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17 Sep 09

Sadanand Menon: A run on the nation's cultural capital

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This has had devastating consequences not just for the media itself but, in fact, to the quality of national cultural memory.
The electronic media operates under the assumption that life is as flat as the screens on which they exist and that the most artistic thing one can engage in is 24x7 ‘news’.
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- Everything is a consequential camera grab or a sound byte, existing in pure, isolated splendour, with no ‘before’ or ‘after’, no history or location or context. Cultural news on our TV screens becomes an inevitable orphan, with no parentage or origins. TV has become incapable now of honouring our artists. On the contrary, it only generates anger by the sheer capriciousness of the broadcast duration it assigns different artists. Canned footage of Michael Jackson, picked up from international hawkers, is endlessly relayed. But a Pattammal or a Gangubai moves from a scroll to a visual and back to the scroll in double quick time. Blink and you can miss it. The medium, rather than informing its vast viewership about the historic significance of these artistic luminaries, in fact, ends up serially disinforming.

Sadanand Menon: BJP's chronic writer's block

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It is even more touching see their honest surprise at realising that, for decades, what they considered sacrosanct facts of history are, in fact, a maze of half-truths confected by a conscripted brigade in their rosters for whom history has been a tool of air-brushing the past in order to frame the present.
Playing with established tenets of history and the process of historicisation has been a favourite pastime within the BJP camp and they have launched concerted efforts to conflate history with mythology, even as they mythologise history.

16 Sep 09

Full Text - International Index to Performing Arts

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A publicity blurb presented the event as a tribute to South Asia, "the home of the cinema", whose phenomenal movie industries had in their time engaged such European masters as Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang and Roberto Rossellini. In modernism's endless search for an Origin, here was the latest, to be showcased, as it were, in the raw
cinema as a metaphor to approach strangeness: the strangeness of the West versus the strangeness of the East
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- where cinema lies in these engagements between cultures, and why.
- that particular (and wondrous) moment of capitalist modernity when technology turned back on itself, declaring itself capable not only of transforming the world physically but of showing the transformation, and to consider what that stretched and elongated 'moment' has come to mean right through the tumultuous history of twentieth-century India.
- As the cinema saw a near 30 per cent rise in theatre audiences through 1994-95, a Times of India report datelined 25 November 1995 said that among the recent Hollywood films finding no release outlets in Bombay were The Mask, Richie Rich, Waterworld, Forrest Gump and Apollo 13, while Hindi-dubbed versions of Cliffhanger, Street Fighter and Braveheart - distributed with considerable publicity - had "failed to even recover the cost of theatre rental". All of the nation was going to see Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (1994), while Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), produced by Yash Chopra, was grossing Rs11.9 lakh (£26,000) per week at the New Excelsior, Bombay, the highest gross in Indian film history.
- growing corporatisation of capital investment in the wake of the television boom can possibly still sit alongside modes of making and of seeing the moving image that film theorists usually tell us had both disappeared sometime in the early silent era. Ex-movie star Jayalalitha, despotic Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, was unceremoniously booted out of power in May this year, at least in part because Rajnikant, the biggest star in Tamil Nadu today, campaigned for the opposition DMK-Tamil Manila Congress combine. This clash of titans has been the dominant narrative of television in Tamil Nadu since early 1995, where the DMK-controlled SUN-TV channel regularly battles it out with Jayalalitha's own JJ-TV network
- when in fact it has survived not just as an Indian filmic convention but as a significant (and at times literally triumphant) element of state legislation in Tamil Nadu

08 Sep 09

My Genome, My Self - Steven Pinker Gets to the Bottom of his own Genetic Code - NYTimes.com

