question of the unresolved issue of sub-national aspirations, and its consequences within the Indian state.
Zardari’s Kashmir policy
The relative silence of Pakistan, and the pro-India statements of President Zardari, should be understood as the fourth reason for the failure of the dissident movement. That Zardari did not choose to lash out against India during the recent anti-India protests in Kashmir is significant. His assurances that there would soon be good news about Kashmir and that both the countries are working towards it show a desire to distance himself from Pakistan’s traditional stance on Kashmir. And more was to follow. Recently he branded Kashmiri militants as “terrorists” and claimed that India was important for Pakistan’s growth. Surprisingly, he received little rebuke for these comments from within his country. Pakistan’s desire to make peace with India, and to rid itself of extremism, also means that it many not continue to support the various dissident parties within Kashmir — as it has done in the past — at the expense of India and its fight with terrorism, though the Pakistani Army and the ISI may fail to demonstratively adhere to this new way of thinking.
Lastly, the anti-Kashmir agitations in Jammu dented the dissident cause. For the rest of the world, ‘Kashmir’s freedom struggle’ is now more nuanced, and Jammu has played an important part in highlighting the conflicts within the conflict. Agitations in Jammu made obvious to all what was already well known within J&K: Jammu and Leh have never been part of the struggle in Kashmir, and were always uneasy about the political supremacy of Kashmiris in the state. Kashmiris have always relied on their own centrality to tell the story of their struggle, yet the reorientation of focus towards the politics of the Kashmiri/Jammuite relationship, have complicated the equation. The introduction of the Jammu and, to a lesser extent, the Leh narratives have crowded the picture. A conflict-within-a-conflict has been unearthed, and it threatens to disrupt the over-simplified nature of the Kashmiri’s argument.
That said, much as New Delhi hopes that elections in the State will bring back normalcy, it needs to ensure that those elections are free and fair, lest the State fall back once more into instability. In other words, New Delhi, in its over-enthusiasm to stabilise the state, must not try to create a façade of normalcy by playing foul with elections. It must demonstrate what it has learnt since 2002, and let the electoral process answer questions it cannot.
Elections to the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly have been announced, and are scheduled to be held in seven phases spread over five weeks. The decision to go ahead with the elections on schedule was taken following intensive discussion, punctuated by numerous disagreements, from both the Election Commission and the mainstream political parties in J&K. The dissidents have made it clear that they will not only boycott the elections, but will also actively campaign against the electoral process itself.
Even as the debate about the political wisdom of conducting elections at this point in time rages on, now is an opportune moment to take a close look at the recent uprising in Kashmir, and ask why it has failed to achieve anything substantial. After almost four months of anti-India slogans and sustained agitation, and despite limited moves towards unity by the Srinagar-based dissident camp, the current uprising in Kashmir seems to have reached a dead-end. Calls by the Prime Minister and the Hurriyat Conference (Mirwaiz) chief for dialogue to resolve the Kashmir issue, indicate that the recent uprising, which garnered nationwide attention, seems to have lost its momentum.
Indeed, Kashmir’s latest experiment with dissidence did appear to have the right mix of all the necessary ingredients for success: mass participation, willingness to defy state crackdown, emotive slogans striking the right Kashmiri chords, timely political alliances and the ever-green romanticism of azadi. More importantly, unlike during the 1990s, the Indian intelligentsia was more sympathetic to the Kashmiri cause this time around, while militants kept away from the scene, not wanting to malign the mass movement. Yet the uprising seems to have fizzled out. It has quite obviously failed to reach any logical conclusion, although its reverberations will continue to impact on the state’s polity for a very long time to come.
What explains its failure?
What then explains its failure? Have dissenting Kashmiris grown disillusioned, sceptical as to the fruits of their struggle against the Indian state, and resigned themselves to submission? Or, can its failure be attributed to successful handling of the situation by the governments of New Delhi and Srinagar? Has the Indian state, after all, learned to contain dissidence in its frontiers? Not really.
An ex post facto analysis of the recent events in Kashmir reveals a clear set of factors responsible for the failure of the Valley’s latest uprising. First of all, the dissident leadership in the Valley did not have a common minimum programme. The lack of an understanding of their political endgame rendered them incapable of negotiating effectively with New Delhi.
Secondly, this lack of common understanding was augmented by acute dissent and leadership struggles within the dissident camp. Hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s claim to ‘sole leadership’ failed to resonate with the other leaders, who have since sought to distance themselves from him. Opposition became all the more serious when Mr. Geelani began questioning the credentials of other dissident leaders to lead the Kashmiris.
Many meanings of azadi
In addition to the aforementioned factors, differences of opinion within the dissident camp represent more than a mere leadership struggle. They stem from something fundamentally ideological: differing conceptions of the very meaning of azadi. That the camp did not have a commonly agreed upon programme, and was stalled by leadership quarrels, underscores the fact that there are many meanings of azadi in the Kashmir Valley. To the one extreme there are those who, like many of the mainstream parties within J&K (such as the National Conference), argue that the word points to greater autonomy and additional political rights. And to the other are those (represented by the JKLF and Mr. Geelani) who typically seek complete independence from India, and see azadi as embodying this desire. Somewhere between these two divergent views are those who argue that it is the Kashmiris’ demand for self-respect, dignity and their inalienable democratic rights, which constitute the true basis of azadi.
The two most important pro-azadi leaders in the Valley, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mr. Geelani, have radically different views as to what azadi entails. Consider, for example, that Mirwaiz has been an important moderate voice, whereas Mr. Geelani harbours no such illusions of temperance. A close reading of Mirwaiz’s statements, taken at various points in time, makes clear that he is more pro-Kashmir than anti-India, willing to talk to and reason with New Delhi, and is flexible in relation to what self-determination entails; his ‘United States of Kashmir’ proposal does not seek complete independence for Kashmir. In other words, the Mirwaiz is willing to make adjustments and seek balance when talking to New Delhi. But Mr. Geelani has made it clear that the resolution to the Kashmir problem lies in nothing short of Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan, and rejects the need to converse with New Delhi.
Most importantly, however, azadi needs to be understood as the rallying cry of a large number of an aggrieved people. For them, the word means something more tangible, something that pertains to their daily lives, than anything so fundamentally ideological: it means freedom from the fear of militants and security forces, as well as dignity, and the absence of New Delhi’s political high-handedness. Moreover, one would have to concede that it is a question of the unresolved issue of sub-national aspirations, and its consequences within the Indian state.
Zardari’s Kashmir policy
The relative silence of Pakistan, and the pro-India statements of President Zardari, should be understood as the fourth reason for the failure of the dissident movement. That Zardari did not choose to lash out against India during the recent anti-India protests in Kashmir is significant. His assurances that there would soon be good news about Kashmir and that both the countries are working towards it show a desire to distance himself from Pakistan’s traditional stance on Kashmir. And more was to follow. Recently he branded Kashmiri militants as “terrorists” and claimed that India was important for Pakistan’s growth. Surprisingly, he received little rebuke for these comments from within his country. Pakistan’s desire to make peace with India, and to rid itself of extremism, also means that it many not continue to support the various dissident parties within Kashmir — as it has done in the past — at the expense of India and its fight with terrorism, though the Pakistani Army and the ISI may fail to demonstratively adhere to this new way of thinking.
Lastly, the anti-Kashmir agitations in Jammu dented the dissident cause. For the rest of the world, ‘Kashmir’s freedom struggle’ is now more nuanced, and Jammu has played an important part in highlighting the conflicts within the conflict. Agitations in Jammu made obvious to all what was already well known within J&K: Jammu and Leh have never been part of the struggle in Kashmir, and were always uneasy about the political supremacy of Kashmiris in the state. Kashmiris have always relied on their own centrality to tell the story of their struggle, yet the reorientation of focus towards the politics of the Kashmiri/Jammuite relationship, have complicated the equation. The introduction of the Jammu and, to a lesser extent, the Leh narratives have crowded the picture. A conflict-within-a-conflict has been unearthed, and it threatens to disrupt the over-simplified nature of the Kashmiri’s argument.
That said, much as New Delhi hopes that elections in the State will bring back normalcy, it needs to ensure that those elections are free and fair, lest the State fall back once more into instability. In other words, New Delhi, in its over-enthusiasm to stabilise the state, must not try to create a façade of normalcy by playing foul with elections. It must demonstrate what it has learnt since 2002, and let the electoral process answer questions it cannot.
India - Time to realign the Indian state
Harish Khare
India can cope with the global fiscal meltdown only if it is able to ensure that policymaking is firmly aligned on the side of public purpose, not private greed.
On Wednesday, Chandrayaan-1 was successfully put into the orbit, a magnificent scientific achievement. A day earlier, the Vilasrao Deshmukh government put the chief of the rampaging Maharasthra Navnirman Sena behind bars. And a day still earlier, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh assured parliamentarians and the nation that “there is no place for fear. This is the time for unity of purpose and resolute action.”
All these can be taken as manifestations of an activist state at work, and ought to be placed in the larger context of failure of ideas and ideologies behind the current global economic meltdown. Three decades of ideologically fashionable sniping at the state and its role as the custodian of the public interest has come to an abrupt end. And, it is about time it did.
The worldwide financial crisis can and must be a sobering, as also chastening, experience for us, particularly to our policymakers and those in the political space who pretend to serve the masses. There are a few lessons that suggest themselves.
First, we need to detoxify our economic decision-making of its current biases and assumptions, without having to dismantle the post-1991 architecture, or even without turning our back on the market and its capabilities. While there can be no return to the bad old rent-seeking days, it is necessary to scrutinise our policy prejudices.
Nothing better illustrates these embedded biases than the official responses to the presumed crisis in the aviation sector. The country watched in utter disbelief as a Minister chose to act as a spokesman of the industry — correction, of two industrialists — rather than give primacy to his role as the custodian of the larger public interest. Then, another Minister allowed himself to be persuaded of the need to dole out immediate help and relief to the two corporate entrepreneurs who, till the other day, were being serenaded as successful practitioners of the market magic.
It was left to a Left parliamentarian from Kerala to sum up the lopsidedness in the current priorities: “The Centre has not yet found time to discuss demands from State governments on the allocation of PDS rice. But it has got the oil Minister to change fuel allocation rules for airlines in neat three hours.”
This is the time for the Prime Minister to take a call. Dr. Singh needs to send out the message in and outside the system that while governments can and must put in place policies designed to help invite private investment and promote entrepreneurship, they do not have the responsibility to ensure that the private sector makes enormous, even windfall, profits. In a democracy, a government will be respected and obeyed only if it is seen as promoting the larger public good, which is socially relevant and morally defensible. No democratically elected government can allow itself to become an instrument of private greed.
The Prime Minister has to tell his ministerial colleagues and senior bureaucrats that they have to respect the Indian values and sensibilities, rather than the demands, expectations and prescriptions of the “captains” of industry and high finance who think they have the Davos mandate. The only mandate relevant to the Indian decision-maker is the idea — and ideals of public purpose. He ought to feel in his bones whether a policy prescription is good for India or not. This would be possible only when the decision-maker reflexively believes that his primary obligation is to the Indian people and their welfare, not to the transient (and self-serving) prescriptions from the World Bank/IMF crowd.
Fashionable willingness
Of late, there is an all too fashionable willingness among the senior bureaucrats to adjust their native impulses and, instead, accommodate the wealthy American lobbyist. This has been one of the unintended consequences of the Manmohan Singh administration’s engagement with Washington over the civil nuclear agreement.
The harsh fact is that the post-1991 mandate has run its course in India, and those policy choices would have to be politically revalidated; it is obvious that such an endorsement can become available only if the policymakers are seen as working for the larger public purpose, instead of playing a junior partner in the game of crony capitalism.
The economic crisis and its unsettling fallout have underlined the critical importance of the political leaders’ trustworthiness. The rioting in Mumbai over jobs in the Railways for Maharashtrians and the counter-rioting in Patna are only the latest reminder of the fragility of the popular acceptability of our democratic arrangements. As the economic situation becomes less certain, the citizens as well as the consumers, and the investors will want to be reassured of the integrity and trustfulness of our governmental leaders.
Therefore it becomes imperative for us to ensure that our regulatory institutions, especially those dealing with the economy, are strengthened and empowered. To begin with, it should be ensured that the men and women chosen to preside over these institutions are individuals of merit, integrity, competence and wisdom; these appointments should not be allowed to become a subject of bargaining and negotiations among coalition partners. This is the minimum that is expected from a Prime Minister who has so admirably become the symbol of integrity in public life.
An unhappy perception is gaining ground that the regulators are not being allowed to discharge their responsibilities to the best of their professional competence; perhaps, what is worse, whenever the government can, it does ignore the regulators’ advice, notwithstanding the statutory requirements to place the recommendations in the public and parliamentary domain. Lawfulness in governance and regulatory mechanism needs to be respected, especially by the government and its functionaries. Institutional resilience is the best anti-dote to economic shocks and dislocations. And, in these times of fiscal meltdown, it is vital to shore up constitutional institutional arrangements. The judiciary, in particular, needs wise leadership all around if the courts are to remain a vibrant institutional arbiter of lawful economic growth.
Then, the economic policies, if not policymakers, ought to be fire-walled against corporate greed. The current global economic crisis presents us with a collective opportunity to question dubious claims and assumptions made on behalf of the market and its servants in the corporate crowd.
The scramble among various States to invite the de-Singurified Tatas to relocate their Nano plant was, to say the least, rather unseemly. The industrialisation agenda has to be placed in the larger context of overall public welfare, there has to be a balance between private profit, personal initiative, on the one hand, and the State or Central government’s largesse, concessions and public good, on the other.
Democratic irony
Unfortunately, the economic crisis has surfaced at a time when we are moving inexorably into the election phase. A very large chunk of our political class is going to remain preoccupied with the elections, first in the north, and, a little later, in the whole of India. This, in effect, often turns out to be the time for political leaders and parties’ vulnerabilities to the corporate crowd and its money power. It is perhaps a supreme democratic irony that come elections, the leaders become invariably inclined to inflict on themselves corporate linkages and obligations which can be repaid only at the expense of public good.
The coming contests would also encourage political parties to seek votes by demanding greater allocation of resources for their regional/ethnic/caste constituencies. This is no surprise. After all, our public discourse and popular culture have got used to selling dreams of easy prosperity, without hard work and sacrifice; now, all our citizens, especially those from the lower strata, demand that the government make the economic dreams come true for them too. And, there is a willingness as also a “democratic sanctity” to make such demands roughly and violently. In other words, the moral efficacy of the post-1991 economic era has come under severe stress.
At a time when the polity needs competent capacities for honest compromise and just bargaining, the political crowd will be distracted in the reverse direction. This is the cost of democratic arrangements, and the cost should not be grudged too much. At the same time, the grand requirement remains that we conduct our democratic rites in a manner that ensures that the Indian state and its policy instruments are re-charged with their democratic obligations.
India can cope with the global fiscal meltdown only if it is able to ensure that policymaking is firmly aligned on the side of public purpose, not private greed.
On Wednesday, Chandrayaan-1 was successfully put into the orbit, a magnificent scientific achievement. A day earlier, the Vilasrao Deshmukh government put the chief of the rampaging Maharasthra Navnirman Sena behind bars. And a day still earlier, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh assured parliamentarians and the nation that “there is no place for fear. This is the time for unity of purpose and resolute action.”
All these can be taken as manifestations of an activist state at work, and ought to be placed in the larger context of failure of ideas and ideologies behind the current global economic meltdown. Three decades of ideologically fashionable sniping at the state and its role as the custodian of the public interest has come to an abrupt end. And, it is about time it did.
The worldwide financial crisis can and must be a sobering, as also chastening, experience for us, particularly to our policymakers and those in the political space who pretend to serve the masses. There are a few lessons that suggest themselves.
First, we need to detoxify our economic decision-making of its current biases and assumptions, without having to dismantle the post-1991 architecture, or even without turning our back on the market and its capabilities. While there can be no return to the bad old rent-seeking days, it is necessary to scrutinise our policy prejudices.
Nothing better illustrates these embedded biases than the official responses to the presumed crisis in the aviation sector. The country watched in utter disbelief as a Minister chose to act as a spokesman of the industry — correction, of two industrialists — rather than give primacy to his role as the custodian of the larger public interest. Then, another Minister allowed himself to be persuaded of the need to dole out immediate help and relief to the two corporate entrepreneurs who, till the other day, were being serenaded as successful practitioners of the market magic.
It was left to a Left parliamentarian from Kerala to sum up the lopsidedness in the current priorities: “The Centre has not yet found time to discuss demands from State governments on the allocation of PDS rice. But it has got the oil Minister to change fuel allocation rules for airlines in neat three hours.”
This is the time for the Prime Minister to take a call. Dr. Singh needs to send out the message in and outside the system that while governments can and must put in place policies designed to help invite private investment and promote entrepreneurship, they do not have the responsibility to ensure that the private sector makes enormous, even windfall, profits. In a democracy, a government will be respected and obeyed only if it is seen as promoting the larger public good, which is socially relevant and morally defensible. No democratically elected government can allow itself to become an instrument of private greed.
The Prime Minister has to tell his ministerial colleagues and senior bureaucrats that they have to respect the Indian values and sensibilities, rather than the demands, expectations and prescriptions of the “captains” of industry and high finance who think they have the Davos mandate. The only mandate relevant to the Indian decision-maker is the idea — and ideals of public purpose. He ought to feel in his bones whether a policy prescription is good for India or not. This would be possible only when the decision-maker reflexively believes that his primary obligation is to the Indian people and their welfare, not to the transient (and self-serving) prescriptions from the World Bank/IMF crowd.
Fashionable willingness
Of late, there is an all too fashionable willingness among the senior bureaucrats to adjust their native impulses and, instead, accommodate the wealthy American lobbyist. This has been one of the unintended consequences of the Manmohan Singh administration’s engagement with Washington over the civil nuclear agreement.
The harsh fact is that the post-1991 mandate has run its course in India, and those policy choices would have to be politically revalidated; it is obvious that such an endorsement can become available only if the policymakers are seen as working for the larger public purpose, instead of playing a junior partner in the game of crony capitalism.
The economic crisis and its unsettling fallout have underlined the critical importance of the political leaders’ trustworthiness. The rioting in Mumbai over jobs in the Railways for Maharashtrians and the counter-rioting in Patna are only the latest reminder of the fragility of the popular acceptability of our democratic arrangements. As the economic situation becomes less certain, the citizens as well as the consumers, and the investors will want to be reassured of the integrity and trustfulness of our governmental leaders.
Therefore it becomes imperative for us to ensure that our regulatory institutions, especially those dealing with the economy, are strengthened and empowered. To begin with, it should be ensured that the men and women chosen to preside over these institutions are individuals of merit, integrity, competence and wisdom; these appointments should not be allowed to become a subject of bargaining and negotiations among coalition partners. This is the minimum that is expected from a Prime Minister who has so admirably become the symbol of integrity in public life.
An unhappy perception is gaining ground that the regulators are not being allowed to discharge their responsibilities to the best of their professional competence; perhaps, what is worse, whenever the government can, it does ignore the regulators’ advice, notwithstanding the statutory requirements to place the recommendations in the public and parliamentary domain. Lawfulness in governance and regulatory mechanism needs to be respected, especially by the government and its functionaries. Institutional resilience is the best anti-dote to economic shocks and dislocations. And, in these times of fiscal meltdown, it is vital to shore up constitutional institutional arrangements. The judiciary, in particular, needs wise leadership all around if the courts are to remain a vibrant institutional arbiter of lawful economic growth.
Then, the economic policies, if not policymakers, ought to be fire-walled against corporate greed. The current global economic crisis presents us with a collective opportunity to question dubious claims and assumptions made on behalf of the market and its servants in the corporate crowd.
The scramble among various States to invite the de-Singurified Tatas to relocate their Nano plant was, to say the least, rather unseemly. The industrialisation agenda has to be placed in the larger context of overall public welfare, there has to be a balance between private profit, personal initiative, on the one hand, and the State or Central government’s largesse, concessions and public good, on the other.
Democratic irony
Unfortunately, the economic crisis has surfaced at a time when we are moving inexorably into the election phase. A very large chunk of our political class is going to remain preoccupied with the elections, first in the north, and, a little later, in the whole of India. This, in effect, often turns out to be the time for political leaders and parties’ vulnerabilities to the corporate crowd and its money power. It is perhaps a supreme democratic irony that come elections, the leaders become invariably inclined to inflict on themselves corporate linkages and obligations which can be repaid only at the expense of public good.
The coming contests would also encourage political parties to seek votes by demanding greater allocation of resources for their regional/ethnic/caste constituencies. This is no surprise. After all, our public discourse and popular culture have got used to selling dreams of easy prosperity, without hard work and sacrifice; now, all our citizens, especially those from the lower strata, demand that the government make the economic dreams come true for them too. And, there is a willingness as also a “democratic sanctity” to make such demands roughly and violently. In other words, the moral efficacy of the post-1991 economic era has come under severe stress.
At a time when the polity needs competent capacities for honest compromise and just bargaining, the political crowd will be distracted in the reverse direction. This is the cost of democratic arrangements, and the cost should not be grudged too much. At the same time, the grand requirement remains that we conduct our democratic rites in a manner that ensures that the Indian state and its policy instruments are re-charged with their democratic obligations.
Health - India;New approaches to sanitation
To be rated the second among the worst places in sanitation is a distinction that India should want to do away with soon. More pressing is the need to prevent, as a WaterAid estimate shows, the death of 1.5 million children every year due to diarrhoea and the loss of 73 million work days due to water-borne diseases. The emphasis, for good reasons, has been more on providing clean water supply than on sanitation. The Planning Commission estimates that, as on March 2004, whi le about 91 per cent of the urban population had access to water supply, only 63 per cent had sewerage and sanitation facilities. The year 2012 is now set as the target for 100 per cent urban sanitation. It is in this context that the government has unveiled the National Urban Sanitation Policy. It seeks to promote community planned and managed toilets where there are constraints of space, safe disposal of waste and recycling of treated waste water, and managing of public sanitation facilities in all urban areas.
The policy envisages extension of sanitary facilities to the poor in listed as well as unlisted slums. However, in practice, the unlisted slums seldom got the benefit since they are seen as illegal settlements by local civic authorities. The document urges the States to make their own policies. But in the absence of financial incentives, the suggestion is unlikely to evoke an enthusiastic response. Anticipating a shortfall in state-funding, it understandably stresses pubic-private partnership to augment sanitation efforts. However, with the increasing emphasis on the cost-recovery approach to urban services, sanitation targets for the poor may become difficult to achieve. Unfortunately, not enough attention has been paid to exploring alternatives such as the “unbundling of the sanitation services” — an approach that divides the city into smaller divisions and facilitates development of self-contained sanitation infrastructure. This will ease the burden on the network and reduce the cost by 30 per cent, as estimated by the U.N. millennium taskforce. The national policy has good intentions, but much will depend on the initiatives taken at the State and the city level to concretise them.
The policy envisages extension of sanitary facilities to the poor in listed as well as unlisted slums. However, in practice, the unlisted slums seldom got the benefit since they are seen as illegal settlements by local civic authorities. The document urges the States to make their own policies. But in the absence of financial incentives, the suggestion is unlikely to evoke an enthusiastic response. Anticipating a shortfall in state-funding, it understandably stresses pubic-private partnership to augment sanitation efforts. However, with the increasing emphasis on the cost-recovery approach to urban services, sanitation targets for the poor may become difficult to achieve. Unfortunately, not enough attention has been paid to exploring alternatives such as the “unbundling of the sanitation services” — an approach that divides the city into smaller divisions and facilitates development of self-contained sanitation infrastructure. This will ease the burden on the network and reduce the cost by 30 per cent, as estimated by the U.N. millennium taskforce. The national policy has good intentions, but much will depend on the initiatives taken at the State and the city level to concretise them.
India - Curbing dangerous tendencies
It was extremely irresponsible of a political leader like Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam General Secretary Vaiko to make a speech with barely concealed secessionist overtones and warn the Government of India that its help to protect the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka would jeopardise the unity and integrity of India itself. Speaking from the same platform, his party chairman M. Kannappan was more explicit in warning the Centre not to force the Tamils in the Sta te to launch a struggle for a separate Tamil Nadu. The Tamil Nadu government has moved swiftly to arrest them and charge them with sedition under the Indian Penal Code and with unlawful activity. Sedition involves speech that would “bring into hatred or contempt or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law in India.” To make it compatible with the right to freedom of speech under the Constitution, the Supreme Court has set the bar high on any prosecution for sedition, limiting it to “activities involving incitement to violence or intention or tendency to create public disorder or cause disturbance of public peace.” Under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, any activity that amounts to advocacy of secession is an offence. Mr. Vaiko’s speech will be tested in the courts under both these provisions as the law takes its course.
What is clear, however, is that speeches and activities such as his are wholly unacceptable and politically dangerous. As this newspaper had spelt out in an editorial on October 18, the response of the Government of India and the people of Tamil Nadu needs to take into account certain imperatives in approaching the Sri Lankan situation. In the first place, no comfort should be given to the LTTE, which is a terrorist organisation banned in 30 countries including India. Secondly, the Indian commitment must be to finding a solution that envisages devolution of powers to the Tamil regions within a united Sri Lanka, which would mean giving no quarter to the demand for an independent Eelam. Thirdly, mainstream political parties in Tamil Nadu need to make a sharp distinction between the current military plight of the LTTE and the displacement and suffering caused by the conflict, affecting an estimated 230,000 Sri Lankan Tamils. The right response for the Government of India and the people of Tamil Nadu would be to offer food, clothing, medicines, fuel and other essential goods as well as the logistical facilities required to reach them to the people through the Sri Lankan government whose President Mahinda Rajapakse has declared his commitment to bring their hardship to an end “in a short time.” Meanwhile, there is cause for concern over the activities of some fringe groups in Tamil Nadu who have let their sympathy for a foreign terrorist organisation overwhelm their commitment to India’s own integrity and have indulged in violent acts including against the Sri Lankan Deputy High Commission and the railways. The action against Mr. Vaiko will send a message to these groups that the State government is firm in its resolve to contain such dangerous tendencies.
What is clear, however, is that speeches and activities such as his are wholly unacceptable and politically dangerous. As this newspaper had spelt out in an editorial on October 18, the response of the Government of India and the people of Tamil Nadu needs to take into account certain imperatives in approaching the Sri Lankan situation. In the first place, no comfort should be given to the LTTE, which is a terrorist organisation banned in 30 countries including India. Secondly, the Indian commitment must be to finding a solution that envisages devolution of powers to the Tamil regions within a united Sri Lanka, which would mean giving no quarter to the demand for an independent Eelam. Thirdly, mainstream political parties in Tamil Nadu need to make a sharp distinction between the current military plight of the LTTE and the displacement and suffering caused by the conflict, affecting an estimated 230,000 Sri Lankan Tamils. The right response for the Government of India and the people of Tamil Nadu would be to offer food, clothing, medicines, fuel and other essential goods as well as the logistical facilities required to reach them to the people through the Sri Lankan government whose President Mahinda Rajapakse has declared his commitment to bring their hardship to an end “in a short time.” Meanwhile, there is cause for concern over the activities of some fringe groups in Tamil Nadu who have let their sympathy for a foreign terrorist organisation overwhelm their commitment to India’s own integrity and have indulged in violent acts including against the Sri Lankan Deputy High Commission and the railways. The action against Mr. Vaiko will send a message to these groups that the State government is firm in its resolve to contain such dangerous tendencies.
World - Manmohan blames financial crisis on 'Casino' capitalism,regulatory failure
Siddharth Varadarajan
Beijing: On a day when stock markets plummeted by more than 10 per cent worldwide, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put on his professorial hat to tell Asian and European leaders that a “collective international effort” to the international financial crisis must involve infrastructure investments in developing countries as a “counter-cyclical device” as well as the creation of a “global monitoring authority to promote global supervision” of cross-border investment, trade and banking.
In candid and even hard-hitting remarks to the first closed session of the Asia-Europe Meeting summit which got under way here on Friday, Dr. Singh said globalisation without the structure of global financial governance had led to severe problems. “Clearly there has been a massive failure of regulatory and supervisory powers. Speculators have had a free run for far too long a period,” he said. “International institutions like the IMF have also not covered themselves with glory. There has been an unacceptable failure of effective multilateral supervision of major developed economies and in particular of what has been going on in their financial markets.”
Dr. Singh was chosen by ASEM’s Chinese hosts to be the last speaker in the key session devoted to an informal exchange of views on the financial crisis. Underlining the sense in which objective developments have made Beijing and Delhi the focus of the heightened international attention on the relative resilience of the Asian economy, Chinese television showed Wen Jiabao enthusiastically welcoming Dr. Singh to the inaugural session of the ASEM summit.
The closed session, which was relayed live on closed circuit television to ministers and officials assembled in another room, was limited to the leaders themselves, many of whom sat in the room without even a single aide.
Speaking to the assembled leaders immediately after Dr. Singh’s intervention, Premier Wen said everyone in the room was aware of the Prime Minister’s long experience in successfully managing the Indian economy.
ASEM, now into its seven meeting, has 45 members from the two continents. India, which recently joined the grouping along with Pakistan, is attending the biannual summit for the first time.
Beijing: On a day when stock markets plummeted by more than 10 per cent worldwide, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put on his professorial hat to tell Asian and European leaders that a “collective international effort” to the international financial crisis must involve infrastructure investments in developing countries as a “counter-cyclical device” as well as the creation of a “global monitoring authority to promote global supervision” of cross-border investment, trade and banking.
In candid and even hard-hitting remarks to the first closed session of the Asia-Europe Meeting summit which got under way here on Friday, Dr. Singh said globalisation without the structure of global financial governance had led to severe problems. “Clearly there has been a massive failure of regulatory and supervisory powers. Speculators have had a free run for far too long a period,” he said. “International institutions like the IMF have also not covered themselves with glory. There has been an unacceptable failure of effective multilateral supervision of major developed economies and in particular of what has been going on in their financial markets.”
Dr. Singh was chosen by ASEM’s Chinese hosts to be the last speaker in the key session devoted to an informal exchange of views on the financial crisis. Underlining the sense in which objective developments have made Beijing and Delhi the focus of the heightened international attention on the relative resilience of the Asian economy, Chinese television showed Wen Jiabao enthusiastically welcoming Dr. Singh to the inaugural session of the ASEM summit.
The closed session, which was relayed live on closed circuit television to ministers and officials assembled in another room, was limited to the leaders themselves, many of whom sat in the room without even a single aide.
Speaking to the assembled leaders immediately after Dr. Singh’s intervention, Premier Wen said everyone in the room was aware of the Prime Minister’s long experience in successfully managing the Indian economy.
ASEM, now into its seven meeting, has 45 members from the two continents. India, which recently joined the grouping along with Pakistan, is attending the biannual summit for the first time.
Entertainment - Michael Jackson plans comeback tour
LONDON: Pop star Michael Jackson is reportedly set to undertake a huge comeback tour with his kids in tow next year.
Jackson, who is now in Las Vegas recording some new material, is planning a tour spanning 30 cities, ananova.com reports.
A source close to the singer said: "Michael said he wasn't doing a Vegas residency but was going on a world tour, taking in 30 cities next year. He said he wanted to do it for his kids. He wants them to see what he does, and he wants to take them on the road. He said he was on his way to Los Angeles to finalise the details."
Jackson was to sign a deal at one of the top Las Vegas casinos, but has instead chosen to go for a tour so that more fans can see him. Jackson has a lot of financial problems and needs to pay off debts.
Jackson, who is now in Las Vegas recording some new material, is planning a tour spanning 30 cities, ananova.com reports.
A source close to the singer said: "Michael said he wasn't doing a Vegas residency but was going on a world tour, taking in 30 cities next year. He said he wanted to do it for his kids. He wants them to see what he does, and he wants to take them on the road. He said he was on his way to Los Angeles to finalise the details."
Jackson was to sign a deal at one of the top Las Vegas casinos, but has instead chosen to go for a tour so that more fans can see him. Jackson has a lot of financial problems and needs to pay off debts.
Sport - Chess;Anand One point away from retaining World Title
BONN: India's Viswanathan Anand is just one step away from retaining his World Chess Championship title. His rival Vladimir Kramnik is now virtually on razor's edge as even the slightest mistake can end the match.
As Anand, a NIIT Mind Champion, drew the eighth game on Friday night he took his tally to 5.5 points as against Kramnik's 2.5 in the 12-game World Chess Championship final here.
Should Anand win the ninth game, the match will be over as Anand needs 6.5 points to claim the title, while a draw would stretch the match to one more game. Kramnik needs a win desperately as he trails by three points.
The eighth game ended in a 39-move draw from Queen's gambit declined as Anand chose the sharp Vienna variation.
There was much speculation if Anand would once again play in Slav, as he did in the previous two black games, which he won. But he was clearly not going to overdo it.
The next game is slated for Sunday with Anand having white pieces.
Anand, showing tremendous preparation with black, came up with a novelty on the 10th move and in the middle game he was testing Kramnik with sharp play. Anand did not castle yet again.
Kramnik made no mistakes but was not able to find a win he so desperately needed to keep himself in the fight.
Kramnik attacked on the king-side while Anand had managed to open a file on queenside and 'connect' his pieces well. When the draw was agreed upon, Kramnik did have a slight advantage but not enough to squeeze a win.
Anand won the third, fifth and sixth games and the rest have been drawn.
The match consists of twelve games, played under classical time controls: 120 minutes for the first 40 moves, 60 minutes for the next 20 moves and then 15 minutes for the rest of the game plus an additional 30 seconds per move starting from move 61.
The prize fund of 1.5 million Euro (approximately $2.35 million), including taxes and FIDE license fees will be split equally between the players.
As Anand, a NIIT Mind Champion, drew the eighth game on Friday night he took his tally to 5.5 points as against Kramnik's 2.5 in the 12-game World Chess Championship final here.
Should Anand win the ninth game, the match will be over as Anand needs 6.5 points to claim the title, while a draw would stretch the match to one more game. Kramnik needs a win desperately as he trails by three points.
The eighth game ended in a 39-move draw from Queen's gambit declined as Anand chose the sharp Vienna variation.
There was much speculation if Anand would once again play in Slav, as he did in the previous two black games, which he won. But he was clearly not going to overdo it.
The next game is slated for Sunday with Anand having white pieces.
Anand, showing tremendous preparation with black, came up with a novelty on the 10th move and in the middle game he was testing Kramnik with sharp play. Anand did not castle yet again.
Kramnik made no mistakes but was not able to find a win he so desperately needed to keep himself in the fight.
Kramnik attacked on the king-side while Anand had managed to open a file on queenside and 'connect' his pieces well. When the draw was agreed upon, Kramnik did have a slight advantage but not enough to squeeze a win.
Anand won the third, fifth and sixth games and the rest have been drawn.
The match consists of twelve games, played under classical time controls: 120 minutes for the first 40 moves, 60 minutes for the next 20 moves and then 15 minutes for the rest of the game plus an additional 30 seconds per move starting from move 61.
The prize fund of 1.5 million Euro (approximately $2.35 million), including taxes and FIDE license fees will be split equally between the players.
India - Troops in Siachen Glacier issued torn clothing
NEW DELHI: Troops posted at the Siachen Glacier, once known as the world's highest and coldest battlefield where the weather claims more lives than combat, have been issued "partly torn" and recycled special clothing for the winters due to its untimely procurement, a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report has revealed.
"Army Head Quarters failed to ensure timely procurement of Special Clothing and Mountaineering items used in operational areas like Siachen resulting in stock out levels of these critical items being as high as 44 to 70 percent," said the CAG report, which was released on Friday.
The troops posted at the glacier brave low temperatures like minus 40 degrees Celsius at altitudes up to 23,000 feet.
"To meet shortage of these items, army resorted to the unauthorised practice of issuing partly worn stores (PWS) to the troops in the glacier region. Such practice of recycling of special clothing items is not desirable on grounds of hygiene, operational suitability and overall morale of the troops," the report says.
The Indian Army deploys about 19,800 soldiers in the frigid Siachen Glacier area, which overlooks Pakistan and China.
The depots meant for stocking and distribution and to ensure ready availability of the right material at the right place and at the right time to the troops are suffering from persistent shortages.
"Thirty percent of the user demands remained unmet, troops in the glacier region had to manage with old worn out clothing and there was high level of dissatisfaction amongst the troops about the quality of clothing supplied," said the report.
An user survey conducted by the CAG revealed that 50 percent of divisions or regiments were not satisfied with the quality and fitting of the clothing supplied.
The major dissatisfaction of the users was related to mismatch between trousers and shirts and their inappropriate sizes, poor quality of clothing with problem of quick colour fading, low usage life of boots against prescribed shelf life and lack of water proofing in caps.
"Army Head Quarters failed to ensure timely procurement of Special Clothing and Mountaineering items used in operational areas like Siachen resulting in stock out levels of these critical items being as high as 44 to 70 percent," said the CAG report, which was released on Friday.
The troops posted at the glacier brave low temperatures like minus 40 degrees Celsius at altitudes up to 23,000 feet.
"To meet shortage of these items, army resorted to the unauthorised practice of issuing partly worn stores (PWS) to the troops in the glacier region. Such practice of recycling of special clothing items is not desirable on grounds of hygiene, operational suitability and overall morale of the troops," the report says.
The Indian Army deploys about 19,800 soldiers in the frigid Siachen Glacier area, which overlooks Pakistan and China.
The depots meant for stocking and distribution and to ensure ready availability of the right material at the right place and at the right time to the troops are suffering from persistent shortages.
"Thirty percent of the user demands remained unmet, troops in the glacier region had to manage with old worn out clothing and there was high level of dissatisfaction amongst the troops about the quality of clothing supplied," said the report.
An user survey conducted by the CAG revealed that 50 percent of divisions or regiments were not satisfied with the quality and fitting of the clothing supplied.
The major dissatisfaction of the users was related to mismatch between trousers and shirts and their inappropriate sizes, poor quality of clothing with problem of quick colour fading, low usage life of boots against prescribed shelf life and lack of water proofing in caps.
Entertainment - Beyonce is now Sasha Fierce
LONDON: Singer Beyonce Knowles has renamed herself Sasha Fierce and says her performing alter-ego shows her more outgoing and sensual side. She has titled her new album "I Am... Sasha Fierce".
Ananova.com reports her saying: "I have someone else that takes over when it's time for me to work and when I'm on stage. An alter-ego I've created that kind of protects me and who I really am. Sasha Fierce is the fun, more sensual, more aggressive, more outspoken and more glamorous side that comes out when I'm working and when I'm on the stage."
She has collaborated with pop star Justin Timberlake in the new album.
Ananova.com reports her saying: "I have someone else that takes over when it's time for me to work and when I'm on stage. An alter-ego I've created that kind of protects me and who I really am. Sasha Fierce is the fun, more sensual, more aggressive, more outspoken and more glamorous side that comes out when I'm working and when I'm on the stage."
She has collaborated with pop star Justin Timberlake in the new album.
Sport - Cricket;Modi reveals the catch in England's IPL participation
LONDON: Indian Premier League chairman Lalit Modi has revealed that the ECB will not allow its players to participate in the cash-rich event until the IPL governing council and the BCCI agree to release 20 of their players for the English version of the twenty20 series.
"The England Cricket Board (ECB) has approached the BCCI and the IPL with the objective of saying they are ready to provide non-objection certificates to the English players to play in the IPL," Modi said at the Global Sport Summit here.
"But there is a big catch to it. The ECB are set to launch the English Premier League and the quid pro quo is that if the ECB was to release their players, then the IPL must release a minimum of 20 players for the English Premier League," he added.
Modi said the suspense over the English participation will continue as long as the matter remains unresolved.
"It (the ECB proposal) has to go to a governing council and the BCCI board for approval. In the absence of that approval we will continue the way we are. I hope the English players can participate but I cannot guarantee that," he said.
Modi also hit back at suggestions that the IPL was to be blamed if Sri Lanka's Test tour to England next year is cancelled due to a clash of dates with the twenty20 event.
The IPL has offered a compensation to Sri Lanka Cricket if it cancels the tour, which was scheduled after Zimbabwe's tour of England in April-May was called off.
"The Indian Premier League took into account the ICC's fixed programme and signed players on three-year contracts. The Sri Lanka board gave their players a no-objection certificate for three years to play in the Indian Premier League," Modi said.
"Unfortunately the Zimbabwe tour to England was cancelled. The ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board) had an obligation to Sky television to bring another team in. It is always portrayed that the Indian Premier League is stopping the Test matches being played. There was never a scheduled Test in the first place," he pointed out.
"The Sri Lankan tour would breach the contract with the Indian Premier League," he explained.
Modi also brushed aside apprehensions being expressed about Test cricket's future in the wake twenty20's rising popularity.
"Test cricket is here to stay. It has its own hard core following and we will continue to see that go forward," said Modi.
"The England Cricket Board (ECB) has approached the BCCI and the IPL with the objective of saying they are ready to provide non-objection certificates to the English players to play in the IPL," Modi said at the Global Sport Summit here.
"But there is a big catch to it. The ECB are set to launch the English Premier League and the quid pro quo is that if the ECB was to release their players, then the IPL must release a minimum of 20 players for the English Premier League," he added.
Modi said the suspense over the English participation will continue as long as the matter remains unresolved.
"It (the ECB proposal) has to go to a governing council and the BCCI board for approval. In the absence of that approval we will continue the way we are. I hope the English players can participate but I cannot guarantee that," he said.
Modi also hit back at suggestions that the IPL was to be blamed if Sri Lanka's Test tour to England next year is cancelled due to a clash of dates with the twenty20 event.
The IPL has offered a compensation to Sri Lanka Cricket if it cancels the tour, which was scheduled after Zimbabwe's tour of England in April-May was called off.
"The Indian Premier League took into account the ICC's fixed programme and signed players on three-year contracts. The Sri Lanka board gave their players a no-objection certificate for three years to play in the Indian Premier League," Modi said.
"Unfortunately the Zimbabwe tour to England was cancelled. The ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board) had an obligation to Sky television to bring another team in. It is always portrayed that the Indian Premier League is stopping the Test matches being played. There was never a scheduled Test in the first place," he pointed out.
"The Sri Lankan tour would breach the contract with the Indian Premier League," he explained.
Modi also brushed aside apprehensions being expressed about Test cricket's future in the wake twenty20's rising popularity.
"Test cricket is here to stay. It has its own hard core following and we will continue to see that go forward," said Modi.
Oct 24, 2008
Me - Hello
Hello,
Hope everyone is doing Great at Work/Life.This week is been good too with the number of Posts.Hope everyone continues to like what they read here.We are closing in on 400 posts for two weeks back to back.
In India,We are celebrating Diwali on Monday,It promises to be a long weekend for us here filled with tons of food,because of which on Sunday & Monday the number of posts from me will be on the lower side.Apologies in advance.Never the less i promise to make amends in the days that follow.
For people who are not familiar with Diwali - Check out what Diwali is at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali
Iam happy to know that we have readers now in Afghanistan too.Like i always say,a big thank you to everyone who posts comments on articles they read here.
Till next time ,Enjoy your weekend.Keep having fun & Enjoy Readin
Take care
SZri
Hope everyone is doing Great at Work/Life.This week is been good too with the number of Posts.Hope everyone continues to like what they read here.We are closing in on 400 posts for two weeks back to back.
In India,We are celebrating Diwali on Monday,It promises to be a long weekend for us here filled with tons of food,because of which on Sunday & Monday the number of posts from me will be on the lower side.Apologies in advance.Never the less i promise to make amends in the days that follow.
For people who are not familiar with Diwali - Check out what Diwali is at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali
Iam happy to know that we have readers now in Afghanistan too.Like i always say,a big thank you to everyone who posts comments on articles they read here.
Till next time ,Enjoy your weekend.Keep having fun & Enjoy Readin
Take care
SZri
India - Intense selling pulls Nifty,Sensex each down 10%
Mandar Nimkar
MUMBAI: Intense selling on deepening concern that the economic slump will deteriorate corporate earnings, pushed indices around the global to two yea
r lows. Japan’s Nikkei was at a 5-year low.
In India, benchmarks plunged 10 per cent each as players sold frenziedly across the counters.
Despite Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s request to investors not to sell in panic markets plunged headlong. After the turn of FIIs, long-only funds too have started selling, triggering today’s fire sale.
All sectoral indicators were in red. Realty, banking, oil & gas, metal, power and auto were down more than 10 per cent. Top index losers were Hindalco Industries (-20.95%), Ranbaxy Laboratories (-18.24%), Mahindra & Mahindra (-17.59%), and Tata Motors (-16.41%).
From realty sector, despite Unitech's clarification on the land payments to the Greater Noida Development Authority, the stock slumped 52 per cent, DLF dropped 25 per cent and HDIL fell 12 per cent.
Despite crude oil correcting about 55 per cent from its all time high of $147 per barrel, oil & gas companies are feeling the heat as slowing economies have cut demand.
Banking stocks dropped as RBI's stance of keeping key rate unchanged dampened investor sentiments.
“These levels are now quite unseen; it's difficult to verbalise this situation right now. Supply is coming at every level, no matter what the valuation. There is no meaning to say whether we have touched bottom or not, but just to wait and watch. Earlier there were companies filing for bankruptcy, but now countries like Pakistan, Russia, Iceland and Argentina are on the verge of bankruptcy. In a nutshell, the present is horrifying," said Arun Kumar, analyst at Global One Hedge Fund.
MUMBAI: Intense selling on deepening concern that the economic slump will deteriorate corporate earnings, pushed indices around the global to two yea
r lows. Japan’s Nikkei was at a 5-year low.
In India, benchmarks plunged 10 per cent each as players sold frenziedly across the counters.
Despite Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s request to investors not to sell in panic markets plunged headlong. After the turn of FIIs, long-only funds too have started selling, triggering today’s fire sale.
All sectoral indicators were in red. Realty, banking, oil & gas, metal, power and auto were down more than 10 per cent. Top index losers were Hindalco Industries (-20.95%), Ranbaxy Laboratories (-18.24%), Mahindra & Mahindra (-17.59%), and Tata Motors (-16.41%).
From realty sector, despite Unitech's clarification on the land payments to the Greater Noida Development Authority, the stock slumped 52 per cent, DLF dropped 25 per cent and HDIL fell 12 per cent.
Despite crude oil correcting about 55 per cent from its all time high of $147 per barrel, oil & gas companies are feeling the heat as slowing economies have cut demand.
Banking stocks dropped as RBI's stance of keeping key rate unchanged dampened investor sentiments.
“These levels are now quite unseen; it's difficult to verbalise this situation right now. Supply is coming at every level, no matter what the valuation. There is no meaning to say whether we have touched bottom or not, but just to wait and watch. Earlier there were companies filing for bankruptcy, but now countries like Pakistan, Russia, Iceland and Argentina are on the verge of bankruptcy. In a nutshell, the present is horrifying," said Arun Kumar, analyst at Global One Hedge Fund.
Business - Preserving 'Brand India' during crisis
Arvind Subramanian
Preserving financial sector confidence, not monetary easing, is key.
“Brand India” is being buffeted by the global financial crisis. India has been more financially integrated than was generally supposed, and hence more affected by financial contagion than expected. The stakes are high because policy hesitancy or missteps can turn mild contagion into virulent disease.
One lesson that countries are learning is that during a crisis of confidence, policy-makers have to get ahead of the curve in order to reassure markets. Governments have discovered the hard way that responses that are reactive, piecemeal, and uncoordinated risk undermining rather than adding to confidence. A formidable policy arsenal needs to be deployed to have any chance of restoring stability. In western financial markets confidence is returning, slowly, only after a series of ambitious actions, boldly initiated by the UK and then followed by Europe and the US.
Between last week’s actions to shore up the financial system and Monday’s cut in interest rates, Indian policymakers can legitimately claim to have risen to the challenge. But will these actions be enough? What more will be necessary?
