gavin's blog

Much hullaballoo is made about the current eminence of Bollywood in the West, and of India too. I've often thought it has less to do with India and more to do with a smaller world, more respectful of its constituents, esp. after the dramatic tipping point of 9/11.

In this now dated but still insightful story, BBC's Sanjoy Majumder examines why India-Pakistan ties have improved. Here are some excerpts:

The scenes could not have been more similar and the outcome more of a contrast.

Four years ago, Pervez Musharraf drove out in a black-stretch limousine from an Agra hotel, after failing to come to an agreement with India's then premier, Atal Behari Vajpayee.

On Monday, President Musharraf drove in the same Mercedes limousine to the residence of Mr Vajpayee, now in semi-retirement, after signing a statement with India's current leader, Manmohan Singh.

It was perhaps his way of paying his respects to a man who had done his best to achieve a breakthrough in relations between India and Pakistan but left office before he could see it through.

So what has happened in the past four years to so vastly change relations between South Asia's nuclear rivals?

In particular, with both sides clearly sticking to their long-held positions on the Kashmir dispute, why were both leaders visibly pleased with this mini-summit?

President Musharraf summed it up in a breakfast meeting with Indian media editors on Monday when he said quite simply: "The world has changed."

is now taking place as is argued in this article titled Second wave of outsourcing from the Times of India.

Excerpts from the article:

‘"Over the past year or two, the outsourcing industry has been throwing up jobs for doctors, engineers, CAs, architects,"says Jacob William of the Bangalore-based Outsource2India, which employs 500 people and offers services in the big-buzz, big-bucks area of knowledge process outsourcing. "Unlike the first wave which was more about entering data and answering phone calls, these jobs involve skill and expertise."

"I wonder how many American students and job aspirants realise that, to a large degree, their fate is decided in India."

"A lot of high-end work is also coming our way. We have a client called Roamware which provides roaming software to mobile providers, and we negotiate and draft agreements between them and third parties like Singapore Telecom,"says Kamlani, whose organisation comprises 35 lawyers and engineers. "Or recently, a Top Ten US law firm gave us 24 hours to find out whether a client's technology and patent was being infringed. We put three engineers and a lawyer on the job and delivered the goods."

"It certainly seems strange that we are sitting in India and treating people in America,"says William, whose company is also involved in teleradiology. "Sometime ago we got an inquiry asking if we would man the security cameras installed in a Las Vegas casino. That's the level of craziness we are reaching."

"The Mumbai office is today much bigger than the New York office and is the nerve centre of the organisation. This is largely due to the fantastic talent available here."

"This I think is it — the elimination of all borders, especially in the economic sphere." ’

is an interesting flash film that you can see here. It's text is an old one, and has been around the internet for some time, but this is the first time I stumbled upon this film. It's a wonder how complicated things become clearer when you shrink them down.

Read about it here

'RECENTLY IN England, four Muslim-staffed committees appointed to advise Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet on issues related to Islam have come up with a recommendation: Get rid of an official event viewed as offensive to Muslims. What event would that be? A celebration of the Crusades, perhaps? No, Holocaust Memorial Day.

In the words of one committee member, ''The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others."

That ''one people," of course, are the Jews.

The committees aren't exactly proposing that the Holocaust commemoration be scrapped outright. They want it to be folded into a ''Genocide Memorial Day" that will also include such crimes as the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the massacres of Bosnian Muslims by the Milosevic regime.

Unfortunately, even against the bloody backdrop of the 20th century, there are strong reasons to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as a unique atrocity. It was the first, and so far the only time that, as Cornell University historian Stephen Katz put it in his 1994 book ''The Holocaust in Historical Context," that ''a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people."

But the problem with the proposal goes far deeper. The other ''genocides" for which they want recognition include the Israeli killings of Palestinians.'

Read the rest here.

Its not so often that one of the most read articles in the Times of India is the same one as one of the most emailed stories in the New York Times, and it isn't surprising that the article is about outsourcing, and how it is bringing these two countries together in unusual ways, in this case, personal tutoring.

The story is about Indian tutors teaching English (and other subjects) to American students at a fraction of the cost and at discernibly higher quality, to mutual benefit. Both countries are integrating through English, and it is very interesting that it is now the colonies that are teaching the pioneers!

defines era' is one of today's stories by Reuters India.

It was sometime last year that I was struck by the irony of Indian religious idols made in (at least officially) godless China. Crystal Ganapatis seemed to be everywhere and there were even some with mongoloid features! A borderless world in which capacity and need seek each other out impervious to tradition or propriety will see more and more such stories.

at the Burning Man, is what I felt when I read about it here. It reminded me of the World Social Forum held in Mumbai in Jan 04 (which seems puny compared to this though) that I'd attended - the part where it was impossible to catch all the sights before they were taken down. Both of these events, on the face of it are different, but they tap into a possibility of community experience that is unprecedented. The world is so much smaller and events that celebrate the world or humanity as a whole invite participation from such a range of nations and cultures that the experience they become is transcendental, even religious, while being utterly chaotic. Just like Life at its best.