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This genetic roulette must be even more significant in an organism as complex as a human, and it tells us that the two traditional shapers of a person, nature and nurture, must be augmented by a third one, brute chance.
That is, the reach of the genes appears to get stronger as we age, not weaker.
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- The environment, then, is not a stamping machine that pounds us into a shape but a cafeteria of options from which our genes and our histories incline us to choose.
- It’s a scaled-up version of the Tay-Sachs test that Ashkenazi Jews have undergone for decades
- It’s thrilling to find yourself so tangibly connected to two millenniums of history
- I found it just as thrilling to zoom outward in the diagrams of my genetic lineage and see my place in a family tree that embraces all of humanity.
- scientifically responsible.
- Assessing risks from genomic data is not like using a pregnancy-test kit with its bright blue line. It’s more like writing a term paper on a topic with a huge and chaotic research literature. You are whipsawed by contradictory studies with different sample sizes, ages, sexes, ethnicities, selection criteria and levels of statistical significance
- I was using my knowledge of myself to make sense of the genetic readout, not the other way around
- novelty-seeking gene, for example, has been associated with a cluster of traits that includes impulsivity. But I don’t think I’m particularly impulsive, so I interpret the gene as the cause of my openness to experience. But then it may be like that baldness gene, and say nothing about me at all.
- Call it Geno’s Paradox
- If that’s the best we can do for height, which can be assessed with a tape measure, what can we expect for more elusive traits like intelligence or personality?
- As sequencing technology improves, more of our genomic variations will come into view. But determining what those variants mean is another matter.
- Biologists discover the genetic pathways that build an organ by spotting genes that correlate with different forms of it and then seeing what they do.
- . A result would be an equilibrium with a certain proportion of tinkers and a certain proportion of tailors. Biologists call this process balancing selection: two designs for an organism are equally fit, but in different physical or social environments, including the environments that consist of other members of the species. Often the choice between versions of such a trait is governed by a single gene, or a few adjacent genes that are inherited together. If instead the trait were controlled by many genes, then during sexual reproduction those genes would get all mixed up with the genes from the other parent, who might have the alternative version of the trait. Over several generations the genes for the two designs would be thoroughly scrambled, and the species would be homogenized.
- But something strange happens when you take a number representing the proportion of people in a sample and apply it to a single individual. The first use of the number is perfectly respectable as an input into a policy that will optimize the costs and benefits of treating a large similar group in a particular way. But the second use of the number is just plain weird. Anyone who knows me can confirm that I’m not 80 percent bald, or even 80 percent likely to be bald; I’m 100 percent likely not to be bald. The most charitable interpretation of the number when applied to me is, “If you knew nothing else about me, your subjective confidence that I am bald, on a scale of 0 to 10, should be 8.” But that is a statement about your mental state, not my physical one. If you learned more clues about me (like seeing photographs of my father and grandfathers), that number would change, while not a hair on my head would be different. Some mathematicians say that “the probability of a single event” is a meaningless concept.
- Even when the effect of some gene is indubitable, the sheer complexity of the self will mean that it will not serve as an oracle on what the person will do
- So why hasn’t it stopped me from enjoying those drinks? Presumably it’s because adults get a sophisticated pleasure from administering controlled doses of aversive stimuli to themselves.
- The self is a byzantine bureaucracy, and no gene can push the buttons of behavior by itself.
- Many of the dystopian fears raised by personal genomics are simply out of touch with the complex and probabilistic nature of genes. Forget about the hyperparents who want to implant math genes in their unborn children, the “Gattaca” corporations that scan people’s DNA to assign them to castes, the employers or suitors who hack into your genome to find out what kind of worker or spouse you’d make. Let them try; they’d be wasting their time.
- It’s our essentialist mind-set that makes the cheek swab feel as if it is somehow a deeper, truer, more authentic test of the child’s ability
- The fallacy is not in thinking that the entire genome matters, but in thinking that an individual gene will matter, at least in a way that is large and intelligible enough for us to care about.

04 Sep 09

Financial Express : Anti-Indian generics policy stemmed from a global pharma report

A report prepared by the London-based International Policy Network (INP) could be greatly responsible for shaping the anti-Indian generics policy mindset that many of the African countries have either adopted in recent past or are in the process of adopting. This report, ‘Keeping it real: combating the spread of fake drugs in poor countries’, is learnt to be in wide circulation among the African countries and is being referred to. The governments of these countries conclude that India and China seem to be the largest producer of fake medicine.

It infers so on the basis of estimates derived from various secondary sources such as European Commission, The Associated Chambers of Commerce and media reports.

A 2004 survey of medicines on sale at a large bazaar in New Delhi found that only 7.5% were genuine. A report in a newspaper said that fakes are freely sold to exporters who sell them to unsuspecting health administrators in Sub-Saharan Africa, who receive some of the millions in aid money.