Broadly, more will need to be done on the financial sector side in order to do less on the monetary policy side. Put differently, if confidence in the financial system is not restored, the easing, even substantial easing, of monetary policies that we have recently seen may not have enough traction, and may even entail risks.
First and foremost, the plight of individual financial institutions should be addressed. A benchmark should be that no Indian bank should have credit default swap (CDS) spreads exceeding 300 or so basis points. It is likely that perilously elevated CDS spreads reflect problems with foreign funding. So, high on the action list would be to provide foreign currency resources from the RBI’s reserves. The RBI’s liquidity injections operations that have so far been in rupees need to be expanded to foreign currency.
One way to do this would be to hold foreign currency auctions for all domestic financial institutions to meet either their own needs or those of their corporate clients that face foreign currency funding pressures. The Fed and ECB responded to dollar shortages in Europe through extensive swap operations that made available enormous lines of dollar credit in European markets. The RBI foreign currency auctions should be held quickly and flexibly so that liquidity can virtually be provided on tap. The RBI’s foreign exchange reserves have been accumulated for rainy days, and these are not just rainy but stormy days, justifying their liberal use today.
If these measures prove inadequate, the government may need to step in to guarantee the foreign-currency debt of domestic financial institutions. This may need to be complemented with government re-capitalisation, especially if private banks are unable to raise capital from private sources within a very short period of time. India just cannot afford to have financial institutions that are flashing amber or red in these times.
Moving beyond individual institutions, and given the crisis of confidence, it may be worth requiring all banks to raise their capital adequacy ratio to about 15-18 per cent, within a short period. If meeting this higher CAR requires additional government capital injection, that should be seriously considered. Ways could be found for this capital to be returned to the government once the crisis subsides. If all banks were seen to be meeting this high standard, it could have a significant impact in reassuring markets. The rationale for the higher CAR, apart from the confidence boosting impact, is the more substantive one that banks’ non-performing assets are bound to rise as the economy weakens. An apparently cushion-providing 15 per cent CAR today could very easily become an 8 per cent CAR within a short space of time.
Next, it might be worth imposing additional transparency requirements on all the major banks to reassure investors and the public. Uncertainty in this environment leads to markets believing the worst. All banks should therefore be required to immediately clarify and publish key variables of concern, including foreign currency exposure, especially on the liability side, the extent and sources of wholesale funding, and exposure to derivatives and other such instruments. A strong transparency effort, under the RBI’s supervision, could have an important reassuring function.
Finally, what about exchange rate and monetary policies? On the former, the RBI should refrain from foreign exchange intervention, which at the moment sends contradictory signals because it sucks out liquidity at the very time that the RBI is pumping enormous amounts of liquidity back into the economy. Far better to use the RBI’s foreign exchange reserves to meet the foreign funding requirements of domestic financial institutions rather than to defend some level for the rupee.
On monetary policy, the RBI has been doing the juggling act of easing interest rates and injecting rupee liquidity, on the one hand, while trying to encourage capital inflows and discourage outflows through a variety of measures such as raising interest rates on foreign currency deposits. Make no mistake that there is an inherent tension, even plain contradiction, between these actions, which the RBI has been able to avoid because residents, unlike foreign investors, are not fleeing rupee assets. The risk of aggressive easing is that it might trigger the move away from rupee holdings, at a time when confidence in the rupee is so shaky, when current and prospective depreciation would offset the favourable effects on inflation from declines in commodity prices, and when credit is still growing at a whopping 30 per cent. It is worth noting that while the repo rate has been cut to 8 per cent, the call rate — which reflects market conditions — is at 6 per cent, below CPI inflation, resulting in negative real interest rates.
A loss of confidence in the rupee is an outcome devoutly to be avoided. At this juncture, restoring confidence in individual financial institutions and the financial system is key to achieving that objective and to avoid unreasonably burdening monetary policy.
“Brand India” has come to connote not just rapid growth but a reasonable ability of policymakers to respond to challenges. Of course, this response will be assessed by outcomes. But critical to this assessment will be whether processes for arriving at outcomes are effective, and specifically, whether all concerned institutions play their rightful roles and maintain their credibility. “Brand India” must pass all these tests.
The author is Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics and Center for Global Development, and Senior Research Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Preserving financial sector confidence, not monetary easing, is key.
“Brand India” is being buffeted by the global financial crisis. India has been more financially integrated than was generally supposed, and hence more affected by financial contagion than expected. The stakes are high because policy hesitancy or missteps can turn mild contagion into virulent disease.
One lesson that countries are learning is that during a crisis of confidence, policy-makers have to get ahead of the curve in order to reassure markets. Governments have discovered the hard way that responses that are reactive, piecemeal, and uncoordinated risk undermining rather than adding to confidence. A formidable policy arsenal needs to be deployed to have any chance of restoring stability. In western financial markets confidence is returning, slowly, only after a series of ambitious actions, boldly initiated by the UK and then followed by Europe and the US.
Between last week’s actions to shore up the financial system and Monday’s cut in interest rates, Indian policymakers can legitimately claim to have risen to the challenge. But will these actions be enough? What more will be necessary?
Broadly, more will need to be done on the financial sector side in order to do less on the monetary policy side. Put differently, if confidence in the financial system is not restored, the easing, even substantial easing, of monetary policies that we have recently seen may not have enough traction, and may even entail risks.
First and foremost, the plight of individual financial institutions should be addressed. A benchmark should be that no Indian bank should have credit default swap (CDS) spreads exceeding 300 or so basis points. It is likely that perilously elevated CDS spreads reflect problems with foreign funding. So, high on the action list would be to provide foreign currency resources from the RBI’s reserves. The RBI’s liquidity injections operations that have so far been in rupees need to be expanded to foreign currency.
One way to do this would be to hold foreign currency auctions for all domestic financial institutions to meet either their own needs or those of their corporate clients that face foreign currency funding pressures. The Fed and ECB responded to dollar shortages in Europe through extensive swap operations that made available enormous lines of dollar credit in European markets. The RBI foreign currency auctions should be held quickly and flexibly so that liquidity can virtually be provided on tap. The RBI’s foreign exchange reserves have been accumulated for rainy days, and these are not just rainy but stormy days, justifying their liberal use today.
If these measures prove inadequate, the government may need to step in to guarantee the foreign-currency debt of domestic financial institutions. This may need to be complemented with government re-capitalisation, especially if private banks are unable to raise capital from private sources within a very short period of time. India just cannot afford to have financial institutions that are flashing amber or red in these times.
Moving beyond individual institutions, and given the crisis of confidence, it may be worth requiring all banks to raise their capital adequacy ratio to about 15-18 per cent, within a short period. If meeting this higher CAR requires additional government capital injection, that should be seriously considered. Ways could be found for this capital to be returned to the government once the crisis subsides. If all banks were seen to be meeting this high standard, it could have a significant impact in reassuring markets. The rationale for the higher CAR, apart from the confidence boosting impact, is the more substantive one that banks’ non-performing assets are bound to rise as the economy weakens. An apparently cushion-providing 15 per cent CAR today could very easily become an 8 per cent CAR within a short space of time.
Next, it might be worth imposing additional transparency requirements on all the major banks to reassure investors and the public. Uncertainty in this environment leads to markets believing the worst. All banks should therefore be required to immediately clarify and publish key variables of concern, including foreign currency exposure, especially on the liability side, the extent and sources of wholesale funding, and exposure to derivatives and other such instruments. A strong transparency effort, under the RBI’s supervision, could have an important reassuring function.
Finally, what about exchange rate and monetary policies? On the former, the RBI should refrain from foreign exchange intervention, which at the moment sends contradictory signals because it sucks out liquidity at the very time that the RBI is pumping enormous amounts of liquidity back into the economy. Far better to use the RBI’s foreign exchange reserves to meet the foreign funding requirements of domestic financial institutions rather than to defend some level for the rupee.
On monetary policy, the RBI has been doing the juggling act of easing interest rates and injecting rupee liquidity, on the one hand, while trying to encourage capital inflows and discourage outflows through a variety of measures such as raising interest rates on foreign currency deposits. Make no mistake that there is an inherent tension, even plain contradiction, between these actions, which the RBI has been able to avoid because residents, unlike foreign investors, are not fleeing rupee assets. The risk of aggressive easing is that it might trigger the move away from rupee holdings, at a time when confidence in the rupee is so shaky, when current and prospective depreciation would offset the favourable effects on inflation from declines in commodity prices, and when credit is still growing at a whopping 30 per cent. It is worth noting that while the repo rate has been cut to 8 per cent, the call rate — which reflects market conditions — is at 6 per cent, below CPI inflation, resulting in negative real interest rates.
A loss of confidence in the rupee is an outcome devoutly to be avoided. At this juncture, restoring confidence in individual financial institutions and the financial system is key to achieving that objective and to avoid unreasonably burdening monetary policy.
“Brand India” has come to connote not just rapid growth but a reasonable ability of policymakers to respond to challenges. Of course, this response will be assessed by outcomes. But critical to this assessment will be whether processes for arriving at outcomes are effective, and specifically, whether all concerned institutions play their rightful roles and maintain their credibility. “Brand India” must pass all these tests.
The author is Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics and Center for Global Development, and Senior Research Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Business - India;The bank that Kamath built
Shobhana Subramanian
KV Kamath, the CEO and managing director of ICICI Bank, is due to step down sometime next year. In the twelve years or so that he has been at the helm of affairs, the bank has more than cashed in on a huge growth opportunity that presented itself as the Indian economy grew stronger. The ICICI brand must be the envy of every banker in the country including State Bank which, many point out, doesn’t really connect with the younger lot — which will soon be the largest earning segment of our population. It’s not surprising that ICICI Bank’s home loan portfolio is bigger than that of State Bank. Before the ICICI stock got a drubbing, its market capitalisation too was higher than that of State Bank. For sure, it’s been a phenomenal success story.
Which is why it was disconcerting to see well-informed people — people aware about how the financial system works — getting nervous about their savings with the bank, when the money market turned really tight a couple of weeks back. The anxiety increased as the stock collapsed 27 per cent one Friday — the market knows something we don’t, they said. Despite numerous appearances on television, the bank’s senior management wasn’t able to reassure too many people. The regulator’s efforts at trying to calm things down were met with scepticism. If everything’s fine, why does the central bank need to speak on behalf of the bank, they asked? If many didn’t actually withdraw money it was because they believed the government would never let the bank fall since that would hurt the financial system too badly and also reflect on their inadequate supervision. Fortunately things settled down. But, for a very brief while, it seemed as though things would get out of control, so willing were people to believe the worst.
At the end of the day, banking is a trust business and if people are unnerved and start worrying that their money might not be safe, then something is not right. Ultimately, the strength of a brand lies in the conviction that depositors must, at all times — and especially in times of a crisis — feel secure. ICICI has done a great job positioning itself as a lender that offers customers a good deal and does it quickly. Perhaps it needs to do something so that its numerous account holders feel their money is safe. While we are sure the bank is well-capitalised and can meet all its obligations, there is nevertheless a need to reassure customers and that cannot be done through damage control. Kamath himself is believed to have said during the recent crisis that ICICI “suffers from the worst perception”. Well, there must be a reason for that and if it is really so, the issue needs to be addressed. There will always be those with mala fide intentions trying to give the bank a bad name — in a competitive environment this cannot be wished away — but the onus rests on the bank to overcome that. It’s not simply that the stock was punished—that may or may not have been the work of a bear cartel—there’s something more to it that makes people feel that things could go wrong.
To make the obvious comparison, HDFC Bank, which started out about the same time as ICICI Bank, may not have the kind of name recall across the country that ICICI does. But in these past three weeks, not once has anyone talked about withdrawing money from HDFC Bank. This speaks volumes for the confidence that depositors have in the bank. The market, of course, has always rewarded HDFC Bank for its tempered approach to lending and consequently cleaner asset portfolio. Never has that attitude seemed more correct than it has now. Centurion Bank, which was merged with HDFC Bank with effect from April this year, came with bagfuls of bad assets but, in spite of that, HDFC Bank’s non-performing loans (NPLs) for both the June and the September quarters haven’t really shot up; it still has the cleanest book in the business.
It’s not that ICICI didn’t do the right thing in chasing assets; it was the obvious thing to do at a time when interest rates were falling and disposable incomes and aspirations were rising. They spotted the opportunity and didn’t die wondering whether it would work. But somewhere along the line, the bank perhaps took it a little too easy, not doing enough due diligence and believing, like many others, that the good times would last forever. This is not to take away from the tremendous job that Kamath has done. Without doubt, he has built an enviable franchise. But there’s something missing. And before he decides to call it a day, he needs to do whatever he can to change this perception. Stepping into his shoes will not be an easy task even for the most competent professional. But unless the “worst perception” is changed, Kamath’s successor will have a hard time.
KV Kamath, the CEO and managing director of ICICI Bank, is due to step down sometime next year. In the twelve years or so that he has been at the helm of affairs, the bank has more than cashed in on a huge growth opportunity that presented itself as the Indian economy grew stronger. The ICICI brand must be the envy of every banker in the country including State Bank which, many point out, doesn’t really connect with the younger lot — which will soon be the largest earning segment of our population. It’s not surprising that ICICI Bank’s home loan portfolio is bigger than that of State Bank. Before the ICICI stock got a drubbing, its market capitalisation too was higher than that of State Bank. For sure, it’s been a phenomenal success story.
Which is why it was disconcerting to see well-informed people — people aware about how the financial system works — getting nervous about their savings with the bank, when the money market turned really tight a couple of weeks back. The anxiety increased as the stock collapsed 27 per cent one Friday — the market knows something we don’t, they said. Despite numerous appearances on television, the bank’s senior management wasn’t able to reassure too many people. The regulator’s efforts at trying to calm things down were met with scepticism. If everything’s fine, why does the central bank need to speak on behalf of the bank, they asked? If many didn’t actually withdraw money it was because they believed the government would never let the bank fall since that would hurt the financial system too badly and also reflect on their inadequate supervision. Fortunately things settled down. But, for a very brief while, it seemed as though things would get out of control, so willing were people to believe the worst.
At the end of the day, banking is a trust business and if people are unnerved and start worrying that their money might not be safe, then something is not right. Ultimately, the strength of a brand lies in the conviction that depositors must, at all times — and especially in times of a crisis — feel secure. ICICI has done a great job positioning itself as a lender that offers customers a good deal and does it quickly. Perhaps it needs to do something so that its numerous account holders feel their money is safe. While we are sure the bank is well-capitalised and can meet all its obligations, there is nevertheless a need to reassure customers and that cannot be done through damage control. Kamath himself is believed to have said during the recent crisis that ICICI “suffers from the worst perception”. Well, there must be a reason for that and if it is really so, the issue needs to be addressed. There will always be those with mala fide intentions trying to give the bank a bad name — in a competitive environment this cannot be wished away — but the onus rests on the bank to overcome that. It’s not simply that the stock was punished—that may or may not have been the work of a bear cartel—there’s something more to it that makes people feel that things could go wrong.
To make the obvious comparison, HDFC Bank, which started out about the same time as ICICI Bank, may not have the kind of name recall across the country that ICICI does. But in these past three weeks, not once has anyone talked about withdrawing money from HDFC Bank. This speaks volumes for the confidence that depositors have in the bank. The market, of course, has always rewarded HDFC Bank for its tempered approach to lending and consequently cleaner asset portfolio. Never has that attitude seemed more correct than it has now. Centurion Bank, which was merged with HDFC Bank with effect from April this year, came with bagfuls of bad assets but, in spite of that, HDFC Bank’s non-performing loans (NPLs) for both the June and the September quarters haven’t really shot up; it still has the cleanest book in the business.
It’s not that ICICI didn’t do the right thing in chasing assets; it was the obvious thing to do at a time when interest rates were falling and disposable incomes and aspirations were rising. They spotted the opportunity and didn’t die wondering whether it would work. But somewhere along the line, the bank perhaps took it a little too easy, not doing enough due diligence and believing, like many others, that the good times would last forever. This is not to take away from the tremendous job that Kamath has done. Without doubt, he has built an enviable franchise. But there’s something missing. And before he decides to call it a day, he needs to do whatever he can to change this perception. Stepping into his shoes will not be an easy task even for the most competent professional. But unless the “worst perception” is changed, Kamath’s successor will have a hard time.
Fun - 'The Wall' Street
How can you put Sachin Tendulkar’s achievement in proper Indian perspective? The number of his total Test runs is currently more than the Sensex, and a few months back, the Sensex was more than his ODI run tally. The latest market rumour is that US merchant bankers are planning to relocate to the street where Rahul Dravid stays. After all, that happens to be the only ‘Wall Street’ that is still standing?
Business - India;Naresh Goyal is his own worst enemy
Anjuli Bhargava
While the mishandling of the Jet Airways sacking and reinstatement of 1,900 employees was an HR and PR disaster, the larger implications of what happened are also worth considering. It is not just that the chairman of India’s most successful airline became the butt of jokes (television channels played and replayed Naresh Goyal’s melodramatic interview), it is also a question of what he knew, when he knew it and who did the bungling.
If Goyal did not know of the sacking, as he claimed on TV, it makes one wonder how he functions as the admittedly hands-on chairman of a publicly listed company. I for one refuse to believe that “his management” would take such a grave step without consulting him or taking his approval. If, on the other hand, he did know about it (which, by all indications and according to sources within the company, he did), then what does the hypocritical act that he performed on television say about this aviation pioneer?
Secondly, what makes Goyal think that the same employees who were dismissed so unceremoniously will swallow his spiel on television hook, line and sinker and serve his company with the same “dedication” as before? It will be hard for employees to forget how they were dismissed summarily (many of them learnt of their job loss as they waited for their transport to pick them up in the morning and take them to work), and I will not be surprised if there is a clear divide between those who got the pink slips and those who escaped them. In fact any kind of mass dismissal in future will be very tough for Jet — even if dictated by business imperatives — because, among other things, a union could well be the outcome of this misadventure.
Goyal’s problems go deeper, for he has also failed to retain the loyalty of some of his top officials. His centralised style of functioning has led to an exodus at the middle and senior management levels over the last couple of years. Moreover, just a few weeks prior to the fiasco with the 1,900 employees, Jetlite, the airline’s wholly-owned subsidiary, fired 800 staffers. At that point, Goyal was neither moved by their tears, agony or helplessness; nor did he feel the need to protect what he now calls his family. Nor indeed has it been reported that he got a headache and high blood pressure, or that he suffered sleepless nights when that round of firing happened.
A close friend of Goyal who was instrumental in helping him buy Sahara, says that he was less than impressed with the way Goyal handled the Sahara buy-out, backing out at one stage after giving his word. Subroto Roy, for all that he may be famous or infamous for, emerged as the more dignified of the two. Never once did he speak out openly in the media about what Goyal had done to him and his airline, although Jet’s actions in that episode were certainly questionable.
A few years prior to that, Goyal was commonly believed to have led the lobbying against Tata getting into the civil aviation business — something for which Ratan Tata must now be very grateful!
To his credit, though, Goyal has given the country an efficient, quality airline with professional management and staff, and a level of service that international visitors to India marvel at. One can also admire him for his obsessive drive (one of Goyal’s friends once told me, “I have never known a man so persistent once he has made up his mind. If Naresh Goyal wants to talk to you, no matter which corner of the world you are in, he will get you”). People say that he has a phenomenal network across the world, is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to political contacts, and has a single-minded focus on bettering his airline and its bottomline.
But ego-driven businesses (and aviation, like cars, is certainly one) are notorious for trapping their owners into taking needlessly ambitious decisions. Goyal’s decision to buy Sahara, expand overseas in competitive markets and to focus on marketshare rather than on bottom line over the past year were serious errors of judgment — for which he is now paying the price. And yet, it is also true that his airline commands by far the highest value on the stock market (about four times as much as rival Kingfisher). So, even if it is Vijay Mallya who has more of a cash cushion because of his liquor and beer businesses, it is Goyal who has by far the better aviation company.
Is it possible, then, that the country’s largest airline can go under? Bleeding like never before, and with bills to pay, Jet certainly has its share of problems, but it is inconceivable that the airline will disappear from the skies. If Goyal pulls the chestnuts out of the fire this time, he will emerge as the king of the aviation business in India. That does not mean that his airline will be making a lot of money (airlines rarely do), but he will be exactly where he wants to be.
All the bigger tragedy then, that Goyal has sullied his copy-book with what he did last week, raising questions relating to both strength of character and sense of ethics. In some ways, as is so often the case with first-generation entrepreneurs, Goyal has turned out to be his own worst enemy.
While the mishandling of the Jet Airways sacking and reinstatement of 1,900 employees was an HR and PR disaster, the larger implications of what happened are also worth considering. It is not just that the chairman of India’s most successful airline became the butt of jokes (television channels played and replayed Naresh Goyal’s melodramatic interview), it is also a question of what he knew, when he knew it and who did the bungling.
If Goyal did not know of the sacking, as he claimed on TV, it makes one wonder how he functions as the admittedly hands-on chairman of a publicly listed company. I for one refuse to believe that “his management” would take such a grave step without consulting him or taking his approval. If, on the other hand, he did know about it (which, by all indications and according to sources within the company, he did), then what does the hypocritical act that he performed on television say about this aviation pioneer?
Secondly, what makes Goyal think that the same employees who were dismissed so unceremoniously will swallow his spiel on television hook, line and sinker and serve his company with the same “dedication” as before? It will be hard for employees to forget how they were dismissed summarily (many of them learnt of their job loss as they waited for their transport to pick them up in the morning and take them to work), and I will not be surprised if there is a clear divide between those who got the pink slips and those who escaped them. In fact any kind of mass dismissal in future will be very tough for Jet — even if dictated by business imperatives — because, among other things, a union could well be the outcome of this misadventure.
Goyal’s problems go deeper, for he has also failed to retain the loyalty of some of his top officials. His centralised style of functioning has led to an exodus at the middle and senior management levels over the last couple of years. Moreover, just a few weeks prior to the fiasco with the 1,900 employees, Jetlite, the airline’s wholly-owned subsidiary, fired 800 staffers. At that point, Goyal was neither moved by their tears, agony or helplessness; nor did he feel the need to protect what he now calls his family. Nor indeed has it been reported that he got a headache and high blood pressure, or that he suffered sleepless nights when that round of firing happened.
A close friend of Goyal who was instrumental in helping him buy Sahara, says that he was less than impressed with the way Goyal handled the Sahara buy-out, backing out at one stage after giving his word. Subroto Roy, for all that he may be famous or infamous for, emerged as the more dignified of the two. Never once did he speak out openly in the media about what Goyal had done to him and his airline, although Jet’s actions in that episode were certainly questionable.
A few years prior to that, Goyal was commonly believed to have led the lobbying against Tata getting into the civil aviation business — something for which Ratan Tata must now be very grateful!
To his credit, though, Goyal has given the country an efficient, quality airline with professional management and staff, and a level of service that international visitors to India marvel at. One can also admire him for his obsessive drive (one of Goyal’s friends once told me, “I have never known a man so persistent once he has made up his mind. If Naresh Goyal wants to talk to you, no matter which corner of the world you are in, he will get you”). People say that he has a phenomenal network across the world, is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to political contacts, and has a single-minded focus on bettering his airline and its bottomline.
But ego-driven businesses (and aviation, like cars, is certainly one) are notorious for trapping their owners into taking needlessly ambitious decisions. Goyal’s decision to buy Sahara, expand overseas in competitive markets and to focus on marketshare rather than on bottom line over the past year were serious errors of judgment — for which he is now paying the price. And yet, it is also true that his airline commands by far the highest value on the stock market (about four times as much as rival Kingfisher). So, even if it is Vijay Mallya who has more of a cash cushion because of his liquor and beer businesses, it is Goyal who has by far the better aviation company.
Is it possible, then, that the country’s largest airline can go under? Bleeding like never before, and with bills to pay, Jet certainly has its share of problems, but it is inconceivable that the airline will disappear from the skies. If Goyal pulls the chestnuts out of the fire this time, he will emerge as the king of the aviation business in India. That does not mean that his airline will be making a lot of money (airlines rarely do), but he will be exactly where he wants to be.
All the bigger tragedy then, that Goyal has sullied his copy-book with what he did last week, raising questions relating to both strength of character and sense of ethics. In some ways, as is so often the case with first-generation entrepreneurs, Goyal has turned out to be his own worst enemy.
Business - India;HDFC bank overtakes ICICI in m-cap race
HDFC Bank, India’s second-largest private bank, has overtaken ICICI Bank, the largest private player, in terms of market capitalisation to top the rankings among private banks.
Among all banks, government-owned State Bank of India (SBI) still tops the banking sector list with market cap of Rs 84,077 crore.
ICICI Bank, which merged with development financial institution ICICI in 2002, first overtook SBI in the m-cap race on December 16, 2005. It retained the number one slot till January 25, 2008, when the public sector bank regained leadership ahead of its rights issue.
But with the stock markets falling amid the global financial turmoil, ICICI Bank shares have fallen 45 per cent since mid-September. The scrip was one of the worst hit mostly on rumours of heavy exposure to sub-prime instruments. HDFC Bank share prices dropped 17 per cent in the same period.
In fact, HDFC Bank overtook ICICI Bank in the m-cap sweepstakes on October 10, lost the slot and regained it today.
Market cap changes this year Jan 08,2008 Oct 23,2008
ICICI Bank 148466.6 40698.9
HDFC Bank 72961.6 45563.2
Figures in Rs crore
The realignment in market cap rankings by the country’s two largest private banks partly highlights the contrast in their growth strategies and how they pan out in troubled times.
For ICICI Bank, the focus has been on aggressive growth in its loan portfolio, which saw it powering ahead with personal, automobile and home loans to borrowers in almost all income levels.
HDFC Bank, in contrast, grew at a slower pace, focusing more on the quality of its portfolio rather than the size. Managing Director Aditya Puri told Business Standard last week, “We always restricted ourselves to the middle and upper-middle income levels. What has fallen out of the demand market is the people at the bottom who had higher interest rates.”
Significantly, ICICI Bank has now decided to go slow on lending. At the start of the year, it had talked of double-digit growth in retail advances. Now projections have been lowered to around 5 per cent.
In recent months, the bank pulled out of two-wheeler finance at dealerships and stopped offering the post-dated cheque facility for consumer durable purchases.
HDFC Bank’s Puri said he expects growth, which has been in the range of 25 to 30 per cent in recent years, to continue. “Our portfolio is fine and so is our growth momentum. We will see some impact on the SMEs, and the companies, but this impact will be more in terms of a squeeze on the profits rather than the viability,” he said.
HDFC Bank also remains India-focused, though it opened its first overseas branch in Bahrain, Puri said.
ICICI Bank, on the other hand, has worked on having a global footprint with a presence in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, West Asia, Singapore and the US. At the end of March, 2008 ICICI Bank’s international operations accounted for about 25 per cent of its consolidated banking assets, one of the reasons that provoked rumours about its sub-prime exposure.
HDFC Bank, which merged Centurion Bank of Punjab with itself in May this year, reported a 43.3 per cent rise in net profit at Rs 527.98 crore for the second quarter ending September 2008.
Analysts expect ICICI Bank’s profits to rise 12 to 13 per cent in the second quarter. The bank will also have to make mark-to-market provisions on investment made by its overseas subsidiaries.
Among all banks, government-owned State Bank of India (SBI) still tops the banking sector list with market cap of Rs 84,077 crore.
ICICI Bank, which merged with development financial institution ICICI in 2002, first overtook SBI in the m-cap race on December 16, 2005. It retained the number one slot till January 25, 2008, when the public sector bank regained leadership ahead of its rights issue.
But with the stock markets falling amid the global financial turmoil, ICICI Bank shares have fallen 45 per cent since mid-September. The scrip was one of the worst hit mostly on rumours of heavy exposure to sub-prime instruments. HDFC Bank share prices dropped 17 per cent in the same period.
In fact, HDFC Bank overtook ICICI Bank in the m-cap sweepstakes on October 10, lost the slot and regained it today.
Market cap changes this year Jan 08,2008 Oct 23,2008
ICICI Bank 148466.6 40698.9
HDFC Bank 72961.6 45563.2
Figures in Rs crore
The realignment in market cap rankings by the country’s two largest private banks partly highlights the contrast in their growth strategies and how they pan out in troubled times.
For ICICI Bank, the focus has been on aggressive growth in its loan portfolio, which saw it powering ahead with personal, automobile and home loans to borrowers in almost all income levels.
HDFC Bank, in contrast, grew at a slower pace, focusing more on the quality of its portfolio rather than the size. Managing Director Aditya Puri told Business Standard last week, “We always restricted ourselves to the middle and upper-middle income levels. What has fallen out of the demand market is the people at the bottom who had higher interest rates.”
Significantly, ICICI Bank has now decided to go slow on lending. At the start of the year, it had talked of double-digit growth in retail advances. Now projections have been lowered to around 5 per cent.
In recent months, the bank pulled out of two-wheeler finance at dealerships and stopped offering the post-dated cheque facility for consumer durable purchases.
HDFC Bank’s Puri said he expects growth, which has been in the range of 25 to 30 per cent in recent years, to continue. “Our portfolio is fine and so is our growth momentum. We will see some impact on the SMEs, and the companies, but this impact will be more in terms of a squeeze on the profits rather than the viability,” he said.
HDFC Bank also remains India-focused, though it opened its first overseas branch in Bahrain, Puri said.
ICICI Bank, on the other hand, has worked on having a global footprint with a presence in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, West Asia, Singapore and the US. At the end of March, 2008 ICICI Bank’s international operations accounted for about 25 per cent of its consolidated banking assets, one of the reasons that provoked rumours about its sub-prime exposure.
HDFC Bank, which merged Centurion Bank of Punjab with itself in May this year, reported a 43.3 per cent rise in net profit at Rs 527.98 crore for the second quarter ending September 2008.
Analysts expect ICICI Bank’s profits to rise 12 to 13 per cent in the second quarter. The bank will also have to make mark-to-market provisions on investment made by its overseas subsidiaries.
Business - India;ATF prices to fall by 16%
Anirban Chowdhury
Aviation industry experts expect the ATF prices to fall by 16 per cent in November, compared with the current month. This, they say, translates into bridging of nearly half the gap between the airlines’ operational costs and total revenues.
There could also be more good news. With Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel pushing for decrease in taxes on ATF (taxes constitute 30 per cent of the cost) and meeting Finance Minister P Chidambaram for that purpose next week, any cut would have a positive impact on the break-even levels of carriers. Chidambaram today said that while the government was looking at rationalisation of taxes on ATF, he had posed a question to the petroleum ministry on the issue of excise duty on jet fuel.
“At the moment, ATF constitutes 50 per cent of the operating cost of an airline. The average gap between revenue and our costs for the industry is around 15 per cent. So we will require an ATF fuel decrease of 30 per cent if we need to achieve the operational break-even,” said Ajay Singh, director of low-cost carrier SpiceJet. In the last two months, ATF prices have dropped by 20 per cent.
According to industry statistics, the current average base price (excluding taxes) of ATF is Rs 44,526/kilolitre. The expected decrease of Rs 6,300/kilolitre will bring the base prices down to Rs 38,226/kilolitre. An addition of 8.24 per cent excise duty and an average of 25 per cent sales tax gives the price of ATF as Rs 50,931/kilolitre, around 16 per cent lower than the current average ATF price of Rs 60,663/kilolitre.
The decrease, according to industry experts, would have been more had factors like the weaker rupee had not stemmed the fall of ATF prices.
The average price of the Indian crude basket this month was around 24 per cent lower than the average prices last month. But the average value of the rupee has also decreased by 5.71 per cent.
However, opinion is divided on whether the ATF cut will be passed on to the customers. “We cannot take a call on fares before the ATF prices completely stabilise. We have to watch the trend for at least a couple of months,” said Hitesh Patel, EVP, Kingfisher Airlines. But a senior director of a LCC said: “We might have to pass on part of the ATF fuel cut in lower fares to regain our market share as well as improve our passenger load factor. It is a complex balancing exercise.”
According to industry statistics, the slowdown in demand has affected the low-cost carriers more than the full-service airlines.
“While sales for the full-service carriers have only gone down by 13 per cent from September to October, sales for LCCs are down by 37 per cent,” said a travel company executive.
According to civil aviation ministry figures, while loads for full-service carriers like Jet and Kingfisher declined by a mere 3-4 per cent, loads for low-cost carriers declined by around 6 per cent (SpiceJet) to as much as 13 per cent (GoAir).
“With the number of passengers fast declining for LCCs, any benefits from decrease in ATF prices will have to be passed on to consumers, thereby again keeping the gap between revenue and costs more or less constant. This is unless the loads go up from around 50 per cent currently to around 60-65 per cent, something that is unlikely in the current scenario,” said an industry expert
Aviation industry experts expect the ATF prices to fall by 16 per cent in November, compared with the current month. This, they say, translates into bridging of nearly half the gap between the airlines’ operational costs and total revenues.
There could also be more good news. With Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel pushing for decrease in taxes on ATF (taxes constitute 30 per cent of the cost) and meeting Finance Minister P Chidambaram for that purpose next week, any cut would have a positive impact on the break-even levels of carriers. Chidambaram today said that while the government was looking at rationalisation of taxes on ATF, he had posed a question to the petroleum ministry on the issue of excise duty on jet fuel.
“At the moment, ATF constitutes 50 per cent of the operating cost of an airline. The average gap between revenue and our costs for the industry is around 15 per cent. So we will require an ATF fuel decrease of 30 per cent if we need to achieve the operational break-even,” said Ajay Singh, director of low-cost carrier SpiceJet. In the last two months, ATF prices have dropped by 20 per cent.
According to industry statistics, the current average base price (excluding taxes) of ATF is Rs 44,526/kilolitre. The expected decrease of Rs 6,300/kilolitre will bring the base prices down to Rs 38,226/kilolitre. An addition of 8.24 per cent excise duty and an average of 25 per cent sales tax gives the price of ATF as Rs 50,931/kilolitre, around 16 per cent lower than the current average ATF price of Rs 60,663/kilolitre.
The decrease, according to industry experts, would have been more had factors like the weaker rupee had not stemmed the fall of ATF prices.
The average price of the Indian crude basket this month was around 24 per cent lower than the average prices last month. But the average value of the rupee has also decreased by 5.71 per cent.
However, opinion is divided on whether the ATF cut will be passed on to the customers. “We cannot take a call on fares before the ATF prices completely stabilise. We have to watch the trend for at least a couple of months,” said Hitesh Patel, EVP, Kingfisher Airlines. But a senior director of a LCC said: “We might have to pass on part of the ATF fuel cut in lower fares to regain our market share as well as improve our passenger load factor. It is a complex balancing exercise.”
According to industry statistics, the slowdown in demand has affected the low-cost carriers more than the full-service airlines.
“While sales for the full-service carriers have only gone down by 13 per cent from September to October, sales for LCCs are down by 37 per cent,” said a travel company executive.
According to civil aviation ministry figures, while loads for full-service carriers like Jet and Kingfisher declined by a mere 3-4 per cent, loads for low-cost carriers declined by around 6 per cent (SpiceJet) to as much as 13 per cent (GoAir).
“With the number of passengers fast declining for LCCs, any benefits from decrease in ATF prices will have to be passed on to consumers, thereby again keeping the gap between revenue and costs more or less constant. This is unless the loads go up from around 50 per cent currently to around 60-65 per cent, something that is unlikely in the current scenario,” said an industry expert
Entertainment - India;Q&A Nitin Atroley & Vivek Gupta
Shuchi Bansal
Some months ago, India’s media and entertainment sector was the darling of most investors. Today, with the ad market looking ready to settle into a deep slumber and the global financial meltdown adding to the gloom, things don’t look rosy anymore. BMR Advisors, which was launched by breakaway partners when Andersen Consulting merged with Ernst & Young, consults with several media companies on tax and M&A issues. BMR partners and media specialists Nitin Atroley and Vivek Gupta refuse to share details of the merger they’re working on between Jagran TV Private Ltd and IBN 18 or the Star India-Balaji Telefilms split, but talk of the sector’s growth potential in the current context of the slowdown. Excerpts from an interview with Shuchi Bansal:
How does the current crisis affect media growth?
Gupta: There are three themes around which India’s media and entertainment sector will work. The first is digitalisation of content — we already have video-on-demand, internet music etc — and making it transportable across digital and mobile platforms. This is a big thrust for entertainment and media companies including print. Dainik Jagran has joined hands with Yahoo to launch a co-branded Hindi portal. Times Internet now has full mobile versions of its newspapers (The Times of India and The Economic Times), much like The Financial Times mobile in the UK. Network 18 has built up a separate division of web 18 entirely devoted to monetising its content over the internet.
Atroley: Of course, monetising this will take five years. The revenue base is still from consumers and not so much from advertising.
Gupta: But in the next five years, the advertising is expected to explode. We’ve already started seeing internet ads for both live and recorded video feeds. We foresee digital and media convergence, multiple distribution platforms and, therefore, growth.
Growth is what we are questioning.
Gupta: All predictions on growth are dictated by what is happening around us. So, on a day when the markets crash, we feel low. The second growth theme is regional. A lot of regional chains have come up and national players are showing interest in those regional chains.
Atroley: This has been happening for three-four years though Zee built its regional channels’ business much earlier. But there’s no clarity on the size of the market. It looks small since it is fragmented. It’ll be interesting to see how many national players will have a sustainable regional strategy.
And the third growth theme?
Gupta: New forms of advertising. Out of home (OOH) will become strong. We are seeing huge private equity investments in the sector from Goldman Sachs, Lehman and Warburg Pincus.
Atroley: OOH is still going into places (read metros) where things are little more organised. If you look at other towns and cities, OOH is pretty splintered.
Print and TV are also fragmented and cluttered.
Gupta: Yes. A study says that over the last five years, the cost of reaching the target audience has risen four times, even though the basic TV viewing time has increased. But because there is an increase in the number of channels, advertisers are forced to purchase more spots to reach the target audience.
Why are people launching more channels?
Gupta: For a moment, ignore the clutter. A medium like TV will continue to grow at twice the economy’s growth rate. A lot of play exists on the subscription and distribution side. If cable gets smoother or large parts of audiences migrate to DTH, the entertainment play becomes very viable immediately. Today it is not viable because channels spend a lot of money on distribution and advertising revenue gets fragmented. Subscription revenue kicks in only when you become a Star Plus (read leader).
Atroley: It’s going to be very tough for the general entertainment channels (GECs) which all look alike unless there is a subscription model which supplements revenue streams. But within general entertainment, there is space for niche channels.
Are channels valuation- or revenue-driven?
Gupta: Eventually everything has to be revenue-driven. Media valuations are all based on the expectation something dramatic will happen on the subscription side. Imagine what will happen if under-declaration goes away or if consumers start paying for niche channels.
Will the consumer pay?
Gupta: Tata Sky started with a family pack at Rs 200, then Rs 250 and Rs 300. It got audiences used to channels and then started withdrawing them. For example, Ten Sports became pay separately at Rs 15. Star Sports, Star Cricket and ESPN became pay from October 1 at Rs 40-45. We have not reached the UK level where Sky charges £17a month for five channels. Yes there is clutter. But if a couple of issues are resolved, the five-year story is very good.
How much private equity exists and is it difficult to find investors now?
Gupta: I don’t have a number for you. But there is a fair amount of funding in radio, TV and print companies like 9X, Sun TV, NDTV, UTV, Radio City, HT Media Ltd and others. Of course, the environment has worsened. But that’s not sector-specific, it is situational and all investors have become much more careful.
Atroley: Going forward, we will see selective investments in the media. The area where investment potential exists is distribution. That’s really the big opportunity waiting to happen if the regulatory framework is streamlined.
What about consolidation?
Atroley: It will be marginal because most large players have a play in most areas. Unless there’s some serious value the smaller players can add, I don’t see anyone willing to pay a lot of money for them.
Are you being approached by companies keen to sell off?
Gupta: There are some strains that are visible but I would not call it a trend.
Atroley: If the economy becomes a little soft over the next year, we might see something more visible then.
How has the media market changed?
Atroley: There’s less dominance. There are more players and more cost pressures. Three years ago, fewer players had the ability to make big investments — the distinction between global players with deep pockets and Indian players with small pockets has narrowed. Capital is no longer a huge differentiator. Who plays the game better will determine success.
Gupta: If we see any more loosening of regulation — one hears talk of FDI and FII limits being treated separately for the media — it could open up more funding.
Atroley: It should happen. It will improve liquidity of the stock for FIIs and therefore more institutions will follow the stock and demand will increase. If 26 per cent is owned by a foreign strategic investor, it leaves nothing for the FII today. Also, this limit includes NRIs. Even after this, 51 per cent can be owned by Indians and will give Indian management control in sensitive sectors where it is required.
Some months ago, India’s media and entertainment sector was the darling of most investors. Today, with the ad market looking ready to settle into a deep slumber and the global financial meltdown adding to the gloom, things don’t look rosy anymore. BMR Advisors, which was launched by breakaway partners when Andersen Consulting merged with Ernst & Young, consults with several media companies on tax and M&A issues. BMR partners and media specialists Nitin Atroley and Vivek Gupta refuse to share details of the merger they’re working on between Jagran TV Private Ltd and IBN 18 or the Star India-Balaji Telefilms split, but talk of the sector’s growth potential in the current context of the slowdown. Excerpts from an interview with Shuchi Bansal:
How does the current crisis affect media growth?
Gupta: There are three themes around which India’s media and entertainment sector will work. The first is digitalisation of content — we already have video-on-demand, internet music etc — and making it transportable across digital and mobile platforms. This is a big thrust for entertainment and media companies including print. Dainik Jagran has joined hands with Yahoo to launch a co-branded Hindi portal. Times Internet now has full mobile versions of its newspapers (The Times of India and The Economic Times), much like The Financial Times mobile in the UK. Network 18 has built up a separate division of web 18 entirely devoted to monetising its content over the internet.
Atroley: Of course, monetising this will take five years. The revenue base is still from consumers and not so much from advertising.
Gupta: But in the next five years, the advertising is expected to explode. We’ve already started seeing internet ads for both live and recorded video feeds. We foresee digital and media convergence, multiple distribution platforms and, therefore, growth.
Growth is what we are questioning.
Gupta: All predictions on growth are dictated by what is happening around us. So, on a day when the markets crash, we feel low. The second growth theme is regional. A lot of regional chains have come up and national players are showing interest in those regional chains.
Atroley: This has been happening for three-four years though Zee built its regional channels’ business much earlier. But there’s no clarity on the size of the market. It looks small since it is fragmented. It’ll be interesting to see how many national players will have a sustainable regional strategy.
And the third growth theme?
Gupta: New forms of advertising. Out of home (OOH) will become strong. We are seeing huge private equity investments in the sector from Goldman Sachs, Lehman and Warburg Pincus.
Atroley: OOH is still going into places (read metros) where things are little more organised. If you look at other towns and cities, OOH is pretty splintered.
Print and TV are also fragmented and cluttered.
Gupta: Yes. A study says that over the last five years, the cost of reaching the target audience has risen four times, even though the basic TV viewing time has increased. But because there is an increase in the number of channels, advertisers are forced to purchase more spots to reach the target audience.
Why are people launching more channels?
Gupta: For a moment, ignore the clutter. A medium like TV will continue to grow at twice the economy’s growth rate. A lot of play exists on the subscription and distribution side. If cable gets smoother or large parts of audiences migrate to DTH, the entertainment play becomes very viable immediately. Today it is not viable because channels spend a lot of money on distribution and advertising revenue gets fragmented. Subscription revenue kicks in only when you become a Star Plus (read leader).
Atroley: It’s going to be very tough for the general entertainment channels (GECs) which all look alike unless there is a subscription model which supplements revenue streams. But within general entertainment, there is space for niche channels.
Are channels valuation- or revenue-driven?
Gupta: Eventually everything has to be revenue-driven. Media valuations are all based on the expectation something dramatic will happen on the subscription side. Imagine what will happen if under-declaration goes away or if consumers start paying for niche channels.
Will the consumer pay?
Gupta: Tata Sky started with a family pack at Rs 200, then Rs 250 and Rs 300. It got audiences used to channels and then started withdrawing them. For example, Ten Sports became pay separately at Rs 15. Star Sports, Star Cricket and ESPN became pay from October 1 at Rs 40-45. We have not reached the UK level where Sky charges £17a month for five channels. Yes there is clutter. But if a couple of issues are resolved, the five-year story is very good.
How much private equity exists and is it difficult to find investors now?
Gupta: I don’t have a number for you. But there is a fair amount of funding in radio, TV and print companies like 9X, Sun TV, NDTV, UTV, Radio City, HT Media Ltd and others. Of course, the environment has worsened. But that’s not sector-specific, it is situational and all investors have become much more careful.
Atroley: Going forward, we will see selective investments in the media. The area where investment potential exists is distribution. That’s really the big opportunity waiting to happen if the regulatory framework is streamlined.
What about consolidation?
Atroley: It will be marginal because most large players have a play in most areas. Unless there’s some serious value the smaller players can add, I don’t see anyone willing to pay a lot of money for them.
Are you being approached by companies keen to sell off?
Gupta: There are some strains that are visible but I would not call it a trend.
Atroley: If the economy becomes a little soft over the next year, we might see something more visible then.
How has the media market changed?
Atroley: There’s less dominance. There are more players and more cost pressures. Three years ago, fewer players had the ability to make big investments — the distinction between global players with deep pockets and Indian players with small pockets has narrowed. Capital is no longer a huge differentiator. Who plays the game better will determine success.
Gupta: If we see any more loosening of regulation — one hears talk of FDI and FII limits being treated separately for the media — it could open up more funding.
Atroley: It should happen. It will improve liquidity of the stock for FIIs and therefore more institutions will follow the stock and demand will increase. If 26 per cent is owned by a foreign strategic investor, it leaves nothing for the FII today. Also, this limit includes NRIs. Even after this, 51 per cent can be owned by Indians and will give Indian management control in sensitive sectors where it is required.
Science - A way to erase bad memories ?
WASHINGTON: US researchers have said they are able to selectively erase memories from mice in a laboratory, raising hopes human memory afflictions like post-traumatic stress syndrome can one day be cured.
“Targeted memory erasure is no longer limited to the realm of science fiction,” the research team headed by Joe Tsien, from the Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, said in Thursday’s issue of Cell Press magazine. The new technique, which the team stress is at a very early stage, could be applied one day to the human brain to erase traumatic memories or deep-set fears, and leave all other memories unaffected.
Memory is generally separated into four different stages: acquisition, consolidation, storage, and retrieval. Earlier research identified specific molecules that appear to play a role in the various phases of the memory process.
But Tsien said his team found a way to quickly manipulate the activity of the “memory molecule,” the protein CaMKII (calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II) that plays a key role in brain cell communication, and so is linked to many aspects of memory.
Researchers developed a “chemical genetic strategy,” which made it possible to manipulate the protein in transgenic mice. “Using this technique, we examined the manipulation of transgenic CaMKII activity on the retrieval of short-term and long-term fear memories and novel object recognition memory” in transgenic mice, Tsien said.
The team figured out they could manipulate the protein in the mice’s brain as the animal was stimulated, and observe the brain’s ability to recall memory of the stimulation. Through the protein manipulation, researchers then found a way to not just block the mice’s memory of the stimulation, but erase them without impacting the brain’s ability to recall other memories
“Targeted memory erasure is no longer limited to the realm of science fiction,” the research team headed by Joe Tsien, from the Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, said in Thursday’s issue of Cell Press magazine. The new technique, which the team stress is at a very early stage, could be applied one day to the human brain to erase traumatic memories or deep-set fears, and leave all other memories unaffected.
Memory is generally separated into four different stages: acquisition, consolidation, storage, and retrieval. Earlier research identified specific molecules that appear to play a role in the various phases of the memory process.