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International Policy Network generics drugs pharma fakes spurious-research

A report prepared by the London-based International Policy Network (INP) could be greatly responsible for shaping the anti-Indian generics policy mindset that many of the African countries have either adopted in recent past or are in the process of adopting. This report, ‘Keeping it real: combating the spread of fake drugs in poor countries’, is learnt to be in wide circulation among the African countries and is being referred to. The governments of these countries conclude that India and China seem to be the largest producer of fake medicine.
It infers so on the basis of estimates derived from various secondary sources such as European Commission, The Associated Chambers of Commerce and media reports.
A 2004 survey of medicines on sale at a large bazaar in New Delhi found that only 7.5% were genuine. A report in a newspaper said that fakes are freely sold to exporters who sell them to unsuspecting health administrators in Sub-Saharan Africa, who receive some of the millions in aid money.

03 Sep 09

The Death of Wat Tyler (1381)

Why will you not go back to your own country?" But the other answered, with a great oath, that neither he nor his fellows would depart until they had cut their charter such as they wished to have it, and had certain points rehearsed and added to their charter which they wished to demand. And he said in a threatening fashion that the lords of the realm would rue it bitterly if these points were not settled to their pleasure. Then the King asked him what were the points which he wished to have revised, and he should have them freely, without contradiction, written out and sealed. Thereupon the said Walter rehearsed the points which were to be demanded; and he asked that there should be no law within the realm save the law of Winchester, and that from henceforth there should be no outlawry in any process of law, and that no lord should have lordship save civilly, and that there should be equality among all people save only the King, and that the goods of Holy Church should not remain in the hands of the religious, nor of parsons and vicars, and other churchmen; but that clergy already in possession should have a sufficient sustenance from the endowments, and the rest of the goods should be divided among the people of the parish. And he demanded that there should be only one bishop in England and only one prelate, and all the lands and tenements now held by them should be confiscated, and divided among the commons, only reserving for them a reasonable sustenance. And he demanded that there should be no more villeins in England, and no serfdom or villeinage, but that all men should be free and of one condition. To this the King gave an easy answer, and said that he should have all that he could fairly grant, reserving only for himself the regality of his crown.

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commons

02 Sep 09

Tamil Nadu :Duplicate products seized; five arrested

Duplicate electrical products and auto parts of leading companies were seized at Hosur in Krishnagiri district and Dharmapuri town in Dharmapuri district recently.

Police personnel conducted raids at electrical shops and on auto parts sellers along with members of a private firm Enforcers of Intellectual Property Rights and recovered fake products worth Rs. 3.95 lakh.

In Hosur town, police raided the shops on Old Bangalore Road and seized duplicate products worth Rs. 75,000. Two persons - Prakash Chand (22) and Karnaram (45) were arrested. Police have filed cases under Sections 486 and 420 of IPC and Sections 77, 78 and 79 of Trade and Merchandise Marks Act.

In Dharmapuri town, police raided electrical and automobile parts shops on Arumaga Achari Street and Rajagopala Goundar Street and recovered duplicate products worth Rs. 3.20 lakh. Krishna Ram (21), Pasupathi (48) and Pandurangan (52) were arrested in this connection.

Police have filed cases under Sections 51 and R/W 63 of the Copyrights Act.

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trademark ip fake

EBay to sell Skype stake to group led by Silver Lake

EBay Inc agreed to sell 65 per cent of its Skype internet-calling unit to an investor group led by Silver Lake for about $2 billion to focus on reviving sales at its main e-commerce site.

The buyers will pay $1.9 billion in cash and will also give EBay a $125 million note, the company said in a statement today. Ebay, which had planned an initial public offering for Skype, will retain 35 per cent of the business. The deal values Skype at $2.75 billion.

The sale lessens Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe’s dependence on a unit that he has said doesn’t fit with the rest of EBay’s operations. The company is improving its Internet- retail operations to stem customer defections to Amazon.com Inc. Donahoe’s predecessor bought Skype for about $2.6 billion in 2005 and wrote down its value the following year.

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internet skype sales ebay

1 in 3 applications for news channels from Reliance ADAG

Reliance Big Broadcasting (RBB), the television arm of the Reliance ADA Group, is on its way to becoming the country’s single largest owner of television channels, under the brand name ‘Big’. It already operates 46 FM radio stations, the highest by a single radio operator and a Direct-to-Home platform, all under the ‘Big’ name.

The company has applied to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) for a licence to operate 33 news channels, the highest for any single broadcaster so far. It has already got the downlink licence for 18 non-news channels under the brand name ‘Big’.

Once it gets all the approvals, RBB would own over 50 television channels, the highest among all the existing broadcasters. The Zee, STAR and Eenadu groups own less than half this number.

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telephony television reliance news

Karnataka software exports rise 23%

Notwithstanding the global economic slowdown, revenue from software exports in Karnataka grew 23 per cent to Rs 74,929 crore for 2008-09, and constituted 34 per cent of the national software export earnings.

The IT Minister of Karnataka, Mr Katta Subramanya Naidu, and the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI)-Bangalore Director, Ms R. Rajalakshmi, said the sector employed 5.54 lakh people in 2008-09, up from 5.2 lakh people during 2007-08.

During the period, 84 software units were added, which included 35 foreign equity companies, two Indian major and 47 small and medium enterprises, taking the total approved STP units to 2085 and electronic hardware technology park (EHTP) units to 68.

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software internet STPI Karnataka

Latha Jishnu: Setting aside Bayer's 'spurious' claims

Two weeks ago Justice S Ravindra Bhat of the Delhi High Court dismissed with costs the writ petition filed by the German pharmaceuticals giant Bayer Corporation against the Union of India, the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) and Cipla. The importance of Justice Bhat’s judgment cannot be overestimated. It is a clear — and sharp — judgment that puts paid to attempts by foreign companies to modify India’s regulations to suit their commercial interest.

The judge characterised the litigation as “a speculative foray; an attempt to ‘tweak’ public policies through court mandated regimes” and, in a first of its kind, awarded costs of Rs 6.75 lakh. The amount, far from being punitive, is to be shared by the government and the third respondent Cipla, one of India’s top drug companies. However, the point that the judgment makes is strong: Companies with deep pockets may “achieve short term goals of keeping out competitors through interim orders” but the court will impose ‘realistic costs’.

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IP patent marketing approval DCGI drugs

Supreme Court issues notice to Gujarat on Jaswant book ban

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice to the Gujarat government on a writ petition filed by the expelled BJP leader, Jaswant Singh, and the publisher, challenging the notification banning the book Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence.

A Bench of Justices Altamas Kabir and Cyriac Joseph issued the notice during ‘mention’ time after hearing senior counsel Fali Nariman, appearing for Mr. Singh and senior counsel Soli Sorabjee for the publisher Rupa and Co.

Counsel submitted that the ban order violated the petitioners’ fundamental right of freedom of speech and expression as guaranteed under Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution.

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court freedom of speech censorship jaswant singh

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice to the Gujarat government on a writ petition filed by the expelled BJP leader, Jaswant Singh, and the publisher, challenging the notification banning the book Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence.

A Bench of Justices Altamas Kabir and Cyriac Joseph issued the notice during ‘mention’ time after hearing senior counsel Fali Nariman, appearing for Mr. Singh and senior counsel Soli Sorabjee for the publisher Rupa and Co.

Counsel submitted that the ban order violated the petitioners’ fundamental right of freedom of speech and expression as guaranteed under Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution.

31 Aug 09

Rs 695 in stores, Rs 150 on streets, Jaswant book a sellout everywhere

Expelled BJP leader Jaswant Singh’s controversial book on M A Jinnah is selling not only in its original form at legitimate bookstores, but also in pirated prints on the pavements.

Jinnah India-Partition Independence costs Rs 695 if you want an original from Rupa Publishers. The cost of a pirated version varies, as low as Rs 150 for those who can bargain and as high as Rs 250 for those who cannot.

At Bandra station, outside the ticket booking office on the west side, a street stall owner says he has not stopped selling copies for a week. “Every morning, I get around eight to 10 copies; by 5 pm, they are all sold out,” he says.

This vendor starts off by asking for Rs 250. “It costs Rs 700 in a big store,” he says, but later agrees to sell for Rs 180. By 3 pm on Sunday, he has just two copies left. He refuses to say where the stock comes from.

At Colaba, Fountain and Churchgate, at railway stations and signals, bargains are being sealed between Rs 150 and Rs 250. A buyer at Fort says, “The cover and the pages are of poor quality and the print is smudged at places, but it’s Ok for a quick read.”