But Tsien said his team found a way to quickly manipulate the activity of the “memory molecule,” the protein CaMKII (calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II) that plays a key role in brain cell communication, and so is linked to many aspects of memory.
Researchers developed a “chemical genetic strategy,” which made it possible to manipulate the protein in transgenic mice. “Using this technique, we examined the manipulation of transgenic CaMKII activity on the retrieval of short-term and long-term fear memories and novel object recognition memory” in transgenic mice, Tsien said.
The team figured out they could manipulate the protein in the mice’s brain as the animal was stimulated, and observe the brain’s ability to recall memory of the stimulation. Through the protein manipulation, researchers then found a way to not just block the mice’s memory of the stimulation, but erase them without impacting the brain’s ability to recall other memories
India - Gets $800mn ADB loan to tap Himalayan hydropower
MANILA: The Asian Development Bank said on Friday that it had approved an $800m loan to help the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh expand hydropower g
eneration with a series of projects in the western Himalayas.
With the help of the eight-year loan package, Himachal Pradesh plans to harness five major rivers to build hydropower plants that will provide a combined capacity of 808 megawatts, the Manila-based bank said in a statement.
The ADB and the state government have identified two projects ready for financing through the first loan tranche of $150m, building the 111MW Sawra Kuddu project on the Pabber river, and civil works for the 65MW Kashang I project.
"Himachal Pradesh's focus on hydropower development will provide jobs to state residents and will further the state's and the country's goal of maximising this clean, indigenous resource to help meet its energy needs," said ADB energy economist Andrew Jeffries.
The mountainous area's power generation potential is 20,415MW --about 25% of India's total hydropower potential -- out of which only 6,150MW has been developed, the bank said.
India is critically short of energy to fuel its economy and imports more than 70% of its energy needs.
eneration with a series of projects in the western Himalayas.
With the help of the eight-year loan package, Himachal Pradesh plans to harness five major rivers to build hydropower plants that will provide a combined capacity of 808 megawatts, the Manila-based bank said in a statement.
The ADB and the state government have identified two projects ready for financing through the first loan tranche of $150m, building the 111MW Sawra Kuddu project on the Pabber river, and civil works for the 65MW Kashang I project.
"Himachal Pradesh's focus on hydropower development will provide jobs to state residents and will further the state's and the country's goal of maximising this clean, indigenous resource to help meet its energy needs," said ADB energy economist Andrew Jeffries.
The mountainous area's power generation potential is 20,415MW --about 25% of India's total hydropower potential -- out of which only 6,150MW has been developed, the bank said.
India is critically short of energy to fuel its economy and imports more than 70% of its energy needs.
Business - US;Online sales to Top Stores for Holidays,per eMarketer
Consumers are strapped for cash this holiday shopping season and retailers with the best deals will capture the dollars spent -- especially online, according to eMarketer.
This year, online holiday sales (excluding travel) will total $32.1 billion, up slightly more than 10 percent over 2007. This is a sharp decline from growth rates in the low-to-mid 20 percent range seen over the past few years.
The weak economy is placing downward pressure on e-commerce sales this season. That pressure accentuates the already declining sales growth, which is a sign of the maturation of the online shopping channel.
Shoppers will shift a larger share of their purchases from stores to the Internet to save gas money and avail themselves of retailers' free shipping offers.
India - Tribals;Lost in the Woods
Ramachandra Guha
Fifty years ago, in October 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a short note explaining what India’s policies towards the tribals should be. He urged that tribal rights in land and forest be protected, that tribal arts and culture be respected and renewed, that the tribals themselves be involved in their own administration (thus ‘we should avoid introducing too many outsiders into tribal territory’), and that government schemes in tribal areas ‘work through, and not in rivalry to, their own social and cultural institutions’. As Nehru pointed out, ‘people should develop along the lines of their own genius and we should avoid imposing anything on them’.
Nehru’s prescriptions have been comprehensively disregarded by the Centre, as well as by the governments of the different states that have significant tribal populations. The quality of schools and hospitals in tribal areas is abysmal. There has been little attempt to involve tribals in their own administration. Worse, state policies have worked actively to dispossess tribals of their land and homes, and to deny them their traditional rights in the forest.
As studies have shown, the tribals of central India have gained least and lost most from six decades of independence and economic development. Their access to education and health care is even more erratic than that of the Dalits. Again, unlike the Dalits they usually go unrepresented in the higher levels of the bureaucracy, the judiciary, or the Union Cabinet. Where the political system has ignored them, the economic system has discriminated against them. Tribal lands are submerged to provide water to Hindu farmers and electricity to urban residents. Else they are taken over by mining companies seeking to service the growing global market for minerals such as iron ore and bauxite. At other times, they are the victims of development’s equally modern ‘Other’: conservation. Thus a disproportionately high number of those displaced by national parks and sanctuaries are tribals.
The Indian state has treated its tribal citizens with contempt and condescension; so, too, have the major political parties of independent India. This neglect has opened up a space for other actors to move into. Thus, in recent decades, three different kinds of missionaries have sought to increase their influence in tribal areas. These are the Christian missionaries, the Hindu missionaries, and the Maoist missionaries.
These three groups each see in the tribals a vehicle for increasing their own social and political influence. Admittedly, each group does try to bring some tangible benefits to the tribals. From the late 19th century, the Christian missionaries have run schools and hospitals in adivasi areas. Since the 1950s, Hindu missionaries have emulated them, by opening their own set of pathshalas and clinics. The Maoists, for their part, do often attempt to get the tribals a higher wage
for labouring in a landlord’s field, and higher rates for the collection of forest produce.
These welfare-oriented activities, however, are merely a means. The end, in each case, is to convert the tribal to the religious or political philosophy of the group in question. The padre or nun hopes to make the tribal a Christian; the sant or sadhu hopes to make the tribal a Hindu; the comrade or party secretary hopes to make him a Maoist revolutionary. Thus, if the state and the established political parties have tended to treat the tribals as second-class citizens, Christian, Hindu, and Maoist missionaries tend to treat them as cannon fodder.
Conventionally, the term ‘missionaries’ is reserved for the Christians. However, in tribal areas, the VHP and the Maoists must be considered missionaries, too, in that they seek, by blandishments or by force, to convert the tribals to their own worldview. These three groups work energetically to augment their own flock at the expense of the others. Notably, each group has contempt for the history, culture, ideas, and aspirations of the tribals themselves. Each works not through, but in rivalry, to tribal cultural institutions.
Thus, Hindu and Christian schools teach tribals to forget their own Gods and embrace the Gods promoted by them. Maoist meetings urge the tribals to replace their deities with the revolutionary trinity of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. At the same time, sadhu, sant, priest, nun, comrade and revolutionary have all shown little interest in the beauties of tribal art, folklore, music, and craftsmanship.
Tribal India has increasingly become a theatre for the competitive harvest of souls. In this rivalry the Christians are placed at a severe disadvantage. This is because the Maoists have behind them the power of the gun, whereas the Hindutva groups can command the power of the State apparatus. Wherever the BJP is in government, whether by itself or in a coalition, it makes sure that it controls the Education and Home portfolios, the better to reshape the curriculum of government schools and to direct the actions (or, as the case may be, the inaction) of the police. This asymmetry lies behind the recent killings and beatings of Christians in Orissa, where the state administration has allowed the VHP and Bajrang Dal cadres to run amok for weeks.
Perhaps the violence in Orissa will soon stop; one certainly hopes it does. But it is hard to see how, within the present configuration, the adivasi will ever be treated with the dignity and respect that Nehru called for. Short-sighted state governments will continue to dispossess tribals to humour urban populations or mining companies. Arrogant missionaries will continue to demand that tribals abandon their own culture to embrace that of the outsider.
Fifty years ago, in October 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a short note explaining what India’s policies towards the tribals should be. He urged that tribal rights in land and forest be protected, that tribal arts and culture be respected and renewed, that the tribals themselves be involved in their own administration (thus ‘we should avoid introducing too many outsiders into tribal territory’), and that government schemes in tribal areas ‘work through, and not in rivalry to, their own social and cultural institutions’. As Nehru pointed out, ‘people should develop along the lines of their own genius and we should avoid imposing anything on them’.
Nehru’s prescriptions have been comprehensively disregarded by the Centre, as well as by the governments of the different states that have significant tribal populations. The quality of schools and hospitals in tribal areas is abysmal. There has been little attempt to involve tribals in their own administration. Worse, state policies have worked actively to dispossess tribals of their land and homes, and to deny them their traditional rights in the forest.
As studies have shown, the tribals of central India have gained least and lost most from six decades of independence and economic development. Their access to education and health care is even more erratic than that of the Dalits. Again, unlike the Dalits they usually go unrepresented in the higher levels of the bureaucracy, the judiciary, or the Union Cabinet. Where the political system has ignored them, the economic system has discriminated against them. Tribal lands are submerged to provide water to Hindu farmers and electricity to urban residents. Else they are taken over by mining companies seeking to service the growing global market for minerals such as iron ore and bauxite. At other times, they are the victims of development’s equally modern ‘Other’: conservation. Thus a disproportionately high number of those displaced by national parks and sanctuaries are tribals.
The Indian state has treated its tribal citizens with contempt and condescension; so, too, have the major political parties of independent India. This neglect has opened up a space for other actors to move into. Thus, in recent decades, three different kinds of missionaries have sought to increase their influence in tribal areas. These are the Christian missionaries, the Hindu missionaries, and the Maoist missionaries.
These three groups each see in the tribals a vehicle for increasing their own social and political influence. Admittedly, each group does try to bring some tangible benefits to the tribals. From the late 19th century, the Christian missionaries have run schools and hospitals in adivasi areas. Since the 1950s, Hindu missionaries have emulated them, by opening their own set of pathshalas and clinics. The Maoists, for their part, do often attempt to get the tribals a higher wage
for labouring in a landlord’s field, and higher rates for the collection of forest produce.
These welfare-oriented activities, however, are merely a means. The end, in each case, is to convert the tribal to the religious or political philosophy of the group in question. The padre or nun hopes to make the tribal a Christian; the sant or sadhu hopes to make the tribal a Hindu; the comrade or party secretary hopes to make him a Maoist revolutionary. Thus, if the state and the established political parties have tended to treat the tribals as second-class citizens, Christian, Hindu, and Maoist missionaries tend to treat them as cannon fodder.
Conventionally, the term ‘missionaries’ is reserved for the Christians. However, in tribal areas, the VHP and the Maoists must be considered missionaries, too, in that they seek, by blandishments or by force, to convert the tribals to their own worldview. These three groups work energetically to augment their own flock at the expense of the others. Notably, each group has contempt for the history, culture, ideas, and aspirations of the tribals themselves. Each works not through, but in rivalry, to tribal cultural institutions.
Thus, Hindu and Christian schools teach tribals to forget their own Gods and embrace the Gods promoted by them. Maoist meetings urge the tribals to replace their deities with the revolutionary trinity of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. At the same time, sadhu, sant, priest, nun, comrade and revolutionary have all shown little interest in the beauties of tribal art, folklore, music, and craftsmanship.
Tribal India has increasingly become a theatre for the competitive harvest of souls. In this rivalry the Christians are placed at a severe disadvantage. This is because the Maoists have behind them the power of the gun, whereas the Hindutva groups can command the power of the State apparatus. Wherever the BJP is in government, whether by itself or in a coalition, it makes sure that it controls the Education and Home portfolios, the better to reshape the curriculum of government schools and to direct the actions (or, as the case may be, the inaction) of the police. This asymmetry lies behind the recent killings and beatings of Christians in Orissa, where the state administration has allowed the VHP and Bajrang Dal cadres to run amok for weeks.
Perhaps the violence in Orissa will soon stop; one certainly hopes it does. But it is hard to see how, within the present configuration, the adivasi will ever be treated with the dignity and respect that Nehru called for. Short-sighted state governments will continue to dispossess tribals to humour urban populations or mining companies. Arrogant missionaries will continue to demand that tribals abandon their own culture to embrace that of the outsider.
World - India's air navigation system to be world's most sophisticated
HYDERABAD: By 2011, India will have arguably the most sophisticated satellite-based air navigation system in the world that will bring immense benef
its to both civilian and military aircraft, experts said.
Raytheon Company of the US is currently leading a team of companies to deliver a comprehensive solution for a global satellite navigation system to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Airports Authority of India.
The $196 mn or Rs.7.74 bn Global Positioning Satellite-Aided Geosynchronous Augmented Navigation system or GAGAN, to be implemented from the end of this year or early next year, will provide India with the most accurate, flexible and efficient air navigation system ever deployed.
"India had asked for the most sophisticated navigation system - even more sophisticated than what we have implemented in the US and Japan and we have shown that we are ready to deliver that," Raytheon's director of business development and strategic planning Fred A. Treyz III told media.
Treyz was here as part of Raytheon's delegation to the first civil aviation air show in India, the India Aviation 2008 held here Oct 15-18, 2008.
The GAGAN design is based on the experience that Raytheon gained while implementing the only certified space-based navigation augmentation systems in the world in the US and Japan.
The Wide Area Augmentation System, designed and developed by Raytheon and now being used in the US, was certified
and commissioned by the Federal Aviation Administration of the US in July 2003.
The MTSAT Satellite Augmentation System also designed and developed by Raytheon was certified and commissioned by the Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau in September 2007.
The European Union is currently implementing the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) but this system is yet to be certified.
No other nation or group of nations is deploying such sophisticated air navigation systems.
The other members of the Raytheon-led technology team are Accord Software and Systems Pvt. Ltd. of Bangalore,
Elcome Technologies Pvt. Ltd. of Gurgaon and Naverus Inc. of Kent, Washington.
Accord Software is providing Global Positioning System (GPS)-based user receiver prototype development optimized for the equatorial region, Elcome is providing logistical and on-site support and Naverus is providing performance-based navigation route design, procedure flight validation and other related services.
The project will provide straight-line fuel-efficient routes and precision approach landings, thereby reducing fuel burn substantially. It will also enable multiple approach capability.
GAGAN will also make it possible to provide coverage of oceanic areas, which is not possible by terrestrial systems; improve airport and airspace access in all weather conditions; enhance reliability and reduce delays; provide uniform and accurate navigation performance over the entire airspace; provide fuel efficient air corridors and provide CAT-I approach without ground element support.
Broadly, the project would result in fuel savings/efficiency for airlines and enable higher air traffic within the limited airspace
its to both civilian and military aircraft, experts said.
Raytheon Company of the US is currently leading a team of companies to deliver a comprehensive solution for a global satellite navigation system to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Airports Authority of India.
The $196 mn or Rs.7.74 bn Global Positioning Satellite-Aided Geosynchronous Augmented Navigation system or GAGAN, to be implemented from the end of this year or early next year, will provide India with the most accurate, flexible and efficient air navigation system ever deployed.
"India had asked for the most sophisticated navigation system - even more sophisticated than what we have implemented in the US and Japan and we have shown that we are ready to deliver that," Raytheon's director of business development and strategic planning Fred A. Treyz III told media.
Treyz was here as part of Raytheon's delegation to the first civil aviation air show in India, the India Aviation 2008 held here Oct 15-18, 2008.
The GAGAN design is based on the experience that Raytheon gained while implementing the only certified space-based navigation augmentation systems in the world in the US and Japan.
The Wide Area Augmentation System, designed and developed by Raytheon and now being used in the US, was certified
and commissioned by the Federal Aviation Administration of the US in July 2003.
The MTSAT Satellite Augmentation System also designed and developed by Raytheon was certified and commissioned by the Japanese Civil Aviation Bureau in September 2007.
The European Union is currently implementing the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) but this system is yet to be certified.
No other nation or group of nations is deploying such sophisticated air navigation systems.
The other members of the Raytheon-led technology team are Accord Software and Systems Pvt. Ltd. of Bangalore,
Elcome Technologies Pvt. Ltd. of Gurgaon and Naverus Inc. of Kent, Washington.
Accord Software is providing Global Positioning System (GPS)-based user receiver prototype development optimized for the equatorial region, Elcome is providing logistical and on-site support and Naverus is providing performance-based navigation route design, procedure flight validation and other related services.
The project will provide straight-line fuel-efficient routes and precision approach landings, thereby reducing fuel burn substantially. It will also enable multiple approach capability.
GAGAN will also make it possible to provide coverage of oceanic areas, which is not possible by terrestrial systems; improve airport and airspace access in all weather conditions; enhance reliability and reduce delays; provide uniform and accurate navigation performance over the entire airspace; provide fuel efficient air corridors and provide CAT-I approach without ground element support.
Broadly, the project would result in fuel savings/efficiency for airlines and enable higher air traffic within the limited airspace
Travel - World's Top 10 tourist destinations
France
Rank: 1
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 81.9 million
France remains the top tourist destination in the world. And not without any reason.
It has, in fact, everything that you could ever want to see on your holidays: a great city like Paris, good beaches, more monuments and lovely nature, among others. France is also a very pleasant place to stay.
It has good food, great wines and people enjoy their lives.
And the best thing about it is that, barring Paris, living in France is not that expensive.
Spain
Rank: 2
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 59.2 million
It’s a spectacular and diverse country. The uniqueness of Spain lies in the separate kingdoms which made up the original Spanish nation.
These regions remain diverse in their language, culture, cuisine and art.
Still Spanish people are very open-hearted and communicative. Spain is also famous for its wines.
United States
Rank: 3
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 56 million
Situated almost entirely in the western hemisphere, the US is one of the world’s most ethnically diverse and multiculture nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries.
It is also home to several of the world’s most exciting cities, some truly mind-blowing landscapes, a strong sense of regionalism, a trenchant mythology, more history than the country gives itself credit for and, arguably, some of the most approachable natives in the world.
China
Rank: 4
With 54.7 million tourist arrivals in 2007
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 54.7 million
China is currently the fourth most popular tourist destination in the world, although using the 2008 Olympics as its launch pad, China is expected to replace France as the world’s top tourism destination by 2014.
China is situated in eastern Asia on the western shore of the Pacific Ocean, with an area of 9.6 million square kilometers.
Its continental coastline extends for about 18,000 kilometers, and its vast sea surface is studded with more than 5,000 islands, of which Taiwan andHainan are the largest.
China has one of the world’s oldest people and continuous civilizations, consisting of states and cultures dating back more than six millennia.
Italy
Rank: 5
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 43.7 million
Italy is a beautiful country. A place of olive oil, pasta, wine, mafia and sunshine, roman ruins and renaissance palaces, Italy has a lot to give its tourists.
It is also a country full of interesting things for the casual tourist and the educated tourist.
Venice and Verona are the most famous tourist attractions in the north-east.
United Kingdom
Rank: 6
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 30.7 million
The United Kingdom constitutes of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The country is one of the 15 member states of the European Union and is the leading industrial and exporting country.
The north and the west are made up of high hills and mountains, while the south and east has a lowland zone with milder climate and better soils for farming. Britain’s moist climate with persistent rainfall has given rise to many rivers and lakes.
Germany
Rank: 7
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 24.4 million
Germany’s cities have endless pleasant surprises in store for those who enjoy good food and drink.
In addition to top-quality international cooking, each region has its own local specialities, ranging from hearty country fare at simple inns to modern light cuisine at star-rated restaurants.
Germany has not one but many major cities. And each city has its own unique character, formed by its history and the surrounding region. Today, Germany is also an industrial powerhouse.
Ukraine
Rank: 8
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 23.1 million
Ukraine is situated in the south-eastern part of Central Europe and has its own territory, government, national emblem, flag and anthem.
It borders on Russia, Byelorussia,Moldova, Slovakia, Roumania,Hungary and Poland on land and Russia,Georgia, Bulgaria, Roumania and Turkey on sea.
The country is rich in natural resources and its territory is mostly a level, treeless plain
Turkey
Rank: 9
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 22.2 million
It is the country that unites Europe and Asia, with her glorious past that lasted for centuries.
It is a country where European aspirations sit comfortably alongside Asian traditions and the volatile atmosphere of the Middle East morphs seamlessly into the relaxed outlook of the Mediterranean world.
The land of many cultures, decorated with the most impressive historical ruins and monuments of these glorious ages and epochs, has been the cradle of many outstanding civilisations.
Mexico
Rank: 10
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 21.4 million
Mexico is about one-fifth the size of the United States. It is the second largest economy in Latin America.
It is a country in an intermediate advanced stage of development with a positive economic performance.
Mexico is a diverse country and a millennial culture with the Olmecan tribe being the first civilization that appeared around 1500 years BC.
It is rich in traditions, history, art and religion, offering a complete tourist infrastructure.
Rank: 1
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 81.9 million
France remains the top tourist destination in the world. And not without any reason.
It has, in fact, everything that you could ever want to see on your holidays: a great city like Paris, good beaches, more monuments and lovely nature, among others. France is also a very pleasant place to stay.
It has good food, great wines and people enjoy their lives.
And the best thing about it is that, barring Paris, living in France is not that expensive.
Spain
Rank: 2
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 59.2 million
It’s a spectacular and diverse country. The uniqueness of Spain lies in the separate kingdoms which made up the original Spanish nation.
These regions remain diverse in their language, culture, cuisine and art.
Still Spanish people are very open-hearted and communicative. Spain is also famous for its wines.
United States
Rank: 3
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 56 million
Situated almost entirely in the western hemisphere, the US is one of the world’s most ethnically diverse and multiculture nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries.
It is also home to several of the world’s most exciting cities, some truly mind-blowing landscapes, a strong sense of regionalism, a trenchant mythology, more history than the country gives itself credit for and, arguably, some of the most approachable natives in the world.
China
Rank: 4
With 54.7 million tourist arrivals in 2007
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 54.7 million
China is currently the fourth most popular tourist destination in the world, although using the 2008 Olympics as its launch pad, China is expected to replace France as the world’s top tourism destination by 2014.
China is situated in eastern Asia on the western shore of the Pacific Ocean, with an area of 9.6 million square kilometers.
Its continental coastline extends for about 18,000 kilometers, and its vast sea surface is studded with more than 5,000 islands, of which Taiwan andHainan are the largest.
China has one of the world’s oldest people and continuous civilizations, consisting of states and cultures dating back more than six millennia.
Italy
Rank: 5
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 43.7 million
Italy is a beautiful country. A place of olive oil, pasta, wine, mafia and sunshine, roman ruins and renaissance palaces, Italy has a lot to give its tourists.
It is also a country full of interesting things for the casual tourist and the educated tourist.
Venice and Verona are the most famous tourist attractions in the north-east.
United Kingdom
Rank: 6
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 30.7 million
The United Kingdom constitutes of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The country is one of the 15 member states of the European Union and is the leading industrial and exporting country.
The north and the west are made up of high hills and mountains, while the south and east has a lowland zone with milder climate and better soils for farming. Britain’s moist climate with persistent rainfall has given rise to many rivers and lakes.
Germany
Rank: 7
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 24.4 million
Germany’s cities have endless pleasant surprises in store for those who enjoy good food and drink.
In addition to top-quality international cooking, each region has its own local specialities, ranging from hearty country fare at simple inns to modern light cuisine at star-rated restaurants.
Germany has not one but many major cities. And each city has its own unique character, formed by its history and the surrounding region. Today, Germany is also an industrial powerhouse.
Ukraine
Rank: 8
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 23.1 million
Ukraine is situated in the south-eastern part of Central Europe and has its own territory, government, national emblem, flag and anthem.
It borders on Russia, Byelorussia,Moldova, Slovakia, Roumania,Hungary and Poland on land and Russia,Georgia, Bulgaria, Roumania and Turkey on sea.
The country is rich in natural resources and its territory is mostly a level, treeless plain
Turkey
Rank: 9
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 22.2 million
It is the country that unites Europe and Asia, with her glorious past that lasted for centuries.
It is a country where European aspirations sit comfortably alongside Asian traditions and the volatile atmosphere of the Middle East morphs seamlessly into the relaxed outlook of the Mediterranean world.
The land of many cultures, decorated with the most impressive historical ruins and monuments of these glorious ages and epochs, has been the cradle of many outstanding civilisations.
Mexico
Rank: 10
International tourist arrivals in ‘07: 21.4 million
Mexico is about one-fifth the size of the United States. It is the second largest economy in Latin America.
It is a country in an intermediate advanced stage of development with a positive economic performance.
Mexico is a diverse country and a millennial culture with the Olmecan tribe being the first civilization that appeared around 1500 years BC.
It is rich in traditions, history, art and religion, offering a complete tourist infrastructure.
World - UNESCO to map global freshwater resources
The UNESCO is all set to publish the first-ever world map of underground aquifers, which account for some 96 per cent of global freshwater resources.
Despite their strategic importance, no global inventory of aquifers most of which straddle international boundaries had been compiled before United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) started work on its online map. It will be launched to coincide with the submission to the General Assembly of a draft Convention on Trans-boundary Aquifers next week.
The Unesco is presenting a detailed map identifying underground water resources that are shared by at least two countries, using data compiled since 2000 by the organisation’s International Hydrological Programme for a groundwater database.
The map will include information about the quality of water and rate of replenishment of the 273 trans-boundary aquifers 68 in the American continent, 38 in Africa, 65 in Eastern Europe, 90 in Western Europe and 12 in Asia. Underground aquifers account for 70 per cent of water used in the European Union, and are often the only source of supply in arid and semi-arid areas 100 per cent in Saudi Arabia and Malta, 95 per cent in Tunisia and 75 per cent in Morocco.
Despite their strategic importance, no global inventory of aquifers most of which straddle international boundaries had been compiled before United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) started work on its online map. It will be launched to coincide with the submission to the General Assembly of a draft Convention on Trans-boundary Aquifers next week.
The Unesco is presenting a detailed map identifying underground water resources that are shared by at least two countries, using data compiled since 2000 by the organisation’s International Hydrological Programme for a groundwater database.
The map will include information about the quality of water and rate of replenishment of the 273 trans-boundary aquifers 68 in the American continent, 38 in Africa, 65 in Eastern Europe, 90 in Western Europe and 12 in Asia. Underground aquifers account for 70 per cent of water used in the European Union, and are often the only source of supply in arid and semi-arid areas 100 per cent in Saudi Arabia and Malta, 95 per cent in Tunisia and 75 per cent in Morocco.
Business - Britannia bets big on nano bites
Shruti Sabharwal
BANGALORE: Nusli Wadia-led Britannia’s efforts to drive biscuit sales through personal-consumption packs, priced between Rs 2 and Rs 5, has taken off
with the newly carved out nano segment, possibly adding over Rs 100 crore in FY09, the first full financial year of the roll-out.
Britannia unveiled the personal-consumption packs in the latter half of 2007 to capture new consumption opportunities and to break away from the traditional mould of being a household grocery item for the family.
“We do not want to segment the consumer, instead we want to segment the consumption opportunity. This small pack is for the individual who is on the go and this is much more hygienic than street food,” Britannia Industries managing director Vinita Bali said. “One can also buy this instead of a chocolate and it will be much healthier,” she added.
Britannia created the personal-consumption pack category with its blockbuster mass brand Tiger, and later bought other brands like 50:50, Treat and Marie Gold into the new pack segmentation. With these packs the company is also bracing up to take on the chocolates segment, positioning this as a healthier option.
At over Rs 100 crore, these nano packs account for under 5% of Britannia’s annual revenue currently, but are poised for a quantum leap. In context, it must be mentioned that Britannia has stemmed a drop in its market share, which now stands at 34% by value in the biscuit market this year.
The Rs 2,600-crore Britannia has been working on capturing the new consumption opportunities, especially the market for impulse buying, instead of traditional marketing driven by demographic segmentation. “We think, it makes sense in a market place where the 35 year-old is behaving like a 17 year-old and vice versa,” a company official added.
With the nano personal consumption packs working well for biscuits, Britannia may now do the same in its non-biscuit business, especially in the case of cakes and rusks.
BANGALORE: Nusli Wadia-led Britannia’s efforts to drive biscuit sales through personal-consumption packs, priced between Rs 2 and Rs 5, has taken off
with the newly carved out nano segment, possibly adding over Rs 100 crore in FY09, the first full financial year of the roll-out.
Britannia unveiled the personal-consumption packs in the latter half of 2007 to capture new consumption opportunities and to break away from the traditional mould of being a household grocery item for the family.
“We do not want to segment the consumer, instead we want to segment the consumption opportunity. This small pack is for the individual who is on the go and this is much more hygienic than street food,” Britannia Industries managing director Vinita Bali said. “One can also buy this instead of a chocolate and it will be much healthier,” she added.
Britannia created the personal-consumption pack category with its blockbuster mass brand Tiger, and later bought other brands like 50:50, Treat and Marie Gold into the new pack segmentation. With these packs the company is also bracing up to take on the chocolates segment, positioning this as a healthier option.
At over Rs 100 crore, these nano packs account for under 5% of Britannia’s annual revenue currently, but are poised for a quantum leap. In context, it must be mentioned that Britannia has stemmed a drop in its market share, which now stands at 34% by value in the biscuit market this year.
The Rs 2,600-crore Britannia has been working on capturing the new consumption opportunities, especially the market for impulse buying, instead of traditional marketing driven by demographic segmentation. “We think, it makes sense in a market place where the 35 year-old is behaving like a 17 year-old and vice versa,” a company official added.
With the nano personal consumption packs working well for biscuits, Britannia may now do the same in its non-biscuit business, especially in the case of cakes and rusks.
Entertainment - India;Screen Sparklers
Minakshi Saini
It’s that time of the year again, when several releases are lined up and people are busy planning what films to catch. However, this year, the buzz around the golden Diwali period seems a bit thanda. Of the four films releasing next week, none can be called blockbusters, certainly not in the same league as previous Diwali films like Om Shanti Om and Saawariya (2007) or Don and Jaan-e-Mann (2006). Diwali dhamaka
Golmaal Returns
Director: Rohit Shetty
Starring: Ajay Devgan, Tusshar Kapoor,
Arshad Warsi, Shreyas Talpade, Kareena Kapoor, Anjana Sukhani, Amrita Arora, Celina Jaitley
Fashion
Director: Madhur Bhandarkar
Starring: Priyanka Chopra, Arjan Bajwa, Mugdha Godse,
Arbaaz Khan, Harsh Chhaya, Sameer Soni, Kangna Ranaut, Kitu Gidwani
Roadside Romeo
Director: Jugal Hansraj
Starring: Saif Ali Khan: voiceover of a dog (Romeo); Kareena Kapoor: voiceover of a dog (Laila); Javed
Jaffrey: voiceover of
a dog (Charlie Anna)
Heroes
Director: Samir Karnik
Starring: Salman Khan, Sunny Deol, Bobby Deol, Mithun Chakraborty, Preity Zinta, Sohail Khan, Vatsal Sheth, Dino Morea, Amrita Arora, Riya Sen
Of this year’s four releases, Roadside Romeo (Oct 24) is riding the Indian animation wave; Fashion (Oct 29) has been in the news for controversies; Heroes (Oct 24) has seen low-key promotions; and Golmaal Returns (Oct 29) is banking on the success of the first film. A pretty mixed bag. Which is just why each may find its own audience.
Neat slots
There are no face-offs this time like previous years. The varied genres of animation, patriotism, drama and comedy should each draw a sizeable number of viewers.
An industry expert says, “Being a cartoon film, Roadside Romeo has a limited appeal and it’s releasing only in multiplexes. Heroes might have a wider appeal due to its multi-star cast. Fashion, with an A certificate, is likely to have more takers in the cities, and Golmaal Returns will look to repeat the original’s success.”
The films that have been generating hype over the past few months and were to hit theatres around Diwali, have now been delayed. These are Akshay Kumar’s Chandni Chowk to China, Shah Rukh Khan’s Billoo Barber, Salman Khan’s Yuvvraaj and the Abhishek Bachchan-Priyanka Chopra-starrer Dostana.
Surprise package
Trade analyst and film critic Rajeev Masand feels, “It’s unfortunate that all these big films missed the Diwali week. But as Diwali is meant for surprise gifts, we can expect one of these films — or maybe all of them — to be surprise packages that might work wonders for the industry.”
The industry needs such wonders desperately. After Singh is Kinng, no film has done very well. Drona, turned out to be a white elephant and Hello managed to just get by.
The lack of clutter should prove to be an advantage. Fashion and Golmaal Returns are the strongest contenders [as box-office toppers] as the subject interests the audience,” believes Saurabh Varma of Reliance Big Entertainment. “Also, Roadside Romeo has a bright chance.”
“Fashion and Golmaal
Returns will do better, with an 80 per cent occupancy”, predicts Deepak Taluja of Fun Cinemas. “Roadside Romeo and Heroes will have 40-50 per cent.”
“These films are more content-driven than star-driven,” points out Varma. If they work, it would be a triumph of substance over style.
It’s that time of the year again, when several releases are lined up and people are busy planning what films to catch. However, this year, the buzz around the golden Diwali period seems a bit thanda. Of the four films releasing next week, none can be called blockbusters, certainly not in the same league as previous Diwali films like Om Shanti Om and Saawariya (2007) or Don and Jaan-e-Mann (2006). Diwali dhamaka
Golmaal Returns
Director: Rohit Shetty
Starring: Ajay Devgan, Tusshar Kapoor,
Arshad Warsi, Shreyas Talpade, Kareena Kapoor, Anjana Sukhani, Amrita Arora, Celina Jaitley
Fashion
Director: Madhur Bhandarkar
Starring: Priyanka Chopra, Arjan Bajwa, Mugdha Godse,
Arbaaz Khan, Harsh Chhaya, Sameer Soni, Kangna Ranaut, Kitu Gidwani
Roadside Romeo
Director: Jugal Hansraj
Starring: Saif Ali Khan: voiceover of a dog (Romeo); Kareena Kapoor: voiceover of a dog (Laila); Javed
Jaffrey: voiceover of
a dog (Charlie Anna)
Heroes
Director: Samir Karnik
Starring: Salman Khan, Sunny Deol, Bobby Deol, Mithun Chakraborty, Preity Zinta, Sohail Khan, Vatsal Sheth, Dino Morea, Amrita Arora, Riya Sen
Of this year’s four releases, Roadside Romeo (Oct 24) is riding the Indian animation wave; Fashion (Oct 29) has been in the news for controversies; Heroes (Oct 24) has seen low-key promotions; and Golmaal Returns (Oct 29) is banking on the success of the first film. A pretty mixed bag. Which is just why each may find its own audience.
Neat slots
There are no face-offs this time like previous years. The varied genres of animation, patriotism, drama and comedy should each draw a sizeable number of viewers.
An industry expert says, “Being a cartoon film, Roadside Romeo has a limited appeal and it’s releasing only in multiplexes. Heroes might have a wider appeal due to its multi-star cast. Fashion, with an A certificate, is likely to have more takers in the cities, and Golmaal Returns will look to repeat the original’s success.”
The films that have been generating hype over the past few months and were to hit theatres around Diwali, have now been delayed. These are Akshay Kumar’s Chandni Chowk to China, Shah Rukh Khan’s Billoo Barber, Salman Khan’s Yuvvraaj and the Abhishek Bachchan-Priyanka Chopra-starrer Dostana.
Surprise package
Trade analyst and film critic Rajeev Masand feels, “It’s unfortunate that all these big films missed the Diwali week. But as Diwali is meant for surprise gifts, we can expect one of these films — or maybe all of them — to be surprise packages that might work wonders for the industry.”
The industry needs such wonders desperately. After Singh is Kinng, no film has done very well. Drona, turned out to be a white elephant and Hello managed to just get by.
The lack of clutter should prove to be an advantage. Fashion and Golmaal Returns are the strongest contenders [as box-office toppers] as the subject interests the audience,” believes Saurabh Varma of Reliance Big Entertainment. “Also, Roadside Romeo has a bright chance.”
“Fashion and Golmaal
Returns will do better, with an 80 per cent occupancy”, predicts Deepak Taluja of Fun Cinemas. “Roadside Romeo and Heroes will have 40-50 per cent.”
“These films are more content-driven than star-driven,” points out Varma. If they work, it would be a triumph of substance over style.
Entertainment - Beyonce excited about married life
Popstar Beyonce Knowles has revealed that she is extremely excited about her marital status.
However, the singer, who was pretty adamant on keeping her wedding to JayZ covert, admits it is taking time for her to get used to her new relationship status, reports China Daily.
"This is a new chapter for me. I''m terrified, but excited. It''s like I''m a new woman!" Beyonce said.
Beyonce also revealed that her husband Jay Z has inspired a lot of songs in her new album.
“I am happy right now and this album has a lot of love songs that talk about my emotions - me naked with my heart exposed,” she added.
However, the singer, who was pretty adamant on keeping her wedding to JayZ covert, admits it is taking time for her to get used to her new relationship status, reports China Daily.
"This is a new chapter for me. I''m terrified, but excited. It''s like I''m a new woman!" Beyonce said.
Beyonce also revealed that her husband Jay Z has inspired a lot of songs in her new album.
“I am happy right now and this album has a lot of love songs that talk about my emotions - me naked with my heart exposed,” she added.
India - Mid-Term review of annual monetary policy
MUMBAI: After infusing Rs 1,85,000 crore liquidity into the banking system this month, RBI on Friday surprised the market by keeping its key rates un
changed in the mid-term review of annual monetary policy, which lowered economic growth projections to 7.5-8% for 2008-09.
With the global commodity and oil prices cooling, the central bank kept the inflation projection unchanged at 7% by end-March but emphasised that inflation continued to be a matter of concern requiring constant "vigil."
Outlining the monetary measures, the policy said the benchmark bank rate has been kept unchanged at 6 per cent, repo rate at 8%, reverse repo at 6 per cent and CRR at 6.5%.
On October 11, the apex bank cut CRR, the percentage of amount banks are required to park with the central bank, by 2.5% -- from 9% to 6.5% -- to inject Rs 100,000 crore liquidity into the system. It reduced repo rate, the rate at which RBI lends short-term funds to banks, by one per cent to 8% on October 20.
Several banks have already indicated after the CRR and repo rate cut that they would take call on reducing their interest rates after the credit policy.
In the face of the global financial turmoil, Reserve Bank, in its mid-term review, said that the developmental and regulatory polices of the central bank would continue to adopt a holistic approach to the responsibility of price and financial stability.
"The RBI is committed to deepening and expanding reforms in the financial sector so that efficient and competitive financial intermediation evolves to secure sustained growth with stability," the RBI said.
The policy has set its focus on issues such as development of various segments of financial markets and strengthening the financial market infrastructure, further liberalisation of forex transactions and relaxation of interest rate ceilings of NRI deposits.
Besides, it focuses on strengthening the regulatory framework of cross-border supervision and surveillance of banks' credit portfolios, the apex bank said.
Terming the global financial situation as the worst since the Great Depression, the RBI said it has been proactive and has taken measures to manage the rapid developments and ease pressures stemming from it.
"The RBI is confident of managing the situation and minimising the adverse impact of the global crisis on the Indian economy," it said.
"Our financial system is strong and healthy and our economic fundamentals are strong. Once the global situation is managed, and calm and confidence are restored, we will return to our higher growth trajectory," the review said.
The monetary tightening measures announced earlier this week by the RBI have seen the inflation rate easing to 11.07% from 11.44 per cent last week.
changed in the mid-term review of annual monetary policy, which lowered economic growth projections to 7.5-8% for 2008-09.
With the global commodity and oil prices cooling, the central bank kept the inflation projection unchanged at 7% by end-March but emphasised that inflation continued to be a matter of concern requiring constant "vigil."
Outlining the monetary measures, the policy said the benchmark bank rate has been kept unchanged at 6 per cent, repo rate at 8%, reverse repo at 6 per cent and CRR at 6.5%.
On October 11, the apex bank cut CRR, the percentage of amount banks are required to park with the central bank, by 2.5% -- from 9% to 6.5% -- to inject Rs 100,000 crore liquidity into the system. It reduced repo rate, the rate at which RBI lends short-term funds to banks, by one per cent to 8% on October 20.
Several banks have already indicated after the CRR and repo rate cut that they would take call on reducing their interest rates after the credit policy.
In the face of the global financial turmoil, Reserve Bank, in its mid-term review, said that the developmental and regulatory polices of the central bank would continue to adopt a holistic approach to the responsibility of price and financial stability.
"The RBI is committed to deepening and expanding reforms in the financial sector so that efficient and competitive financial intermediation evolves to secure sustained growth with stability," the RBI said.
The policy has set its focus on issues such as development of various segments of financial markets and strengthening the financial market infrastructure, further liberalisation of forex transactions and relaxation of interest rate ceilings of NRI deposits.
Besides, it focuses on strengthening the regulatory framework of cross-border supervision and surveillance of banks' credit portfolios, the apex bank said.
Terming the global financial situation as the worst since the Great Depression, the RBI said it has been proactive and has taken measures to manage the rapid developments and ease pressures stemming from it.
"The RBI is confident of managing the situation and minimising the adverse impact of the global crisis on the Indian economy," it said.
"Our financial system is strong and healthy and our economic fundamentals are strong. Once the global situation is managed, and calm and confidence are restored, we will return to our higher growth trajectory," the review said.
The monetary tightening measures announced earlier this week by the RBI have seen the inflation rate easing to 11.07% from 11.44 per cent last week.
Mktg - India;With Jingle,brands,indie singers come closer
Gouri Shah
Mumbai: Sona Mohapatra’s new album won’t be out till the summer of 2009.
Most people across the country, however, are already familiar with one of the songs on the album, Paas aao (come closer, in Hindi).
The song, in keeping with its name, is the tune to which the latest ad for Closeup, a toothpaste brand from Hindustan Unilever Ltd, is set. And it could well mark the beginning here of an established trend in the US, the UK, and the rest of Europe.
While Indian advertisers have always turned to popular music—both homegrown Bollywood hits as well as international tracks—to draw attention to their brand, this is perhaps the first time a company has licensed an unknown song for its ad. Mohapatra could also be the first Indian musician seeking to tap into the popularity and reach of big-brand advertising to launch and promote her work.
Such arrangements work for both sides: the company gets to licence an original piece of music at a fraction of what it would have cost to licence a popular Bollywood number and the artist gets a promotional fillip—airplay on TV channels and radio stations that could rub off on the album when it is released.
According to Ram Sampath of The Mint, a Mumbai-based music production house, licensing an original composition such as Paas aao could cost a company between Rs5 lakh and Rs15 lakh. A Bollywood number would cost them Rs25-30 lakh, while an international song by an A-list singer such as Madonna could set them back by a cool $1 million (Rs4.8 crore at today’s prices).
“Not only does it make economic sense but an original composition is a more likely fit as compared to a song where the lyrics are not composed from the brand’s point of view,” said Sandeep Puri, regional business director on Unilever business, Lowe Bangkok. “In this case, Paas aao communicated exactly what the brand wanted to.” The song remains the intellectual property of the singer.
“Most people hope their songs get picked for a movie. But when the ad came along, I knew there was no better video for my song,” said Mohapatra, whose last album, Sona, was released by Sony BMG.
“Here was a chance to run the song in mainstream media without having to lose the soul or integrity of it. It could breathe and was not part of a contrived situation on film where it would be overshadowed by the star.” Mohapatra is partner and producer at The Mint and married to Sampath.
The move will help musicians because it is otherwise difficult for them to showcase their talent, said a composer. “It is next to impossible to get mainstream attention,” said Sampath. “When Bollywood is so all-pervasive, there are no avenues for local or indigenous musicians to express themselves any more.”
The dominance of Bollywood music also has to do with the kind of TV and radio audience measurement systems in use, according to Amar Deb, chief rowdy, RowdyRascals, an Internet content company. When media buying is based on a rating system that measures the quantity and not quality of audience, it’s only natural that a majority of radio stations and television music channels will opt for the least common denominator, the one that rakes in a chunk of the audience—Bollywood music, he said.
Music companies, too, rarely root for independent musicians because it is difficult for them to survive on record sales alone. That explains their near-obsession with Bollywood.
“The issue is exposure,” said Craig Pereira, associate marketing director, Artistes and Repertoire, Sony BMG India. An indie (as in independent artist created) track gets a maximum of three-four plays on a music channel per day, as compared to at least 10 for a Bollywood one, he explained. In January, Sony launched an album by Pakistani band Strings. The music video for the title track featured Bollywood actor John Abraham—an effort targeted at higher exposure. “The song has definitely got 100% more rotations just because of John Abraham,” added Pereira.
According to Pereira, when a big music label such as Sony BMG launches an album, it spends around Rs1 crore, of which around 55% will go to cutting a music video and marketing the album. Clearly, it’s easier to make the economics of this business work with Bollywood music.
The only avenues open to musicians are advertising, television and films, said Dhruv Ghanekar, co-founder and key composer of Blue Frog Media Pvt. Ltd, a live performance venue, record label and music production company rolled into one. The scope for live performances is limited, he added. “If you want real money at a show, Rs5-10 lakh, it’s in film music. Not in singing the blues.” The record label division of Blue Frog Media is now looking to hook up some of its talent, such as Sha’ir + Func, a Mumbai- and New York-based band, with advertisers who could use their compositions in ads. Recently, Ghanekar, along with a colleague, Ashu Phatak, used a jazz blues song with Bengali lyrics from their album Smoke Signals, as the soundtrack for the television commercial for GQ India.
The trend of tapping musicians for ads isn’t new. In 1989, before the commercial release of the song, PepsiCo Inc. used Madonna’s song Like a prayer in a television commercial featuring the pop star. The commercial was aired only twice before the release of the music video on MTV. The video itself was controversial and Pepsi pulled the plug on its ad when religious groups threatened to boycott the drink. More recently, singer Jose Gonzalez’s song Heartbeats reached No. 7 on the UK charts, helped by an award-winning Sony Bravia television commercial which used the song as its soundtrack.
“Any avenue that delivers exposure to the song is considered,” said Pereira of Sony BMG.
Mumbai: Sona Mohapatra’s new album won’t be out till the summer of 2009.
Most people across the country, however, are already familiar with one of the songs on the album, Paas aao (come closer, in Hindi).
The song, in keeping with its name, is the tune to which the latest ad for Closeup, a toothpaste brand from Hindustan Unilever Ltd, is set. And it could well mark the beginning here of an established trend in the US, the UK, and the rest of Europe.
While Indian advertisers have always turned to popular music—both homegrown Bollywood hits as well as international tracks—to draw attention to their brand, this is perhaps the first time a company has licensed an unknown song for its ad. Mohapatra could also be the first Indian musician seeking to tap into the popularity and reach of big-brand advertising to launch and promote her work.
Such arrangements work for both sides: the company gets to licence an original piece of music at a fraction of what it would have cost to licence a popular Bollywood number and the artist gets a promotional fillip—airplay on TV channels and radio stations that could rub off on the album when it is released.
According to Ram Sampath of The Mint, a Mumbai-based music production house, licensing an original composition such as Paas aao could cost a company between Rs5 lakh and Rs15 lakh. A Bollywood number would cost them Rs25-30 lakh, while an international song by an A-list singer such as Madonna could set them back by a cool $1 million (Rs4.8 crore at today’s prices).
“Not only does it make economic sense but an original composition is a more likely fit as compared to a song where the lyrics are not composed from the brand’s point of view,” said Sandeep Puri, regional business director on Unilever business, Lowe Bangkok. “In this case, Paas aao communicated exactly what the brand wanted to.” The song remains the intellectual property of the singer.
“Most people hope their songs get picked for a movie. But when the ad came along, I knew there was no better video for my song,” said Mohapatra, whose last album, Sona, was released by Sony BMG.
“Here was a chance to run the song in mainstream media without having to lose the soul or integrity of it. It could breathe and was not part of a contrived situation on film where it would be overshadowed by the star.” Mohapatra is partner and producer at The Mint and married to Sampath.
The move will help musicians because it is otherwise difficult for them to showcase their talent, said a composer. “It is next to impossible to get mainstream attention,” said Sampath. “When Bollywood is so all-pervasive, there are no avenues for local or indigenous musicians to express themselves any more.”