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ip piracy jaswant singh

Financial Express : Film body ropes in pvt players to check piracy

Anti piracy has again come to the fore for the Hindi film industry. The anti-piracy arm ICRA (Indian Cinema Rights Association) set up by some of the big companies in the industry, UTV Motion Pictures, Big Pictures and Moser Baer have stepped up its drive in Delhi and Mumbai—the hubs of film piracy.

To sharpen intelligence gathering, ICRA has roped in a Delhi-based consultancy called Assiduous, which has a network of people in places like Hyderabad and Mumbai. ICRA was set up about a month ago. Officials recently conducted raids in Maharashtra and Haryana, which resulted in seizure of close to 60,000 CDs and DVDs of various movies, including the recent releases Kaminey and Agyaat.

The anti-piracy efforts have reasons to be stepped up. A report published by US-based think tank RAND Corporation says video piracy worldwide is becoming a conduit for terrorism. For India therefore the implications are significant.

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piracy IP terrorism RAND ICRA

30 Aug 09

Chennai : 26665 Pirated videos seized

As many as 26,665 VCDs containing pirated version of latest Tamil and other language films were seized in a State-wide raid conducted by the Crime Branch CID police. Under the instructions of the Additional Director General of Police (Crimes) R. Sekar, special teams arrested 41 persons for indulging in the manufacture and sale of pirated VCDs.

Besides the VCDs, computers and electronic gadgets used by the suspects were also seized, a press release said.

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piracy raid ip copyright

PIL filed on illegal news broadcast

A Dahod resident has said in his Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that many private cable operators in the state broadcast news without obtaining mandatory permission for the same. The petitioner has also demanded the state government to formulate guidelines to control the cable news operators in the state. Giving a specific case of a Dahod-based cable operator, the petitioner said that the operator is carrying out various illegal activities under the guise of the television network. The division bench of Chief Justice K S Radhakrishnan and Justice Akil Kureshi has asked the government pleader to take instructions from the government. The next hearing in the case has been kept after 10 days.

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broadcast PIL courts news media telephony

28 Aug 09

Kerala: Visually challenged teachers log on

Within a short span of time, these teachers from schools in the district have learned the basics of computer. The training programme is being conducted as part of the information, communication and technology (ICT) programme of the IT@School project and Insight, a project of the Kerala State IT Mission. “Though we felt a little difficulty when we started to learn the basics of computer, gradually we learned the simple methods to operate it and now we can browse the Net by the help of search engines such as Google and Yahoo,” M. Krishnan, a teacher of Government Higher Secondary School, Meenangadi, and president the Kerala Federation of Blind district unit, told The Hindu on Thursday.

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IT visually-disabled kerala linux orca

27 Aug 09

Financial Express : Incremental pharma innovation in patent regime to benefit local firms says USIBC

Expanding the scope of India’s current patent regime to include incremental pharma innovation would benefit the domestic pharma players, according to a study commissioned by the US India Business Council, which was released on Wednesday.

Citing statistics from the National Knowledge Commission's studies, which show that around 76.4% of Indian pharma companies have introduced incremental pharma innovation in recent years while only 37% of them have been able to manage breakthrough innovation, USIBC makes a case for patent regime, which doesn’t entail wholesale exclusion of patent based on modifications, new dosing, new delivery system, the most common forms of incremental pharma innovations.

Further, the USIBC projects that by 2015, the share of incremental pharma market would account for $7 billion, almost 30% of the total pie of $20 billion Indian pharma market.

Traditionally, the government, the policy makers and the judiciary have not favoured grant of patent to incremental pharma innovations.

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ip incremental pharma

Expanding the scope of India’s current patent regime to include incremental pharma innovation would benefit the domestic pharma players, according to a study commissioned by the US India Business Council, which was released on Wednesday.
Citing statistics from the National Knowledge Commission's studies, which show that around 76.4% of Indian pharma companies have introduced incremental pharma innovation in recent years while only 37% of them have been able to manage breakthrough innovation, USIBC makes a case for patent regime, which doesn’t entail wholesale exclusion of patent based on modifications, new dosing, new delivery system, the most common forms of incremental pharma innovations.
Further, the USIBC projects that by 2015, the share of incremental pharma market would account for $7 billion, almost 30% of the total pie of $20 billion Indian pharma market.
Traditionally, the government, the policy makers and the judiciary have not favoured grant of patent to incremental pharma innovations.