The dominance of Bollywood music also has to do with the kind of TV and radio audience measurement systems in use, according to Amar Deb, chief rowdy, RowdyRascals, an Internet content company. When media buying is based on a rating system that measures the quantity and not quality of audience, it’s only natural that a majority of radio stations and television music channels will opt for the least common denominator, the one that rakes in a chunk of the audience—Bollywood music, he said.
Music companies, too, rarely root for independent musicians because it is difficult for them to survive on record sales alone. That explains their near-obsession with Bollywood.
“The issue is exposure,” said Craig Pereira, associate marketing director, Artistes and Repertoire, Sony BMG India. An indie (as in independent artist created) track gets a maximum of three-four plays on a music channel per day, as compared to at least 10 for a Bollywood one, he explained. In January, Sony launched an album by Pakistani band Strings. The music video for the title track featured Bollywood actor John Abraham—an effort targeted at higher exposure. “The song has definitely got 100% more rotations just because of John Abraham,” added Pereira.
According to Pereira, when a big music label such as Sony BMG launches an album, it spends around Rs1 crore, of which around 55% will go to cutting a music video and marketing the album. Clearly, it’s easier to make the economics of this business work with Bollywood music.
The only avenues open to musicians are advertising, television and films, said Dhruv Ghanekar, co-founder and key composer of Blue Frog Media Pvt. Ltd, a live performance venue, record label and music production company rolled into one. The scope for live performances is limited, he added. “If you want real money at a show, Rs5-10 lakh, it’s in film music. Not in singing the blues.” The record label division of Blue Frog Media is now looking to hook up some of its talent, such as Sha’ir + Func, a Mumbai- and New York-based band, with advertisers who could use their compositions in ads. Recently, Ghanekar, along with a colleague, Ashu Phatak, used a jazz blues song with Bengali lyrics from their album Smoke Signals, as the soundtrack for the television commercial for GQ India.
The trend of tapping musicians for ads isn’t new. In 1989, before the commercial release of the song, PepsiCo Inc. used Madonna’s song Like a prayer in a television commercial featuring the pop star. The commercial was aired only twice before the release of the music video on MTV. The video itself was controversial and Pepsi pulled the plug on its ad when religious groups threatened to boycott the drink. More recently, singer Jose Gonzalez’s song Heartbeats reached No. 7 on the UK charts, helped by an award-winning Sony Bravia television commercial which used the song as its soundtrack.
“Any avenue that delivers exposure to the song is considered,” said Pereira of Sony BMG.
Business - India;PepsiCo ventures into energy drink segment
NEW DELHI: Global food and beverages major PepsiCo on Thursday announced its entry energy supplement segment of the estimated Rs 500-crore Indian ene
rgy drink market with plans to capture a substantial section of the segment within two-three years.
The company's plans to roll out its SoBe Adrenaline Rush energy supplement comes on the heels of PepsiCo global chief Indra Nooyi's announcement of investing USD 500 million in the Indian market over next three years with the aim of trebling the company's sale.
The company is targeting the 24 plus young segment in the major urban centres for the new drink which would be rolled out in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, before being marketed in other cities, PepsiCo said in a statement.
The new launch is part of the company's plan to expand the non-carbonated portfolio and provide consumers with a range of beverage options, it added.
The company said it is aiming for a 'substantial' segment of the Indian energy drink market but did not elaborate further. It is also planning to undertake a sale promotion campaign for the new drink in the India market
The new drink is available at Rs 75 per 245 ml can, the company added.
PepsiCo's new drink is being introduced just in the aftermath of the company's India operations being elevated to a regional status. Besides, the company had during recent week's undertaken a series of brand building exercises including introduction of special Diwali packages and a major relaunch of its fruit drink Tropicana
rgy drink market with plans to capture a substantial section of the segment within two-three years.
The company's plans to roll out its SoBe Adrenaline Rush energy supplement comes on the heels of PepsiCo global chief Indra Nooyi's announcement of investing USD 500 million in the Indian market over next three years with the aim of trebling the company's sale.
The company is targeting the 24 plus young segment in the major urban centres for the new drink which would be rolled out in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, before being marketed in other cities, PepsiCo said in a statement.
The new launch is part of the company's plan to expand the non-carbonated portfolio and provide consumers with a range of beverage options, it added.
The company said it is aiming for a 'substantial' segment of the Indian energy drink market but did not elaborate further. It is also planning to undertake a sale promotion campaign for the new drink in the India market
The new drink is available at Rs 75 per 245 ml can, the company added.
PepsiCo's new drink is being introduced just in the aftermath of the company's India operations being elevated to a regional status. Besides, the company had during recent week's undertaken a series of brand building exercises including introduction of special Diwali packages and a major relaunch of its fruit drink Tropicana
India - The financial crisis & the Indian response
Arjun.K.Sengupta
After the international financial crisis even the most ardent market fundamentalists now recognise that markets often fail, and the governments have to correct the markets equitably and efficiently. But for that, the government actions have to be carefully designed, which policymakers often do not, because of their reluctance to give up orthodox market solutions.
During the current financial crisis the government seems to be following a similar conventional approach of market management, without directly addressing the source of the problem. Traditionally during a financial crisis, the Central Banks act as lenders of last resort, lending liquidity to the banks. In India, RBI is returning some of the liquidities of the banking system that it held as reserves. As a lender of last resort, RBI would provide such liquidity only to those banks who needed them.
No doubt our banks are suffering from liquidity crunch for some time, caused by our earlier policy of liquidity withdrawal to manage inflation. The RBI’s attempts to contain the fall in the exchange rate of rupee by selling dollar is also withdrawing rupees. Most important however is in a falling stock markets, FII investors take away dollars by surrendering rupees.
But injection of rupee by the RBI into the system will not necessarily increase bank lending unless borrowers have the confidence in the sustainability of our economy to induce them to increase their investment and the banks have the confidence that these borrowers will be able to pay back.
Missing element
The main element that is missing in the system is enough confidence of our economic actors in our ability to get over the crisis within a short period. In its absence, there is hardly any way that either the demand for credit and finance for investment or the bankers’ willingness to meet that demand can increase. This is a classic case similar to the Keynesian liquidly trap when a substantial increase in liquidity supply is only accumulated as cash or near cash instruments with little effect on investment expenditure.
In such situations, the government has to take steps to increase confidence in the system, and provide a stimulus to increase the rate of investment and expectations of revival of growth. Relaxation of liquidity shortage will be good, especially when it was the result of government’s policies. But, it may not be able to reduce the interest rates very much, even if the Repo-rate is brought down, because market expectations of non-sustainability of return may more than swamp the effects of a fall in cost of finance.
Only a policy to increase the rate of investment will be seen as promoting growth and revive confidence. When private investors are reluctant, we have to depend upon public investment to stimulate investment. We have a large public sector functioning with efficiency, as has been demonstrated by a sustained increase in its profitability. The government may mobilise some of our public sector corporations engaged in the sectors of power, transport, construction and communication to expand investment in our infrastructure. Many of these enterprises have long experience of successful execution of such projects, and if the programmes can be properly designed to share the risk and incentivise the success, these enterprises may again prove their worth and perform.
They also have substantial reserves to be able to finance some of these investments. But when they do not, the government may provide them with funds through deficit financing. We should try to increase in such investment compensated by reducing government expenditures in other areas. But if in spite of all that an increase in deficit is necessary, they should be financed openly by money creation, that is by the government borrowing directly from the Reserve Bank. The effect of that will be an increase in liquidity, exactly in the same way liquidity is increased through the reduction of CRR. In one case the RBIs liability will increase, in other case its assets will decline, with similar effect on money creation and inflation. But while the liquidity provided to the banks may not be translated into increased lending or investment expenditure, promoting investment of the PSUs in infrastructure will directly impact on our growth potential. Private investors will eventually regain their confidence in our prospects of growth and increase investment.
This policy of expanding real expenditure through a monetized budget deficit to finance infrastructure investment, can be compensated by a policy of expanding credit to the SMEs. This sector with only 10 per cent import content and with a proven ability to expand production through small amount of investment can very rapidly increase output and employment in our system. This sector has suffered most when the banks are in no mood to support SMEs with limited profitability and with practically no collateral. Only a directed public policy of providing financial support can galvanize them.
Stock markets
But the government also must attack directly the problem of loss of confidence in the stock markets. If this market continues to fall, not only the FIIs but also the domestic investors will move away. With a mark-to-market requirement of Basel -2, most of our corporate entities have severely suffered in their market capitalization, making it increasingly difficult for them to borrow not only for investment but also for working capital. This is exactly the situation when the financial crisis can quickly lead to a real economic crisis, with the corporate entities selling their assets for their borrowing requirements or just going bankrupt.
This calls for active government intervention in the stock markets to raise their values, through some kind of sovereign funds for purchasing stocks. Without buying designated assets, as some others are trying, we may use our mutual funds. They can do the job quite effectively with the minimum involvement of the government. A simple mechanism would be opening a window of lending to the mutual funds against their purchase of stocks or retaining them even when there is a high demand for redemption. To make this window attractive, this lending can be at variable interest rates, such as at a zero rate for the first six months, raising it steadily for every succeeding six months. If the mutual funds can invest in stocks whose prices go up quickly, they can retain the profits or pass them on to the investors, paying only a relatively small rate of interest. This is a simple mechanism which can have an immediate impact on our stock market.
The response of public intervention in a situation of market failure must be designed in such a way that attacks the problem at its roots. The government should use all its instruments with a clear objective. In the current situation the primary objective is to increase the confidence of all market participants in our potential for growth. Our fundamentals may be alright but the confidence in them has been grossly eroded. If a government programme can stimulate that confidence by investing in infrastructure, by allowing the small and micro enterprises to expand their output and employment and by increasing the private sector confidence in our stock market, it is highly likely that we shall get our the crisis.
(Dr. Sengupta is a Member of Parliament and former Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund and was a Member of the senior management team of the IMF, during the Debt Crisis of the late 1980s, as a Special Adviser of the Managing Director.)
After the international financial crisis even the most ardent market fundamentalists now recognise that markets often fail, and the governments have to correct the markets equitably and efficiently. But for that, the government actions have to be carefully designed, which policymakers often do not, because of their reluctance to give up orthodox market solutions.
During the current financial crisis the government seems to be following a similar conventional approach of market management, without directly addressing the source of the problem. Traditionally during a financial crisis, the Central Banks act as lenders of last resort, lending liquidity to the banks. In India, RBI is returning some of the liquidities of the banking system that it held as reserves. As a lender of last resort, RBI would provide such liquidity only to those banks who needed them.
No doubt our banks are suffering from liquidity crunch for some time, caused by our earlier policy of liquidity withdrawal to manage inflation. The RBI’s attempts to contain the fall in the exchange rate of rupee by selling dollar is also withdrawing rupees. Most important however is in a falling stock markets, FII investors take away dollars by surrendering rupees.
But injection of rupee by the RBI into the system will not necessarily increase bank lending unless borrowers have the confidence in the sustainability of our economy to induce them to increase their investment and the banks have the confidence that these borrowers will be able to pay back.
Missing element
The main element that is missing in the system is enough confidence of our economic actors in our ability to get over the crisis within a short period. In its absence, there is hardly any way that either the demand for credit and finance for investment or the bankers’ willingness to meet that demand can increase. This is a classic case similar to the Keynesian liquidly trap when a substantial increase in liquidity supply is only accumulated as cash or near cash instruments with little effect on investment expenditure.
In such situations, the government has to take steps to increase confidence in the system, and provide a stimulus to increase the rate of investment and expectations of revival of growth. Relaxation of liquidity shortage will be good, especially when it was the result of government’s policies. But, it may not be able to reduce the interest rates very much, even if the Repo-rate is brought down, because market expectations of non-sustainability of return may more than swamp the effects of a fall in cost of finance.
Only a policy to increase the rate of investment will be seen as promoting growth and revive confidence. When private investors are reluctant, we have to depend upon public investment to stimulate investment. We have a large public sector functioning with efficiency, as has been demonstrated by a sustained increase in its profitability. The government may mobilise some of our public sector corporations engaged in the sectors of power, transport, construction and communication to expand investment in our infrastructure. Many of these enterprises have long experience of successful execution of such projects, and if the programmes can be properly designed to share the risk and incentivise the success, these enterprises may again prove their worth and perform.
They also have substantial reserves to be able to finance some of these investments. But when they do not, the government may provide them with funds through deficit financing. We should try to increase in such investment compensated by reducing government expenditures in other areas. But if in spite of all that an increase in deficit is necessary, they should be financed openly by money creation, that is by the government borrowing directly from the Reserve Bank. The effect of that will be an increase in liquidity, exactly in the same way liquidity is increased through the reduction of CRR. In one case the RBIs liability will increase, in other case its assets will decline, with similar effect on money creation and inflation. But while the liquidity provided to the banks may not be translated into increased lending or investment expenditure, promoting investment of the PSUs in infrastructure will directly impact on our growth potential. Private investors will eventually regain their confidence in our prospects of growth and increase investment.
This policy of expanding real expenditure through a monetized budget deficit to finance infrastructure investment, can be compensated by a policy of expanding credit to the SMEs. This sector with only 10 per cent import content and with a proven ability to expand production through small amount of investment can very rapidly increase output and employment in our system. This sector has suffered most when the banks are in no mood to support SMEs with limited profitability and with practically no collateral. Only a directed public policy of providing financial support can galvanize them.
Stock markets
But the government also must attack directly the problem of loss of confidence in the stock markets. If this market continues to fall, not only the FIIs but also the domestic investors will move away. With a mark-to-market requirement of Basel -2, most of our corporate entities have severely suffered in their market capitalization, making it increasingly difficult for them to borrow not only for investment but also for working capital. This is exactly the situation when the financial crisis can quickly lead to a real economic crisis, with the corporate entities selling their assets for their borrowing requirements or just going bankrupt.
This calls for active government intervention in the stock markets to raise their values, through some kind of sovereign funds for purchasing stocks. Without buying designated assets, as some others are trying, we may use our mutual funds. They can do the job quite effectively with the minimum involvement of the government. A simple mechanism would be opening a window of lending to the mutual funds against their purchase of stocks or retaining them even when there is a high demand for redemption. To make this window attractive, this lending can be at variable interest rates, such as at a zero rate for the first six months, raising it steadily for every succeeding six months. If the mutual funds can invest in stocks whose prices go up quickly, they can retain the profits or pass them on to the investors, paying only a relatively small rate of interest. This is a simple mechanism which can have an immediate impact on our stock market.
The response of public intervention in a situation of market failure must be designed in such a way that attacks the problem at its roots. The government should use all its instruments with a clear objective. In the current situation the primary objective is to increase the confidence of all market participants in our potential for growth. Our fundamentals may be alright but the confidence in them has been grossly eroded. If a government programme can stimulate that confidence by investing in infrastructure, by allowing the small and micro enterprises to expand their output and employment and by increasing the private sector confidence in our stock market, it is highly likely that we shall get our the crisis.
(Dr. Sengupta is a Member of Parliament and former Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund and was a Member of the senior management team of the IMF, during the Debt Crisis of the late 1980s, as a Special Adviser of the Managing Director.)
India - Democracy & Peace process in J&K
Praveen Swami
New Delhi must break with a script which has led to a breakdown of democratic institutions and engendered a dysfunctional political culture.
Speaking from atop his wooden throne in Srinagar’s Jama Masjid earlier this month, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq delivered a stinging attack on politicians who will contest the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections next month.
“I want to ask the Prime Minister of India,” the cleric and secessionist politician said in his October 10 sermon, “whether it serves any purpose to hold discussions with leaders who do not dare move among the masses unless they are protected by a cordon of guards.”
Mirwaiz Farooq’s fighting words would have had a great moral force had it not been for one uncomfortable fact: he is among the ranks of politicians he railed against. Like his secessionist colleagues Sajjad Gani Lone, Bilal Gani Lone, Abdul Gani Butt and Aga Syed Hassan, the Mirwaiz is protected by the Jammu and Kashmir police. In addition, the Mirwaiz—whose father was assassinated by jihadists — has invested in a bullet-proof car.
Early next year, notwithstanding the anti-election campaign that has now been unleashed by secessionists, an elected government will again hold power in the State. Influential figures in New Delhi’s policy establishment have been suggesting that once the rituals of democracy are done with, New Delhi, along with Islamabad, must get down to the real business of hammering out a peace deal with the very politicians who are seeking to obstruct the elections. While the new government goes about fixing roads and sewers, this line of thinking has it, the big boys will fix Jammu and Kashmir’s future.
If New Delhi is in fact serious about peace-building in Jammu and Kashmir, it must break with this script — a script which over the last six decades has led to a breakdown of democratic institutions in the State and engendered a near-clinical dysfunction in its political life. Instead, the politicians who are elected this winter must be pushed to come up with a workable vision of the State’s future — and encouraged to negotiate its contours and content with their counterparts in Parliament.
Ever since Independence, New Delhi had sought to secure Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India through a series of backroom deals. Politicians were cajoled — and sometimes coerced — to sign agreements in 1952, 1966, 1971 and 1975. Not one was debated and ratified by an elected body.
Deceit and betrayal
It takes little to see what drove this unhappy story. Prime Ministers, from Jawaharlal Nehru to P.V. Narasimha Rao, were driven by the need to defend India against Pakistan’s covert war in Jammu and Kashmir. In their vision, the proper role of the elected governments in Jammu and Kashmir was to dispense patronage, and thus undermine dissent — not deal with the issues which drove the conflict.
When Jammu and Kashmir saw the restoration of democratic governance in 1996, this paradigm continued to shape New Delhi’s policies. Soon after he took office, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee set about seeking a deal with the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) — a secessionist coalition cast as the sole representative of Kashmir’s authentic, secessionist sentiment.
Prime Minister Vajpayee’s peace efforts, although helped along by generously-funded covert funding to the APHC leadership, achieved little. Hemmed in by hawks in his Cabinet, Mr. Vajpayee was in no position to make significant political concessions. APHC leaders, for their part, faced massive coercive pressures from jihadist groups like the Hizb ul-Mujahideen and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. In essence, the APHC and the Government of India played for time. Both hoped that negotiations with Pakistan would lead to an agreement that would end the conflict by gifting the secessionists power within an autonomy-based framework. Apprehensive of just that outcome, the National Conference began adopting increasingly intransigent postures, hoping to frustrate a New Delhi-Islamabad-APHC deal. Even as New Delhi talked to the APHC, though, it rejected the National Conference’s calls for a dialogue on autonomy — souring relations with the most important player in State politics.
During his first years in office, Prime Minister Singh’s policies closely mirrored those of his predecessor. He once again initiated negotiations with the APHC, and authorised a covert programme to reach out to hardline secessionists outside its fold. As before, the APHC refused to bring to the table a road map for dialogue. And mirroring the actions of the National Conference earlier, the People’s Democratic Party turned to Islamist ideas and practices in an effort to stave off the political consequences of a New Delhi-APHC deal.
In 2006, the Prime Minister finally departed from the tried and tested path, realising that it led only to certain failure. Instead of seeking a deal with the APHC alone, he now reached out to the full spectrum of political opinion in Jammu and Kashmir. Following all-party conferences in New Delhi and Srinagar, the Prime Minister set up five Working Groups on the conflict. Four of the groups — on social confidence-building measures, the cross-Line of Control relationship, economic development and governance — submitted their reports last year.
But the critical fifth group, which discussed Jammu and Kashmir’s constitutional relationship with New Delhi, has not met in over a year, let alone submit a report.
Part of the reason was that major political parties in Jammu and Kashmir have not been able to arrive at a shared vision of the future. National Conference leaders reiterated their controversial 1999 proposals for wide-ranging autonomy within the Union of India, but offered no blueprint for addressing the anxieties of those residents who opposed this agenda. For its part, the People’s Democratic Party called for self-rule, but submitted only a blueprint for devolution of powers to district and regional bodies—not a map for transfiguring Jammu and Kashmir’s relationship with New Delhi. Bharatiya Janata Party representatives called for the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution (which confers a special status on the State), while the Congress said nothing at all.
New Delhi’s failure to push the fifth Working Group also stemmed from its hope that the APHC could still be made to sign on to an emerging India-Pakistan deal. At secret meetings which began in 2005, Prime Minister Singh’s envoy, SK Lambah, and his Pakistani counterpart, Tariq Aziz, arrived at five points of convergence. First, the two men agreed that there would be no redrawing of the Line of Control. Second, they accepted that there would have to be greater political autonomy on both sides of Jammu and Kashmir. Lambah and Aziz also agreed that India would begin troop cuts in response to de-escalation of jihadist violence, cooperatively use resources like watersheds, forests and glaciers, and, finally, open the LoC for travel and trade.
From the outset, the APHC rejected participation in the Prime Minister’s round-table dialogue, refusing to accept that it was just one of several political voices in Jammu and Kashmir. Speaking after a February 20, 2006 meeting where the APHC rejected an invitation to participate in the Delhi round-table conference, Mirwaiz Farooq said that while “the Hurriyat is not averse to New Delhi’s consultation process with others,” it “believes that for permanent resolution of the Kashmir crisis, the governments of India and Pakistan shall have to essentially deal with those people who have been treating Jammu and Kashmir as a disputed territory from day one.” Before the subsequent Srinagar conference, Prime Minister Singh’s advisors have long claimed, Mirwaiz Farooq tempered that stand and agreed to join in the discussions. However, the APHC backed out at the last moment.
Since then the Mirwaiz’s position has hardened. In the midst of this summer’s communally charged Shrine Board protests, he signed a secret June 19 agreement with Syed Ali Shah Geelani dropping the option of direct talks with the Government of India — the Islamist patriarch’s long-standing bone of contention with the APHC.
In his sermon, Mirwaiz Farooq lashed out at “the accords and agreements signed by Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad and Syed Mir Qasim with New Delhi, which the people of Kashmir have never accepted.” Agreements like these, the Mirwaiz said, bred a culture of “deceit and betrayal.” He is right, but he omitted to mention that secessionists were just as complicit in this corruption as pro-India politicians. Groups like the APHC are reluctant to engage in a genuine dialogue precisely because it will be substantive. Few among the secessionists have a workable vision for the future; those who do have are willing to risk the consequences of articulating one.
As things stand, it appears that the APHC and other secessionists want a deal which hands them power, not a real dialogue — a replay of the New Delhi-Srinagar pacts involving Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, which they claim to abhor. Whether the APHC likes it or not, the National Conference, the Congress and the People’s Democratic Party do speak for substantial sections of Jammu and Kashmir. Accepting this plurality of voices is a prerequisite for a meaningful peace.
Instead of empowering secessionists by starting a renewed engagement with the APHC after the elections, New Delhi would do well to turn, instead, to the politicians chosen by Jammu and Kashmir’s people to represent them.
New Delhi must break with a script which has led to a breakdown of democratic institutions and engendered a dysfunctional political culture.
Speaking from atop his wooden throne in Srinagar’s Jama Masjid earlier this month, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq delivered a stinging attack on politicians who will contest the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections next month.
“I want to ask the Prime Minister of India,” the cleric and secessionist politician said in his October 10 sermon, “whether it serves any purpose to hold discussions with leaders who do not dare move among the masses unless they are protected by a cordon of guards.”
Mirwaiz Farooq’s fighting words would have had a great moral force had it not been for one uncomfortable fact: he is among the ranks of politicians he railed against. Like his secessionist colleagues Sajjad Gani Lone, Bilal Gani Lone, Abdul Gani Butt and Aga Syed Hassan, the Mirwaiz is protected by the Jammu and Kashmir police. In addition, the Mirwaiz—whose father was assassinated by jihadists — has invested in a bullet-proof car.
Early next year, notwithstanding the anti-election campaign that has now been unleashed by secessionists, an elected government will again hold power in the State. Influential figures in New Delhi’s policy establishment have been suggesting that once the rituals of democracy are done with, New Delhi, along with Islamabad, must get down to the real business of hammering out a peace deal with the very politicians who are seeking to obstruct the elections. While the new government goes about fixing roads and sewers, this line of thinking has it, the big boys will fix Jammu and Kashmir’s future.
If New Delhi is in fact serious about peace-building in Jammu and Kashmir, it must break with this script — a script which over the last six decades has led to a breakdown of democratic institutions in the State and engendered a near-clinical dysfunction in its political life. Instead, the politicians who are elected this winter must be pushed to come up with a workable vision of the State’s future — and encouraged to negotiate its contours and content with their counterparts in Parliament.
Ever since Independence, New Delhi had sought to secure Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India through a series of backroom deals. Politicians were cajoled — and sometimes coerced — to sign agreements in 1952, 1966, 1971 and 1975. Not one was debated and ratified by an elected body.
Deceit and betrayal
It takes little to see what drove this unhappy story. Prime Ministers, from Jawaharlal Nehru to P.V. Narasimha Rao, were driven by the need to defend India against Pakistan’s covert war in Jammu and Kashmir. In their vision, the proper role of the elected governments in Jammu and Kashmir was to dispense patronage, and thus undermine dissent — not deal with the issues which drove the conflict.
When Jammu and Kashmir saw the restoration of democratic governance in 1996, this paradigm continued to shape New Delhi’s policies. Soon after he took office, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee set about seeking a deal with the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) — a secessionist coalition cast as the sole representative of Kashmir’s authentic, secessionist sentiment.
Prime Minister Vajpayee’s peace efforts, although helped along by generously-funded covert funding to the APHC leadership, achieved little. Hemmed in by hawks in his Cabinet, Mr. Vajpayee was in no position to make significant political concessions. APHC leaders, for their part, faced massive coercive pressures from jihadist groups like the Hizb ul-Mujahideen and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. In essence, the APHC and the Government of India played for time. Both hoped that negotiations with Pakistan would lead to an agreement that would end the conflict by gifting the secessionists power within an autonomy-based framework. Apprehensive of just that outcome, the National Conference began adopting increasingly intransigent postures, hoping to frustrate a New Delhi-Islamabad-APHC deal. Even as New Delhi talked to the APHC, though, it rejected the National Conference’s calls for a dialogue on autonomy — souring relations with the most important player in State politics.
During his first years in office, Prime Minister Singh’s policies closely mirrored those of his predecessor. He once again initiated negotiations with the APHC, and authorised a covert programme to reach out to hardline secessionists outside its fold. As before, the APHC refused to bring to the table a road map for dialogue. And mirroring the actions of the National Conference earlier, the People’s Democratic Party turned to Islamist ideas and practices in an effort to stave off the political consequences of a New Delhi-APHC deal.
In 2006, the Prime Minister finally departed from the tried and tested path, realising that it led only to certain failure. Instead of seeking a deal with the APHC alone, he now reached out to the full spectrum of political opinion in Jammu and Kashmir. Following all-party conferences in New Delhi and Srinagar, the Prime Minister set up five Working Groups on the conflict. Four of the groups — on social confidence-building measures, the cross-Line of Control relationship, economic development and governance — submitted their reports last year.
But the critical fifth group, which discussed Jammu and Kashmir’s constitutional relationship with New Delhi, has not met in over a year, let alone submit a report.
Part of the reason was that major political parties in Jammu and Kashmir have not been able to arrive at a shared vision of the future. National Conference leaders reiterated their controversial 1999 proposals for wide-ranging autonomy within the Union of India, but offered no blueprint for addressing the anxieties of those residents who opposed this agenda. For its part, the People’s Democratic Party called for self-rule, but submitted only a blueprint for devolution of powers to district and regional bodies—not a map for transfiguring Jammu and Kashmir’s relationship with New Delhi. Bharatiya Janata Party representatives called for the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution (which confers a special status on the State), while the Congress said nothing at all.
New Delhi’s failure to push the fifth Working Group also stemmed from its hope that the APHC could still be made to sign on to an emerging India-Pakistan deal. At secret meetings which began in 2005, Prime Minister Singh’s envoy, SK Lambah, and his Pakistani counterpart, Tariq Aziz, arrived at five points of convergence. First, the two men agreed that there would be no redrawing of the Line of Control. Second, they accepted that there would have to be greater political autonomy on both sides of Jammu and Kashmir. Lambah and Aziz also agreed that India would begin troop cuts in response to de-escalation of jihadist violence, cooperatively use resources like watersheds, forests and glaciers, and, finally, open the LoC for travel and trade.
From the outset, the APHC rejected participation in the Prime Minister’s round-table dialogue, refusing to accept that it was just one of several political voices in Jammu and Kashmir. Speaking after a February 20, 2006 meeting where the APHC rejected an invitation to participate in the Delhi round-table conference, Mirwaiz Farooq said that while “the Hurriyat is not averse to New Delhi’s consultation process with others,” it “believes that for permanent resolution of the Kashmir crisis, the governments of India and Pakistan shall have to essentially deal with those people who have been treating Jammu and Kashmir as a disputed territory from day one.” Before the subsequent Srinagar conference, Prime Minister Singh’s advisors have long claimed, Mirwaiz Farooq tempered that stand and agreed to join in the discussions. However, the APHC backed out at the last moment.
Since then the Mirwaiz’s position has hardened. In the midst of this summer’s communally charged Shrine Board protests, he signed a secret June 19 agreement with Syed Ali Shah Geelani dropping the option of direct talks with the Government of India — the Islamist patriarch’s long-standing bone of contention with the APHC.
In his sermon, Mirwaiz Farooq lashed out at “the accords and agreements signed by Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad and Syed Mir Qasim with New Delhi, which the people of Kashmir have never accepted.” Agreements like these, the Mirwaiz said, bred a culture of “deceit and betrayal.” He is right, but he omitted to mention that secessionists were just as complicit in this corruption as pro-India politicians. Groups like the APHC are reluctant to engage in a genuine dialogue precisely because it will be substantive. Few among the secessionists have a workable vision for the future; those who do have are willing to risk the consequences of articulating one.
As things stand, it appears that the APHC and other secessionists want a deal which hands them power, not a real dialogue — a replay of the New Delhi-Srinagar pacts involving Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, which they claim to abhor. Whether the APHC likes it or not, the National Conference, the Congress and the People’s Democratic Party do speak for substantial sections of Jammu and Kashmir. Accepting this plurality of voices is a prerequisite for a meaningful peace.
Instead of empowering secessionists by starting a renewed engagement with the APHC after the elections, New Delhi would do well to turn, instead, to the politicians chosen by Jammu and Kashmir’s people to represent them.
India - New impetus for rural india
India’s khadi and village industries that provide employment to over eight million rural workers and artisans are set for an overhaul in the years ahead. This important sub-group of the rural non-farm sector (RNFS) has been overlooked by the Indian consumer at one level, and is hampered by institutional and marketing constraints at the other. Given the asymmetry between the size of the rural population (72 per cent) and the low contribution of agriculture and allied activities to the gross domestic product (18 per cent), there is an immediate need to revive the RNFS. As the Eleventh Five-Year Plan rightly notes, “village industries have an important role in generating employment at a comparatively low cost.” The Plan identifies the khadi and village industries as one of the sectors with “prospects for high growth in output and creation of new employment opportunities.” Limited access to institutional credit and raw materials and the lack of proper marketing strategies are among the major handicaps that keep village artisans trapped in poverty. The Plan calls for a concerted effort “to change the mindset” and create a setting where people buy khadi “not as a ‘national duty’ or ‘act of charity’, but because it is fashionable, admired the world over, and intrinsically of high value.”
Against this backdrop has come a $150-million loan from the Asian Development Bank that aims at enhancing income and employment in the RNFS by revitalising khadi and village industries. “Enhanced sustainability of khadi, increased employment generation and incomes, increased artisan welfare, and development of select traditional village industries,” are the main elements of the Khadi Reform Package. To be implemented over the next three years, the package seeks to realign the khadi sector with contemporary market realities. Establishing the identity of the product through a “Khadi mark” and emphasising its niche as a hand-spun and hand-woven product “produced through fair trade practices” mark a critical change in the marketing strategy, wherein the private sector will have a role. This offers wide potential to enter international markets — the lack of access to them has been a lacuna in the current marketing setup. The new line of thinking for new khadi ventures — either through the Producer Company Model, or through the Entrepreneur Model — will mean a significant shift towards making artisans, spinners, and weavers stakeholders in their enterprises. The reform package, if implemented properly and with sensitivity to economic conditions, will ensure a new future for a traditional, but ailing, economic segment of rural India.
Against this backdrop has come a $150-million loan from the Asian Development Bank that aims at enhancing income and employment in the RNFS by revitalising khadi and village industries. “Enhanced sustainability of khadi, increased employment generation and incomes, increased artisan welfare, and development of select traditional village industries,” are the main elements of the Khadi Reform Package. To be implemented over the next three years, the package seeks to realign the khadi sector with contemporary market realities. Establishing the identity of the product through a “Khadi mark” and emphasising its niche as a hand-spun and hand-woven product “produced through fair trade practices” mark a critical change in the marketing strategy, wherein the private sector will have a role. This offers wide potential to enter international markets — the lack of access to them has been a lacuna in the current marketing setup. The new line of thinking for new khadi ventures — either through the Producer Company Model, or through the Entrepreneur Model — will mean a significant shift towards making artisans, spinners, and weavers stakeholders in their enterprises. The reform package, if implemented properly and with sensitivity to economic conditions, will ensure a new future for a traditional, but ailing, economic segment of rural India.
World - Economic gap widens in rich nations
PARIS: Economic inequality is growing in the world’s richest countries, particularly in the United States, jeopardising the American Dream of social mobility just as the world tilts toward recession, said a 30-nation report on Tuesday.
The gap between rich and poor has widened over the last 20 years in nearly all the countries studied, even as trade and technological advances have spurred rapid growth in their economies.
With job losses and home foreclosures skyrocketing and many of these countries now facing recession, policy makers must act quickly to prevent a surge in populist and protectionist sentiment such as was seen following the Great Depression, said the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“What will happen if the next decade is not one of world growth but of world recession? If a rising tide didn’t lift all boats, how will they be affected by an ebbing tide?” asked Oxford University economist Anthony Atkinson at a conference at the OECD headquarters.
In a 20-year study of its member countries, the OECD found inequality had increased in 27 of its 30 members as top earners’ incomes soared while others’ stagnated.
The U.S. has the highest inequality and poverty rates in the OECD after Mexico and Turkey, and the gap has increased rapidly since 2000, the report said. France, meanwhile, has seen inequalities fall in the past 20 years as poorer workers are better paid.
Rising inequality threatens social mobility — children doing better than their parents, the poor improving their lot through hard work — which is lower in countries like the U.S., Great Britain and Italy, where inequality is high, than countries with less inequality such as Denmark, Sweden and Australia, said the report.
Wealthy households are not only widening the gap with the poor, but in countries such as the U.S., Canada and Germany they are also leaving middle-income earners further behind, with potentially ominous consequences if the global financial crisis sparks a long recession. The two decades covered in the study — 1985-2005 — saw the development of wider global trade and the Internet, and a period of overall strong economic growth. The countries covered are mostly developed nations, especially in Europe.
OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said the study, which took three years to complete, would be useful to policy makers because it is coming out just as the world is undergoing “the worst crisis in decades.”
With several OECD countries already in recession, the “key question” raised by the report is whether governments can prevent a possible drop in top earners’ incomes from sparking “a second wave” hit to the lowest-income households, said Martin Hirsch, France’s high commissioner for fighting poverty.
The OECD’s Gurria urged governments to address the “divisive” issue of growing inequality. He said they should do more to educate the whole work force — and not just the elite — while helping people get jobs and increasing incomes for working families, rather than relying on social benefits.
“Greater income inequality stifles upward mobility between generations, making it harder for talented and hardworking people to get the rewards they deserve,” he said in a statement. “It polarises societies, it divides regions within countries, and it carves up the world between rich and poor.”
In the U.S., the richest 10 per cent earn an average of $93,000 — the highest level in the OECD. The poorest 10 per cent earn an average of $5,800 — about 20 per cent lower than the OECD average.
Health - New TB vaccine offers glimmer of hope to HIV positive people
Jaya Shreedhar
It can reduce the risk of HIV-infected people falling sick with TB.
A new Tuberculosis vaccine that can reduce the risk of HIV-infected people falling sick with TB, has been developed by a U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored trial in Dar-es-Salaam. Announcing the results of the ‘Dar Dar’ trial of the prime boost Mycobacterium vaccae (MV) vaccine at the 39th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Paris recently, Executive Director of the International Union Against TB and Lung Diseases (IUATLD) Nils Billo said the re sults were among “the most exciting and promising for people living with HIV in recent times.”
The trial was a collaboration between the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Tanzania and the U.S. Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) and cited by the investigators as a fine example of North-South cooperation in responding to an international health problem.
The seven-year study enrolled about 2,000 HIV positive volunteers who had received childhood BCG and whose CD4 count was 200 or more cells per microlitre of blood. The CD4 is a white blood cell that plays a critical role in the immune response and is normally above 800 cells per microlitre. Half the volunteers received five doses of the Mycobacterium vaccae two months apart over a year. The other half acted as a control arm receiving a dummy vaccine or placebo. Dr. Ford von Reyn, Professor of Medicine, DMS and principal investigator of the study said, “the vaccine was found to boost lymphocyte counts and protect against all forms of definite TB among 20 of the 1,000 who received it. There is no risk of getting TB infection from the vaccine itself as it is an inactivated form. The technology used to create the vaccine is low cost and that will help ensure its affordability in those countries where it will be needed most.”
TB is the world’s leading cause of death among PLHIV. Over a third of the global total of 33 million PLHIV is co-infected with TB and will likely die without treatment. One in five people with a severely weakened immune system can develop active TB within a year, an extraordinarily high risk. The risk of TB goes up as immunity comes down.
Preventing HIV positive people from falling sick with TB ranks among the leading public health challenges in China, India and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. People whose immunity is down because of HIV infection, can have TB that manifests in a very atypical way, for example, without a persistent cough. Such people miss getting diagnosed with TB at the health care services and can die as a result. If cases of TB among PLHIV are diagnosed, the chance of them getting cured of TB is much worse than among those without HIV infection. In Malawi, for instance, four out of ten TB patients with HIV co infection die before the completion of anti-TB treatment. People who complete anti-TB treatment and are pronounced fully cured of TB run a high risk of getting TB again, owing to their low immunity.
A TB vaccine that will afford permanent protection is badly needed. It is too early to know if the Mycobaterium vaccae vaccine can do that. “Our follow-up with the study volunteers shows that the vaccine is affording a 40 per cent protection so far in these three to four years. We need to study its durability,” observed Dr. Robert Horsburgh, Chairman, Department of Epidemiology, Boston University Department of Public Health.
It is clear that the M.vaccae vaccine will have a profound impact on TB control among PLHIV in India as elsewhere. Dr. Anthony Harries, Senior Adviser to the IUATLD said, “these results suggest that about 6,000 cases of TB can be averted among a population of 2 million PLHIV within three years if 50 per cent of them received it.” The current armamentarium to prevent TB consists of the BCG vaccine which is given to children at birth. While it protects children from acquiring serious TB, it does not afford much protection to adults. Besides, BC being a live vaccine, could theoretically cause TB in PLHIV. The only other weapon available is giving HIV infected patients a daily dose of a single anti-TB drug — Isoniazid — to prevent them from getting TB. This measure is acknowledged to fuel the spread of Isoniazid resistant TB, but is still adopted as the lesser of the two evils. “The new vaccine would overcome both these challenges. I see it becoming part of a whole package of pre-Anti Retroviral Therapy care that can keep people with HIV healthy for many years,” said Prof. Harries. It is for future research to unravel how the vaccine may benefit people with CD4 counts lower than 200. While the Dar Dar study focused on a group at high risk for TB, the potential of the new vaccine to prevent TB among HIV negative individuals in TB prevalent areas is open to exploration. Meantime, it may be two years before Mycobacterium vaccae will become available.
It can reduce the risk of HIV-infected people falling sick with TB.
A new Tuberculosis vaccine that can reduce the risk of HIV-infected people falling sick with TB, has been developed by a U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored trial in Dar-es-Salaam. Announcing the results of the ‘Dar Dar’ trial of the prime boost Mycobacterium vaccae (MV) vaccine at the 39th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Paris recently, Executive Director of the International Union Against TB and Lung Diseases (IUATLD) Nils Billo said the re sults were among “the most exciting and promising for people living with HIV in recent times.”
The trial was a collaboration between the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Tanzania and the U.S. Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) and cited by the investigators as a fine example of North-South cooperation in responding to an international health problem.
The seven-year study enrolled about 2,000 HIV positive volunteers who had received childhood BCG and whose CD4 count was 200 or more cells per microlitre of blood. The CD4 is a white blood cell that plays a critical role in the immune response and is normally above 800 cells per microlitre. Half the volunteers received five doses of the Mycobacterium vaccae two months apart over a year. The other half acted as a control arm receiving a dummy vaccine or placebo. Dr. Ford von Reyn, Professor of Medicine, DMS and principal investigator of the study said, “the vaccine was found to boost lymphocyte counts and protect against all forms of definite TB among 20 of the 1,000 who received it. There is no risk of getting TB infection from the vaccine itself as it is an inactivated form. The technology used to create the vaccine is low cost and that will help ensure its affordability in those countries where it will be needed most.”
TB is the world’s leading cause of death among PLHIV. Over a third of the global total of 33 million PLHIV is co-infected with TB and will likely die without treatment. One in five people with a severely weakened immune system can develop active TB within a year, an extraordinarily high risk. The risk of TB goes up as immunity comes down.
Preventing HIV positive people from falling sick with TB ranks among the leading public health challenges in China, India and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. People whose immunity is down because of HIV infection, can have TB that manifests in a very atypical way, for example, without a persistent cough. Such people miss getting diagnosed with TB at the health care services and can die as a result. If cases of TB among PLHIV are diagnosed, the chance of them getting cured of TB is much worse than among those without HIV infection. In Malawi, for instance, four out of ten TB patients with HIV co infection die before the completion of anti-TB treatment. People who complete anti-TB treatment and are pronounced fully cured of TB run a high risk of getting TB again, owing to their low immunity.
A TB vaccine that will afford permanent protection is badly needed. It is too early to know if the Mycobaterium vaccae vaccine can do that. “Our follow-up with the study volunteers shows that the vaccine is affording a 40 per cent protection so far in these three to four years. We need to study its durability,” observed Dr. Robert Horsburgh, Chairman, Department of Epidemiology, Boston University Department of Public Health.
It is clear that the M.vaccae vaccine will have a profound impact on TB control among PLHIV in India as elsewhere. Dr. Anthony Harries, Senior Adviser to the IUATLD said, “these results suggest that about 6,000 cases of TB can be averted among a population of 2 million PLHIV within three years if 50 per cent of them received it.” The current armamentarium to prevent TB consists of the BCG vaccine which is given to children at birth. While it protects children from acquiring serious TB, it does not afford much protection to adults. Besides, BC being a live vaccine, could theoretically cause TB in PLHIV. The only other weapon available is giving HIV infected patients a daily dose of a single anti-TB drug — Isoniazid — to prevent them from getting TB. This measure is acknowledged to fuel the spread of Isoniazid resistant TB, but is still adopted as the lesser of the two evils. “The new vaccine would overcome both these challenges. I see it becoming part of a whole package of pre-Anti Retroviral Therapy care that can keep people with HIV healthy for many years,” said Prof. Harries. It is for future research to unravel how the vaccine may benefit people with CD4 counts lower than 200. While the Dar Dar study focused on a group at high risk for TB, the potential of the new vaccine to prevent TB among HIV negative individuals in TB prevalent areas is open to exploration. Meantime, it may be two years before Mycobacterium vaccae will become available.
World - This beetle's signature:bullet marks on trees
WORCESTER (Massachusetts): A wood-devouring beetle has gained a foothold in New England, U.S., and authorities plan to cut down large numbers of infested trees and grind them up to stop the pest from spreading to the region’s celebrated forests and ravaging the timber, tourism and maple-syrup industries.
The infestation of Asian long-horned beetles in the Worcester area marks the fourth time the pests have been found in trees in the U.S. and the closest they have ever come to the great New England woods that erupt in dazzling, tourist-pleasing colours in the fall.
“This insect scares us to death because if it ever got loose in the forests of New England, it would be just about impossible to contain and it’d change the landscape dramatically,” said Tom McCrum, coordinator of the Massachusetts Maple Syrup Association.
Calling it a national emergency, federal authorities have committed themselves to spending millions of dollars to fight the invasion. They have sent in smokejumpers, tree-climbers and other experts to identify infested trees. The affected area now covers 160 square km around Worcester and four neighbouring towns, and at least 1,800 trees have been tagged for destruction.
The outbreak was detected this summer, after Donna Massie spotted beetles on a tree in her backyard in Worcester. She caught one, searched online to identify it, and then called agriculture authorities. Now her tree is riddled with thimble-size holes. “It looks like someone opened fire with a machine gun,” said Ms. Massie of the signature exit holes gnawed away by the bullet-shaped black beetle with white freckles, long antennae and a voracious appetite for hardwood.
The beetles first appeared in the U.S. in 1996 in Brooklyn, probably arriving in the wood of a shipping crate from China, and have since shown up in New York’s Central Park and parts of New Jersey and Illinois. Authorities believe that the Massachusetts infestation is unrelated but that the beetles probably arrived the same way.
Eradication efforts in New York, New Jersey and Illinois have cost $268 million over the past 11 years. — AP
The infestation of Asian long-horned beetles in the Worcester area marks the fourth time the pests have been found in trees in the U.S. and the closest they have ever come to the great New England woods that erupt in dazzling, tourist-pleasing colours in the fall.
“This insect scares us to death because if it ever got loose in the forests of New England, it would be just about impossible to contain and it’d change the landscape dramatically,” said Tom McCrum, coordinator of the Massachusetts Maple Syrup Association.
Calling it a national emergency, federal authorities have committed themselves to spending millions of dollars to fight the invasion. They have sent in smokejumpers, tree-climbers and other experts to identify infested trees. The affected area now covers 160 square km around Worcester and four neighbouring towns, and at least 1,800 trees have been tagged for destruction.
The outbreak was detected this summer, after Donna Massie spotted beetles on a tree in her backyard in Worcester. She caught one, searched online to identify it, and then called agriculture authorities. Now her tree is riddled with thimble-size holes. “It looks like someone opened fire with a machine gun,” said Ms. Massie of the signature exit holes gnawed away by the bullet-shaped black beetle with white freckles, long antennae and a voracious appetite for hardwood.
The beetles first appeared in the U.S. in 1996 in Brooklyn, probably arriving in the wood of a shipping crate from China, and have since shown up in New York’s Central Park and parts of New Jersey and Illinois. Authorities believe that the Massachusetts infestation is unrelated but that the beetles probably arrived the same way.
Eradication efforts in New York, New Jersey and Illinois have cost $268 million over the past 11 years. — AP
Health - Want to lose weight ? Try eating
LONDON: Scientists try to stop hunger with retooled foods. That is one of the strategies being developed by scientists experimenting with foods that trick the body into feeling full.
At the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, England, food expert Peter Wilde and colleagues are developing foods that slow down the digestive system, which then triggers a signal to the brain that suppresses appetite. “That fools you into thinking you’ve eaten far too much when you really haven’t,” said Mr. Wilde.
From his studies on fat digestion, he said it should be possible to make foods, from bread to yogurts, which make it easier to diet.
While the research is preliminary, Mr. Wilde’s approach to curbing appetite is one that some doctors say could be key in combating the obesity epidemic.
“Being able to switch off appetite would be a big help for people having trouble losing weight,” said Steve Bloom, a professor of investigative medicine at London’s Imperial College. Scientists in North America and elsewhere in Europe are also trying to control appetite, including through chemical injections or implantable devices that interfere with the digestive system. Mr. Bloom said regulating appetite through modified foods is theoretically possible. Other mechanisms in the body, like cholesterol production, are already routinely tweaked with medicines.