Financial Express : ‘Stringent IP enforcement will limit access to generic drugs’

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pharma drugs ip

ivil society organisations, led by Centre for Trade and Development, have sent a strong missive to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), urging it to be careful about associating with multinational corporations and developed countries that are keen to push more stringent intellectual property (IP) enforcement laws in India . The letter is in response to an international conference recently hosted by CII to enhance IP standards and their enforcement.
Stressing that stricter IP enforcement laws will limit the access of life-saving generic drugs to people in developing countries, the letter asks CII to “not view IP as only a business tool” but also look at the larger scheme of things, given India’s social and economic realities.
The letter also pointed to the controversial seizure of generic drugs shipped from India to Africa by customs authorities in the European Union. Though the drugs were not patent-protected in India or the consignee countries, EU authorities seized them in transit, arguing that the rights of patent-holders in Europe were being infringed. Freedom of transit for legitimate trade is clearly laid down under GATT. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) Agreement also emphasises that measures to protect intellectual property shoul

Rana Dasgupta

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But in this segregated city, everyone comes together on the roads. The subway network is still incomplete, there are few local trains (unlike Bombay), and you can’t take a helicopter to work (unlike São Paulo) – the draconian security regulations prevent that. So the Delhi roads accommodate every kind of citizen, and offer a unique exhibition of the city’s social relations.
The stricken carriageways are never adequate for the car mania, no matter how many new lanes and flyovers are built – and in Delhi, most cars are stationery most of the time. Hemmed in by the perpetual emergency of roadworks, and governed by traffic lights that can stay red for ten minutes, the situation is unpromising. Delhi drivers, moreover, never confident that any system will produce benefits for all, try to beat the traffic with an opportunistic hustle that often turns to a great honking blockage, smothered in the smoke of so many engines air-conditioning their passengers against the forty-degree heat
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- the endless automobile reveries posted up on hoardings, images of a parallel world where the roads are open, and driving is sexy and carefree.
- the vertiginous altitude of Delhi’s class system comes through admirably, even on the horizontal roads.
- BMW limousines are so well insulated that passengers don’t even hear the unflinching horn with which chauffeurs disperse everything in their path.
- a Hyundai driver gets out of his car to kick in the doors of a Maruti that kept him dawdling behind, while young men in a Mercedes chase after a Tata driver who dared abuse them out of the window, running him down and slapping him as if he were an insubordinate kid.
- ne’s social significance is assumed to be nil unless there are tangible signs to the contrary,
- Brands hold within them the impressive infinity of the new global market. They hold out the promise of dignity and distinction in a harsh city that constantly tries to withhold these things. They even offer clarity in intimate questions: “He drives a Honda City,” a woman says, meaningfully, about a prospective son-in-law.
- Sanjeev Nanda was a charismatic twenty-one year-old who had just graduated from Wharton Business School. His lineage was deluxe: his grandfather was Admiral S. M. Nanda, Chief of India’s Naval Staff, who, like several other well-connected figures in the Indian armed services, had made big money in his retirement by setting up as an arms dealer, brokering deals between foreign arms companies and his former colleagues. The business flourished further under the shrewd eye of Sanjeev’s father, Suresh, whose acquisition of Delhi’s elegant Claridges Hotel was only a small part of a network of investments and acquisitions he built in India and around the world.
- Out on bail, Sanjeev did an MBA at INSEAD in Paris, became Managing Director of the family hotel business, and moved into a penthouse at Claridges. Manoj Malik mysteriously disappeared.
- It emerged that he ran an internet procurement monopoly that gave him a guaranteed cut of the vast business of government tenders, and the newspapers expressed outrage that he could continue to enjoy this privilege even as that same government had him under investigation. Before long, he was caught offering a bribe of a hundred million rupees (£1.4m) to a tax official who was offering to hush up the investigation, and he and Sanjeev were sent to jail for fourteen days.
- In September 2008, nine years after the incident, Sanjeev Nanda was convicted of mowing down six people while driving in a drunken condition, and sentenced to five years imprisonment – an extraordinary moment when, contrary to expectations and experience, it was shown that the Indian elite cannot always make its acts disappear.
- freedom so absolute that the only adequate use of it would be cruelty
- and this feeling of perpetual deficit lets in apprehensions of a vampiric ruling class, sucking the plenitude away from everyone els
- the recklessness of this economic system, its out-of-control heartlessness. Nanda’s speeding BMW is a symbol of gleaming, maleficent capital, unchecked by conscience or by the roadblocks of the state. The scene of the impact, a 100-metre stretch of road strewn with organs, severed limbs and pools of blood, is like a morality painting of the cataclysmic effects of this marauding elite in the world of ordinary people.
- The Indian road has not been given over to speed as it has elsewhere; it is a place of innumerable modes of transport, a place of commerce, leisure and bureaucracy, a place cluttered with history. Even the most powerful men in the country cannot expect that clean lines will open up for them through the Indian reality. Only someone with no connection to that reality could imagine such a thing.
- hey still enjoy many privileges, but as time goes on they see their values and sensibilities disappearing from the media and the streets, and they are faced with the troubling realisation that they no longer rule this society or dominate its imagination – or even understand the first thing about it.
- I can’t stay the whole year in Delhi. It’s backward. You take your life in your hands on the roads, you see the kind of people there are. It’s been taken over by Hindi speakers and loud Punjabi festivals like karva chauth that no one used to make a fuss about twenty years back.”
- These people may come from smaller cities, they may be less worldly, and they may speak only broken English. But they are skilled in the realm of opportunity and profit, and they are at home in the booming world of overlords, connections, bribes, political loopholes, sweeteners – and occasional violence – that sends their anglicised peers running for the nearest cappuccino.
- Over the last few years, provincials have become Delhi’s dominant economic group, with many millionaires, and a few billionaires, among their number, and networks of political protection that make them immensely more influential than those who have got rich on a salary.
  