But Mr. Bloom warned that controlling appetite may be more challenging. “The body has lots of things to prevent its regulatory mechanisms from being tricked,” he said. For instance, while certain hormones regulate appetite, the brain also relies on nerve receptors in the stomach to detect the presence of food and tell it when the stomach is full.
Mr. Wilde’s research hinges on the body’s mechanisms for digesting fat.
Fat normally gets broken down in the first part of the small intestines. When you eat a high-fat meal, however, the body can only digest the fat entirely further down in the intestines.
That sparks a release of hormones that suppress appetite. Mr. Wilde’s approach copies what happens with a high-fat meal: he coats fat droplets in foods with modified proteins from plants, so it takes longer for the enzymes that break down fat to reach it.
That means that the fat is not digested until it hits the far reaches of the intestines. At that point, intestinal cells send side-effects like gas and diarrhoea. Scientists think that those side-effects could be avoided if fibre intake is increased.
In taste tests by several dozen people, participants found that alginate-enhanced bread tasted as good as or even better than regular bread, said molecular physiology professor Jeffrey Pearson, who is leading the Newcastle research. “It would be very helpful to reduce people’s calorific levels by stealth, so they don’t notice there’s been a change,” he said. Adding: “People don’t want to completely change their lifestyle and stop eating. ... This lets them indulge again.”
Food companies and pharmaceutical firms are also exploring ways to tinker with appetite. In 2004, Unilever bought the rights to a South African plant traditionally chewed by tribesman to ward off hunger. A small study found people given the plant extract, ‘Hoodia gordonii’, for 15 days had slashed their food intake by 1,000 calories compared to people on a placebo. A Unilever spokesman said the extract would be added to a food or beverage and could hit the market within a few years.
Not all experts are convinced appetite-stopping foods will be a cure-all for obesity.
“Humans are a very messy group to control,” said Alice H. Lichtenstein, a nutritionist at Tufts University. People are motivated to eat for various reasons, from taste to price to childhood nostalgia, she said. Other experts worry about how such food might be regulated once they are available. “If you have this magic bullet, how do you control who gets it? What do you do about anorexics or female adolescents,” asked Peter Fryer, a chemical engineer at the University of Birmingham.
But experts agree that foods that cut appetite could be an effective tool against obesity. “Dieting is an awful bore and most human beings are very gullible,” said Mr. Bloom, adding: “We need all the help science can provide.”
At the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, England, food expert Peter Wilde and colleagues are developing foods that slow down the digestive system, which then triggers a signal to the brain that suppresses appetite. “That fools you into thinking you’ve eaten far too much when you really haven’t,” said Mr. Wilde.
From his studies on fat digestion, he said it should be possible to make foods, from bread to yogurts, which make it easier to diet.
While the research is preliminary, Mr. Wilde’s approach to curbing appetite is one that some doctors say could be key in combating the obesity epidemic.
“Being able to switch off appetite would be a big help for people having trouble losing weight,” said Steve Bloom, a professor of investigative medicine at London’s Imperial College. Scientists in North America and elsewhere in Europe are also trying to control appetite, including through chemical injections or implantable devices that interfere with the digestive system. Mr. Bloom said regulating appetite through modified foods is theoretically possible. Other mechanisms in the body, like cholesterol production, are already routinely tweaked with medicines.
But Mr. Bloom warned that controlling appetite may be more challenging. “The body has lots of things to prevent its regulatory mechanisms from being tricked,” he said. For instance, while certain hormones regulate appetite, the brain also relies on nerve receptors in the stomach to detect the presence of food and tell it when the stomach is full.
Mr. Wilde’s research hinges on the body’s mechanisms for digesting fat.
Fat normally gets broken down in the first part of the small intestines. When you eat a high-fat meal, however, the body can only digest the fat entirely further down in the intestines.
That sparks a release of hormones that suppress appetite. Mr. Wilde’s approach copies what happens with a high-fat meal: he coats fat droplets in foods with modified proteins from plants, so it takes longer for the enzymes that break down fat to reach it.
That means that the fat is not digested until it hits the far reaches of the intestines. At that point, intestinal cells send side-effects like gas and diarrhoea. Scientists think that those side-effects could be avoided if fibre intake is increased.
In taste tests by several dozen people, participants found that alginate-enhanced bread tasted as good as or even better than regular bread, said molecular physiology professor Jeffrey Pearson, who is leading the Newcastle research. “It would be very helpful to reduce people’s calorific levels by stealth, so they don’t notice there’s been a change,” he said. Adding: “People don’t want to completely change their lifestyle and stop eating. ... This lets them indulge again.”
Food companies and pharmaceutical firms are also exploring ways to tinker with appetite. In 2004, Unilever bought the rights to a South African plant traditionally chewed by tribesman to ward off hunger. A small study found people given the plant extract, ‘Hoodia gordonii’, for 15 days had slashed their food intake by 1,000 calories compared to people on a placebo. A Unilever spokesman said the extract would be added to a food or beverage and could hit the market within a few years.
Not all experts are convinced appetite-stopping foods will be a cure-all for obesity.
“Humans are a very messy group to control,” said Alice H. Lichtenstein, a nutritionist at Tufts University. People are motivated to eat for various reasons, from taste to price to childhood nostalgia, she said. Other experts worry about how such food might be regulated once they are available. “If you have this magic bullet, how do you control who gets it? What do you do about anorexics or female adolescents,” asked Peter Fryer, a chemical engineer at the University of Birmingham.
But experts agree that foods that cut appetite could be an effective tool against obesity. “Dieting is an awful bore and most human beings are very gullible,” said Mr. Bloom, adding: “We need all the help science can provide.”
World - Obama says India will be top priority
Ashok Easwaran
Chicago: A stronger relationship and a close strategic partnership with India will be a “top priority” of a Barack Obama administration, the Democratic presidential candidate has said.
“The U.S. should be working with India on a range of critical issues from preventing terrorism to promoting peace and stability in Asia,” Senator Obama said in an exclusive interview to IANS on Wednesday. “Joe Biden and I will make building a stronger relationship, including a close strategic partnership, with India a top priority.”
On his agenda for working with New Delhi, he said: “I also believe India is a natural strategic partner for America in the 21st century and that the U.S. should be working with India on a range of critical issues from preventing terrorism to promoting peace and stability in Asia.”
In the interview, Mr. Obama elaborated on a range of issues, from comprehensive immigration reforms and making globalisation and trade work for American workers, to seeking the active participation of the Indian American community in the process of change that he has advocated.
He said he would support “comprehensive immigration reform,” including the H-1B visa programme “to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.”
Mr. Obama explained that he wanted to end abuses of the H1-B visas that are used by highly qualified specialists to work in the U.S. He added that he would make “immigrant workers less dependent on their employers for their right to stay in the country, and would hold accountable employers who abuse the system and their workers.”
The administration, he said, would seek to strengthen ties with the “vibrant” Indian American community and encourage their “active engagement... in making the change we seek.” He asserted that the Democratic nomination was running on the manifesto of “inclusiveness, optimism and hope” that would translate into a “progressive presidency.”
On the contentious topics of outsourcing and globalisation, he said: “We know that we cannot and should not put up walls around our economy.” Acknowledging that global competition “is a fact that cannot be reversed,” Mr. Obama added: “But we must find a way to make globalisation and trade work for American workers.”
Mr. Obama has deep roots in Chicago, having started his career as a community organiser in the city. From his days as an Illinois Senator, he has had strong links with the city’s growing Indian American community.
Chicago: A stronger relationship and a close strategic partnership with India will be a “top priority” of a Barack Obama administration, the Democratic presidential candidate has said.
“The U.S. should be working with India on a range of critical issues from preventing terrorism to promoting peace and stability in Asia,” Senator Obama said in an exclusive interview to IANS on Wednesday. “Joe Biden and I will make building a stronger relationship, including a close strategic partnership, with India a top priority.”
On his agenda for working with New Delhi, he said: “I also believe India is a natural strategic partner for America in the 21st century and that the U.S. should be working with India on a range of critical issues from preventing terrorism to promoting peace and stability in Asia.”
In the interview, Mr. Obama elaborated on a range of issues, from comprehensive immigration reforms and making globalisation and trade work for American workers, to seeking the active participation of the Indian American community in the process of change that he has advocated.
He said he would support “comprehensive immigration reform,” including the H-1B visa programme “to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.”
Mr. Obama explained that he wanted to end abuses of the H1-B visas that are used by highly qualified specialists to work in the U.S. He added that he would make “immigrant workers less dependent on their employers for their right to stay in the country, and would hold accountable employers who abuse the system and their workers.”
The administration, he said, would seek to strengthen ties with the “vibrant” Indian American community and encourage their “active engagement... in making the change we seek.” He asserted that the Democratic nomination was running on the manifesto of “inclusiveness, optimism and hope” that would translate into a “progressive presidency.”
On the contentious topics of outsourcing and globalisation, he said: “We know that we cannot and should not put up walls around our economy.” Acknowledging that global competition “is a fact that cannot be reversed,” Mr. Obama added: “But we must find a way to make globalisation and trade work for American workers.”
Mr. Obama has deep roots in Chicago, having started his career as a community organiser in the city. From his days as an Illinois Senator, he has had strong links with the city’s growing Indian American community.
Business - Now,chocolate from camel milk
Dubai: Al Nassma, claimed as the world’s first camel-milk chocolate, has been officially launched in Dubai.
Al Nassma, which in Arabic means cool desert breeze, is seen as a significant development for the United Arab Emirates’ camel milk industry as demand from the chocolate manufacturers is set to create demand for more of it.
“We want to create a brand which has international importance. I believe this product has the power to become the sweet ambassador of Arabia born in Dubai,” Johann George Hochleitner, the man behind the idea, was quoted as saying by Abu Dhabi’s The National.
Mr. Hochleitner, who has created chocolate from sheep and goat milk, spent two years travelling as far as Libya and Kazakhstan looking for a suitable camel milk producer. He finally found Dubai’s Camelicious. It took another two years to develop the product line.
The chocolate is made from Camelicious’ camel milk powder. Although a traditional staple for the Bedouin, camel milk is not produced on a large scale in the UAE. There are only two camel farms in the country, and fresh milk continues to be a niche product. Camel milk is produced in many countries in West Asia and North Africa, but only Dubai has a facility to make chocolate. — PTI
Al Nassma, which in Arabic means cool desert breeze, is seen as a significant development for the United Arab Emirates’ camel milk industry as demand from the chocolate manufacturers is set to create demand for more of it.
“We want to create a brand which has international importance. I believe this product has the power to become the sweet ambassador of Arabia born in Dubai,” Johann George Hochleitner, the man behind the idea, was quoted as saying by Abu Dhabi’s The National.
Mr. Hochleitner, who has created chocolate from sheep and goat milk, spent two years travelling as far as Libya and Kazakhstan looking for a suitable camel milk producer. He finally found Dubai’s Camelicious. It took another two years to develop the product line.
The chocolate is made from Camelicious’ camel milk powder. Although a traditional staple for the Bedouin, camel milk is not produced on a large scale in the UAE. There are only two camel farms in the country, and fresh milk continues to be a niche product. Camel milk is produced in many countries in West Asia and North Africa, but only Dubai has a facility to make chocolate. — PTI
Sports - Cricket;BCCI may terminate Nimbus rights
Sonali Krishna
MUMBAI: Nimbus, which bagged the telecast rights for domestic cricket and all international matches played at home for $612 million in 2006, seems to be going through some turbulent times. Highly placed officials told ET, that The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is upset with Nimbus, due to outstanding dues of approximately Rs 170 crore. This includes the payment to be made by Nimbus for the upcoming India-England series.
These officials indicated that BCCI has sent a legal notice to Nimbus and may even be contemplating terminating the broadcast rights that was awarded to the sports company three years ago. However, when contacted, BCCI secretary N Srinivasan said: “I am not prepared to offer comments as it relates to our contract with Nimbus and we wish to respect the privacy of the same.”
Nimbus Communications CEO Digvijay Singh said: “We are governed by confidentiality provisions in contracts and therefore can offer no comment in respect of your queries, other than to confirm that we remain in compliance of our payment obligations to BCCI and in respect of security thereof.”
However, BCCI insiders confirmed that there was, in fact, a payment issue that the cricket board was grappling with at the moment. This is not the first time that Nimbus has struggled to meet payment schedules. Last year, BCCI shot off a letter to Nimbus Sports chairman Harish Thawani to pay up Rs 130-crore dues, failing which they would invoke the bank guarantees.
In September, ET had reported that Nimbus was in the market looking for an investor to sell 26% stake. However, given the current market scenario and the fact that Nimbus has less than two years left for their $612.18-million deal with BCCI to expire, it is going to be increasingly difficult to rope in an equity partner. The company was looking at raising $140 million for a 26% stake, valuing the diversified media firm at $550 million. Last year, Nimbus raised $125 million from 3i, Cisco and Oman International Fund.
MUMBAI: Nimbus, which bagged the telecast rights for domestic cricket and all international matches played at home for $612 million in 2006, seems to be going through some turbulent times. Highly placed officials told ET, that The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is upset with Nimbus, due to outstanding dues of approximately Rs 170 crore. This includes the payment to be made by Nimbus for the upcoming India-England series.
These officials indicated that BCCI has sent a legal notice to Nimbus and may even be contemplating terminating the broadcast rights that was awarded to the sports company three years ago. However, when contacted, BCCI secretary N Srinivasan said: “I am not prepared to offer comments as it relates to our contract with Nimbus and we wish to respect the privacy of the same.”
Nimbus Communications CEO Digvijay Singh said: “We are governed by confidentiality provisions in contracts and therefore can offer no comment in respect of your queries, other than to confirm that we remain in compliance of our payment obligations to BCCI and in respect of security thereof.”
However, BCCI insiders confirmed that there was, in fact, a payment issue that the cricket board was grappling with at the moment. This is not the first time that Nimbus has struggled to meet payment schedules. Last year, BCCI shot off a letter to Nimbus Sports chairman Harish Thawani to pay up Rs 130-crore dues, failing which they would invoke the bank guarantees.
In September, ET had reported that Nimbus was in the market looking for an investor to sell 26% stake. However, given the current market scenario and the fact that Nimbus has less than two years left for their $612.18-million deal with BCCI to expire, it is going to be increasingly difficult to rope in an equity partner. The company was looking at raising $140 million for a 26% stake, valuing the diversified media firm at $550 million. Last year, Nimbus raised $125 million from 3i, Cisco and Oman International Fund.
Mktg - Airtel's Voice SMS Campaign - Kantabai? (G.Read)
Neha Kalra
Kantabai, the character in Karan Johar’s hit production, Kal Ho Naa Ho, had what it takes to become a ‘filmi’ legend. And Airtel’s new TV commercial for its voice SMS product proves the point through a reprise of sorts. The TVC will enter viewers’ living rooms on Saturday, but you can be the first to watch it now, here on afaqs!
http://www.afaqs.com/perl/advertising/creative_showcase/index.html?id=7264&media=TV
In terms of work, the TVC offers a different approach by the creative agency, Rediffusion Y&R, for the brand. For Hindi film actors Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor, the TVC is the first time they will share the advertising screen.
The film opens on Shah Rukh Khan standing in the balcony of a house and Saif walking up to him. Saif opens the floor for conversation, "I miss you so much, it hurts." SRK turns his face and walks away. Saif approaches him again when he’s bathing, but has the shower curtain drawn in his face for his pains.
Next, Saif is shown working out at the gym, repeating the golden words, "I miss you so much, it hurts." SRK, who is standing behind him, punches him hard in the stomach, only to get a pain-steeped version of the same dialogue. And as Saif speaks his lines, SRK records it on his mobile. Next, he punches a few keys on the phone.
The next shot opens on Saif's real life girlfriend, Kareena, sitting with a friend and fulminating against her boyfriend. When her mobile rings, she picks it up after much nudging from her friend. But when she hears the pain wracked lines, she softens visibly. This is followed by a super, 'Voice SMS', and the voiceover, "Add emotion to your messages with voice SMS." The film ends with the Airtel logo.
Giving his first byte to the media on the TVC, Chandrashekhar Radhakrishnan (Chandru), head, brand and media, Bharti Airtel, tells afaqs!, "Airtel is looking at various opportunities to engage with the youth. Through offerings such as Song Catcher, Hello Tune and Music on Demand, we are strengthening the brand's promise towards the young audience. Voice SMS has the potential to define the language of the youth." Chandru believes that the voice SMS platform adds impact and emotion to messages.
The service is priced at 75 paise per SMS.
The brief that was provided to Rediffusion was to talk about adding emotion to messages. "The initial creative presentation was based on the story of two friends and the girlfriend of one of them. The celebrity angle came in later and has actually led to it being a stronger proposition in terms of communication," Chandru explains.
Amitesh Rao, national head on Airtel at Rediffusion, says, "The brand is looking at starting a new youth phenomenon with the product as well as the communication that one can see. Every new product or piece of communication becomes a fad. Considering the product, the youth is most likely to pick it up first, fast."
Brand Airtel has used several celebrities in recent times, beginning with the ads featuring R Madhavan and Vidya Balan. In fact, the latest TVC for Airtel digital TV is bubbling with stars, though SRK’s absence is noticeable, maybe because he endorses the rival DishTV.
"One can see that Airtel has seen a high usage of celebrities in its communication over the last six months. But the inclusion of SRK, Saif and Kareena for this TVC came in at the production stage," reveals Rao.
Apart from Ramanuj Shastry and Sagar Mahabaleshwarkar, national creative directors, Rediffusion Y&R, who have worked closely on the creative for the ad, Deepesh Jha and Jaideep Mahajan, creative heads on Airtel, have also contributed to the ideation.
The product, Chandru, says, has been rigorously tested over a period of three to six months amongst the prospective target consumers. He reveals that market research talks about the urban market using such a product for sending fun messages to people close to them.
Sources reveal that the film has been shot at a whopping budget of Rs 1.5-2 crore, which includes the costs incurred on the celebrities. Apart from television, radio and outdoor will also be part of the communication for the product. Considering the youth quotient that the brand is aiming at, viral campaigns and social networking will be used, too.
The story has a marked similarity to the Kantabai scenes in Kal Ho Naa Ho. Was it deliberate? "There was already a context to SRK and Saif – we only got to push it further," says Chandru.
The film has been shot in Mumbai over two days by Corcoise Films and it has been directed by Prashant Issar.
Kantabai, the character in Karan Johar’s hit production, Kal Ho Naa Ho, had what it takes to become a ‘filmi’ legend. And Airtel’s new TV commercial for its voice SMS product proves the point through a reprise of sorts. The TVC will enter viewers’ living rooms on Saturday, but you can be the first to watch it now, here on afaqs!
http://www.afaqs.com/perl/advertising/creative_showcase/index.html?id=7264&media=TV
In terms of work, the TVC offers a different approach by the creative agency, Rediffusion Y&R, for the brand. For Hindi film actors Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor, the TVC is the first time they will share the advertising screen.
The film opens on Shah Rukh Khan standing in the balcony of a house and Saif walking up to him. Saif opens the floor for conversation, "I miss you so much, it hurts." SRK turns his face and walks away. Saif approaches him again when he’s bathing, but has the shower curtain drawn in his face for his pains.
Next, Saif is shown working out at the gym, repeating the golden words, "I miss you so much, it hurts." SRK, who is standing behind him, punches him hard in the stomach, only to get a pain-steeped version of the same dialogue. And as Saif speaks his lines, SRK records it on his mobile. Next, he punches a few keys on the phone.
The next shot opens on Saif's real life girlfriend, Kareena, sitting with a friend and fulminating against her boyfriend. When her mobile rings, she picks it up after much nudging from her friend. But when she hears the pain wracked lines, she softens visibly. This is followed by a super, 'Voice SMS', and the voiceover, "Add emotion to your messages with voice SMS." The film ends with the Airtel logo.
Giving his first byte to the media on the TVC, Chandrashekhar Radhakrishnan (Chandru), head, brand and media, Bharti Airtel, tells afaqs!, "Airtel is looking at various opportunities to engage with the youth. Through offerings such as Song Catcher, Hello Tune and Music on Demand, we are strengthening the brand's promise towards the young audience. Voice SMS has the potential to define the language of the youth." Chandru believes that the voice SMS platform adds impact and emotion to messages.
The service is priced at 75 paise per SMS.
The brief that was provided to Rediffusion was to talk about adding emotion to messages. "The initial creative presentation was based on the story of two friends and the girlfriend of one of them. The celebrity angle came in later and has actually led to it being a stronger proposition in terms of communication," Chandru explains.
Amitesh Rao, national head on Airtel at Rediffusion, says, "The brand is looking at starting a new youth phenomenon with the product as well as the communication that one can see. Every new product or piece of communication becomes a fad. Considering the product, the youth is most likely to pick it up first, fast."
Brand Airtel has used several celebrities in recent times, beginning with the ads featuring R Madhavan and Vidya Balan. In fact, the latest TVC for Airtel digital TV is bubbling with stars, though SRK’s absence is noticeable, maybe because he endorses the rival DishTV.
"One can see that Airtel has seen a high usage of celebrities in its communication over the last six months. But the inclusion of SRK, Saif and Kareena for this TVC came in at the production stage," reveals Rao.
Apart from Ramanuj Shastry and Sagar Mahabaleshwarkar, national creative directors, Rediffusion Y&R, who have worked closely on the creative for the ad, Deepesh Jha and Jaideep Mahajan, creative heads on Airtel, have also contributed to the ideation.
The product, Chandru, says, has been rigorously tested over a period of three to six months amongst the prospective target consumers. He reveals that market research talks about the urban market using such a product for sending fun messages to people close to them.
Sources reveal that the film has been shot at a whopping budget of Rs 1.5-2 crore, which includes the costs incurred on the celebrities. Apart from television, radio and outdoor will also be part of the communication for the product. Considering the youth quotient that the brand is aiming at, viral campaigns and social networking will be used, too.
The story has a marked similarity to the Kantabai scenes in Kal Ho Naa Ho. Was it deliberate? "There was already a context to SRK and Saif – we only got to push it further," says Chandru.
The film has been shot in Mumbai over two days by Corcoise Films and it has been directed by Prashant Issar.
Business - Dell plans to up focus on India biz
Anticipating some softness in the demand in the wake global financial downturn, world’s second biggest computer maker, Dell, is now increasing its focus on emerging markets including India, China, Brazil and Russia.
As a part of this strategy, the company is rolling out its first brand campaign in India roping in real-life business heros and entrepreneurs to endorse its products, especially targeting the small and medium businesses (SMBs).
This is in a slight change in its marketing strategy which was earlier largely focussed on the large enterprises.
“Yes, we are already seeing softening demand. However, the current economic slowdown can either be a problem or an opportunity for us. But we are strategically focussed on gaining market share by conveying the message to the people to invest in right products and technology,” Mark Jarvis, chief marketing officer, Dell told newspersons here on Thursday.
Starting from next week, Dell plans to launch the brand campaign across 22 cities in India showcasing the success of real life Indian entrepreneurs including Raman Roy, CEO of Qattro BPO who is also known as the father of BPO industry in India; P Rajendran, co-founder of NIIT and national award winning filmmaker V K Prakash.
The new campaign will run on newspapers, billboards and mobile SMS to start with, which will gradually be taken into television advertisement campaigns.
“Dell is a well-known brand in India, but among the SMBs we are not the brand leader. Our competitors have chosen Bollywood stars who are not real life heros. However, our campaign will convey the SMBs the stories of real life Indian business heros who have used IT and have become successful in their own business,” said Jarvis.
Dell, which leads the large enterprise market in India cornering 22 per cent market share in the personal computer market, has also improved its position last quarter to no-2 in the consumer segment. However, the company still lags behind its competitors in the SMB segment with a mere 3 per cent market share.
According to industry sources, Hewlett Packard is the number one player in the SMB market in India whereas Dell has been pushed to the fifth position. Over the last one year, Dell had been systematically preparing itself to tap to the opportunities in the SMB market as a part of which the company opened its manufacturing centre in India last year.
This helps the company in reducing the lead time for delivery of products from 21 days to about a week’s time. In April this year, the company went for a channel strategy when it realised that the most SMBs don’t have in-house IT departments.
The company has now more than 300 channel partners in 150 cities who work as the IT advisors to the SMBs thus pushing the sale of Dell computers.
In August this year, the company has launched its Vostro range of products (laptops) which are specifically designed keeping in mind the interest of the SMBs and the users in emerging markets.
“Earlier, we were shipping the products from our factory in Malaysia which was taking at least 21 days to deliver the order in India. It was not much of a problem for large enterprises who plan their investments ahead and in a phased manner. Having our factory in India has reduced the lead time to about 7 days, which will help us better in catering the small businesses who don’t go for a planned purchase,” said P Krishnakumar, Director - Marketing, Dell India.
There are close to 8 million SMBs in India. According to a recent survey, about 12-13 per cent of the Indian SMBs use technology in their business operations. India is presently the 13th largest country in terms of PC usage. According to a report by research firm IDC, with phenomenal increase in the number of users, India is set to become the third largest PC market by 2015.
As a part of this strategy, the company is rolling out its first brand campaign in India roping in real-life business heros and entrepreneurs to endorse its products, especially targeting the small and medium businesses (SMBs).
This is in a slight change in its marketing strategy which was earlier largely focussed on the large enterprises.
“Yes, we are already seeing softening demand. However, the current economic slowdown can either be a problem or an opportunity for us. But we are strategically focussed on gaining market share by conveying the message to the people to invest in right products and technology,” Mark Jarvis, chief marketing officer, Dell told newspersons here on Thursday.
Starting from next week, Dell plans to launch the brand campaign across 22 cities in India showcasing the success of real life Indian entrepreneurs including Raman Roy, CEO of Qattro BPO who is also known as the father of BPO industry in India; P Rajendran, co-founder of NIIT and national award winning filmmaker V K Prakash.
The new campaign will run on newspapers, billboards and mobile SMS to start with, which will gradually be taken into television advertisement campaigns.
“Dell is a well-known brand in India, but among the SMBs we are not the brand leader. Our competitors have chosen Bollywood stars who are not real life heros. However, our campaign will convey the SMBs the stories of real life Indian business heros who have used IT and have become successful in their own business,” said Jarvis.
Dell, which leads the large enterprise market in India cornering 22 per cent market share in the personal computer market, has also improved its position last quarter to no-2 in the consumer segment. However, the company still lags behind its competitors in the SMB segment with a mere 3 per cent market share.
According to industry sources, Hewlett Packard is the number one player in the SMB market in India whereas Dell has been pushed to the fifth position. Over the last one year, Dell had been systematically preparing itself to tap to the opportunities in the SMB market as a part of which the company opened its manufacturing centre in India last year.
This helps the company in reducing the lead time for delivery of products from 21 days to about a week’s time. In April this year, the company went for a channel strategy when it realised that the most SMBs don’t have in-house IT departments.
The company has now more than 300 channel partners in 150 cities who work as the IT advisors to the SMBs thus pushing the sale of Dell computers.
In August this year, the company has launched its Vostro range of products (laptops) which are specifically designed keeping in mind the interest of the SMBs and the users in emerging markets.
“Earlier, we were shipping the products from our factory in Malaysia which was taking at least 21 days to deliver the order in India. It was not much of a problem for large enterprises who plan their investments ahead and in a phased manner. Having our factory in India has reduced the lead time to about 7 days, which will help us better in catering the small businesses who don’t go for a planned purchase,” said P Krishnakumar, Director - Marketing, Dell India.
There are close to 8 million SMBs in India. According to a recent survey, about 12-13 per cent of the Indian SMBs use technology in their business operations. India is presently the 13th largest country in terms of PC usage. According to a report by research firm IDC, with phenomenal increase in the number of users, India is set to become the third largest PC market by 2015.
Business - India;Carlsberg to introduce global brands
Pradipta Mukherjee
Carlsberg, the world’s fourth largest brewery with over 120 brands and a sales revenue of $10 billion, is eyeing 5 per cent share of the Indian beer market this year. The company, which is still in the first year of operations, has so far invested Rs 250 crore in India, and is planning to introduce its global brands over the next few years.
It also plans to set up a greenfield brewery at Hooghly in West Bengal in collaboration with an Indian company Parag Breweries at an investment of Rs 80 crore - Rs 100 crore.
Pradeep Gidwani, managing director of Carlsberg’s India operations, said: “The West Bengal plant will have a capacity of 1.5 lakh hectolitres (hl) and should be operational by the end of this year. Carlsberg will have a 60 per cent holding in the Bengal unit.”
Among its other plans, the company is rolling out Carlsberg brand nationally, after testing it in north Indian markets. Besides, the company will roll out Palone brand soon. “Innovation is the need of the hour and, therefore, our attempt will be to try and create a niche category for all-malt beer in India. Currently, there are no players in all-malt beer, and with innovation packaging and marketing initiatives, we intend to capture 5 per cent market share within the first year of operations,” Gidwani added.
The total beer market in India is currently 12 million hl. Carlsberg’s largest markets currently are the UK and Denmark. In India, its brands are currently available in over 5,000 outlets.
In order to boost on-the-go consumption and impulse purchase, Carlsberg will introduce cans priced at Rs 40 for 500 ml. Currently, a 330-ml Carlsberg bottle is priced between Rs 30 and Rs 60, subject to state-level taxes. Carlsberg entered into a joint venture in 2006 to form South Asia Breweries to build a greenfield brewery in Rajasthan.
Carlsberg holds 45 per cent stake in South Asia Breweries, the Industrialisation Fund for Development Countries of Danish government holds 10 per cent and the remaining 45 per cent is owned by a group of investors led by Carlsberg’s partner in Sri Lanka, the Lion Brewery Ceylon.
Carlsberg, the world’s fourth largest brewery with over 120 brands and a sales revenue of $10 billion, is eyeing 5 per cent share of the Indian beer market this year. The company, which is still in the first year of operations, has so far invested Rs 250 crore in India, and is planning to introduce its global brands over the next few years.
It also plans to set up a greenfield brewery at Hooghly in West Bengal in collaboration with an Indian company Parag Breweries at an investment of Rs 80 crore - Rs 100 crore.
Pradeep Gidwani, managing director of Carlsberg’s India operations, said: “The West Bengal plant will have a capacity of 1.5 lakh hectolitres (hl) and should be operational by the end of this year. Carlsberg will have a 60 per cent holding in the Bengal unit.”
Among its other plans, the company is rolling out Carlsberg brand nationally, after testing it in north Indian markets. Besides, the company will roll out Palone brand soon. “Innovation is the need of the hour and, therefore, our attempt will be to try and create a niche category for all-malt beer in India. Currently, there are no players in all-malt beer, and with innovation packaging and marketing initiatives, we intend to capture 5 per cent market share within the first year of operations,” Gidwani added.
The total beer market in India is currently 12 million hl. Carlsberg’s largest markets currently are the UK and Denmark. In India, its brands are currently available in over 5,000 outlets.
In order to boost on-the-go consumption and impulse purchase, Carlsberg will introduce cans priced at Rs 40 for 500 ml. Currently, a 330-ml Carlsberg bottle is priced between Rs 30 and Rs 60, subject to state-level taxes. Carlsberg entered into a joint venture in 2006 to form South Asia Breweries to build a greenfield brewery in Rajasthan.
Carlsberg holds 45 per cent stake in South Asia Breweries, the Industrialisation Fund for Development Countries of Danish government holds 10 per cent and the remaining 45 per cent is owned by a group of investors led by Carlsberg’s partner in Sri Lanka, the Lion Brewery Ceylon.
World - Was Bill Gates plain lucky ?
Vivek Kaul
It is wrong to think that more successful people are more skilled than less successful ones
MUMBAI: 80% of success is showing up - Woody Allen
William Henry “Bill” Gates III, the third-richest man in the world, built one of the most famous software brands “Microsoft” from scratch. Was it his intelligence and hardwork that was responsible for the stupendous success that followed or was he just plain lucky?
“I think if we look back on our lives, most of us would find that in all our major changes of direction, there was one or more unrelated event which, if it had not happened, would have led us to a very different place in life. That ranges from meeting a future spouse by chance at a train station to Bill Gates, who would probably have been far less wealthy had it not been for several chance incidents that led to his licensing of DOS (disk operating system) to IBM, and with that, the rise of Microsoft,” says Leonard Mlodinow, a faculty at the California Institute of Technology and most recently the author of The Drunkard’s Walk - How Randomness Rules Our Lives.
Mlodinow has previously co-authored A Briefer History of Time with Stephen Hawking and is currently working on another book with Hawking titled The Grand Design.
“Since luck plays a large role in results, it is wrong to think that more successful people are more skilled than less successful ones. Talent and hard work do matter - they increase your chances of succeeding - but plenty of very talented people end up with worse results than less talented ones. The role of chance shuffles the results, ruining any deterministic forces,” says Mlodinow.
Luck had a large part to play in the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft.
As the story goes and Mlodinow recounts it in his book, in August 1990, IBM was looking for a programme called “operating system” for their “home computer.” A group of executives from IBM went to meet Gates, who was then running a very small company.
Gates told them that he couldn’t provide the operating system they wanted and directed them to a programmer called Gary Kildall at Digital Research Inc. The talks between Kildall and IBM did not work out primarily because Kildall’s wife and the company’s business manager refused to sign IBM’s non-disclosure agreement.
Around the same time, Jack Sams, an IBM employee met Gates again. As Mlodinow writes, “They both knew of another operating system that was available, a system that was available, a system that was, depending on whom you ask, based or inspired by Kildall’s. According to Sams, Gates said, “Do you want to get…[that operating system], or do you want me to?” Sams, apparently not appreciating the implications, said, “By all means, you get it.””
Sams of course did not understand the implications of his statement. Gates got the operating system for around $50,000 (or by some accounts, a little more), “made a few changes, and renamed it DOS (disk operating system). IBM, apparently with little faith in the potential of its new idea, licensed DOS from Gates for a low per-copy royalty fee, letting Gates retain the rights.” And the rest as we have seen is history. There was a lot of luck involved in the success of Gates. If Kildall had co-operated, Gates wouldn’t have come into the picture at all.
Also, if IBM had just bought the operating system itself, the situation would have been very different.
“Unfortunately, even if the achievement is purely random, as in coin flipping, people will usually look back and credit the successful individual with great skill for having accomplished it. We make many mistakes of this type, attributing skill to a person who had only luck,” says Mlodinow.
Investment professionals go through a similar lucky phase. Take the case of star fund manager Bill Miller whose Legg Mason Value Trust mutual fund beat the returns of S&P 500 Index for 15 consecutive years from 1991 to 2005. Tomes got written on his legendary investing style and various reasons got attributed to his success. But Mlodinow feels Miller was plain lucky.
“Bill Miller is an example of a person who was credited for skill but had only luck. His mutual fund beat the S&P 500 index for 15 years straight, so it looks skillful, but many theories of stock pricing show that the market is too unpredictable for such a streak to be meaningful,” says Mlodinow.
“On the other hand, a simple calculation shows that if a the few thousand mutual fund managers who were managing funds comparable to his were simply flipping coins once a year, rather than investing in the market, and if we equated getting “heads” with beating the S&P, then, after a few decades, the chances of a streak of “beating the S&P” for 15 or more years in a row would be 75%. This illustrates that a streak like his was to be expected, by chance alone, and hence does not indicate skill,” says Mlodinow.
So if it’s ultimately all about luck, shouldn’t we try to make things happen?
“People who accomplish great things have usually failed many times prior to their success, or at least had only moderate success before their really great breakthrough. As Thomas Watson of IBM said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate,” says Mlodinow.
It is wrong to think that more successful people are more skilled than less successful ones
MUMBAI: 80% of success is showing up - Woody Allen
William Henry “Bill” Gates III, the third-richest man in the world, built one of the most famous software brands “Microsoft” from scratch. Was it his intelligence and hardwork that was responsible for the stupendous success that followed or was he just plain lucky?
“I think if we look back on our lives, most of us would find that in all our major changes of direction, there was one or more unrelated event which, if it had not happened, would have led us to a very different place in life. That ranges from meeting a future spouse by chance at a train station to Bill Gates, who would probably have been far less wealthy had it not been for several chance incidents that led to his licensing of DOS (disk operating system) to IBM, and with that, the rise of Microsoft,” says Leonard Mlodinow, a faculty at the California Institute of Technology and most recently the author of The Drunkard’s Walk - How Randomness Rules Our Lives.
Mlodinow has previously co-authored A Briefer History of Time with Stephen Hawking and is currently working on another book with Hawking titled The Grand Design.
“Since luck plays a large role in results, it is wrong to think that more successful people are more skilled than less successful ones. Talent and hard work do matter - they increase your chances of succeeding - but plenty of very talented people end up with worse results than less talented ones. The role of chance shuffles the results, ruining any deterministic forces,” says Mlodinow.
Luck had a large part to play in the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft.
As the story goes and Mlodinow recounts it in his book, in August 1990, IBM was looking for a programme called “operating system” for their “home computer.” A group of executives from IBM went to meet Gates, who was then running a very small company.
Gates told them that he couldn’t provide the operating system they wanted and directed them to a programmer called Gary Kildall at Digital Research Inc. The talks between Kildall and IBM did not work out primarily because Kildall’s wife and the company’s business manager refused to sign IBM’s non-disclosure agreement.
Around the same time, Jack Sams, an IBM employee met Gates again. As Mlodinow writes, “They both knew of another operating system that was available, a system that was available, a system that was, depending on whom you ask, based or inspired by Kildall’s. According to Sams, Gates said, “Do you want to get…[that operating system], or do you want me to?” Sams, apparently not appreciating the implications, said, “By all means, you get it.””
Sams of course did not understand the implications of his statement. Gates got the operating system for around $50,000 (or by some accounts, a little more), “made a few changes, and renamed it DOS (disk operating system). IBM, apparently with little faith in the potential of its new idea, licensed DOS from Gates for a low per-copy royalty fee, letting Gates retain the rights.” And the rest as we have seen is history. There was a lot of luck involved in the success of Gates. If Kildall had co-operated, Gates wouldn’t have come into the picture at all.
Also, if IBM had just bought the operating system itself, the situation would have been very different.
“Unfortunately, even if the achievement is purely random, as in coin flipping, people will usually look back and credit the successful individual with great skill for having accomplished it. We make many mistakes of this type, attributing skill to a person who had only luck,” says Mlodinow.
Investment professionals go through a similar lucky phase. Take the case of star fund manager Bill Miller whose Legg Mason Value Trust mutual fund beat the returns of S&P 500 Index for 15 consecutive years from 1991 to 2005. Tomes got written on his legendary investing style and various reasons got attributed to his success. But Mlodinow feels Miller was plain lucky.
“Bill Miller is an example of a person who was credited for skill but had only luck. His mutual fund beat the S&P 500 index for 15 years straight, so it looks skillful, but many theories of stock pricing show that the market is too unpredictable for such a streak to be meaningful,” says Mlodinow.
“On the other hand, a simple calculation shows that if a the few thousand mutual fund managers who were managing funds comparable to his were simply flipping coins once a year, rather than investing in the market, and if we equated getting “heads” with beating the S&P, then, after a few decades, the chances of a streak of “beating the S&P” for 15 or more years in a row would be 75%. This illustrates that a streak like his was to be expected, by chance alone, and hence does not indicate skill,” says Mlodinow.
So if it’s ultimately all about luck, shouldn’t we try to make things happen?
“People who accomplish great things have usually failed many times prior to their success, or at least had only moderate success before their really great breakthrough. As Thomas Watson of IBM said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate,” says Mlodinow.
Entertainment - India;Still room for more in Marathi GEC market
Swapna Rahul Shah
The Marathi general entertainment channel (GEC) genre has been witnessing some action of late. The existing players include Zee Marathi, ETV Marathi, DD Sahyadri, Mi Marathi, and Saam Marathi. Star India is set to launch its Marathi GEC, Star Pravah, next month with their driver show ‘Raja Shivchhatrapati’.
DD Sahyadri was launched in 1998, while Zee Marathi was launched a year later in 1999. ETV Marathi, Tara Marathi and Prabhat channels were launched in the 2001-02 period. While Tara Marathi and Prabhat have long since closed shop, Zee Marathi and ETV Marathi are still going strong.
According to TAM Media Research data for week 35 to week 42 in the CS 4+ in Maharashtra, Zee Marathi leads among Marathi GECs. ETV Marathi is ranked No. 2, followed by DD Sahyadri at No. 3, Mi Marathi at No. 4 and Saam Marathi, which was launched in August 2008, at No. 5.
Commenting on Saam Marathi’s performance, its Channel Promotion Head, Ambernath Sinha, said, “It is still early days for Saam Marathi. I admit that there have been some hiccups, but we believe that slowly and steadily we will definitely grow in terms of content as well as ratings. Very soon we will have innovative and interactive programmes to strengthen the channel further and I am sure we will then be able to grab more market share. We have a strong content and marketing team to support the same and are working very hard to achieve our goals.”
Quality content the key
Quite a bit of excitement has been generated by the news of Star Pravah’s launch in mid-November. According to media planners, the launch of yet another channel in the Marathi GC genre will not lead to clutter as there is room for more. However, they stressed that quality content was the key to the survival and performance of the channels.
Maharashtra has been a priority market in any media plan, hence GECs have been giving considerable importance to this market.
Nikhil Rangnekar, Executive Director, India – West, Starcom Worldwide, observed, “I think, while there are many channels in this space, the quality of content still remains quite poor. Also, in terms of reception and distribution, they might be lacking to some extent. That’s the reason why it is only Zee Marathi that gets a lion’s share of viewership while the others are languishing behind. I do believe there is still a lot of space for quality content, and a new channel which can provide that to the audiences can succeed. Hence, there seems to be a market for more regional channels, but with quality content.”
He added, “Marathi channels have a fairly high share of viewership and can deliver good numbers in terms of GRPs and reach.”
On the competition amongst the Marathi GECs, he said, “With good quality programming content, it might be relatively easy for a new channel to overtake ETV Marathi as the No. 2 player. But it will be a tough task to get close to Zee Marathi since they have quite a few well-entrenched programmes, which include fiction as well as reality shows, and also a decent fan following for their stars and anchors.”
According to Rajneesh Chaturvedi, National Director - India, MEC Access, “There is a lot of space in the Marathi GEC segment and we can have more regional channels in the segment. The Maharashtra market can support and sustain another Marathi GEC.”
On how important Marathi GECs were in a media plan, Chaturvedi said, “It helps in targeting those brands for which Maharashtra is a targeted market, and there are quite a few brands for which Maharashtra is a market. In that case, they will always prefer Marathi GECs to reach out to the targeted audiences.”
On competition amongst channels, he said that competition always helped in improving the content of the channels.
Mktg - Google swamped with 'great ideas'
Thousands vie for $10mn prize
SILICON VALLEY: A $10 million call by Google for beneficial, world-changing ideas has generated more than 1,50,000 online submissions, CNN.com reported on Thursday. The deadline for people to submit ideas for the initiative, called Project 10^100, was Monday. Google employees will now sift through the ideas, submitted in 25 languages, and choose 100 semifinalists by January 27.
"We're thrilled by the large array of enthusiastic responses to Project 10^100. That number has exceeded our expectations," said Bethany Poole, a product marketing manager at Google. "We're also very impressed by the variety and ingenuity of the submissions across all categories, ranging from health to energy, education and the environment," she said.
Google launched the ambitious project September 24 to help celebrate its 10th birthday. In announcing Project 10^100 (pronounced "10 to the 100th"), the Internet giant said to hoped to solicit and bankroll fresh ideas it believes will have beneficial effects on people's lives.
More than 3,000 Google employees from 50 offices worldwide will whittle down the massive list to 100 finalists. On January 27, Google will make the top 100 ideas available online for public voting for one week. A panel of as-yet-unnamed judges will then review the top 20 ideas and announce up to five winners in mid-February.
SILICON VALLEY: A $10 million call by Google for beneficial, world-changing ideas has generated more than 1,50,000 online submissions, CNN.com reported on Thursday. The deadline for people to submit ideas for the initiative, called Project 10^100, was Monday. Google employees will now sift through the ideas, submitted in 25 languages, and choose 100 semifinalists by January 27.
"We're thrilled by the large array of enthusiastic responses to Project 10^100. That number has exceeded our expectations," said Bethany Poole, a product marketing manager at Google. "We're also very impressed by the variety and ingenuity of the submissions across all categories, ranging from health to energy, education and the environment," she said.
Google launched the ambitious project September 24 to help celebrate its 10th birthday. In announcing Project 10^100 (pronounced "10 to the 100th"), the Internet giant said to hoped to solicit and bankroll fresh ideas it believes will have beneficial effects on people's lives.
More than 3,000 Google employees from 50 offices worldwide will whittle down the massive list to 100 finalists. On January 27, Google will make the top 100 ideas available online for public voting for one week. A panel of as-yet-unnamed judges will then review the top 20 ideas and announce up to five winners in mid-February.
Entertainment - Chinese Action for Rajni's Endhiran
Famed stunt coordinator Woo-ping Yuen will be directing superstar Rajnikanth, reports Prithwish Ganguly
South superstar Rajnikanth and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan starrer Endhiran, which was previously titled Robot, has roped in acclaimed Chinese stunt coordinator Woo-ping Yuen to supervise the action stunts of the film.
Sixty-three-year-old Yuen, also an actor and director, has been instrumental in creating some of the most memorable action stunts in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that had Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, Uma Thurman’s Kill Bill films, The Matrix series starring Keanu Reeves and The Forbidden Kingdom, which had Jet Li and Jackie Chan in it.
Directed by S Shankar, Endhiran is based on the work of the late writer Sujatha’s novels En Iniya Iyanthira and Jeeno Shankar, who has previously directed Rajnikanth in Sivaji: The Boss. The film has a mammoth budget of rupees 140 crore for Endhiran making it the most expensive film to be made in India to date.
“Endhiran will have very slick action sequences and Shankar wanted to have someone who is very big to create some never seen before stunts. Yuen is a master of stunts,” says an insider.
The source adds, “With Yuen looking after the stunts himself, be rest assured that you will get to see some action that defy gravity and reason. There may be some on-air stunts too. Rajnikanth is super excited that he will get to do all this. Yuen might also mix some martial arts in the action sequences.”
The shooting of Endhiran, shooting has already begun in the exotic locales of Peru, is
expected to release on April 14, 2010.
South superstar Rajnikanth and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan starrer Endhiran, which was previously titled Robot, has roped in acclaimed Chinese stunt coordinator Woo-ping Yuen to supervise the action stunts of the film.
Sixty-three-year-old Yuen, also an actor and director, has been instrumental in creating some of the most memorable action stunts in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that had Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, Uma Thurman’s Kill Bill films, The Matrix series starring Keanu Reeves and The Forbidden Kingdom, which had Jet Li and Jackie Chan in it.
Directed by S Shankar, Endhiran is based on the work of the late writer Sujatha’s novels En Iniya Iyanthira and Jeeno Shankar, who has previously directed Rajnikanth in Sivaji: The Boss. The film has a mammoth budget of rupees 140 crore for Endhiran making it the most expensive film to be made in India to date.
“Endhiran will have very slick action sequences and Shankar wanted to have someone who is very big to create some never seen before stunts. Yuen is a master of stunts,” says an insider.
The source adds, “With Yuen looking after the stunts himself, be rest assured that you will get to see some action that defy gravity and reason. There may be some on-air stunts too. Rajnikanth is super excited that he will get to do all this. Yuen might also mix some martial arts in the action sequences.”
The shooting of Endhiran, shooting has already begun in the exotic locales of Peru, is
expected to release on April 14, 2010.
Sport - Cricket;In Conversation with Sunny & Sachin
Two legends of the game — Sachin Tendulkar and Sunil Gavaskar — share a platform and talk to CNN-IBN editor-in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai on the show, ‘The Little Masters’ to be aired later today. Here are excerpts from the interaction
Sachin… 12,000 runs, has it sunk in?
Tendulkar: To be honest, it still hasn’t sunk in; I was just focusing on the ball because till I scored the runs whoever met me, the first question was, you have to do it and when are you doing it? So I was literally fed up answering them. I don’t play for records and I just want to play my game and enjoy my cricket rather than chasing records. I know if I go and do that records will be broken automatically and I don’t need to focus on that.
Is that the same way you felt when you scored 10,000 runs Mr Gavaskar?
Gavaskar: Ten thousand was not something that people looked at, it was basically when one got close to that 29th century mark of Sir Donald Bradman… that was the time after the 28th century… you got off the aircraft and the aircraft maintenance guys would ask you about it, you had room service breakfast, the guy who delivered it, instead of asking for a complimentary match-ticket, he would say we want your 29th century here, so the pressure used to build up every time you went to the ground, we didn’t have ipods then so we had to listen to the talis as well as gaalis.
How do you deal with pressure?
Tendulkar: It’s not that easy to switch off from all these things, our sub-conscious mind grasps all these things and somewhere it is stored. Even if you don’t want to focus on all these things, the room-service guy will remind you of it, so somewhere it’s stored and that’s the last thing you want, you want to go out there with a blank mind. You just have to go out and bat, watch the ball as closely as possible and bat.
Mr. Gavaskar, you used to say something that I still don’t quite believe that you never used to know your score… that you did not even know when you were on 99?
Gavaskar: Yes because I was not interested in how many runs I was batting on, I was only interested in how many runs I got after I got out.
So you never had a look at the scoreboard?
Gavaskar: I had a vague idea, for the simple reason, because if you are on 46, and you know you need four runs to get to a 50, you might play a shot to a ball which you normally wouldn’t in just trying to get that boundary. If you are on 96 you might play a shot that would get you out, so the thing to do would be to forget how many runs you are and then only see your score when you got out.
Are you the same Sachin?
Tendulkar: No, I do look at the scoreboard.
Sachin, is there something that you have learnt from the Gavaskar school of batting?
Tendulkar: It’s everything about him because growing up as a budding cricketer and wanting to play for India, it was the ultimate dream and you had the ultimate player whom we actually had this pleasure of watching from a close distance, the concentration and the determination, the dedication, the confidence to play fast bowling.
You say you would chase your dreams. Was your dream, even in 1987-88, when you were started off to score 10,000 runs? Did you say to yourself there is Sunil Gavaskar with 34 Test hundreds, I want to score more than that?
Tendulkar: There was always this target of 34 hundreds and growing up as a cricketer, my brother always told me that if you want to be something in the history of Indian cricket this is what you have to chase because this is the ultimate thing and Gavaskar is your role model, so you have to try and follow all those things and it was my target.
Mr Gavaskar still plays badminton everyday at four o’clock if he is in Mumbai. Sachin, do you have a set schedule?
Tendulkar: No, not really, I go by my instincts. There are times when just before going to bat I feel like listening to some music. I have done two different things, opening in one day cricket is different and batting in the middle order in Tests is different. In one-day cricket I can be still listening to music and as soon as the umpires are out and the fielders are out, I immediately remove my ear-phones and keep them aside and just walk in to bat. But in Test cricket, I don’t know at what time I have to walk in.
What’s the one piece of advice you would like to give Sachin Tendulkar today if there is anything at all Mr Gavaskar?
Gavaskar: I think I did that four-years ago so I am not going to do that but what I will do is, not advise him, but I will make a plea - please regain the World Cup for us in 2011.
Sachin, is that the next goal then?
Tendulkar: It has always been a dream because that is the ultimate thing you can get for your country.
Sachin… 12,000 runs, has it sunk in?
Tendulkar: To be honest, it still hasn’t sunk in; I was just focusing on the ball because till I scored the runs whoever met me, the first question was, you have to do it and when are you doing it? So I was literally fed up answering them. I don’t play for records and I just want to play my game and enjoy my cricket rather than chasing records. I know if I go and do that records will be broken automatically and I don’t need to focus on that.
Is that the same way you felt when you scored 10,000 runs Mr Gavaskar?
Gavaskar: Ten thousand was not something that people looked at, it was basically when one got close to that 29th century mark of Sir Donald Bradman… that was the time after the 28th century… you got off the aircraft and the aircraft maintenance guys would ask you about it, you had room service breakfast, the guy who delivered it, instead of asking for a complimentary match-ticket, he would say we want your 29th century here, so the pressure used to build up every time you went to the ground, we didn’t have ipods then so we had to listen to the talis as well as gaalis.
How do you deal with pressure?
Tendulkar: It’s not that easy to switch off from all these things, our sub-conscious mind grasps all these things and somewhere it is stored. Even if you don’t want to focus on all these things, the room-service guy will remind you of it, so somewhere it’s stored and that’s the last thing you want, you want to go out there with a blank mind. You just have to go out and bat, watch the ball as closely as possible and bat.
Mr. Gavaskar, you used to say something that I still don’t quite believe that you never used to know your score… that you did not even know when you were on 99?
Gavaskar: Yes because I was not interested in how many runs I was batting on, I was only interested in how many runs I got after I got out.
So you never had a look at the scoreboard?
Gavaskar: I had a vague idea, for the simple reason, because if you are on 46, and you know you need four runs to get to a 50, you might play a shot to a ball which you normally wouldn’t in just trying to get that boundary. If you are on 96 you might play a shot that would get you out, so the thing to do would be to forget how many runs you are and then only see your score when you got out.
Are you the same Sachin?
Tendulkar: No, I do look at the scoreboard.
Sachin, is there something that you have learnt from the Gavaskar school of batting?
Tendulkar: It’s everything about him because growing up as a budding cricketer and wanting to play for India, it was the ultimate dream and you had the ultimate player whom we actually had this pleasure of watching from a close distance, the concentration and the determination, the dedication, the confidence to play fast bowling.
You say you would chase your dreams. Was your dream, even in 1987-88, when you were started off to score 10,000 runs? Did you say to yourself there is Sunil Gavaskar with 34 Test hundreds, I want to score more than that?
Tendulkar: There was always this target of 34 hundreds and growing up as a cricketer, my brother always told me that if you want to be something in the history of Indian cricket this is what you have to chase because this is the ultimate thing and Gavaskar is your role model, so you have to try and follow all those things and it was my target.
Mr Gavaskar still plays badminton everyday at four o’clock if he is in Mumbai. Sachin, do you have a set schedule?
Tendulkar: No, not really, I go by my instincts. There are times when just before going to bat I feel like listening to some music. I have done two different things, opening in one day cricket is different and batting in the middle order in Tests is different. In one-day cricket I can be still listening to music and as soon as the umpires are out and the fielders are out, I immediately remove my ear-phones and keep them aside and just walk in to bat. But in Test cricket, I don’t know at what time I have to walk in.
What’s the one piece of advice you would like to give Sachin Tendulkar today if there is anything at all Mr Gavaskar?
Gavaskar: I think I did that four-years ago so I am not going to do that but what I will do is, not advise him, but I will make a plea - please regain the World Cup for us in 2011.
Sachin, is that the next goal then?
Tendulkar: It has always been a dream because that is the ultimate thing you can get for your country.
World - US;Nuclear Power may be in early stages of revival
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON — After three decades without starting a single new plant, the American nuclear power industry is getting ready to build again.
When the industry first said several years ago that it would resume building plants, deep skepticism greeted the claim. Not since 1973 had anybody in the United States ordered a nuclear plant that was actually built, and the obstacles to a new generation of plants seemed daunting.
But now, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 21 companies say they will seek permission to build 34 power plants, from New York to Texas. Factories are springing up in Indiana and Louisiana to build reactor parts. Workers are clearing a site in Georgia to put in reactors. Starting in January, millions of electric customers in Florida will be billed several dollars a month to finance four new reactors.
On Thursday, the French company Areva, the world’s largest builder of nuclear reactors, and Northrop Grumman announced an investment of more than $360 million at a shipyard in Newport News, Va., to build components for seven proposed American reactors, and more for export.
The change of fortune has come so fast that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which had almost forgotten how to accept an application, has gone into a frenzy of hiring, bringing on hundreds of new engineers to handle the crush of applications.
Many problems could derail the so-called nuclear revival, and virtually no one believes all 34 proposed plants will be built. It is still unclear how many billions they would cost, whether the expense can be financed in a troubled credit market, and how the cost might compare with other power sources.
But experts who follow the industry expect that at least some of the 34 will be built.
Given rising public concern about global warming and a recent history of reliable operation among nuclear plants, “the climate for introducing new plants is probably the best it’s been since the industry started canceling plants” 30 years ago, said Brian Balogh, a history professor at the University of Virginia. Unlike most types of power generation, nuclear plants do not emit the gases that cause global warming, once they are completed.
In the United States, orders for new reactors essentially ended in October 1973. That was also the month that the Arab oil embargo began, inaugurating an era of economic problems that drove up construction costs and suppressed demand for power. In the end, more than 100 nuclear reactors, some in advanced stages of construction, were canceled, and tens of billions of dollars were squandered.
On top of that, the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl explosion in 1986 made nuclear power a hard sell. And cheap turbines were developed to burn natural gas to generate electricity. By the 1990s, even some nuclear plants that had been running for a few years were deemed too costly and were closed.
But nuclear power never went away. The United States has 104 commercial reactors in operation, and the industry has improved their reliability markedly, increasing their output. They generate almost 20 percent of the country’s electric power.
As concerns over global warming and natural gas supplies have worsened, strong support has developed in Congress and some states for new reactors. The governor of Maryland recently cited a “moral imperative” to build plants to counter the threat of climate change. Support for new reactors has long been strong in some localities, particularly those that are candidates for billions of dollars in construction work.
And investment dollars are starting to flow.
“We have a long-term vision,” Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of Areva, said in an interview here on Thursday, explaining her company’s decision to join forces with Northrop Grumman at Newport News.
To help spur a revival, Congress provided $18.5 billion in loan guarantees in a 2005 energy law, plus operating subsidies similar to those available for solar and wind power, and insurance against regulatory delays.
Little effective political opposition to new reactors has emerged so far. The environmental movement is spending its energy fighting new coal-burning power plants, with considerable effect. While few environmental advocates are enthusiastic about nuclear power, a handful acknowledge it could play a role in countering global warming.
“There is no question that some of the passion of the antinuclear movement has drained away,” said Professor Balogh, who is the author of a 1990 book on opposition to nuclear power.
Worried about its ability to build coal plants, but needing new power plants to meet rising electric demand, the utility industry is determined to move ahead on nuclear power. While most spending so far is on engineering work and environmental studies, physical work is in the early stages, as well.
The Georgia Power Company wants new units adjacent to its two Vogtle reactors, finished in the 1980s, and workers there are tearing down old buildings left over from that construction to make space for new construction.
At the Port of Lake Charles, La., the Shaw Group and Westinghouse Electric, owned by Toshiba, are building a factory bigger than 10 football fields that will make components for new reactors in the United States and around the world. BWX Technologies, a subsidiary of McDermott International, is setting up a plant in Mount Vernon, Ind., to resume manufacturing reactor vessels and other big components. Both companies expect work for years to come.
The industry’s most intractable problem, what to do with spent nuclear fuel, has not been solved. The government was supposed to begin accepting spent fuel for burial in 1998 but now says it will be 2017 at the earliest, and it is not clear that the site under study, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, will win a license.
But companies that want to build say the industry could make do for the next few decades with an above-ground “interim storage” site. That might mean centralized storage in a remote desert facility.
Some skeptics argue that a technology that needs taxpayer help on a large scale should not be built. In fact, construction costs for power plants of all kinds have risen sharply in the last two years, creating special problems for nuclear power, which has more steel and concrete than other plants of equal output. By some estimates costs have more than doubled since 2000.
The critics argue that the same money spent elsewhere — on wind power, or on retrofitting buildings — could create bigger cuts in carbon dioxide output. Joseph J. Romm, an official in the Energy Department during the Clinton administration, pointed to a recent estimate by Florida Power & Light that a new reactor could cost a steep $8,000 for each kilowatt of capacity — enough power to run a window air-conditioner. That is at least double what a coal-burning power plant would cost, and Mr. Romm said that it was only the preconstruction estimate of an industry famous for cost overruns.
He said the plants would be hard to finance. “I just read that McDonald’s was having trouble getting money, and there’s not a lot of risk in building a new McDonald’s,” he said. “Obviously, the risks with a nuclear plant are enormous.”
He predicted a return to the problem of the 1970s — high prices for electricity driving electric demand down so much that plants under construction were no longer needed. Some people say they believe more political opposition will emerge once some of the proposed plants move closer to construction.
At the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in Washington that frequently criticizes the nuclear industry, David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer, said it was too soon to say that opposition was weaker now than during construction of the older plants, when grandmothers tried to block bulldozers.
“We’ve got the grandmothers; we just don’t have the bulldozers,” he said. “There’s not the Kodak moment that a lot of these protests need.”
WASHINGTON — After three decades without starting a single new plant, the American nuclear power industry is getting ready to build again.
When the industry first said several years ago that it would resume building plants, deep skepticism greeted the claim. Not since 1973 had anybody in the United States ordered a nuclear plant that was actually built, and the obstacles to a new generation of plants seemed daunting.
But now, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 21 companies say they will seek permission to build 34 power plants, from New York to Texas. Factories are springing up in Indiana and Louisiana to build reactor parts. Workers are clearing a site in Georgia to put in reactors. Starting in January, millions of electric customers in Florida will be billed several dollars a month to finance four new reactors.
On Thursday, the French company Areva, the world’s largest builder of nuclear reactors, and Northrop Grumman announced an investment of more than $360 million at a shipyard in Newport News, Va., to build components for seven proposed American reactors, and more for export.
The change of fortune has come so fast that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which had almost forgotten how to accept an application, has gone into a frenzy of hiring, bringing on hundreds of new engineers to handle the crush of applications.
Many problems could derail the so-called nuclear revival, and virtually no one believes all 34 proposed plants will be built. It is still unclear how many billions they would cost, whether the expense can be financed in a troubled credit market, and how the cost might compare with other power sources.
But experts who follow the industry expect that at least some of the 34 will be built.
Given rising public concern about global warming and a recent history of reliable operation among nuclear plants, “the climate for introducing new plants is probably the best it’s been since the industry started canceling plants” 30 years ago, said Brian Balogh, a history professor at the University of Virginia. Unlike most types of power generation, nuclear plants do not emit the gases that cause global warming, once they are completed.
In the United States, orders for new reactors essentially ended in October 1973. That was also the month that the Arab oil embargo began, inaugurating an era of economic problems that drove up construction costs and suppressed demand for power. In the end, more than 100 nuclear reactors, some in advanced stages of construction, were canceled, and tens of billions of dollars were squandered.
On top of that, the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl explosion in 1986 made nuclear power a hard sell. And cheap turbines were developed to burn natural gas to generate electricity. By the 1990s, even some nuclear plants that had been running for a few years were deemed too costly and were closed.
But nuclear power never went away. The United States has 104 commercial reactors in operation, and the industry has improved their reliability markedly, increasing their output. They generate almost 20 percent of the country’s electric power.
As concerns over global warming and natural gas supplies have worsened, strong support has developed in Congress and some states for new reactors. The governor of Maryland recently cited a “moral imperative” to build plants to counter the threat of climate change. Support for new reactors has long been strong in some localities, particularly those that are candidates for billions of dollars in construction work.
And investment dollars are starting to flow.
“We have a long-term vision,” Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of Areva, said in an interview here on Thursday, explaining her company’s decision to join forces with Northrop Grumman at Newport News.
To help spur a revival, Congress provided $18.5 billion in loan guarantees in a 2005 energy law, plus operating subsidies similar to those available for solar and wind power, and insurance against regulatory delays.
Little effective political opposition to new reactors has emerged so far. The environmental movement is spending its energy fighting new coal-burning power plants, with considerable effect. While few environmental advocates are enthusiastic about nuclear power, a handful acknowledge it could play a role in countering global warming.
“There is no question that some of the passion of the antinuclear movement has drained away,” said Professor Balogh, who is the author of a 1990 book on opposition to nuclear power.
Worried about its ability to build coal plants, but needing new power plants to meet rising electric demand, the utility industry is determined to move ahead on nuclear power. While most spending so far is on engineering work and environmental studies, physical work is in the early stages, as well.
The Georgia Power Company wants new units adjacent to its two Vogtle reactors, finished in the 1980s, and workers there are tearing down old buildings left over from that construction to make space for new construction.
At the Port of Lake Charles, La., the Shaw Group and Westinghouse Electric, owned by Toshiba, are building a factory bigger than 10 football fields that will make components for new reactors in the United States and around the world. BWX Technologies, a subsidiary of McDermott International, is setting up a plant in Mount Vernon, Ind., to resume manufacturing reactor vessels and other big components. Both companies expect work for years to come.
The industry’s most intractable problem, what to do with spent nuclear fuel, has not been solved. The government was supposed to begin accepting spent fuel for burial in 1998 but now says it will be 2017 at the earliest, and it is not clear that the site under study, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, will win a license.
But companies that want to build say the industry could make do for the next few decades with an above-ground “interim storage” site. That might mean centralized storage in a remote desert facility.
Some skeptics argue that a technology that needs taxpayer help on a large scale should not be built. In fact, construction costs for power plants of all kinds have risen sharply in the last two years, creating special problems for nuclear power, which has more steel and concrete than other plants of equal output. By some estimates costs have more than doubled since 2000.
The critics argue that the same money spent elsewhere — on wind power, or on retrofitting buildings — could create bigger cuts in carbon dioxide output. Joseph J. Romm, an official in the Energy Department during the Clinton administration, pointed to a recent estimate by Florida Power & Light that a new reactor could cost a steep $8,000 for each kilowatt of capacity — enough power to run a window air-conditioner. That is at least double what a coal-burning power plant would cost, and Mr. Romm said that it was only the preconstruction estimate of an industry famous for cost overruns.
He said the plants would be hard to finance. “I just read that McDonald’s was having trouble getting money, and there’s not a lot of risk in building a new McDonald’s,” he said. “Obviously, the risks with a nuclear plant are enormous.”
He predicted a return to the problem of the 1970s — high prices for electricity driving electric demand down so much that plants under construction were no longer needed. Some people say they believe more political opposition will emerge once some of the proposed plants move closer to construction.
At the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in Washington that frequently criticizes the nuclear industry, David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer, said it was too soon to say that opposition was weaker now than during construction of the older plants, when grandmothers tried to block bulldozers.
“We’ve got the grandmothers; we just don’t have the bulldozers,” he said. “There’s not the Kodak moment that a lot of these protests need.”
Health - US;Half of doctors routinely prescribe Placebos
GARDINER HARRIS
Half of all American doctors responding to a nationwide survey say they regularly prescribe placebos to patients. The results trouble medical ethicists, who say more research is needed to determine whether doctors must deceive patients in order for placebos to work.
The study involved 679 internists and rheumatologists chosen randomly from a national list of such doctors. In response to three questions included as part of the larger survey, about half reported recommending placebos regularly. Surveys in Denmark, Israel, Britain, Sweden and New Zealand have found similar results.
The most common placebos the American doctors reported using were headache pills and vitamins, but a significant number also reported prescribing antibiotics and sedatives. Although these drugs, contrary to the usual definition of placebos, are not inert, doctors reported using them for their effect on patients’ psyches, not their bodies.
In most cases, doctors who recommended placebos described them to patients as “a medicine not typically used for your condition but might benefit you,” the survey found. Only 5 percent described the treatment to patients as “a placebo.”
The study is being published in BMJ, formerly The British Medical Journal. One of the authors, Franklin G. Miller, was among the medical ethicists who said they were troubled by the results.
“This is the doctor-patient relationship, and our expectations about being truthful about what’s going on and about getting informed consent should give us pause about deception,” said Dr. Miller, director of the research ethics program in the department of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. William Schreiber, an internist in Louisville, Ky., at first said in an interview that he did not believe the survey’s results, because, he said, few doctors he knows routinely prescribe placebos.
But when asked how he treated fibromyalgia or other conditions that many doctors suspect are largely psychosomatic, Dr. Schreiber changed his mind. “The problem is that most of those people are very difficult patients, and it’s a whole lot easier to give them something like a big dose of Aleve,” he said. “Is that a placebo treatment? Depending on how you define it, I guess it is.”
But antibiotics and sedatives are not placebos, he said.
The American Medical Association discourages the use of placebos by doctors when represented as helpful.
“In the clinical setting, the use of a placebo without the patient’s knowledge may undermine trust, compromise the patient-physician relationship and result in medical harm to the patient,” the group’s policy states.
Controlled clinical trials have hinted that placebos may have powerful effects. Some 30 percent to 40 percent of depressed patients who are given placebos get better, a treatment effect that antidepressants barely top. Placebos have also proved effective against hypertension and pain.
But despite much attention given to the power of placebos, basic questions about them remain unanswered: Are they any better than no treatment at all? Must people be deceived into believing that a treatment is active for a placebo to work?
Some studies have hinted at answers, but experts say far more work is needed.
Dr. Howard Brody, director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, said the popularity of alternative medical treatments had led many doctors to embrace placebos as a potentially useful tool. But, Dr. Brody said, doctors should resist using placebos, because they reinforce the deleterious notion that “when something is the matter with you, you will not get better unless you swallow pills.”
Earlier this year, a Maryland mother announced that she would start selling dextrose tablets as a children’s placebo called Obecalp, for “placebo” spelled backward.
Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, one of the study’s authors, said doctors should not prescribe antibiotics or sedatives as placebos, given those drugs’ risks. Use of less active placebos is understandable, he said, since risks are low.
“Everyone comes out happy: the doctor is happy, the patient is happy,” said Dr. Emanuel, chairman of the bioethics department at the health institutes. “But ethical challenges remain.”
Half of all American doctors responding to a nationwide survey say they regularly prescribe placebos to patients. The results trouble medical ethicists, who say more research is needed to determine whether doctors must deceive patients in order for placebos to work.
The study involved 679 internists and rheumatologists chosen randomly from a national list of such doctors. In response to three questions included as part of the larger survey, about half reported recommending placebos regularly. Surveys in Denmark, Israel, Britain, Sweden and New Zealand have found similar results.
The most common placebos the American doctors reported using were headache pills and vitamins, but a significant number also reported prescribing antibiotics and sedatives. Although these drugs, contrary to the usual definition of placebos, are not inert, doctors reported using them for their effect on patients’ psyches, not their bodies.
In most cases, doctors who recommended placebos described them to patients as “a medicine not typically used for your condition but might benefit you,” the survey found. Only 5 percent described the treatment to patients as “a placebo.”
The study is being published in BMJ, formerly The British Medical Journal. One of the authors, Franklin G. Miller, was among the medical ethicists who said they were troubled by the results.
“This is the doctor-patient relationship, and our expectations about being truthful about what’s going on and about getting informed consent should give us pause about deception,” said Dr. Miller, director of the research ethics program in the department of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. William Schreiber, an internist in Louisville, Ky., at first said in an interview that he did not believe the survey’s results, because, he said, few doctors he knows routinely prescribe placebos.
But when asked how he treated fibromyalgia or other conditions that many doctors suspect are largely psychosomatic, Dr. Schreiber changed his mind. “The problem is that most of those people are very difficult patients, and it’s a whole lot easier to give them something like a big dose of Aleve,” he said. “Is that a placebo treatment? Depending on how you define it, I guess it is.”
But antibiotics and sedatives are not placebos, he said.
The American Medical Association discourages the use of placebos by doctors when represented as helpful.
“In the clinical setting, the use of a placebo without the patient’s knowledge may undermine trust, compromise the patient-physician relationship and result in medical harm to the patient,” the group’s policy states.
Controlled clinical trials have hinted that placebos may have powerful effects. Some 30 percent to 40 percent of depressed patients who are given placebos get better, a treatment effect that antidepressants barely top. Placebos have also proved effective against hypertension and pain.
But despite much attention given to the power of placebos, basic questions about them remain unanswered: Are they any better than no treatment at all? Must people be deceived into believing that a treatment is active for a placebo to work?
Some studies have hinted at answers, but experts say far more work is needed.
Dr. Howard Brody, director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, said the popularity of alternative medical treatments had led many doctors to embrace placebos as a potentially useful tool. But, Dr. Brody said, doctors should resist using placebos, because they reinforce the deleterious notion that “when something is the matter with you, you will not get better unless you swallow pills.”
Earlier this year, a Maryland mother announced that she would start selling dextrose tablets as a children’s placebo called Obecalp, for “placebo” spelled backward.
Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, one of the study’s authors, said doctors should not prescribe antibiotics or sedatives as placebos, given those drugs’ risks. Use of less active placebos is understandable, he said, since risks are low.
“Everyone comes out happy: the doctor is happy, the patient is happy,” said Dr. Emanuel, chairman of the bioethics department at the health institutes. “But ethical challenges remain.”
Tech - Hearing Aids;Picking up good vibrations ( with limitations)
Julie Connelly
Hearing aids provide many benefits, but they do not restore hearing to normal, and that is a tough lesson to learn for many people who use them.
"Regardless of how good they are, they never match the quality of your hearing at its best," said William McKenna, a lawyer and former deputy district attorney in Westchester County, New York, who has been wearing hearing aids in both ears for nearly 20 years. "Recently my audiologist asked me how good my hearing was on a scale of 1 to 10. I said, 8 ½."
People who use hearing aids, on average, live with hearing loss for seven years before resigning themselves, usually around age 70, to using a device, according to the Hearing Loss Association of America. "You are in a position where you've been struggling, and you get tired of asking people to repeat themselves," McKenna said.
Most people with hearing loss eventually acknowledge that "the standard becomes hearing better than you heard before," said Eduardo Bravo, an audiologist with Audio Help Associates in Manhattan.
Today, baby boomers account for 10 million of the 31.5 million Americans with hearing loss, according to the Better Hearing Institute, a nonprofit educational organization, and many hearing experts attribute this to listening to overly loud rock music.
"The noise exposure just builds up, and with baby boomers it's been a lifetime of amplified music," said John Burkey, director of audiology at the Lippy Group for Ear Nose and Throat, in Warren, Ohio. Most of these boomers are still in the work force and can't afford not to hear.
"I had to have the best hearing I could because I wanted to remain a psychologist," said Teresa Cochran of Alexandria, Virginia, who has a cochlear implant in one ear but depends on a hearing aid in the other to augment her range of hearing. "I see patients six hours a day during weekdays, and I need to be alert to what they say."
Why do hearing aids fall short of restoring hearing to the equivalent of 20/20 vision? Because there is no cure for sensorineural hearing loss, by far the most common problem. It is caused by degeneration of the nerve cells, known as hair cells, that line the cochlea, the inner ear structure that looks like a snail.
The hair cells transmit signals received from the bones in the middle ear to the auditory nerve, which sends them to the brain. Aging and exposure to noise cause hair cells to die off, starting with those that transmit high-frequency sounds like "s" and "t." Medical science has not yet found a way to repair this nerve damage.
"Birds and fish can regenerate their hair cells, and we've done it on frogs," said John House, president of the House Ear Institute, a nonprofit research group in Los Angeles, which is working on hair-cell regeneration. "But taking a dead or damaged nerve and replacing it — that's 5 or 10 years off."
Or even 20, in the view of Burkey, who is also the author of "Baby Boomers and Hearing Loss: A Guide to Prevention and Care." Hair-cell regeneration is "going to be the future" of hearing technology, he said.
Meanwhile, consumers expect the devices to work as well as glasses or contact lenses. But eyes pose a different problem, one that is more often readily solved. "There is a perfectly good optic nerve," House said. "The only problem is that the focus is not perfect on the retina. Glasses focus the image on the retina."
With the ear, the problem is the nerve itself. But hearing aids can do a lot, especially for those with mild to moderate high-frequency loss, a group that encompasses most people who are hard of hearing.
Digital technology allows fine-tuning to address the wearer's specific loss rather than amplifying sounds indiscriminately, a common complaint about older hearing aids.
Feedback cancellation eliminates most of the whistling that bedevils wearers and distracts many others at movies and concerts. Open-fit hearing aids, tucked discreetly behind the ear with an almost invisible plastic tube going into the canal, offer a more natural sound by allowing low-frequency sounds to penetrate the ear while amplifying the high-frequency ones. A telecoil, a small device that can be embedded in the hearing aid to eliminate feedback, can improve hearing on the telephone.
And the entire package can be encased in colors or leopard-skin plastic for the fashion-forward.
A problem that remains unresolved is background noise. While directional microphones reduce sounds from behind the wearer and amplify those in front, no technology can pull the one voice you want to hear from the babble of other voices.
"Wearers get frustrated," said Brenda Battat, associate executive director of the Hearing Loss Association of America. "Their reaction is, 'I still can't hear at a party, and I just spent $4,000 for these things.' "
Because digital hearing aids are tiny computers that can be adjusted for subtle changes, wearers must keep returning to the audiologist who sold them the devices until they feel comfortable. Sometimes, the process takes months.
Typically, the price of a hearing aid — $1,986 per ear on average in 2007, according to Hearing Aid Journal — includes two or three return visits to the audiologist during a 30- to 45-day trial period. Even after the trial period, many audiologists do not charge for adjustments.
"We have a number of patients who come back and back," said Bravo, the Manhattan audiologist. "We stay with them until they are happy."
Medicare does not pay for hearing aids, although it does cover cochlear implants. Coverage among insurers varies, but most do not pay for hearing aids.
Cochran, the psychologist, suggested that people with hearing loss try to take control of their environments. She asks for a quiet table in restaurants and sits with her back to the wall to eliminate distracting noise behind her. And she reminds herself: "Your hearing becomes better, but it does not become perfect."
Hearing aids provide many benefits, but they do not restore hearing to normal, and that is a tough lesson to learn for many people who use them.
"Regardless of how good they are, they never match the quality of your hearing at its best," said William McKenna, a lawyer and former deputy district attorney in Westchester County, New York, who has been wearing hearing aids in both ears for nearly 20 years. "Recently my audiologist asked me how good my hearing was on a scale of 1 to 10. I said, 8 ½."
People who use hearing aids, on average, live with hearing loss for seven years before resigning themselves, usually around age 70, to using a device, according to the Hearing Loss Association of America. "You are in a position where you've been struggling, and you get tired of asking people to repeat themselves," McKenna said.
Most people with hearing loss eventually acknowledge that "the standard becomes hearing better than you heard before," said Eduardo Bravo, an audiologist with Audio Help Associates in Manhattan.
Today, baby boomers account for 10 million of the 31.5 million Americans with hearing loss, according to the Better Hearing Institute, a nonprofit educational organization, and many hearing experts attribute this to listening to overly loud rock music.
"The noise exposure just builds up, and with baby boomers it's been a lifetime of amplified music," said John Burkey, director of audiology at the Lippy Group for Ear Nose and Throat, in Warren, Ohio. Most of these boomers are still in the work force and can't afford not to hear.
"I had to have the best hearing I could because I wanted to remain a psychologist," said Teresa Cochran of Alexandria, Virginia, who has a cochlear implant in one ear but depends on a hearing aid in the other to augment her range of hearing. "I see patients six hours a day during weekdays, and I need to be alert to what they say."
Why do hearing aids fall short of restoring hearing to the equivalent of 20/20 vision? Because there is no cure for sensorineural hearing loss, by far the most common problem. It is caused by degeneration of the nerve cells, known as hair cells, that line the cochlea, the inner ear structure that looks like a snail.
The hair cells transmit signals received from the bones in the middle ear to the auditory nerve, which sends them to the brain. Aging and exposure to noise cause hair cells to die off, starting with those that transmit high-frequency sounds like "s" and "t." Medical science has not yet found a way to repair this nerve damage.
"Birds and fish can regenerate their hair cells, and we've done it on frogs," said John House, president of the House Ear Institute, a nonprofit research group in Los Angeles, which is working on hair-cell regeneration. "But taking a dead or damaged nerve and replacing it — that's 5 or 10 years off."
Or even 20, in the view of Burkey, who is also the author of "Baby Boomers and Hearing Loss: A Guide to Prevention and Care." Hair-cell regeneration is "going to be the future" of hearing technology, he said.
Meanwhile, consumers expect the devices to work as well as glasses or contact lenses. But eyes pose a different problem, one that is more often readily solved. "There is a perfectly good optic nerve," House said. "The only problem is that the focus is not perfect on the retina. Glasses focus the image on the retina."
With the ear, the problem is the nerve itself. But hearing aids can do a lot, especially for those with mild to moderate high-frequency loss, a group that encompasses most people who are hard of hearing.
Digital technology allows fine-tuning to address the wearer's specific loss rather than amplifying sounds indiscriminately, a common complaint about older hearing aids.
Feedback cancellation eliminates most of the whistling that bedevils wearers and distracts many others at movies and concerts. Open-fit hearing aids, tucked discreetly behind the ear with an almost invisible plastic tube going into the canal, offer a more natural sound by allowing low-frequency sounds to penetrate the ear while amplifying the high-frequency ones. A telecoil, a small device that can be embedded in the hearing aid to eliminate feedback, can improve hearing on the telephone.
And the entire package can be encased in colors or leopard-skin plastic for the fashion-forward.
A problem that remains unresolved is background noise. While directional microphones reduce sounds from behind the wearer and amplify those in front, no technology can pull the one voice you want to hear from the babble of other voices.
"Wearers get frustrated," said Brenda Battat, associate executive director of the Hearing Loss Association of America. "Their reaction is, 'I still can't hear at a party, and I just spent $4,000 for these things.' "
Because digital hearing aids are tiny computers that can be adjusted for subtle changes, wearers must keep returning to the audiologist who sold them the devices until they feel comfortable. Sometimes, the process takes months.
Typically, the price of a hearing aid — $1,986 per ear on average in 2007, according to Hearing Aid Journal — includes two or three return visits to the audiologist during a 30- to 45-day trial period. Even after the trial period, many audiologists do not charge for adjustments.
"We have a number of patients who come back and back," said Bravo, the Manhattan audiologist. "We stay with them until they are happy."
Medicare does not pay for hearing aids, although it does cover cochlear implants. Coverage among insurers varies, but most do not pay for hearing aids.
Cochran, the psychologist, suggested that people with hearing loss try to take control of their environments. She asks for a quiet table in restaurants and sits with her back to the wall to eliminate distracting noise behind her. And she reminds herself: "Your hearing becomes better, but it does not become perfect."
World - You can take the vines out of Burgundy,but will they make better wine ?
Eric Asimov
You heard the one about the suitcase clones, no? It goes like this: In the black of night a guy sneaks into a famous Burgundy vineyard - let's say La Tâche, but it could just as easily be Le Musigny or Clos de Bèze. He takes some cuttings of pinot noir vines, wraps them in wet cloth and smuggles them back to California. He propagates the vines and, voilà! He's got grand cru pinot noir.
Dubious? It supposedly happens all the time - the smuggling part, at least - if we are to believe the marketing for dozens of American wineries. Their promotional materials tell the story of the suitcase clones, or the brand-name version, Samsonite clones. In some variations, it was a friend of a friend who obtained the clones. Either way, vineyards all over the West Coast associate themselves in their marketing with Burgundy's greatest.
Such stories may excite gullible consumers who are looking for something, anything, to distinguish one of the myriad pinot noirs from another.
But the truth is that the origin of a vine, whether from a clone boldly swiped from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti or meekly purchased from the local nursery, is at best meaningless. The grand cru association is a little like picking up a guitar like one Jimi Hendrix used and expecting "Purple Haze" to burst out. Fat chance.
And by the way, it is illegal to import agricultural material without proper quarantining.
Yet the continued fascination with suitcase clones, and with the arcane issue of grape clones in general, hints at the desperation of consumers to gain some sense of control over where their wine dollars are going. The more we know about the clonal selections, soil composition, rootstocks, trellising techniques, pruning methods and degree days, the better we can guess what's going to be in the bottle, right?
To an extent, yes, but even well-informed wine drinkers have a difficult time making sense of many of the technical details of winemaking, especially when it comes to clones. So let's take a closer look at clones and the actual role they play in what's in your glass, regardless of their origin.
Vines grow grapes because they want to reproduce the old-fashioned way, by enticing birds or other critters to eat the sweet fruit, a natural means of transporting the seeds to a new location for planting. Such methods prove inefficient to meet human needs.
The scourge of phylloxera, for one thing, makes it impossible for most vinifera grapevines to grow on their own roots. This makes growing from seeds cumbersome, so instead growers propagate vines from cuttings of parent plants.
The time-honored technique was a mass selection, in which growers would take cuttings from many different vines. The result was a diverse vineyard that produced grapes of many varied characteristics, particularly if that grape was pinot noir, which is somewhat genetically unstable and mutates far more easily and frequently than, say, cabernet sauvignon or syrah. This is why most suitcase clone tales are about Burgundy and pinot noir.
Many growers in Burgundy still believe a mass selection is the best way to plant a vineyard. Since many if not all of the great Burgundy vineyards are mass selections, the folly of filching a few dozen or even a few hundred cuttings is clear: it can't approach the diversity in the original site.
Meticulous growers used only particular vines for their cuttings. Perhaps these vines were the healthiest or produced the most flavorful grapes. Short-sighted growers might have singled out the most vigorous vines. Either way, by narrowing the clonal selection they were emphasizing their preferred characteristics.
By the late 20th century, scientists had grown expert at isolating clones that produced particular aromas and flavors, that were early ripening or slow to mature or were resistant to disease or produced wine dark in color.
In Dijon, France, a series of pinot noir clones became available with such designations as 113, 114 and 115, which were not only free of grape viruses but also emphasized the aromas and flavors of red fruits like cherry and raspberry, and 667, 777 and 828, which were reminiscent of darker fruits.
Regardless of the attention paid to suitcase clones, these Dijon clones have become the dominant selection among California pinot noir growers, particularly recently, when the number of acres of pinot noir planted in California has almost doubled, to 29,191, (about 11,800 hectares) in 2007 from 15,514 in 1999.
An over-reliance on these clones has troubled some wine writers, like Matt Kramer of Wine Spectator and Allen Meadows of Burghound.com, who have singled them out as one reason that so many California pinot noirs taste the same and lack complexity. Both writers, in fact, used the same word: boring.
It stands to reason. In a vineyard with a wide array of pinot noir clones, some will ripen faster, some slower. Some will taste like red fruits, others like black fruits, and some, maybe, will have fresh herbal touches. Blended together, they would most likely produce a wine of more complexity than a wine made from a small number of clones.
Meadows, in his latest issue, argues that the Dijon clones in particular taste pretty much the same regardless of where they are grown, which further contributes to uniformity.
Both writers have urged growers to aim for a greater mix of clones, not just the numbered Dijons but also older clones that go by names like Swan, Pommard, Mount Eden and Calera. There are quite a few others, some of which, in fact, originally came to California as suitcase clones.
One of the best-known suitcase couriers is Gary Pisoni, who owns vineyards and a winery in the Santa Lucia Highlands. The story of his 1982 vineyard rifling has been told so often and in so many different ways that it's difficult to separate fact from myth. These days Pisoni prefers to play down the whole episode, insisting wisely that clones are just a small component of the larger picture, which includes rootstock, soils, trellising and all the rest.
"Don't forget, Burgundy's had hundreds and hundreds of years to find out which clones grow best in which area," he told me by phone. "We're just getting started here in America."
You heard the one about the suitcase clones, no? It goes like this: In the black of night a guy sneaks into a famous Burgundy vineyard - let's say La Tâche, but it could just as easily be Le Musigny or Clos de Bèze. He takes some cuttings of pinot noir vines, wraps them in wet cloth and smuggles them back to California. He propagates the vines and, voilà! He's got grand cru pinot noir.
Dubious? It supposedly happens all the time - the smuggling part, at least - if we are to believe the marketing for dozens of American wineries. Their promotional materials tell the story of the suitcase clones, or the brand-name version, Samsonite clones. In some variations, it was a friend of a friend who obtained the clones. Either way, vineyards all over the West Coast associate themselves in their marketing with Burgundy's greatest.
Such stories may excite gullible consumers who are looking for something, anything, to distinguish one of the myriad pinot noirs from another.
But the truth is that the origin of a vine, whether from a clone boldly swiped from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti or meekly purchased from the local nursery, is at best meaningless. The grand cru association is a little like picking up a guitar like one Jimi Hendrix used and expecting "Purple Haze" to burst out. Fat chance.
And by the way, it is illegal to import agricultural material without proper quarantining.
Yet the continued fascination with suitcase clones, and with the arcane issue of grape clones in general, hints at the desperation of consumers to gain some sense of control over where their wine dollars are going. The more we know about the clonal selections, soil composition, rootstocks, trellising techniques, pruning methods and degree days, the better we can guess what's going to be in the bottle, right?
To an extent, yes, but even well-informed wine drinkers have a difficult time making sense of many of the technical details of winemaking, especially when it comes to clones. So let's take a closer look at clones and the actual role they play in what's in your glass, regardless of their origin.
Vines grow grapes because they want to reproduce the old-fashioned way, by enticing birds or other critters to eat the sweet fruit, a natural means of transporting the seeds to a new location for planting. Such methods prove inefficient to meet human needs.
The scourge of phylloxera, for one thing, makes it impossible for most vinifera grapevines to grow on their own roots. This makes growing from seeds cumbersome, so instead growers propagate vines from cuttings of parent plants.
The time-honored technique was a mass selection, in which growers would take cuttings from many different vines. The result was a diverse vineyard that produced grapes of many varied characteristics, particularly if that grape was pinot noir, which is somewhat genetically unstable and mutates far more easily and frequently than, say, cabernet sauvignon or syrah. This is why most suitcase clone tales are about Burgundy and pinot noir.
Many growers in Burgundy still believe a mass selection is the best way to plant a vineyard. Since many if not all of the great Burgundy vineyards are mass selections, the folly of filching a few dozen or even a few hundred cuttings is clear: it can't approach the diversity in the original site.
Meticulous growers used only particular vines for their cuttings. Perhaps these vines were the healthiest or produced the most flavorful grapes. Short-sighted growers might have singled out the most vigorous vines. Either way, by narrowing the clonal selection they were emphasizing their preferred characteristics.
By the late 20th century, scientists had grown expert at isolating clones that produced particular aromas and flavors, that were early ripening or slow to mature or were resistant to disease or produced wine dark in color.
In Dijon, France, a series of pinot noir clones became available with such designations as 113, 114 and 115, which were not only free of grape viruses but also emphasized the aromas and flavors of red fruits like cherry and raspberry, and 667, 777 and 828, which were reminiscent of darker fruits.
Regardless of the attention paid to suitcase clones, these Dijon clones have become the dominant selection among California pinot noir growers, particularly recently, when the number of acres of pinot noir planted in California has almost doubled, to 29,191, (about 11,800 hectares) in 2007 from 15,514 in 1999.
An over-reliance on these clones has troubled some wine writers, like Matt Kramer of Wine Spectator and Allen Meadows of Burghound.com, who have singled them out as one reason that so many California pinot noirs taste the same and lack complexity. Both writers, in fact, used the same word: boring.
It stands to reason. In a vineyard with a wide array of pinot noir clones, some will ripen faster, some slower. Some will taste like red fruits, others like black fruits, and some, maybe, will have fresh herbal touches. Blended together, they would most likely produce a wine of more complexity than a wine made from a small number of clones.
Meadows, in his latest issue, argues that the Dijon clones in particular taste pretty much the same regardless of where they are grown, which further contributes to uniformity.
Both writers have urged growers to aim for a greater mix of clones, not just the numbered Dijons but also older clones that go by names like Swan, Pommard, Mount Eden and Calera. There are quite a few others, some of which, in fact, originally came to California as suitcase clones.
One of the best-known suitcase couriers is Gary Pisoni, who owns vineyards and a winery in the Santa Lucia Highlands. The story of his 1982 vineyard rifling has been told so often and in so many different ways that it's difficult to separate fact from myth. These days Pisoni prefers to play down the whole episode, insisting wisely that clones are just a small component of the larger picture, which includes rootstock, soils, trellising and all the rest.
"Don't forget, Burgundy's had hundreds and hundreds of years to find out which clones grow best in which area," he told me by phone. "We're just getting started here in America."
Personality - Choi Hyun Mi - The 'Defector Girl Boxer'
Choe Sang-Hun
SEOUL: In a gym on the top floor of a five-story building with no elevator, in a ring with an uneven and patched canvas and strung with laundry, a 17-year-old girl who had never heard of Muhammad Ali until four years ago shadowboxes against an imaginary opponent.
On a wall, a framed motto exhorts: "Today sweat, Tomorrow champion!" But what really drives Choi Hyun Mi is not the former boxing champions gazing down at her from faded photos on the wall. Rather, it is the thought of how her father abandoned a privileged position in North Korea and risked his life to give his talented daughter the freedom to pursue her dream in South Korea.
It is also the image of her mother praying and weeping from the ringside on Oct. 11, as Choi slugged it out with Xu Chunnyan of China and won the World Boxing Association women's featherweight championship.
Even before Choi won the title, news media here had noted her unusual background, dubbing her a "Million Dollar Baby," after the 2004 Clint Eastwood film about a determined young female boxer.
Choi says her fighting career has barely begun.
"When I returned to my corner between rounds of my championship bout, I glimpsed down at my mother sobbing," Choi said. "My parents gave up everything in North Korea to give their children a better life in the South.
"I fight for fame and success," she said. "Boxing is my way to prove that my parents made the right decision."
Choi's family fled to the capitalist South in 2004. After entering amateur contests in 2006, she swept five domestic championships in South Korea, suffering only one defeat and winning the rest of her 17 fights. In September 2007 she turned pro.
It was government scouts in North Korea who first detected Choi's potential. Choi, now 1.7 meters, or 5 feet 7 inches, tall, was almost a head taller than her peers in the malnourished country, and faster than anyone else in her school in Pyongyang. One day, she was approached by the head coach of the prestigious Kim Chul Joo Educational University, in Pyongyang.
There, the government trained Choi and 19 other girls for the possibility of competing in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, encouraging them with special food rations and a promise to reward a gold medal with a seat in Parliament. (In the end, the International Olympic Committee decided it was too early to admit women's boxing as an Olympic sport.)
At 13, she was the youngest but one of the toughest. From an early age, her parents said, Choi was a terror in her neighborhood.
Once, she chased a boy who had beaten up her older brother to his home and challenged him to a fight. Her stunned father bought her an accordion, hoping to divert her energies into music.
But "sitting with a musical instrument was not my style," she said.
Choi is now a senior at Seoul's Yeomgwang High School, which allows her to skip classes when she's training for a fight. Last week, she returned to her gym after recuperating from the championship bout. She wore oversized sunglasses on the street to hide her black eyes and swollen face. Her arms still bore bruises.
"Why do I box? Boxing makes you curvy," she said, striking a pose with a giggle. "I want to be a pretty girl who does pretty boxing.
"But in this sport, you do take some punches."
Choi has shed any trace of a North Korean accent, a low-status marker that often holds back the thousands of North Korean defectors who are struggling to eke out a living in the South. During the interview at the gym, her cellphone constantly vibrated with incoming text messages. At school, her championship has made her a celebrity, with students who have never talked to her before clamoring for her autograph.
South Korea has only 50 professional female boxers, and most say they first took up the sport to lose weight or improve their looks. But Choi is different: She boxes to support her family. Her parents have been unable to find work in South Korea, and her brother is in college.
Despite the little-girl bangs and smiles that give her the look of what she calls "a happy acorn," once in the ring, she turns into what her coach, Kim Han Sang, calls "a hungry fighter like the kind we used to have in Korea, unlike those girls who box as a hobby."
"I think I can make her into a million-dollar boxer," said Kim, a retired marine and former boxer.
In a country where boxing's popularity has been in steep decline and few people know that South Korea has five reigning female world boxing champions, Choi's background is one of her biggest selling points. Posters bill her as the "Defector Girl Boxer."
Her family had lived a life of relative comfort in North Korea. Her father traveled overseas for his state-owned company, which exported zinc to China and sea urchins to Japan. The family's apartment was stocked with Japanese appliances.