  Saif Rizvi, a sociable young plastic surgeon who has grown up mostly in Saudi Arabia and the United States, is one of many who are affronted by the new arrivals. Prominent Muslims from Lucknow, his family traces its lineage back five hundred years, and Saif has a healthy contempt for Delhi’s upstarts:
  
  “Oh my God, the nouveaux riches. Yeah I see them everywhere I go, man, you see the way they walk into the clubs, the way they order their drinks. They’re horrible. The only thing those guys have that’s nice is their cars. The nicest cars pull up and the most horrible people get out. Horrible bodies, horrible teeth, horrible voice modulation.”
- The Ministry of Sound set up a club in Delhi and you know what kind of music they played? Bollywood. Can you believe it?
- The rewards of that boom have flowed to them because its implausible escalations rode on the one thing they had that Delhi people did not: land.
- One of these men was Kushal Pal Singh, who came from a small town in Uttar Pradesh, and whose father-in-law’s real-estate business was decimated when the DDA was set up. Singh was charged with reviving the business, later called DLF, and in 1979, unable to operate in Delhi, he began to buy up rural land to the south of city, in the state of Haryana
- I did everything it took to persuade these farmers to trust me. I spent weeks and months with their families. I wore kurtas, sat on charpoys, drank fly-infested milk from dirty glasses, attended weddings, visited the sick.
- We bought 3,500 acres of land in Gurgaon, more than half of it on credit, without one litigation against DLF
- a dusty, booming expanse of hypertrophic apartment complexes, skyscrapers and malls. In 2007, K.P. Singh listed his company on the Indian stock exchanges; the 2008 Forbes list estimated him to be the world’s eighth-richest man, with a fortune of thirty billion dollars.
- Even farmers walked away from land deals with a few million dollars in their trunks, and bought hulking SUVs for their sons, who brought them to Delhi and drove with macho glee around the seat of power. Such windfalls were often quickly spent, but the more astute of these families set up real-estate businesses, and took further slices of the pie. Some of the real-estate agents who had set out on their mopeds a few years ago to sell all this new property now received Mercedes and apartments as bonuses.
- There was a general escalation of criminality and violence, and the people who came through with new fortunes were a formidable breed. They knew how to hijack state power for their own private profit, and they enjoyed the support of the police and of much-feared extortion gangs.
- What kind of people were walking around with, say, a million dollars in cash? It was not the cosmopolitan children of the original Delhi middle class, who worked as PR executives or TV newscasters, and for whom a million dollars of black money was a tall order. These people were moving out of the city into Gurgaon flats. No: the people with the suitcases of cash were, as likely as not, property tycoons, industrialists, politicians or criminals. The capital of “shining India” was being systematically handed over from its middle classes to a new black money elite, and it was this group who was increasingly setting the tone – aesthetic, commercial and ethical – for everyone else.
- There are no ideas except the idea of more wealth. The elite doesn’t read. They know how to work the till, and that’s it.
- . Rural India, that’s eight hundred million people, has simply fallen out of the master narrative of this country. There should have been an enormous political left in India, but people worship the rich and there’s no criticism of what they do
- Indian businesspeople might run a school or feed a few orphans but they’re not interested in reform because they are bent on making the system work for them. Hinduism is very pliable. It rationalises inequality: if that guy is poor it’s because he deserves it from his previous lives, and it’s not for me to sort out his accounts.
- he corporations and the state are in bed with each other, eating and drinking the country out of everything it has. The Ganges is becoming a trickle: the most fertile river basin in the world.
- Capitalism is rapacious, and its new elites, wherever they have been in the world, have usually risen sternly. Is the new Indian elite worse than everyone else? Is it worse, moreover, than the socialist ruling class that went before? It is so common, these days, to hear people indicting the vulgar new India, as Tarun does, by comparing it unfavourably to the more genteel socialist system of the old days. But wasn’t the socialist elite just as cruel and corrupt, even as it quoted Shakespeare and Marx? Isn’t there much that is positive in the explosive dynamism of the contemporary Indian economy?