"I dressed my children in nothing but Japanese clothes," said her father, Choi Chul Soo, a name he adopted in the South. "But in North Korea, even if you were rich, you were always under surveillance. People disappeared."
While on a business trip in China in 2004, Choi's father sent for his family and bribed border guards to ensure their safe crossing. From China, they were smuggled into Vietnam, where they spent four months living in hiding in hotel rooms, before they were flown to Seoul.
There, they live in a rented apartment half the size of the one they had in Pyongyang. Choi's father found himself jobless in South Korea, dependent on government subsidies for North Korean defectors. His heart sank further when his efforts to smuggle out his mother went awry.
She was caught by the Chinese police and returned to the North, he said, where she was sent to a labor camp.
"I sometimes miss my life in North Korea and wonder whether I made a right choice," the father said with a sigh.
In Seoul, Choi had to unlearn her North Korean boxing vocabulary. South Korea uses English words like "hook" and "KO." She no longer trains under portraits of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Here, she works out to the rhythm of American hip-hop music.
Choi suffered her first setback when her dream of representing her new home in the 2008 Olympics crumbled. She turned pro. But for almost a year, she was kept out of the ring in a legal dispute with her old manager.
Kim, the coach, said Choi must soon resume her three-times-a-day training routine to prepare to defend her title in December. She needs to hone a knockout power punch, Kim said.
As a champion, Choi can earn about $10,000 per fight, much less than men receive. She then shares the money with her manager and coaching staff. She has yet to win any commercial endorsements.
Choi said she wanted to sweep all the world titles in her weight division and then get into the country's entertainment industry, where a few former athletes have proved hugely successful. To achieve that, she said, she needs to become as famous as Laila Ali, the boxing-star daughter of Muhammad Ali.
She raised her white boxing glove. "I'm going to make everyone recognize my name," she said.
SEOUL: In a gym on the top floor of a five-story building with no elevator, in a ring with an uneven and patched canvas and strung with laundry, a 17-year-old girl who had never heard of Muhammad Ali until four years ago shadowboxes against an imaginary opponent.
On a wall, a framed motto exhorts: "Today sweat, Tomorrow champion!" But what really drives Choi Hyun Mi is not the former boxing champions gazing down at her from faded photos on the wall. Rather, it is the thought of how her father abandoned a privileged position in North Korea and risked his life to give his talented daughter the freedom to pursue her dream in South Korea.
It is also the image of her mother praying and weeping from the ringside on Oct. 11, as Choi slugged it out with Xu Chunnyan of China and won the World Boxing Association women's featherweight championship.
Even before Choi won the title, news media here had noted her unusual background, dubbing her a "Million Dollar Baby," after the 2004 Clint Eastwood film about a determined young female boxer.
Choi says her fighting career has barely begun.
"When I returned to my corner between rounds of my championship bout, I glimpsed down at my mother sobbing," Choi said. "My parents gave up everything in North Korea to give their children a better life in the South.
"I fight for fame and success," she said. "Boxing is my way to prove that my parents made the right decision."
Choi's family fled to the capitalist South in 2004. After entering amateur contests in 2006, she swept five domestic championships in South Korea, suffering only one defeat and winning the rest of her 17 fights. In September 2007 she turned pro.
It was government scouts in North Korea who first detected Choi's potential. Choi, now 1.7 meters, or 5 feet 7 inches, tall, was almost a head taller than her peers in the malnourished country, and faster than anyone else in her school in Pyongyang. One day, she was approached by the head coach of the prestigious Kim Chul Joo Educational University, in Pyongyang.
There, the government trained Choi and 19 other girls for the possibility of competing in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, encouraging them with special food rations and a promise to reward a gold medal with a seat in Parliament. (In the end, the International Olympic Committee decided it was too early to admit women's boxing as an Olympic sport.)
At 13, she was the youngest but one of the toughest. From an early age, her parents said, Choi was a terror in her neighborhood.
Once, she chased a boy who had beaten up her older brother to his home and challenged him to a fight. Her stunned father bought her an accordion, hoping to divert her energies into music.
But "sitting with a musical instrument was not my style," she said.
Choi is now a senior at Seoul's Yeomgwang High School, which allows her to skip classes when she's training for a fight. Last week, she returned to her gym after recuperating from the championship bout. She wore oversized sunglasses on the street to hide her black eyes and swollen face. Her arms still bore bruises.
"Why do I box? Boxing makes you curvy," she said, striking a pose with a giggle. "I want to be a pretty girl who does pretty boxing.
"But in this sport, you do take some punches."
Choi has shed any trace of a North Korean accent, a low-status marker that often holds back the thousands of North Korean defectors who are struggling to eke out a living in the South. During the interview at the gym, her cellphone constantly vibrated with incoming text messages. At school, her championship has made her a celebrity, with students who have never talked to her before clamoring for her autograph.
South Korea has only 50 professional female boxers, and most say they first took up the sport to lose weight or improve their looks. But Choi is different: She boxes to support her family. Her parents have been unable to find work in South Korea, and her brother is in college.
Despite the little-girl bangs and smiles that give her the look of what she calls "a happy acorn," once in the ring, she turns into what her coach, Kim Han Sang, calls "a hungry fighter like the kind we used to have in Korea, unlike those girls who box as a hobby."
"I think I can make her into a million-dollar boxer," said Kim, a retired marine and former boxer.
In a country where boxing's popularity has been in steep decline and few people know that South Korea has five reigning female world boxing champions, Choi's background is one of her biggest selling points. Posters bill her as the "Defector Girl Boxer."
Her family had lived a life of relative comfort in North Korea. Her father traveled overseas for his state-owned company, which exported zinc to China and sea urchins to Japan. The family's apartment was stocked with Japanese appliances.
"I dressed my children in nothing but Japanese clothes," said her father, Choi Chul Soo, a name he adopted in the South. "But in North Korea, even if you were rich, you were always under surveillance. People disappeared."
While on a business trip in China in 2004, Choi's father sent for his family and bribed border guards to ensure their safe crossing. From China, they were smuggled into Vietnam, where they spent four months living in hiding in hotel rooms, before they were flown to Seoul.
There, they live in a rented apartment half the size of the one they had in Pyongyang. Choi's father found himself jobless in South Korea, dependent on government subsidies for North Korean defectors. His heart sank further when his efforts to smuggle out his mother went awry.
She was caught by the Chinese police and returned to the North, he said, where she was sent to a labor camp.
"I sometimes miss my life in North Korea and wonder whether I made a right choice," the father said with a sigh.
In Seoul, Choi had to unlearn her North Korean boxing vocabulary. South Korea uses English words like "hook" and "KO." She no longer trains under portraits of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Here, she works out to the rhythm of American hip-hop music.
Choi suffered her first setback when her dream of representing her new home in the 2008 Olympics crumbled. She turned pro. But for almost a year, she was kept out of the ring in a legal dispute with her old manager.
Kim, the coach, said Choi must soon resume her three-times-a-day training routine to prepare to defend her title in December. She needs to hone a knockout power punch, Kim said.
As a champion, Choi can earn about $10,000 per fight, much less than men receive. She then shares the money with her manager and coaching staff. She has yet to win any commercial endorsements.
Choi said she wanted to sweep all the world titles in her weight division and then get into the country's entertainment industry, where a few former athletes have proved hugely successful. To achieve that, she said, she needs to become as famous as Laila Ali, the boxing-star daughter of Muhammad Ali.
She raised her white boxing glove. "I'm going to make everyone recognize my name," she said.
World - Want to be heard in India?You'd better form a militia
Anand Giridharadas
MUMBAI: Not long ago, officials in this seaside megalopolis announced plans to retire taxicabs built before 1983.
This was no radical idea: So withered are Mumbai's taxis that they must often shut the radio when they need the horsepower to climb a hill.
But one union leader here didn't like it. Last week he ordered the drivers of 55,000 taxis to strike. A few hundred drivers, needing money, defied him. Strikers smashed dozens of their taxis. Meanwhile, a fleet of newer, air-conditioned taxis, unconnected to the striking union, operated as usual, until mobs attacked its cabs, too. Thousands of officegoers in India's financial capital were stranded.
Five days later, they were stranded again — but for a different reason. A local ethnic-baiting politician was arrested for inciting violence against north Indian migrants. Followers of his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, or MNS, party flooded the streets hurling stones and bottles, and taxicabs were smashed once again, this time because many are driven by north Indians.
From Mumbai to Bengal to the central plains, violence is achieving an exalted new status even by this region's bloody standards. Politically motivated beating and burning and killing, never wholly absent from the subcontinent, have become more than spasmodic human failings. They have started to replace hunger strikes, sit-ins and marches as the basic tools of Indian political life: guiltlessly deployed, fatally effective.
Forget what you've heard about Gandhi and nonviolence in India. This is a nation of militias now.
"Only nonviolence cannot work," said Sandeep Deshpanda, 34, vice president of the student wing of MNS. "Some people understand only when you kick them," he added, citing an old Hindi adage.
The MNS has come to symbolize this broader phenomenon. Earlier this year, its leader, Raj Thackeray, fired a verbal fusillade against migrants in Mumbai. Young party cadres fanned out and began to thrash migrants in the streets. Then he went after Mumbai stores that print their sign board in English but not in the local Marathi language.
His party is a minority in the state legislature; he runs no organ of state. Yet, as his cadres began to smash the windows of uncooperative stores, thousands of other stores tacked on Marathi signs. The city's appearance changed overnight.
Thackeray's successes evidently left an impression on 1,900 employees of Jet Airways, who were fired last week thanks to the global financial crisis. They rushed to Thackeray's office. He thundered that no Jet Airways flight would leave Mumbai until the employees were rehired.
If an Indian politician said that a generation ago, it might have been empty bluster. Today, the threat was taken seriously enough that the airline's chairman, Naresh Goyal, held telephone discussions with Thackeray. After Thackeray's and others' lobbying, the employees were rehired the next day.
"It is disturbing that workers of Jet Airways sought the help of the MNS when they were given the pink slip," The Times of India newspaper wrote in an editorial. "It is as if they were contracting the mafia to serve their private needs because they didn't have any other recourse."
Political theorists define sovereignty simply. What separates Jordan from Lebanon is a state monopoly on force. In sovereign countries, militias do not decide who drives taxis and doesn't, who is fired and isn't. If this is the definition, it is difficult to call India wholly sovereign today.
Tata, an Indian conglomerate, decided not long ago to build the world's lowest-cost car in West Bengal State. It got into a land dispute. Good arguments surfaced on each side. But arguments matter ever less. Goaded by yet another state politician without a majority, activists besieged the Tata plant, pelted stones at journalists and threatened workers. Tata left the state.
In an open letter to West Bengal citizens last week, Ratan Tata, chairman of the group, wrote that they face a choice between "a prosperous state with the rule of law" and "a destructive political environment of confrontation, agitation, violence and lawlessness."
Maoist insurgents are firebombing their way through central India, winning control over some destitute areas. The government's response? More violence. Government security forces, in tandem with a vigilante group called Salwa Judum, have, according to Human Rights Watch, engaged in "threats, beatings, arbitrary arrests and detention, killings, pillage, and burning of villages to force residents into supporting Salwa Judum."
Meanwhile, Muslim extremists blow up markets, Hindu extremists slaughter Christians and politicians convene commissions.
Whatever its reputation, India has never exactly been a nation of pacifists. Gandhi represented just one strand of thinking, and his view is not the only one to have prevailed. From Kashmir's jihad to various secessionisms to Hindu-Muslim riots, political violence is as Indian as tandoori chicken. Yet in the past it was generally seen as regrettable by people with power. It was rarely a workaday tactic, the way hunger strikes are a tactic.
But in recent years the hollowing of the Indian political center has allowed violence be mainstreamed. The major national parties draw ever smaller fractions of the vote. Challenging them are caste-based and regional parties that narrowcast to electoral pockets. Factional identities are hardening as citizens "vote their caste rather than cast their vote," as a popular refrain puts it.
This political fragmentation pits tribe against tribe. It has corroded the faith among Indians that the institutions that hear and answer grievances — the police, courts, media — are neutral. All increasingly are seen as biased, answerable to their different masters, rather than impartial executors of the public good. All contribute to a growing sense of powerlessness. And so if you are a leader of a political faction that wants to be heard, it is not irrational to believe you need a militia of violent young men to make yourself heard.
Yasin Malik once commanded a militant group in Kashmir, waging war against India. Fourteen years ago, he surrendered his weapons and declared himself a "Gandhian." This week, he told me he is struggling to recruit a new generation to nonviolence.
"Gandhi is the person who created and gave the concept of nonviolence to the world," he said. "He inspired Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. But, unfortunately, in India right now Gandhi is no longer relevant."
"I'm in search of Gandhi in the land of Gandhi," he added. "I've failed to find him."
MUMBAI: Not long ago, officials in this seaside megalopolis announced plans to retire taxicabs built before 1983.
This was no radical idea: So withered are Mumbai's taxis that they must often shut the radio when they need the horsepower to climb a hill.
But one union leader here didn't like it. Last week he ordered the drivers of 55,000 taxis to strike. A few hundred drivers, needing money, defied him. Strikers smashed dozens of their taxis. Meanwhile, a fleet of newer, air-conditioned taxis, unconnected to the striking union, operated as usual, until mobs attacked its cabs, too. Thousands of officegoers in India's financial capital were stranded.
Five days later, they were stranded again — but for a different reason. A local ethnic-baiting politician was arrested for inciting violence against north Indian migrants. Followers of his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, or MNS, party flooded the streets hurling stones and bottles, and taxicabs were smashed once again, this time because many are driven by north Indians.
From Mumbai to Bengal to the central plains, violence is achieving an exalted new status even by this region's bloody standards. Politically motivated beating and burning and killing, never wholly absent from the subcontinent, have become more than spasmodic human failings. They have started to replace hunger strikes, sit-ins and marches as the basic tools of Indian political life: guiltlessly deployed, fatally effective.
Forget what you've heard about Gandhi and nonviolence in India. This is a nation of militias now.
"Only nonviolence cannot work," said Sandeep Deshpanda, 34, vice president of the student wing of MNS. "Some people understand only when you kick them," he added, citing an old Hindi adage.
The MNS has come to symbolize this broader phenomenon. Earlier this year, its leader, Raj Thackeray, fired a verbal fusillade against migrants in Mumbai. Young party cadres fanned out and began to thrash migrants in the streets. Then he went after Mumbai stores that print their sign board in English but not in the local Marathi language.
His party is a minority in the state legislature; he runs no organ of state. Yet, as his cadres began to smash the windows of uncooperative stores, thousands of other stores tacked on Marathi signs. The city's appearance changed overnight.
Thackeray's successes evidently left an impression on 1,900 employees of Jet Airways, who were fired last week thanks to the global financial crisis. They rushed to Thackeray's office. He thundered that no Jet Airways flight would leave Mumbai until the employees were rehired.
If an Indian politician said that a generation ago, it might have been empty bluster. Today, the threat was taken seriously enough that the airline's chairman, Naresh Goyal, held telephone discussions with Thackeray. After Thackeray's and others' lobbying, the employees were rehired the next day.
"It is disturbing that workers of Jet Airways sought the help of the MNS when they were given the pink slip," The Times of India newspaper wrote in an editorial. "It is as if they were contracting the mafia to serve their private needs because they didn't have any other recourse."
Political theorists define sovereignty simply. What separates Jordan from Lebanon is a state monopoly on force. In sovereign countries, militias do not decide who drives taxis and doesn't, who is fired and isn't. If this is the definition, it is difficult to call India wholly sovereign today.
Tata, an Indian conglomerate, decided not long ago to build the world's lowest-cost car in West Bengal State. It got into a land dispute. Good arguments surfaced on each side. But arguments matter ever less. Goaded by yet another state politician without a majority, activists besieged the Tata plant, pelted stones at journalists and threatened workers. Tata left the state.
In an open letter to West Bengal citizens last week, Ratan Tata, chairman of the group, wrote that they face a choice between "a prosperous state with the rule of law" and "a destructive political environment of confrontation, agitation, violence and lawlessness."
Maoist insurgents are firebombing their way through central India, winning control over some destitute areas. The government's response? More violence. Government security forces, in tandem with a vigilante group called Salwa Judum, have, according to Human Rights Watch, engaged in "threats, beatings, arbitrary arrests and detention, killings, pillage, and burning of villages to force residents into supporting Salwa Judum."
Meanwhile, Muslim extremists blow up markets, Hindu extremists slaughter Christians and politicians convene commissions.
Whatever its reputation, India has never exactly been a nation of pacifists. Gandhi represented just one strand of thinking, and his view is not the only one to have prevailed. From Kashmir's jihad to various secessionisms to Hindu-Muslim riots, political violence is as Indian as tandoori chicken. Yet in the past it was generally seen as regrettable by people with power. It was rarely a workaday tactic, the way hunger strikes are a tactic.
But in recent years the hollowing of the Indian political center has allowed violence be mainstreamed. The major national parties draw ever smaller fractions of the vote. Challenging them are caste-based and regional parties that narrowcast to electoral pockets. Factional identities are hardening as citizens "vote their caste rather than cast their vote," as a popular refrain puts it.
This political fragmentation pits tribe against tribe. It has corroded the faith among Indians that the institutions that hear and answer grievances — the police, courts, media — are neutral. All increasingly are seen as biased, answerable to their different masters, rather than impartial executors of the public good. All contribute to a growing sense of powerlessness. And so if you are a leader of a political faction that wants to be heard, it is not irrational to believe you need a militia of violent young men to make yourself heard.
Yasin Malik once commanded a militant group in Kashmir, waging war against India. Fourteen years ago, he surrendered his weapons and declared himself a "Gandhian." This week, he told me he is struggling to recruit a new generation to nonviolence.
"Gandhi is the person who created and gave the concept of nonviolence to the world," he said. "He inspired Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. But, unfortunately, in India right now Gandhi is no longer relevant."
"I'm in search of Gandhi in the land of Gandhi," he added. "I've failed to find him."
World - From Beirut to 9/11
Robert C. McFarlane
In the summer of 1983, I became President Ronald Reagan's special representative to the Middle East, with the mission of restoring a measure of calm to Israel's relations with her neighbors, starting with Lebanon. At the time, Lebanon was occupied by Syrian and Israeli forces - Syria since shortly after Lebanon's civil war began in 1975, and Israel since its invasion in June of the previous year.
Scarcely three months into that assignment, however, I was recalled to Washington and named the president's national security adviser.
Just after midnight on Friday, Oct. 21, I was awakened by a call from Vice President George H.W. Bush, who reported that several East Caribbean states had asked the United States to send forces to the Caribbean island of Grenada to prevent the Soviet Union and Cuba from establishing a base there. I called the president and Secretary of State George Shultz, who were on a golfing trip in Augusta, Georgia, and received approval to have our forces prepare to land within 72 hours.
Then, less than 24 hours later I was awakened again, this time by the duty officer at the White House situation room, who reported that United States Marine barracks in Lebanon had been attacked by Iranian-trained Hezbollah terrorists with heavy losses. Again, I called the president, and he prepared for an immediate return to Washington to deal with both crises.
Today is the 25th anniversary of that bombing, which killed 241 Americans who were part of a multinational peacekeeping force (a simultaneous attack on the French base killed 58 paratroopers). The attack was planned over several months at Hezbollah's training camp in the Bekaa Valley in central Lebanon.
Once American intelligence confirmed who was responsible and where the attack had been planned, President Reagan approved a joint French-American air assault on the camp - only to have the mission aborted just before launching by the secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger. Four months later, all the marines were withdrawn, capping one of the most tragic and costly policy defeats in the brief modern history of American counterterrorism operations.
One could draw several conclusions from this episode. To me the most telling was the one reached by Middle Eastern terrorists, that the United States had neither the will nor the means to respond effectively to a terrorist attack, a conclusion seemingly borne out by our fecklessness toward terrorist attacks in the 1990s: in 1993 on the World Trade Center; on Air Force troops at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996; on our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998; on the destroyer Cole in 2000.
There was no effective response from the United States to any of these. It was not until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that our country decided to go to war against radical Islam.
A second conclusion concerns the age-old maxim never to deploy a force without giving it a clear military mission. In 1983, the Marine battalion positioned at the Beirut Airport was assigned the mission of "presence"; that is, to lend moral support to the fragile Lebanese government. Secretary of State Shultz and I urged the president to give the marines their traditional role - to deploy, at the invitation of the Lebanese government, into the mountains alongside the newly established Lebanese Army in an effort to secure the evacuation of Syrian and Israeli forces from Lebanon.
Weinberger disagreed. He felt strongly that American interests in the Middle East lay primarily in the region's oil, and that to assure access to that oil we ought never to undertake military operations that might result in Muslim casualties and put at risk Muslim goodwill.
Cabinet officers often disagree, and rigorous debate and refinement often lead to better policy. What is intolerable, however, is irresolution. In this case the president allowed the refusal by his secretary of defense to carry out a direct order to go by without comment - an event which could have seemed to Weinberger only a vindication of his judgment.
Faced with the persistent refusal of his secretary of defense to countenance a more active role for the marines, the president withdrew them, sending the terrorists a powerful signal of paralysis within our government and missing an early opportunity to counter the Islamist terrorist threat in its infancy.
Since 9/11 we have learned a lot about the threat from radical Islam and how to defeat it. Our commitment to Iraq is now being vindicated and, if sustained, will enable us to establish an example of pluralism in a Muslim state with a flourishing economy.
First, however, we must win in Afghanistan - truly the decisive battleground in this global struggle. Never has there been a greater need for experience and judgment in the White House.
Unless our next president understands the complexity of the challenge as well as what it will take to succeed, and can lead his cabinet and our country in resolute execution of that strategy, we will lose this war.
Robert C. McFarlane was the national security adviser from 1983 to 1985.
In the summer of 1983, I became President Ronald Reagan's special representative to the Middle East, with the mission of restoring a measure of calm to Israel's relations with her neighbors, starting with Lebanon. At the time, Lebanon was occupied by Syrian and Israeli forces - Syria since shortly after Lebanon's civil war began in 1975, and Israel since its invasion in June of the previous year.
Scarcely three months into that assignment, however, I was recalled to Washington and named the president's national security adviser.
Just after midnight on Friday, Oct. 21, I was awakened by a call from Vice President George H.W. Bush, who reported that several East Caribbean states had asked the United States to send forces to the Caribbean island of Grenada to prevent the Soviet Union and Cuba from establishing a base there. I called the president and Secretary of State George Shultz, who were on a golfing trip in Augusta, Georgia, and received approval to have our forces prepare to land within 72 hours.
Then, less than 24 hours later I was awakened again, this time by the duty officer at the White House situation room, who reported that United States Marine barracks in Lebanon had been attacked by Iranian-trained Hezbollah terrorists with heavy losses. Again, I called the president, and he prepared for an immediate return to Washington to deal with both crises.
Today is the 25th anniversary of that bombing, which killed 241 Americans who were part of a multinational peacekeeping force (a simultaneous attack on the French base killed 58 paratroopers). The attack was planned over several months at Hezbollah's training camp in the Bekaa Valley in central Lebanon.
Once American intelligence confirmed who was responsible and where the attack had been planned, President Reagan approved a joint French-American air assault on the camp - only to have the mission aborted just before launching by the secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger. Four months later, all the marines were withdrawn, capping one of the most tragic and costly policy defeats in the brief modern history of American counterterrorism operations.
One could draw several conclusions from this episode. To me the most telling was the one reached by Middle Eastern terrorists, that the United States had neither the will nor the means to respond effectively to a terrorist attack, a conclusion seemingly borne out by our fecklessness toward terrorist attacks in the 1990s: in 1993 on the World Trade Center; on Air Force troops at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996; on our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998; on the destroyer Cole in 2000.
There was no effective response from the United States to any of these. It was not until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that our country decided to go to war against radical Islam.
A second conclusion concerns the age-old maxim never to deploy a force without giving it a clear military mission. In 1983, the Marine battalion positioned at the Beirut Airport was assigned the mission of "presence"; that is, to lend moral support to the fragile Lebanese government. Secretary of State Shultz and I urged the president to give the marines their traditional role - to deploy, at the invitation of the Lebanese government, into the mountains alongside the newly established Lebanese Army in an effort to secure the evacuation of Syrian and Israeli forces from Lebanon.
Weinberger disagreed. He felt strongly that American interests in the Middle East lay primarily in the region's oil, and that to assure access to that oil we ought never to undertake military operations that might result in Muslim casualties and put at risk Muslim goodwill.
Cabinet officers often disagree, and rigorous debate and refinement often lead to better policy. What is intolerable, however, is irresolution. In this case the president allowed the refusal by his secretary of defense to carry out a direct order to go by without comment - an event which could have seemed to Weinberger only a vindication of his judgment.
Faced with the persistent refusal of his secretary of defense to countenance a more active role for the marines, the president withdrew them, sending the terrorists a powerful signal of paralysis within our government and missing an early opportunity to counter the Islamist terrorist threat in its infancy.
Since 9/11 we have learned a lot about the threat from radical Islam and how to defeat it. Our commitment to Iraq is now being vindicated and, if sustained, will enable us to establish an example of pluralism in a Muslim state with a flourishing economy.
First, however, we must win in Afghanistan - truly the decisive battleground in this global struggle. Never has there been a greater need for experience and judgment in the White House.
Unless our next president understands the complexity of the challenge as well as what it will take to succeed, and can lead his cabinet and our country in resolute execution of that strategy, we will lose this war.
Robert C. McFarlane was the national security adviser from 1983 to 1985.
World - Rebranding America
Nicholas D. Kristof
The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:
She: Obama? But he's the black man, isn't he?
Me: Yes, exactly.
She: But surely a black man couldn't become president of the United States?
Me: It looks as if he'll be elected.
She: But president? That's such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.
Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.
She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?
Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it'll be because white people voted for him.
[Long pause.]
She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!
We're beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama's political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American "brand" to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy's presidency did in the early 1960s.
In his endorsement of Obama, Colin Powell noted that "the new president is going to have to fix the reputation that we've left with the rest of the world." That's not because we Americans crave admiration, but because cooperation is essential to address 21st-century challenges; you can't fire cruise missiles at the global financial crisis.
In his endorsement, Powell added that an Obama election "will also not only electrify our country, I think it'll electrify the world." You can already see that. A 22-nation survey by the BBC found that voters abroad preferred Obama to McCain in every single country - by four to one overall. Nearly half of those in the BBC poll said that the election of Obama, an African-American, would "fundamentally change" their perceptions of the United States.
Europe is particularly intoxicated by the possibility of restoring amity with America in an Obama presidency. As The Economist put it: "Across the Continent, Bush hatred has been replaced by Obama-mania."
Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Obama's rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world "know" about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Obama's rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.
"It's an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.," Kull said.
Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany.
As for Africa, Obama's Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.
Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it's worth remembering something else.
In the Western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica's 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.
Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don't forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.
Look, Obama's skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism.
Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America's global influence - and thus to achieve some of our international objectives - in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person's epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we're every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.
The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:
She: Obama? But he's the black man, isn't he?
Me: Yes, exactly.
She: But surely a black man couldn't become president of the United States?
Me: It looks as if he'll be elected.
She: But president? That's such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.
Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.
She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?
Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it'll be because white people voted for him.
[Long pause.]
She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!
We're beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama's political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American "brand" to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy's presidency did in the early 1960s.
In his endorsement of Obama, Colin Powell noted that "the new president is going to have to fix the reputation that we've left with the rest of the world." That's not because we Americans crave admiration, but because cooperation is essential to address 21st-century challenges; you can't fire cruise missiles at the global financial crisis.
In his endorsement, Powell added that an Obama election "will also not only electrify our country, I think it'll electrify the world." You can already see that. A 22-nation survey by the BBC found that voters abroad preferred Obama to McCain in every single country - by four to one overall. Nearly half of those in the BBC poll said that the election of Obama, an African-American, would "fundamentally change" their perceptions of the United States.
Europe is particularly intoxicated by the possibility of restoring amity with America in an Obama presidency. As The Economist put it: "Across the Continent, Bush hatred has been replaced by Obama-mania."
Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Obama's rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world "know" about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Obama's rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.
"It's an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.," Kull said.
Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany.
As for Africa, Obama's Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.
Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it's worth remembering something else.
In the Western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica's 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.
Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don't forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.
Look, Obama's skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism.
Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America's global influence - and thus to achieve some of our international objectives - in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person's epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we're every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.
Tech - Partying helps power a Dutch nightclub
Elisabeth Rosenthal
Friday, October 24, 2008
ROTTERDAM: If you felt that the atmosphere in the new hip Club Watt was somehow electric, you would be right: Watt has a new type of dance floor that harvests the energy generated by jumps and gyrations and transforms it into electricity. It is one of a handful of energy-generating floors in the world, most still experimental.
With its human engineering, Watt partly powers itself: The better the music, the more people dance, the more electricity comes out of the floor.
At Watt, which describes itself as the first sustainable dance club, that electricity is used to power the light show in and around the floor. "For this first club, we thought it was useful for people to see the results," said Michel Smit, an adviser on the project. "But if the next owner wants to use the electricity to power his toaster, it can do that just as well."
Watt is in large part the creation of the Sustainable Dance Club, a quirky company formed last year by a group of Dutch ecological inventors, engineers and investors now headed by Smit. More than a year in the making, Watt is a huge performance space with not just the sustainable dance floor, but also rainwater-fed toilets and low-waste bars. (Everything is recycled.) Its heat is harvested from the bands' amplifiers and other musical equipment.
"Our idea is that there's enough energy in this world, you just have to use it the right way," Smit said. "If you have a full dance club, there's lots there, you just have to turn it into a usable product."
Greener clubbing will obviously not solve the problem of rising greenhouse gas emissions, which scientists say are responsible for global warming. With their woofers and strobes, nightclubs are electricity guzzlers, unlikely ever to be carbon neutral even if scientists could harness the energy of a mosh pit. (The club's lights do use low-energy bulbs, however.)
Still, the energy produced by an average person dancing is about 20 watts' worth, so two people could light a bulb, Club Watt's scientific consultants have found. Aryan Tielemen, the club's owner, hopes his sustainable dance floor will ultimately produce 10 percent of the club's electricity. Green innovations at the venue will reduce energy use by 50 percent and water use by 30 percent, compared with the previous club in the building, he said.
The United Nations has said the world must reduce greenhouse gases between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020 to prevent dangerous warming. Some of that reduction could come from large changes, like the closing of coal-fired plants and better protection of rain forests. But sustainability experts emphasize that much of the gain should come from doing the things everyone does now, but in ways that are a bit more efficient and green.
"The concept is you party like you always do, but here it will be better for the earth," Smit said.
Watt is the clubbing equivalent of driving a hybrid.
Customers seem to like it. "Sure, I care about the environment, and I'm happy to do my bit in this way," said Bas Muller, a student, emerging from bathrooms that feature waterless urinals and rainwater-fed toilets, with tanks that show how many liters are used per flush. Muller was attending a concert of the Norwegian band Psychomotor, but had also been at the club in September.
Club Watt, which holds about 1,400 people, is part consciousness-raising, part green-energy experiment — and in large part simple entertainment. (Indeed, Tielemen offered the British pop singer Amy Winehouse hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform at the club's opening. It opened without her.)
"The first thing is, I wanted to do my little something for the planet," said Tielemen, who decided to build an entirely green club after seeing a presentation by Sustainable Dance Club on the dance floor, which functions through a technology called piezoelectricity.
But he added: "I'll be very happy with whatever energy the floor produces for the club. And as a businessman, I know it attracts attention."
Tielemen spent about $257,000 on the floor, an investment that will not be recouped from the energy it saves, he said, because as a first-generation model it is fairly inefficient. He lends out parts of the roughly 270-square-foot floor for demonstrations. (Part of it will be flown to New York in December.)
It is perhaps natural that this concept has taken off in Rotterdam, a gritty port city with a booming club scene where young residents have a strong vested interest in controlling global warming.
Located at sea level, Rotterdam would be one of the first cities to go under if global ice melted and sea levels rose significantly. And the Netherlands — which has reclaimed substantial tracts of territory from the sea — has gained a reputation for environmental innovation.
In 2006, a group of local architects, academics and engineers was convened by Döll architects and Enviu, an environmental research group, to brainstorm on the eco-club idea. They ultimately created the Sustainable Dance Club company to develop a blueprint for a greener party place that included what they called "spectaculars" (elements like the no-waste bars that customers could see) as well as hidden elements, like a promise to consider sustainability in purchasing.
The most spectacular "spectacular" is, of course, the dance floor. It takes advantage of the piezoelectric effect: certain materials, when squeezed, develop a charge and produce electricity. When people are dancing, the sustainable dance floor yields by about 1 centimeter — less than half an inch — compressing cells containing piezoelectric material underneath.
In theory, piezoelectric floors can take the energy of any step or jump and convert it into electricity, although that process is now expensive and inefficient, converting just a fraction of human energy to usable power. But the technology is evolving, and the world's first sustainable dance floor is being reprogrammed and electronically adjusted to improve output.
The company hopes to sell the dance floor technology to other clubs and is offering green certification to those that reduce emissions 30 percent. Sustainable Dance Club is now getting an inquiry a day from clubs about the floor. "You can use it anywhere there's movement, but the question now is when does it become cost-efficient?" Smit said, noting that the company was working to develop cheaper, more effective materials.
Energy-generating sidewalks? Subway platforms? Recently, the company identified the next frontier: Gyms and fitness centers.
Friday, October 24, 2008
ROTTERDAM: If you felt that the atmosphere in the new hip Club Watt was somehow electric, you would be right: Watt has a new type of dance floor that harvests the energy generated by jumps and gyrations and transforms it into electricity. It is one of a handful of energy-generating floors in the world, most still experimental.
With its human engineering, Watt partly powers itself: The better the music, the more people dance, the more electricity comes out of the floor.
At Watt, which describes itself as the first sustainable dance club, that electricity is used to power the light show in and around the floor. "For this first club, we thought it was useful for people to see the results," said Michel Smit, an adviser on the project. "But if the next owner wants to use the electricity to power his toaster, it can do that just as well."
Watt is in large part the creation of the Sustainable Dance Club, a quirky company formed last year by a group of Dutch ecological inventors, engineers and investors now headed by Smit. More than a year in the making, Watt is a huge performance space with not just the sustainable dance floor, but also rainwater-fed toilets and low-waste bars. (Everything is recycled.) Its heat is harvested from the bands' amplifiers and other musical equipment.
"Our idea is that there's enough energy in this world, you just have to use it the right way," Smit said. "If you have a full dance club, there's lots there, you just have to turn it into a usable product."
Greener clubbing will obviously not solve the problem of rising greenhouse gas emissions, which scientists say are responsible for global warming. With their woofers and strobes, nightclubs are electricity guzzlers, unlikely ever to be carbon neutral even if scientists could harness the energy of a mosh pit. (The club's lights do use low-energy bulbs, however.)
Still, the energy produced by an average person dancing is about 20 watts' worth, so two people could light a bulb, Club Watt's scientific consultants have found. Aryan Tielemen, the club's owner, hopes his sustainable dance floor will ultimately produce 10 percent of the club's electricity. Green innovations at the venue will reduce energy use by 50 percent and water use by 30 percent, compared with the previous club in the building, he said.
The United Nations has said the world must reduce greenhouse gases between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020 to prevent dangerous warming. Some of that reduction could come from large changes, like the closing of coal-fired plants and better protection of rain forests. But sustainability experts emphasize that much of the gain should come from doing the things everyone does now, but in ways that are a bit more efficient and green.
"The concept is you party like you always do, but here it will be better for the earth," Smit said.
Watt is the clubbing equivalent of driving a hybrid.
Customers seem to like it. "Sure, I care about the environment, and I'm happy to do my bit in this way," said Bas Muller, a student, emerging from bathrooms that feature waterless urinals and rainwater-fed toilets, with tanks that show how many liters are used per flush. Muller was attending a concert of the Norwegian band Psychomotor, but had also been at the club in September.
Club Watt, which holds about 1,400 people, is part consciousness-raising, part green-energy experiment — and in large part simple entertainment. (Indeed, Tielemen offered the British pop singer Amy Winehouse hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform at the club's opening. It opened without her.)
"The first thing is, I wanted to do my little something for the planet," said Tielemen, who decided to build an entirely green club after seeing a presentation by Sustainable Dance Club on the dance floor, which functions through a technology called piezoelectricity.
But he added: "I'll be very happy with whatever energy the floor produces for the club. And as a businessman, I know it attracts attention."
Tielemen spent about $257,000 on the floor, an investment that will not be recouped from the energy it saves, he said, because as a first-generation model it is fairly inefficient. He lends out parts of the roughly 270-square-foot floor for demonstrations. (Part of it will be flown to New York in December.)
It is perhaps natural that this concept has taken off in Rotterdam, a gritty port city with a booming club scene where young residents have a strong vested interest in controlling global warming.
Located at sea level, Rotterdam would be one of the first cities to go under if global ice melted and sea levels rose significantly. And the Netherlands — which has reclaimed substantial tracts of territory from the sea — has gained a reputation for environmental innovation.
In 2006, a group of local architects, academics and engineers was convened by Döll architects and Enviu, an environmental research group, to brainstorm on the eco-club idea. They ultimately created the Sustainable Dance Club company to develop a blueprint for a greener party place that included what they called "spectaculars" (elements like the no-waste bars that customers could see) as well as hidden elements, like a promise to consider sustainability in purchasing.
The most spectacular "spectacular" is, of course, the dance floor. It takes advantage of the piezoelectric effect: certain materials, when squeezed, develop a charge and produce electricity. When people are dancing, the sustainable dance floor yields by about 1 centimeter — less than half an inch — compressing cells containing piezoelectric material underneath.
In theory, piezoelectric floors can take the energy of any step or jump and convert it into electricity, although that process is now expensive and inefficient, converting just a fraction of human energy to usable power. But the technology is evolving, and the world's first sustainable dance floor is being reprogrammed and electronically adjusted to improve output.
The company hopes to sell the dance floor technology to other clubs and is offering green certification to those that reduce emissions 30 percent. Sustainable Dance Club is now getting an inquiry a day from clubs about the floor. "You can use it anywhere there's movement, but the question now is when does it become cost-efficient?" Smit said, noting that the company was working to develop cheaper, more effective materials.
Energy-generating sidewalks? Subway platforms? Recently, the company identified the next frontier: Gyms and fitness centers.
World - NY Times endorses Obama
NEW YORK: The New York Times endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for U.S. president on Thursday, saying he had "met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change."
The Times posted its endorsement on its Internet site on Thursday evening and was to publish it in Friday editions of the newspaper.
Earlier this year, the newspaper endorsed New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, but it said Obama had long ago erased the reservations that led it to make that decision.
"He has drawn in legions of new voters with powerful messages of hope and possibility and calls for shared sacrifice and social responsibility," the Times said. "He has shown a cool head and sound judgement. We believe he has the will and the ability to forge the broad political consensus that is essential to finding solutions to this nation's problems."
The newspaper declared that the choice between Obama and Republican John McCain was easy.
"Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgement to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing," it said.
The endorsement was not unexpected. The Times endorsed Democrats John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000.
According to Editor & Publisher magazine, Obama is outpacing McCain in newspaper endorsements by about three to one, even winning the nod of the Chicago Tribune, the first time it has endorsed a Democrat for president.
However such endorsements are considered to have little influence on voters, especially in presidential races.
(Reporting by Alan Elsner; editing by Mohammad Zargham)
The Times posted its endorsement on its Internet site on Thursday evening and was to publish it in Friday editions of the newspaper.
Earlier this year, the newspaper endorsed New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, but it said Obama had long ago erased the reservations that led it to make that decision.
"He has drawn in legions of new voters with powerful messages of hope and possibility and calls for shared sacrifice and social responsibility," the Times said. "He has shown a cool head and sound judgement. We believe he has the will and the ability to forge the broad political consensus that is essential to finding solutions to this nation's problems."
The newspaper declared that the choice between Obama and Republican John McCain was easy.
"Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgement to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing," it said.
The endorsement was not unexpected. The Times endorsed Democrats John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000.
According to Editor & Publisher magazine, Obama is outpacing McCain in newspaper endorsements by about three to one, even winning the nod of the Chicago Tribune, the first time it has endorsed a Democrat for president.
However such endorsements are considered to have little influence on voters, especially in presidential races.
(Reporting by Alan Elsner; editing by Mohammad Zargham)
World - Chinese banks brace for housing aftershock
Keith Bradsher
Thursday, October 23, 2008
SHENZHEN, China: A soft-spoken electronics engineer with an aversion to parties, Liu Shirong does not mind living in a complex where only 50 of 780 apartments are occupied and the swimming pool is eternally empty.
"I have peace and quiet at night," he said.
Liu may like that tranquility, a rarity in this city of 12 million. But the vacant apartments are a nightmare for the mainly speculative investors who bought them when the complex opened a year ago - and they are part of an emerging problem for Chinese banks.
As in the United States, Britain and Spain, the real estate bubble in China has turned into a bust in many cities; only one of the two dozen towering cranes at projects near Liu's home was in operation one recent afternoon.
Banking experts and economists expect the bust to produce, by next spring or summer, a sharp increase in loan defaults that could erode the high profits earned by Chinese banks over the past three years.
The Chinese government announced a series of measures late Wednesday night to bolster real estate prices. The central bank ordered commercial banks to reduce mortgage rates and down payments for borrowers obtaining their first mortgage, beginning next Monday. And the Finance Ministry reduced the stamp tax on real estate purchases, effective Nov. 1, but only for first-time home buyers acquiring an apartment of less than 90 square meters, or 970 square feet.
But real estate professionals and economists said the measures were too narrow to reverse the growing gloom in the Chinese housing market. Prices have already fallen by up to one-third in some neighborhoods of Shenzhen, the city most affected by the real estate bust.
A national index of real estate prices released by Beijing on Wednesday showed a decline of 0.1 percent in September compared with August, the first drop the government has acknowledged. But experts inside and outside China say that actual declines have been much greater, and that municipal officials have been reluctant to reflect this in the data they send to Beijing.
Under the new rules announced Wednesday, mortgage interest rates will be reduced by 0.27 percent for first-time buyers, to 4.59 percent for mortgages of five years or more.
The new rules also leave in place China's many punitive policies toward people who buy real estate as an investment.
"Things are still getting worse," said a top executive at a real estate developer with a variety of projects. The executive insisted on anonymity, citing the government's sensitivity about the housing market.
Real estate problems could also extend beyond banking, complicating efforts by officials in Beijing to maintain economic growth while fighting inflation. The Chinese central bank, for instance, has come under intense pressure to lower interest rates and ease restrictions on banks' lending to developers.
But a rapid or broad relaxation of monetary policy in response to real estate difficulties could reignite inflation, which rose to 8.7 percent at the consumer level in February but was at 4.6 percent in September.
"Real estate developers are threatening the People's Bank of China, saying, 'If we die, the banks die first,"' said Yu Yongding, a former member of the central bank's monetary policy committee and now an adviser to the cabinet.
According to Yu, developers are exaggerating the dangers that bankruptcies could pose for banks. "If the government bows to this kind of pressure, we lose all the benefits of what we did before" to control inflation, Yu said.
Paradoxically, the relative lack of sophistication of the Chinese mortgage system could keep its real estate bubble from expanding into a credit and financial crisis like the one that has engulfed the West.
Though the Chinese banking system has many problems, including being subject to political influence and fraud in corporate lending, mortgage lending is still more tightly regulated than in the West.
The mortgage market remains closer to something out of the 1946 Frank Capra movie "It's a Wonderful Life" than to the home loans with no down payments and practically no credit checks that proliferated in the United States over the past few years.
In China, roughly half of all home buyers still pay cash for their homes and do not obtain a mortgage at all - although they might borrow some of the cash from friends, families or neighbors. For those who do obtain mortgages, the down payment is 30 percent for buyers taking their first mortgage and 40 percent or more for buyers who have a mortgage on another home.
Under the measures announced Wednesday, the down payment will fall to 20 percent for buyers seeking their first mortgage. But many cities, including Shenzhen, had already lowered the down payment to 20 percent for buyers obtaining their first mortgage.
One Chinese regulation, which would never be allowed in the United States, is widely accepted here as simple prudence: the term of a mortgage must end when the borrower reaches a certain age - 55 for a woman, 60 for a man. This means that a 52-year-old man can obtain a mortgage of up to eight years and that a 52-year-old woman can get a mortgage of up to three years. (Since the 1950s, women in China have retired at an earlier age, as it was thought necessary to protect women's health. Some experts in China are now calling for parity.)
Short durations of mortgages mean that homeowners quickly build up equity in their homes with their monthly payments. That makes them reluctant to mail the keys to the bank and walk away if the market weakens, although a few speculators do so anyway.
It is also nearly impossible for Chinese banks to foreclose on homes. Instead, banks tend to renegotiate monthly payments for borrowers who can clearly demonstrate financial strain.
Chinese banks hold the mortgages they issue instead of following the U.S. practice of bundling them together as securities and reselling pieces to various investors. That process, known as securitization, is now making it hard for homeowners in the United States to renegotiate their mortgages.
For years, U.S. bankers and lawyers urged China, unsuccessfully, to allow securitization, but they have curbed such pleas in recent months after seeing the global financial crisis unfold.
"That's one area where I've always been very critical of Chinese government policy, but now it's not looking so bad," said Joel Rothstein, a partner and real estate specialist in the Beijing office of the Paul Hastings law firm.
U.S. officials are still urging China to pursue more financial innovations, but they have not specifically discussed securitization, said David McCormick, under secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury.
Tao Wang, an economist for UBS in Beijing, calculated that for the average mortgage at publicly traded banks in China, the principal still owed to the bank is equal to half the original purchase price of the house.
With the real estate bust, analysts say some small and medium-size banks with greater exposure to the sector could face difficulties. But large banks, which have been forced by regulators to limit their real estate loans since 2004, are expected to remain somewhat profitable over all.
Most big banks in China are publicly traded, with the government owning a large majority of the shares.
"The chances of a systemic financial crisis in China in this cycle are extremely, extremely low," said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Dragonomics Research, a consulting company in Beijing.
Leo Wah, a China banking analyst at Moody's, has not downgraded banks in China but is closely watching the weakness in real estate and related industries.
"We do not believe that it would cause a serious problem, but if property prices fall some more, it won't be the only sector that has problems," he said.
Already, construction is slowing, and that is starting to hurt other industries. With a sudden drop in Chinese steel consumption, steel makers are rapidly stepping up exports to the United States, despite the risk of fanning trade tensions between the two countries.
For their part, Western banks and real estate funds have made only limited loans and other investments in Chinese real estate because of government restrictions on flows of money into the country. But in some cases, Western investors have started hiring lawyers to serve notices of default to Chinese partners who have fallen behind on payments.
"Until six or eight months ago, we really didn't have this for the China deals," Rothstein, of the Paul Hastings law firm, said.
Chinese banks are flush with cash, with capital equal to 12 to 14 percent of assets, compared with the international regulatory standard of 8 percent.
More important, China has a heavily regulated market that guarantees banks some of the widest margins in the world. Banks raise most of their money through short-term household deposits on which they pay an interest rate of just 0.7 percent. They lend at rates of 6 percent or more.
U.S. regulators were reluctant to prick the real estate bubble that had developed in the United States until last year. But starting in 2004, Beijing officials tried to limit real estate speculation through administrative measures, by setting quotas on real estate lending done by each bank.
In August 2007, as the severity of the crisis involving subprime mortgages in the United States started to become apparent, Chinese bank regulators took the somewhat more market-oriented approach of fine-tuning the heavily regulated interest rates that banks charge for mortgages.
In addition to requiring larger down payments for second and third homes, banks charge interest rates that are up to 3 percentage points higher for these homes than for first-time home buyers.
Even before the policy changes announced Wednesday, few people other than first-time home buyers were buying real estate. "Last year, people were grabbing whatever they could get their hands on," said Liu Nan, a real estate broker in Shenzhen.
"This year, it's mostly people who want to live in them," Liu said.
Keith Bradsher reported from Shenzhen late last month and later added additional reporting from Hong Kong.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
SHENZHEN, China: A soft-spoken electronics engineer with an aversion to parties, Liu Shirong does not mind living in a complex where only 50 of 780 apartments are occupied and the swimming pool is eternally empty.
"I have peace and quiet at night," he said.
Liu may like that tranquility, a rarity in this city of 12 million. But the vacant apartments are a nightmare for the mainly speculative investors who bought them when the complex opened a year ago - and they are part of an emerging problem for Chinese banks.
As in the United States, Britain and Spain, the real estate bubble in China has turned into a bust in many cities; only one of the two dozen towering cranes at projects near Liu's home was in operation one recent afternoon.
Banking experts and economists expect the bust to produce, by next spring or summer, a sharp increase in loan defaults that could erode the high profits earned by Chinese banks over the past three years.
The Chinese government announced a series of measures late Wednesday night to bolster real estate prices. The central bank ordered commercial banks to reduce mortgage rates and down payments for borrowers obtaining their first mortgage, beginning next Monday. And the Finance Ministry reduced the stamp tax on real estate purchases, effective Nov. 1, but only for first-time home buyers acquiring an apartment of less than 90 square meters, or 970 square feet.
But real estate professionals and economists said the measures were too narrow to reverse the growing gloom in the Chinese housing market. Prices have already fallen by up to one-third in some neighborhoods of Shenzhen, the city most affected by the real estate bust.
A national index of real estate prices released by Beijing on Wednesday showed a decline of 0.1 percent in September compared with August, the first drop the government has acknowledged. But experts inside and outside China say that actual declines have been much greater, and that municipal officials have been reluctant to reflect this in the data they send to Beijing.
Under the new rules announced Wednesday, mortgage interest rates will be reduced by 0.27 percent for first-time buyers, to 4.59 percent for mortgages of five years or more.
The new rules also leave in place China's many punitive policies toward people who buy real estate as an investment.
"Things are still getting worse," said a top executive at a real estate developer with a variety of projects. The executive insisted on anonymity, citing the government's sensitivity about the housing market.
Real estate problems could also extend beyond banking, complicating efforts by officials in Beijing to maintain economic growth while fighting inflation. The Chinese central bank, for instance, has come under intense pressure to lower interest rates and ease restrictions on banks' lending to developers.
But a rapid or broad relaxation of monetary policy in response to real estate difficulties could reignite inflation, which rose to 8.7 percent at the consumer level in February but was at 4.6 percent in September.
"Real estate developers are threatening the People's Bank of China, saying, 'If we die, the banks die first,"' said Yu Yongding, a former member of the central bank's monetary policy committee and now an adviser to the cabinet.
According to Yu, developers are exaggerating the dangers that bankruptcies could pose for banks. "If the government bows to this kind of pressure, we lose all the benefits of what we did before" to control inflation, Yu said.
Paradoxically, the relative lack of sophistication of the Chinese mortgage system could keep its real estate bubble from expanding into a credit and financial crisis like the one that has engulfed the West.
Though the Chinese banking system has many problems, including being subject to political influence and fraud in corporate lending, mortgage lending is still more tightly regulated than in the West.
The mortgage market remains closer to something out of the 1946 Frank Capra movie "It's a Wonderful Life" than to the home loans with no down payments and practically no credit checks that proliferated in the United States over the past few years.
In China, roughly half of all home buyers still pay cash for their homes and do not obtain a mortgage at all - although they might borrow some of the cash from friends, families or neighbors. For those who do obtain mortgages, the down payment is 30 percent for buyers taking their first mortgage and 40 percent or more for buyers who have a mortgage on another home.
Under the measures announced Wednesday, the down payment will fall to 20 percent for buyers seeking their first mortgage. But many cities, including Shenzhen, had already lowered the down payment to 20 percent for buyers obtaining their first mortgage.
One Chinese regulation, which would never be allowed in the United States, is widely accepted here as simple prudence: the term of a mortgage must end when the borrower reaches a certain age - 55 for a woman, 60 for a man. This means that a 52-year-old man can obtain a mortgage of up to eight years and that a 52-year-old woman can get a mortgage of up to three years. (Since the 1950s, women in China have retired at an earlier age, as it was thought necessary to protect women's health. Some experts in China are now calling for parity.)
Short durations of mortgages mean that homeowners quickly build up equity in their homes with their monthly payments. That makes them reluctant to mail the keys to the bank and walk away if the market weakens, although a few speculators do so anyway.
It is also nearly impossible for Chinese banks to foreclose on homes. Instead, banks tend to renegotiate monthly payments for borrowers who can clearly demonstrate financial strain.
Chinese banks hold the mortgages they issue instead of following the U.S. practice of bundling them together as securities and reselling pieces to various investors. That process, known as securitization, is now making it hard for homeowners in the United States to renegotiate their mortgages.
For years, U.S. bankers and lawyers urged China, unsuccessfully, to allow securitization, but they have curbed such pleas in recent months after seeing the global financial crisis unfold.
"That's one area where I've always been very critical of Chinese government policy, but now it's not looking so bad," said Joel Rothstein, a partner and real estate specialist in the Beijing office of the Paul Hastings law firm.
U.S. officials are still urging China to pursue more financial innovations, but they have not specifically discussed securitization, said David McCormick, under secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury.
Tao Wang, an economist for UBS in Beijing, calculated that for the average mortgage at publicly traded banks in China, the principal still owed to the bank is equal to half the original purchase price of the house.
With the real estate bust, analysts say some small and medium-size banks with greater exposure to the sector could face difficulties. But large banks, which have been forced by regulators to limit their real estate loans since 2004, are expected to remain somewhat profitable over all.
Most big banks in China are publicly traded, with the government owning a large majority of the shares.
"The chances of a systemic financial crisis in China in this cycle are extremely, extremely low," said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Dragonomics Research, a consulting company in Beijing.
Leo Wah, a China banking analyst at Moody's, has not downgraded banks in China but is closely watching the weakness in real estate and related industries.
"We do not believe that it would cause a serious problem, but if property prices fall some more, it won't be the only sector that has problems," he said.
Already, construction is slowing, and that is starting to hurt other industries. With a sudden drop in Chinese steel consumption, steel makers are rapidly stepping up exports to the United States, despite the risk of fanning trade tensions between the two countries.
For their part, Western banks and real estate funds have made only limited loans and other investments in Chinese real estate because of government restrictions on flows of money into the country. But in some cases, Western investors have started hiring lawyers to serve notices of default to Chinese partners who have fallen behind on payments.
"Until six or eight months ago, we really didn't have this for the China deals," Rothstein, of the Paul Hastings law firm, said.
Chinese banks are flush with cash, with capital equal to 12 to 14 percent of assets, compared with the international regulatory standard of 8 percent.
More important, China has a heavily regulated market that guarantees banks some of the widest margins in the world. Banks raise most of their money through short-term household deposits on which they pay an interest rate of just 0.7 percent. They lend at rates of 6 percent or more.
U.S. regulators were reluctant to prick the real estate bubble that had developed in the United States until last year. But starting in 2004, Beijing officials tried to limit real estate speculation through administrative measures, by setting quotas on real estate lending done by each bank.
In August 2007, as the severity of the crisis involving subprime mortgages in the United States started to become apparent, Chinese bank regulators took the somewhat more market-oriented approach of fine-tuning the heavily regulated interest rates that banks charge for mortgages.
In addition to requiring larger down payments for second and third homes, banks charge interest rates that are up to 3 percentage points higher for these homes than for first-time home buyers.
Even before the policy changes announced Wednesday, few people other than first-time home buyers were buying real estate. "Last year, people were grabbing whatever they could get their hands on," said Liu Nan, a real estate broker in Shenzhen.
"This year, it's mostly people who want to live in them," Liu said.
Keith Bradsher reported from Shenzhen late last month and later added additional reporting from Hong Kong.
World - West is in talks on credit to aid poorer nations
Mark Landler
WASHINGTON: With the financial crisis engulfing developing countries from Latin America to Central Europe, raising the specter of market panic and even social unrest, Western officials are weighing coordinated action to try to stabilize these economies.
The International Monetary Fund, which is in negotiations with several countries to provide emergency loans, is also working to arrange a large credit line that would allow other countries desperate for foreign capital to borrow dollars, according to several officials.
The list of countries under threat is growing by the day, and now includes such stalwarts of the emerging market as Brazil, South Africa and Turkey. They have become collateral damage in a crisis that began in the American subprime housing market.
The fast-growing economies of the developing world depend on money from Western banks to build factories, buy machinery and export goods to the United States and Europe. When those banks stop lending and the money dries up, as it has in recent weeks, investor confidence vanishes and the countries suddenly find themselves in crisis.
The details of the arrangement are still being worked out, but it could be supported by Japan and several oil-producing countries, a fund official said. The fund has not yet approached the Federal Reserve, according to officials, although the Treasury Department has expressed interest in the proposal.
Two weeks ago, the Fed set up unlimited swap agreements with the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and other central banks to ease the severe credit turmoil in Western Europe.
This time, the focus would be on emerging markets with good economic records that are having trouble borrowing dollars.
"There needs to be some action to help these countries," said Neil Dougall, chief economist for emerging markets at Dresdner Kleinwort in London. "There has been a severe drying-up of liquidity there, and it is early days. The tsunami has only just reached their shores."
The monetary fund has about $250 billion available for all types of loans. That could be supplemented by funds from central banks, officials said, though they dismissed a rumor that circled the globe on Thursday that the fund was arranging a $1 trillion credit line.
Whatever the amount ultimately pledged, it would represent the most concerted international response yet to what economists warn could be a volatile, dangerous new phase in the crisis.
"We view it seriously," said Clay Lowery, assistant Treasury secretary for international affairs. "There are a lot of emerging markets that have come under increased pressure recently."
Unlike in the United States and Western Europe, banks in these countries bought few of the mortgage-related securities that undermined the financial system. But as banks stopped lending — either to each other or anyone else — that credit squeeze has hit emerging markets hard.
Stock markets and currencies have plunged, foreign capital has fled, trade flows have slowed and, in an echo of past financial crises, investors have begun to worry about governments' defaulting. Many have heavy debts in foreign currencies, but the cost of repaying that debt has increased as their home currencies' values have declined. To compensate, they are seeking dollars to repay the loans.
On the list of endangered countries, economists put Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria.
The economic woes of these countries could reverberate back to the United States, experts say, because many of them are trading partners, at a time when exports are one of the few bright spots in the American economy.
"Our whole economic prospects are going to turn on whether the emerging markets keep growing," said C. Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "It could be the difference between a moderate downturn and a deep downturn."
The crisis has been indiscriminate in its victims. It has worsened the problems in countries like Iceland, Ukraine and Argentina, which had festering economic or political troubles. Argentina, in particular, has drawn criticism from economists for its decision this week to nationalize the country's private pension funds, worth $30 billion.
But the turmoil also hit South Africa and Turkey, which economists had praised for their sound policies.
Among the earliest victims have been countries, like Hungary, where companies and even individuals borrowed heavily in foreign currencies. As credit dried up and their local currencies plummeted, they have been unable to roll over those loans. In even healthy countries, near panic has ensued — leaving people bewildered by the sudden reversal in their fortunes.
"We were not an obvious target," said Peter Akos Bod, a former governor of the Hungarian central bank. "I could not see major problems in Hungary's economic outlook. But there is sort of a panic."
Economists say the inability to borrow foreign currency is dangerous because it can quickly turn healthy economies into sick ones, as companies and potentially even governments default on loans.
"Right now, it's a liquidity problem, but if it goes on long enough, it can become a solvency problem," said Yusuke Horiguchi, the chief economist of the Institute for International Finance.
Horiguchi said that developed economies bore responsibility for easing this problem, because it stemmed from the crisis in their banking system.
Indeed, the financial rescue packages announced by the United States and European countries have aggravated the problem. Safeguards like attempts to stabilize their banks and government guarantees behind some bank lending have made banks in developing countries look less secure.
In a gesture to the precarious situation, President George W. Bush made an unscheduled appearance this month at a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 countries, organized by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr. Bush also agreed to convene an emergency meeting of the group on Nov. 15 to develop responses to the crisis.
Beyond reassuring words, there is a limit to what the United States can do to solve the problems of these countries. Paulson is overseeing the largest rescue program in the United States since the Great Depression. He cannot devote anywhere near the amount of time that a predecessor, Robert Rubin, devoted to the Asian and Mexican crises during the Clinton administration.
"The most important thing the United States can do is stabilize its financial system," Lowery, of the Treasury, said. "The other thing we can do is to support the actions taken by emerging-market countries."
On Thursday, the central banks of Brazil and Mexico intervened heavily in the foreign exchange market to support their currencies. Hungary obtained a loan of up to 5 billion euros from the European Central Bank.
And Hungary has overcome deep reluctance and begun negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for emergency loans, as have Iceland, Pakistan, Belarus and Ukraine. Countries are traditionally averse to such loans because they come with strict conditions.
"I'm totally unhappy about having to borrow from the IMF," Akos Bod, the Hungarian central banker, said. "I thought in my lifetime, we would never have to borrow from the IMF"
As the largest shareholder in the fund, the United States can exert influence on its policies. Administration officials said the highest-ranking American at the fund, John Lipsky, the first deputy managing director, would lead the fund's effort to extend loans to a broader range of countries.
The idea, they said, was proposed at a board meeting on Wednesday by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French managing director, who is the subject of an internal investigation into whether he abused his power in conducting a brief affair with a worker at the fund.
Economists praised the idea of giving emerging markets access to dollars. But the key to the effort's success, they said, is whether the fund can line up support from central banks.
"The IMF has only $200 billion of its own resources, which is not enough collateral," Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the fund, said. "It would be spectacular if they could pull this off."
WASHINGTON: With the financial crisis engulfing developing countries from Latin America to Central Europe, raising the specter of market panic and even social unrest, Western officials are weighing coordinated action to try to stabilize these economies.
The International Monetary Fund, which is in negotiations with several countries to provide emergency loans, is also working to arrange a large credit line that would allow other countries desperate for foreign capital to borrow dollars, according to several officials.
The list of countries under threat is growing by the day, and now includes such stalwarts of the emerging market as Brazil, South Africa and Turkey. They have become collateral damage in a crisis that began in the American subprime housing market.
The fast-growing economies of the developing world depend on money from Western banks to build factories, buy machinery and export goods to the United States and Europe. When those banks stop lending and the money dries up, as it has in recent weeks, investor confidence vanishes and the countries suddenly find themselves in crisis.
The details of the arrangement are still being worked out, but it could be supported by Japan and several oil-producing countries, a fund official said. The fund has not yet approached the Federal Reserve, according to officials, although the Treasury Department has expressed interest in the proposal.
Two weeks ago, the Fed set up unlimited swap agreements with the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and other central banks to ease the severe credit turmoil in Western Europe.
This time, the focus would be on emerging markets with good economic records that are having trouble borrowing dollars.
"There needs to be some action to help these countries," said Neil Dougall, chief economist for emerging markets at Dresdner Kleinwort in London. "There has been a severe drying-up of liquidity there, and it is early days. The tsunami has only just reached their shores."
The monetary fund has about $250 billion available for all types of loans. That could be supplemented by funds from central banks, officials said, though they dismissed a rumor that circled the globe on Thursday that the fund was arranging a $1 trillion credit line.
Whatever the amount ultimately pledged, it would represent the most concerted international response yet to what economists warn could be a volatile, dangerous new phase in the crisis.
"We view it seriously," said Clay Lowery, assistant Treasury secretary for international affairs. "There are a lot of emerging markets that have come under increased pressure recently."
Unlike in the United States and Western Europe, banks in these countries bought few of the mortgage-related securities that undermined the financial system. But as banks stopped lending — either to each other or anyone else — that credit squeeze has hit emerging markets hard.
Stock markets and currencies have plunged, foreign capital has fled, trade flows have slowed and, in an echo of past financial crises, investors have begun to worry about governments' defaulting. Many have heavy debts in foreign currencies, but the cost of repaying that debt has increased as their home currencies' values have declined. To compensate, they are seeking dollars to repay the loans.
On the list of endangered countries, economists put Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria.
The economic woes of these countries could reverberate back to the United States, experts say, because many of them are trading partners, at a time when exports are one of the few bright spots in the American economy.
"Our whole economic prospects are going to turn on whether the emerging markets keep growing," said C. Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "It could be the difference between a moderate downturn and a deep downturn."
The crisis has been indiscriminate in its victims. It has worsened the problems in countries like Iceland, Ukraine and Argentina, which had festering economic or political troubles. Argentina, in particular, has drawn criticism from economists for its decision this week to nationalize the country's private pension funds, worth $30 billion.
But the turmoil also hit South Africa and Turkey, which economists had praised for their sound policies.
Among the earliest victims have been countries, like Hungary, where companies and even individuals borrowed heavily in foreign currencies. As credit dried up and their local currencies plummeted, they have been unable to roll over those loans. In even healthy countries, near panic has ensued — leaving people bewildered by the sudden reversal in their fortunes.
"We were not an obvious target," said Peter Akos Bod, a former governor of the Hungarian central bank. "I could not see major problems in Hungary's economic outlook. But there is sort of a panic."
Economists say the inability to borrow foreign currency is dangerous because it can quickly turn healthy economies into sick ones, as companies and potentially even governments default on loans.
"Right now, it's a liquidity problem, but if it goes on long enough, it can become a solvency problem," said Yusuke Horiguchi, the chief economist of the Institute for International Finance.
Horiguchi said that developed economies bore responsibility for easing this problem, because it stemmed from the crisis in their banking system.
Indeed, the financial rescue packages announced by the United States and European countries have aggravated the problem. Safeguards like attempts to stabilize their banks and government guarantees behind some bank lending have made banks in developing countries look less secure.
In a gesture to the precarious situation, President George W. Bush made an unscheduled appearance this month at a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 countries, organized by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr. Bush also agreed to convene an emergency meeting of the group on Nov. 15 to develop responses to the crisis.
Beyond reassuring words, there is a limit to what the United States can do to solve the problems of these countries. Paulson is overseeing the largest rescue program in the United States since the Great Depression. He cannot devote anywhere near the amount of time that a predecessor, Robert Rubin, devoted to the Asian and Mexican crises during the Clinton administration.
"The most important thing the United States can do is stabilize its financial system," Lowery, of the Treasury, said. "The other thing we can do is to support the actions taken by emerging-market countries."
On Thursday, the central banks of Brazil and Mexico intervened heavily in the foreign exchange market to support their currencies. Hungary obtained a loan of up to 5 billion euros from the European Central Bank.
And Hungary has overcome deep reluctance and begun negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for emergency loans, as have Iceland, Pakistan, Belarus and Ukraine. Countries are traditionally averse to such loans because they come with strict conditions.
"I'm totally unhappy about having to borrow from the IMF," Akos Bod, the Hungarian central banker, said. "I thought in my lifetime, we would never have to borrow from the IMF"
As the largest shareholder in the fund, the United States can exert influence on its policies. Administration officials said the highest-ranking American at the fund, John Lipsky, the first deputy managing director, would lead the fund's effort to extend loans to a broader range of countries.
The idea, they said, was proposed at a board meeting on Wednesday by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French managing director, who is the subject of an internal investigation into whether he abused his power in conducting a brief affair with a worker at the fund.
Economists praised the idea of giving emerging markets access to dollars. But the key to the effort's success, they said, is whether the fund can line up support from central banks.
"The IMF has only $200 billion of its own resources, which is not enough collateral," Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the fund, said. "It would be spectacular if they could pull this off."
World - Pakistan tribal militias walk tightrope in Taliban fight
Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah
Thursday, October 23, 2008
PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Two tribal elders lay stretched out in an orthopedic ward here last week, their plastered limbs and winces of pain grim evidence of the slaughter they survived when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the midst of their tribal gathering.
These wounded men, and many others in the hospital, were supposed to be the backbone of a Pakistani government effort to take on the Taliban, and its backers, Al Qaeda, with armies of traditional tribesmen working in consultation with the Pakistani military.
The tribal militias, known as lashkars, have quickly become a crucial tool of Pakistan's strategy in the tribal belt, where the army has been fighting the Taliban for more than two months in what army generals acknowledge is a tougher and more protracted slog than they anticipated. And, indeed, the lashkars' early efforts have been far from promising.
As the strength of the militants in the tribal areas grows, and as the war across the border in Afghanistan worsens, the Pakistanis are casting about for new tactics. The emergence of the lashkars is a sign of the tribesmen's rising frustration with the ruthlessness of the Taliban, but also of their traditional desire to run their own affairs and keep the Pakistani Army at bay, Pakistani officers and law enforcement officials say.
Some in Washington have pointed to the emergence of the lashkars as a hopeful parallel to the largely successful Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq, which drew on tribes' frustration with militant jihadis to build an alliance with American troops that helped lessen violence in Iraq. But there are significant differences, a senior American government official acknowledged. In Anbar Province, he said, the Iraqi tribes "woke up to millions of dollars in government assistance, and the support of the Third Infantry division." But the support by the Pakistani Army and civilian government for the tribal militias has been "episodic" and so far "unsustained," he said. In addition, tribal structures in Pakistan have been weakened in recent years by the Taliban, unlike the situation in Iraq.
The tribesmen, armed with antiquated weaponry from the 1980s Afghan war, are facing better equipped, highly motivated Taliban who have intimidated and crushed some of the militia.
In the last two months, the Taliban have burned the homes of tribal leaders and assassinated others who have dared to participate in the resistance. They have pulled tribesmen suspected of backing the militia out of buses and cars and used suicide bombers against them as they did in Orakzai, the place where the wounded in the Peshawar hospital were attacked.
"We wanted to form a lashkar," said Abdul Rehman, 50, a tribal leader of the Orakzai area, as he lay on his crumpled bed in the Lady Reading hospital. "We were pressured by the government to take action because they warned: 'If you don't take action you will be bombed.' " The lack of consistent Pakistani Army and government support has left some tribesmen feeling betrayed. About 1,000 tribesmen were meeting on Oct. 10 and had just decided to form a lashkar, when the suicide bomber, armed with perfect intelligence for a pre-emptive strike, killed more than 100 tribesmen, and wounded many more.
The next day, government forces struck back in Orakzai but helicopter gunships hit more civilians than militants, forcing a large number of people to leave the area and providing space for the militants to occupy, residents of the area said.
The Pakistani military is counting on the tribal militia to work as localized forces and to pick up some of the burden of the heavy fighting that is now concentrated in the Bajaur part of the tribal belt. "We're concentrating on the hard core, the lashkars are cleansing their areas, taking people out in their areas," said one general.
But in the last four years as the Taliban have deliberately targeted pro-government tribal elders, killing as many as 500 of them, and have attracted uneducated tribal youth with the lure of good money and stature.
Even in the best of times, there are basic unwritten rules about the tribal militia in Pakistan that limit their impact.
The Pakistani military, for example, can lend moral support but not initiate a tribal militia, the generals said. The lashkars come with their own weapons, food, and ammunition. They have their own fixed area of responsibility, and are not permanent.
Indeed great care is taken to make sure the lashkars do not become a threat to the military itself. "We do not want a lashkar to become an offensive force," said one of the generals, who spoke frankly about the lashkars on condition of anonymity. For that reason, the military was willing to lend fire support artillery and helicopters but would not give the militias heavy weapons, he said.
Beyond those rules of the game, the Pakistani Army and government have not been able to inculcate the lashkars with the needed confidence, said Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province.
"You put these people up front and you will get them chewed up," Aziz said. "If you deploy the lashkar on an ad hoc basis they can be an embarrassment."
The lashkars' fragility has been most clearly demonstrated in the Charmang area of Bajaur, a stronghold of the Taliban in the foothills of the mountains that border Afghanistan where the Taliban have been in control for several years, building supply lines and bases.
The Taliban have ruled civilian life in Charmang, imposing taxes, issuing permits for businesses and handing out their form of justice.
Taj Mohammed, 20, a college student in Bajaur who is now a refugee on the outskirts of Peshawar, said that based on promises from the government that they would receive proper backing, his father and some other elders had formed a lashkar in the village of Hilal Khel.
Immediately, he said, the Taliban brought in 600 reinforcements from Afghanistan under the command of Zia ur-Rehman, a well known Afghan Taliban leader.
"This weakened the resolve of the elders," Mohammed said.
Then, the Taliban sowed terror by kidnapping and executing four tribal leaders of the lashkar, leaving their bodies on the roadside, the throats slit.
After the beheadings, there was fighting between the lashkar and the militants, Mohammed said. The Taliban, he said, had "very sophisticated weapons" including rocket launchers and heavy guns. His father had a Kalashnikov.
"The Taliban came to my father as a leader of the lashkar and said, "We will slaughter you."
The Taliban torched houses in several of Charmang's villages, he said, an act that is considered a particular humiliation.
After the four executions, many of the leaders of the lashkar fled and others surrendered. The Taliban burned dozens of houses in four villages, particularly in Babara. A request by the lashkar for help from the military did not materialize, and unlike the lashkar, the military took no casualties in the episode, said Fazl-e Sadiq, a schoolteacher from Charmang who is also a refugee in the Peshawar area. "The villagers became very demoralized," he said.
Mohammed said his father, Mohammed Gul, was betrayed by the elders of the Hanafia Khel tribe, and he fled for his life. "He tried very hard," Mohammed said of his father.
"Now he is in a safe place from the Taliban."
Among the houses that the Taliban burned was his family homestead, built 15 years ago at great expense, he said. "My home is very beautiful, my home is very clean, a big house with 12 rooms," he said in broken English. Thirty members of his extended family, including his wife and 6-month-old daughter, lived there.
"Except for my one clothes, and my one hat," he had little left, he said pointing to a refugee tent with a couple of mattresses but nothing else.
In one area of Bajaur, known as Salarzai, the recently formed tribal militia have proved a success.
But that was largely because the Taliban have never had strong roots there, and the ancient tribal hierarchy of rich landlords presiding over large properties remains intact, tribesmen from Bajaur said.
The people of Salarzai were strongly motivated to keep the Taliban at bay, said Jalal Uddin, the son of one of the prominent local elders. "I felt overjoyed when I was riding with the lashkar because it meant the old tribal system was working," Uddin said.
In a reversal of the pattern elsewhere, the lashkar in Salarzai had recently burned about 20 houses belonging to the militants in the village of Baanda, the only place in Salarzai where the militants have strength, according to Sahibzada Bahahuddin, a journalist in Khar, the capital of Bajaur.
But, so far, the such successes are rare in the rest of the tribal region.
In the longer term, the defeat of the lashkar in Charmang would make the situation much more difficult for the government, Mohammed said. His father felt betrayed, and he doubted his father would take on such a role again. It was now up to the government to win the war on its own, he said.
As he stood at the flap of his tent, cradling his tiny daughter, Soomia, Mohammed said despite the let-down by the government, he wanted nothing more than to return to his lands in Charmang.
"But we must have peace in the area," he said. "When the Taliban are weakened and the roads are safe we will rebuild. All this depends on the government."
Thursday, October 23, 2008
PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Two tribal elders lay stretched out in an orthopedic ward here last week, their plastered limbs and winces of pain grim evidence of the slaughter they survived when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the midst of their tribal gathering.
These wounded men, and many others in the hospital, were supposed to be the backbone of a Pakistani government effort to take on the Taliban, and its backers, Al Qaeda, with armies of traditional tribesmen working in consultation with the Pakistani military.
The tribal militias, known as lashkars, have quickly become a crucial tool of Pakistan's strategy in the tribal belt, where the army has been fighting the Taliban for more than two months in what army generals acknowledge is a tougher and more protracted slog than they anticipated. And, indeed, the lashkars' early efforts have been far from promising.
As the strength of the militants in the tribal areas grows, and as the war across the border in Afghanistan worsens, the Pakistanis are casting about for new tactics. The emergence of the lashkars is a sign of the tribesmen's rising frustration with the ruthlessness of the Taliban, but also of their traditional desire to run their own affairs and keep the Pakistani Army at bay, Pakistani officers and law enforcement officials say.
Some in Washington have pointed to the emergence of the lashkars as a hopeful parallel to the largely successful Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq, which drew on tribes' frustration with militant jihadis to build an alliance with American troops that helped lessen violence in Iraq. But there are significant differences, a senior American government official acknowledged. In Anbar Province, he said, the Iraqi tribes "woke up to millions of dollars in government assistance, and the support of the Third Infantry division." But the support by the Pakistani Army and civilian government for the tribal militias has been "episodic" and so far "unsustained," he said. In addition, tribal structures in Pakistan have been weakened in recent years by the Taliban, unlike the situation in Iraq.
The tribesmen, armed with antiquated weaponry from the 1980s Afghan war, are facing better equipped, highly motivated Taliban who have intimidated and crushed some of the militia.
In the last two months, the Taliban have burned the homes of tribal leaders and assassinated others who have dared to participate in the resistance. They have pulled tribesmen suspected of backing the militia out of buses and cars and used suicide bombers against them as they did in Orakzai, the place where the wounded in the Peshawar hospital were attacked.
"We wanted to form a lashkar," said Abdul Rehman, 50, a tribal leader of the Orakzai area, as he lay on his crumpled bed in the Lady Reading hospital. "We were pressured by the government to take action because they warned: 'If you don't take action you will be bombed.' " The lack of consistent Pakistani Army and government support has left some tribesmen feeling betrayed. About 1,000 tribesmen were meeting on Oct. 10 and had just decided to form a lashkar, when the suicide bomber, armed with perfect intelligence for a pre-emptive strike, killed more than 100 tribesmen, and wounded many more.
The next day, government forces struck back in Orakzai but helicopter gunships hit more civilians than militants, forcing a large number of people to leave the area and providing space for the militants to occupy, residents of the area said.
The Pakistani military is counting on the tribal militia to work as localized forces and to pick up some of the burden of the heavy fighting that is now concentrated in the Bajaur part of the tribal belt. "We're concentrating on the hard core, the lashkars are cleansing their areas, taking people out in their areas," said one general.
But in the last four years as the Taliban have deliberately targeted pro-government tribal elders, killing as many as 500 of them, and have attracted uneducated tribal youth with the lure of good money and stature.
Even in the best of times, there are basic unwritten rules about the tribal militia in Pakistan that limit their impact.
The Pakistani military, for example, can lend moral support but not initiate a tribal militia, the generals said. The lashkars come with their own weapons, food, and ammunition. They have their own fixed area of responsibility, and are not permanent.
Indeed great care is taken to make sure the lashkars do not become a threat to the military itself. "We do not want a lashkar to become an offensive force," said one of the generals, who spoke frankly about the lashkars on condition of anonymity. For that reason, the military was willing to lend fire support artillery and helicopters but would not give the militias heavy weapons, he said.
Beyond those rules of the game, the Pakistani Army and government have not been able to inculcate the lashkars with the needed confidence, said Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province.
"You put these people up front and you will get them chewed up," Aziz said. "If you deploy the lashkar on an ad hoc basis they can be an embarrassment."
The lashkars' fragility has been most clearly demonstrated in the Charmang area of Bajaur, a stronghold of the Taliban in the foothills of the mountains that border Afghanistan where the Taliban have been in control for several years, building supply lines and bases.
The Taliban have ruled civilian life in Charmang, imposing taxes, issuing permits for businesses and handing out their form of justice.
Taj Mohammed, 20, a college student in Bajaur who is now a refugee on the outskirts of Peshawar, said that based on promises from the government that they would receive proper backing, his father and some other elders had formed a lashkar in the village of Hilal Khel.
Immediately, he said, the Taliban brought in 600 reinforcements from Afghanistan under the command of Zia ur-Rehman, a well known Afghan Taliban leader.
"This weakened the resolve of the elders," Mohammed said.
Then, the Taliban sowed terror by kidnapping and executing four tribal leaders of the lashkar, leaving their bodies on the roadside, the throats slit.
After the beheadings, there was fighting between the lashkar and the militants, Mohammed said. The Taliban, he said, had "very sophisticated weapons" including rocket launchers and heavy guns. His father had a Kalashnikov.
"The Taliban came to my father as a leader of the lashkar and said, "We will slaughter you."
The Taliban torched houses in several of Charmang's villages, he said, an act that is considered a particular humiliation.
After the four executions, many of the leaders of the lashkar fled and others surrendered. The Taliban burned dozens of houses in four villages, particularly in Babara. A request by the lashkar for help from the military did not materialize, and unlike the lashkar, the military took no casualties in the episode, said Fazl-e Sadiq, a schoolteacher from Charmang who is also a refugee in the Peshawar area. "The villagers became very demoralized," he said.
Mohammed said his father, Mohammed Gul, was betrayed by the elders of the Hanafia Khel tribe, and he fled for his life. "He tried very hard," Mohammed said of his father.
"Now he is in a safe place from the Taliban."
Among the houses that the Taliban burned was his family homestead, built 15 years ago at great expense, he said. "My home is very beautiful, my home is very clean, a big house with 12 rooms," he said in broken English. Thirty members of his extended family, including his wife and 6-month-old daughter, lived there.
"Except for my one clothes, and my one hat," he had little left, he said pointing to a refugee tent with a couple of mattresses but nothing else.
In one area of Bajaur, known as Salarzai, the recently formed tribal militia have proved a success.
But that was largely because the Taliban have never had strong roots there, and the ancient tribal hierarchy of rich landlords presiding over large properties remains intact, tribesmen from Bajaur said.
The people of Salarzai were strongly motivated to keep the Taliban at bay, said Jalal Uddin, the son of one of the prominent local elders. "I felt overjoyed when I was riding with the lashkar because it meant the old tribal system was working," Uddin said.
In a reversal of the pattern elsewhere, the lashkar in Salarzai had recently burned about 20 houses belonging to the militants in the village of Baanda, the only place in Salarzai where the militants have strength, according to Sahibzada Bahahuddin, a journalist in Khar, the capital of Bajaur.
But, so far, the such successes are rare in the rest of the tribal region.
In the longer term, the defeat of the lashkar in Charmang would make the situation much more difficult for the government, Mohammed said. His father felt betrayed, and he doubted his father would take on such a role again. It was now up to the government to win the war on its own, he said.
As he stood at the flap of his tent, cradling his tiny daughter, Soomia, Mohammed said despite the let-down by the government, he wanted nothing more than to return to his lands in Charmang.
"But we must have peace in the area," he said. "When the Taliban are weakened and the roads are safe we will rebuild. All this depends on the government."
World - US;The Temperament Factor;Who's Best suited to the Job?
NANCY GIBBS
Of all the false intimacies of modern life, the promise of a presidential campaign may be the most misleading. We think we know these men well enough to judge them. They come into our living rooms every night, plying us with insight and confession; we know the prayers they say and the beer they drink, their tics, their tastes, their talismans.
But both John McCain and Barack Obama insist that there are things a campaign can't tell you about the temperament of an aspiring President. "Who is the real Barack Obama?" McCain asks, as he runs ads attacking his opponent's "bad instincts" and dangerous lack of judgment. Obama argues the reverse: You can't trust McCain because the one thing you know is that you never know what he'll do next. He's an impulsive hothead who is "erratic in a crisis." Is that really the guy you want steering through a storm?
That Obama's fortunes rose as the markets sank shows how central temperament has become in the homestretch of the presidential race. Only weeks ago, you might have expected that McCain's greater experience and his courage in the clutch would lift him as a leader in a moment of crisis. Yet the turn of the polls suggests the reverse; without taking a dramatically different approach on substance, Obama won this round on style and disposition. Both candidates supported the bailout, and both call for tax cuts and policing of markets, but in tenor, they were polar opposites. Temperament is in the eye of the voter. Is one response evidence of composure and self-possession — or of being too laid-back and unassertive? Is the other response a sign of urgency and decisiveness or a frantic lack of control?
A funny thing happens when you sit down with historians and ask them what presidential temperament is and when it matters and whether voters make a mistake to let it count for much. What emerges is that temperament is as elusive as it is essential. George W. Bush probably wasn't lying in the 2000 campaign when he promised a humble foreign policy. He just had no idea what was coming. F.D.R. probably was lying when he promised the anxious parents of 1940 that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Always be sincere, Harry Truman said, even if you don't mean it. The presidency is less an office than a performance: Who saw the gloom and glower behind Eisenhower's incandescent grin? This is why temperament descends easily into caricature: the feisty Give-'Em-Hell Harry, the cool-as-crystal Kennedy, the Vesuvian Lyndon Johnson. "We've taken temperament and turned it," warns presidential historian Richard Norton Smith of George Mason University, into "vaudeville."
So at this crucial moment, what do we make of the two men before us, the passionate Maverick and the cool-handed Hopemonger, Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice? Does the crucible of a campaign actually give you a glimpse of their souls? And does anything that happens on the trail have any bearing on what would happen after they take the oath of office?
What Qualities Matter?
Meeting Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill said, was like opening your first bottle of champagne. "Knowing him was like drinking it." Temperament is a special subcommittee of character: it is less intellect than instinct, more about music than lyrics — the quality voters sense when they watch a candidate improvise or when he thinks no one is looking. It's why newspapers run profiles quoting kindergarten teachers; temperament is formed early. "You can call it balance. You can call it a sense of proportion. You can call it maturity, good judgment," says historian David McCullough. "One of the clearest lessons of history is that there's no such thing as the foreseeable future, and particularly in traumatic times such as we have now, temperament is of the utmost importance."
But what type of temperament matters, especially in a time like this? The idea that anyone can grow up to be President is an American gospel, but that's about honoring equality not excellence. It's good to be smart, but that's no guarantee of success; Woodrow Wilson, the only President with a Ph.D., never won over a majority of voters. More important is the confidence that lets you welcome smart people around you — and hope they disagree. Hence Lincoln's famous "team of rivals," says biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin. "How can you do this?" people asked him when he stocked his Cabinet with former adversaries. "He said, 'Look, these are the strongest and most able men in the country. The country's in peril. I need them by my side.' He had the internal self-confidence to know that if he could get them working together as a team, it would be exactly what he needed for his leadership."
Perhaps even more important than intelligence is vitality: Tigger beats Eeyore any day. F.D.R.'s success, argues Goodwin, reflected as much his infectious optimism as his eloquence: "To have gone through his own adversity with polio and still remain optimistic and upbeat — all of that was what he projected to the country during the Depression," she says. "They had faith in themselves because he had faith in them." McCain had his fortitude forged by fire in a prison camp; he throbs with an energy of someone who has never stopped making up for lost time. He burns more calories sitting in a chair than most people do shoveling snow. Obama is upbeat but never giddy, sunny without being blinding.
Resilience helps too; every President will get thrown back against a wall and need to come back stronger. Just ask Bill Clinton. So do steadfastness, persistence, conviction. But as soon as you make the list, it mocks you, for history is a dance of luck and intent, and sometimes they trip each other. Wilson was strong enough to win a war but too stubborn to save the peace. Herbert Hoover was "the Great Humanitarian" who saved Belgium from starvation; under the right circumstances, he could have been a great President. But his temperament undermined his talent; he never understood that politics was more art than engineering. He later recalled that after growing up in Iowa as a Quaker orphan, he was 10 years old before he realized he could do something for the sheer joy of it without offending God. "Now that's a lesson from his early days that I think crippled him temperamentally," says Smith, "particularly as the kind of empathetic leader that we desperately called for after 1929."
The problem for voters today is that crisis comes in triplicate: Would McCain be better suited to the challenge of another terrorist attack? Is Obama's deliberate style more likely to yield progress against a challenge like climate change? And who can navigate a path through an economic crisis hardly anyone understands? Not only can't you know what a President will face, but his reflexes in one crisis may not be typical of how he responds to another. President Kennedy's temperament has been defined by his ingenuity and cool head during the Cuban missile crisis. "That's not necessarily representative of how he was during his Administration," notes historian David Coleman of the Miller Center of Public Affairs, citing the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and race relations. "There was a tendency to put off decisions, whether it was foreign or domestic policies ... to maintain as many options as you can."
Every man is a moon, Mark Twain liked to say, with a dark side he doesn't show anybody. The set speeches and careful debates tell us only how candidates want to be seen. Nixon could be a statesman in public and a hit man in private. Eisenhower was the amiable uncle — except that it was known around the White House that if the President was wearing a brown suit that day, stay away or risk his wrath. His reputation as an indifferent manager evaporated once scholars got a look at his papers, which showed a much more engaged and sophisticated player than the avuncular image he cultivated. It is widely believed that Presidents who are good at handling people, who have high emotional intelligence, stand a better chance of pushing their agendas through. But "we put so much emphasis on character because of Nixon," says David Gergen, an adviser to four Presidents. "Until Bush came along, we'd forgotten how important judgment also is."
Two Early Baptisms
When Barack Obama was 6 years old, he was the only foreign child in his neighborhood in Jakarta, Indonesia. He didn't know the kids, didn't speak the language. At first the locals were a little freaked out, says Zulfin Adi, 47, who as a kid lived a block from Obama. "He was so much bigger than the rest of us." So they decided to haze him. One day a group of children ambushed him, carried him to the local watering hole and threw him in. They had no idea if he could swim. Bu
Of all the false intimacies of modern life, the promise of a presidential campaign may be the most misleading. We think we know these men well enough to judge them. They come into our living rooms every night, plying us with insight and confession; we know the prayers they say and the beer they drink, their tics, their tastes, their talismans.
But both John McCain and Barack Obama insist that there are things a campaign can't tell you about the temperament of an aspiring President. "Who is the real Barack Obama?" McCain asks, as he runs ads attacking his opponent's "bad instincts" and dangerous lack of judgment. Obama argues the reverse: You can't trust McCain because the one thing you know is that you never know what he'll do next. He's an impulsive hothead who is "erratic in a crisis." Is that really the guy you want steering through a storm?
That Obama's fortunes rose as the markets sank shows how central temperament has become in the homestretch of the presidential race. Only weeks ago, you might have expected that McCain's greater experience and his courage in the clutch would lift him as a leader in a moment of crisis. Yet the turn of the polls suggests the reverse; without taking a dramatically different approach on substance, Obama won this round on style and disposition. Both candidates supported the bailout, and both call for tax cuts and policing of markets, but in tenor, they were polar opposites. Temperament is in the eye of the voter. Is one response evidence of composure and self-possession — or of being too laid-back and unassertive? Is the other response a sign of urgency and decisiveness or a frantic lack of control?
A funny thing happens when you sit down with historians and ask them what presidential temperament is and when it matters and whether voters make a mistake to let it count for much. What emerges is that temperament is as elusive as it is essential. George W. Bush probably wasn't lying in the 2000 campaign when he promised a humble foreign policy. He just had no idea what was coming. F.D.R. probably was lying when he promised the anxious parents of 1940 that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Always be sincere, Harry Truman said, even if you don't mean it. The presidency is less an office than a performance: Who saw the gloom and glower behind Eisenhower's incandescent grin? This is why temperament descends easily into caricature: the feisty Give-'Em-Hell Harry, the cool-as-crystal Kennedy, the Vesuvian Lyndon Johnson. "We've taken temperament and turned it," warns presidential historian Richard Norton Smith of George Mason University, into "vaudeville."
So at this crucial moment, what do we make of the two men before us, the passionate Maverick and the cool-handed Hopemonger, Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice? Does the crucible of a campaign actually give you a glimpse of their souls? And does anything that happens on the trail have any bearing on what would happen after they take the oath of office?
What Qualities Matter?
Meeting Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill said, was like opening your first bottle of champagne. "Knowing him was like drinking it." Temperament is a special subcommittee of character: it is less intellect than instinct, more about music than lyrics — the quality voters sense when they watch a candidate improvise or when he thinks no one is looking. It's why newspapers run profiles quoting kindergarten teachers; temperament is formed early. "You can call it balance. You can call it a sense of proportion. You can call it maturity, good judgment," says historian David McCullough. "One of the clearest lessons of history is that there's no such thing as the foreseeable future, and particularly in traumatic times such as we have now, temperament is of the utmost importance."
But what type of temperament matters, especially in a time like this? The idea that anyone can grow up to be President is an American gospel, but that's about honoring equality not excellence. It's good to be smart, but that's no guarantee of success; Woodrow Wilson, the only President with a Ph.D., never won over a majority of voters. More important is the confidence that lets you welcome smart people around you — and hope they disagree. Hence Lincoln's famous "team of rivals," says biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin. "How can you do this?" people asked him when he stocked his Cabinet with former adversaries. "He said, 'Look, these are the strongest and most able men in the country. The country's in peril. I need them by my side.' He had the internal self-confidence to know that if he could get them working together as a team, it would be exactly what he needed for his leadership."
Perhaps even more important than intelligence is vitality: Tigger beats Eeyore any day. F.D.R.'s success, argues Goodwin, reflected as much his infectious optimism as his eloquence: "To have gone through his own adversity with polio and still remain optimistic and upbeat — all of that was what he projected to the country during the Depression," she says. "They had faith in themselves because he had faith in them." McCain had his fortitude forged by fire in a prison camp; he throbs with an energy of someone who has never stopped making up for lost time. He burns more calories sitting in a chair than most people do shoveling snow. Obama is upbeat but never giddy, sunny without being blinding.
Resilience helps too; every President will get thrown back against a wall and need to come back stronger. Just ask Bill Clinton. So do steadfastness, persistence, conviction. But as soon as you make the list, it mocks you, for history is a dance of luck and intent, and sometimes they trip each other. Wilson was strong enough to win a war but too stubborn to save the peace. Herbert Hoover was "the Great Humanitarian" who saved Belgium from starvation; under the right circumstances, he could have been a great President. But his temperament undermined his talent; he never understood that politics was more art than engineering. He later recalled that after growing up in Iowa as a Quaker orphan, he was 10 years old before he realized he could do something for the sheer joy of it without offending God. "Now that's a lesson from his early days that I think crippled him temperamentally," says Smith, "particularly as the kind of empathetic leader that we desperately called for after 1929."
The problem for voters today is that crisis comes in triplicate: Would McCain be better suited to the challenge of another terrorist attack? Is Obama's deliberate style more likely to yield progress against a challenge like climate change? And who can navigate a path through an economic crisis hardly anyone understands? Not only can't you know what a President will face, but his reflexes in one crisis may not be typical of how he responds to another. President Kennedy's temperament has been defined by his ingenuity and cool head during the Cuban missile crisis. "That's not necessarily representative of how he was during his Administration," notes historian David Coleman of the Miller Center of Public Affairs, citing the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and race relations. "There was a tendency to put off decisions, whether it was foreign or domestic policies ... to maintain as many options as you can."
Every man is a moon, Mark Twain liked to say, with a dark side he doesn't show anybody. The set speeches and careful debates tell us only how candidates want to be seen. Nixon could be a statesman in public and a hit man in private. Eisenhower was the amiable uncle — except that it was known around the White House that if the President was wearing a brown suit that day, stay away or risk his wrath. His reputation as an indifferent manager evaporated once scholars got a look at his papers, which showed a much more engaged and sophisticated player than the avuncular image he cultivated. It is widely believed that Presidents who are good at handling people, who have high emotional intelligence, stand a better chance of pushing their agendas through. But "we put so much emphasis on character because of Nixon," says David Gergen, an adviser to four Presidents. "Until Bush came along, we'd forgotten how important judgment also is."
Two Early Baptisms
When Barack Obama was 6 years old, he was the only foreign child in his neighborhood in Jakarta, Indonesia. He didn't know the kids, didn't speak the language. At first the locals were a little freaked out, says Zulfin Adi, 47, who as a kid lived a block from Obama. "He was so much bigger than the rest of us." So they decided to haze him. One day a group of children ambushed him, carried him to the local watering hole and threw him in. They had no idea if he could swim. Bu