- A car accident is a matter of perception, it’s a trick of fate, but a father’s duty to his son is absolute.
- This isn’t a guilt culture. In the Indian psyche, you dissociate yourself from the bad things you have done, and then they’re not yours anymore. That’s why you can never make any accusation stick to a businessman or a politician. They won’t even recognise the crimes you’re accusing them of. They’ll probably have you beaten up for insulting them.”
- Delhi has an impoverished symbolic vocabulary: there hasn’t been enough time since all these waves of destruction for its symbols to be restored. If I don’t have adequate symbols of the self, I can’t tell the difference between me and mine. So people buy stuff all the time to try and make up for the narcissistic wound. It’s their defence against history.”
- You know about the Oedipus complex? Freud said this was the universal condition of young men: they unconsciously want to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. That’s the source of revolutionary energy – you kill your father symbolically by rejecting all his values and finding new ones. But I don’t think this applies to Indian men. I would analyse Indian men in terms of what I call the Rama complex. In the Ramayana, Rama gives up the throne that is rightfully his and submits himself to enormous suffering in order to conform to the will of his father. Indian men don’t wish to kill their fathers, they wish to become them, they wish to empty themselves out of everything that has not come from their fathers.”
- the socialist regime at least took the trouble to legitimise itself in terms they could recognise. This modicum of intellectual correspondence with the ruling class seems positively alluring now that the people who are shaping their world are so adamantly opaque
- hey are feelings, in fact, that accompany the north Indian business class wherever they go: both Mumbai and Bangalore have significant political movements devoted to protecting local society against the ferocious business acumen of north Indian entrepreneurs. I
- for the new Indian elite is charismatic and muscular and ultimately well reared for the age of globalisation. In all their grandiose unsentimentality they remind us that a lot of the comfortable myths we have been told about capitalism are simply that. In truth, it is a flailing, terrifying thing.
- Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian President for a cattle ranch there. The President told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for, let’s go for it. We’re going in there with [exiled Russian oligarch] Boris Berezovsky. Africa is amazing. That’s where it’s at. You’re talking about numbers that can’t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we’re still ahead of the curve. I’m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that’s what I’ve decided. I’m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It’s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.”
- Is it on the strength of such throwaway reason that three quarters of a million acres of Ethiopia are cleared and hundreds of farmers shipped across the world?
- I like it when you think up something and it’s so wild you’re messed in the head and you think How can I do this? – and then you think Why not?”
- This is a man who can dream up earth-bending forms of money-making, but his ideas of spending it are consumerist in the most ordinary of ways. His middle-class vocabulary seems at odds with his multi-billion dollar international economy, and I wonder if he is deferring his sports car so as not to run out of future acquisitions too quickly. I wonder if the whole enterprise does not teeter on the edge of senselessness, if he is not in fact still waiting for someone to supply him with a meaning for this money around which his life is organised.
- Once again I feel that his stand against the nihilism of the Delhi rich is all the more fervent because he is assailed by it himself. He is intimate with all the thuggish bad boys who have given people like him such a bad name (“It’s so sad what happened to Sanjeev Nanda,” he says, “he’s such a sweet guy”) and he is impressed by parables of restraint.

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