SONYA FATAH

As urban India booms, thousands of workers insist on having meals ferried in from home

November 18, 2008
SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI, India–Rajesh Vora sat at a table inside his office’s air-conditioned cafeteria, carefully opened the three-tier steel lunch box, and released the various, familiar aromas of his kitchen.

Around him, most folks availed of cafeteria food, piling their trays with Indian cuisine prepared at the office’s kitchen. But Vora and at least 15 others at ICICI Securities, one of the nation’s largest bank affiliates, prefer to get their food delivered to them from home just as they break for lunch.

For Vora, 38, who is vice president of equity research, the posh and unusually well-equipped cafeteria just isn’t a substitute for his wife’s cooking. For the last 10 years, he’s been subscribing to a uniquely Mumbai phenomenon: the dabbawalla or lunch-box man, paying a monthly rate of less than $10 to get his lunch picked up from home and delivered to his workplace.

“It’s a full-course meal,” said Vora, as he began digging into his curry, lentils, rice, Indian-style bread and fruit. “If I had eaten at home, I would have gotten absolutely the same meal.”

Over the past decade, urban India has undergone fast-paced change with tradition being quickly swapped for a slice of modernity. But in the country’s largest city – formerly known as Bombay and home to 25 million people – a 128-year-old business of ferrying lunch boxes across the city still thrives.

Some 200,000 dabbas are collected, delivered and returned six days a week by 5,000 dabbawallas who skirt their way through the city’s bustling streets, wearing their trademark white caps and balancing a multitude of boxes filled with home cooking on the handlebars of their bikes or on iron crates stacked on wooden carts that are wheeled around for delivery. Each is an independent businessman, leasing his services to Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Supplier Trust for between $100 and $250 a month.

The labour-intensive dabbawalla business became such a successful management phenomenon that Harvard University’s prestigious business school uses it as a case study even though dabbawallas are either illiterate or semi-literate.

“The secret to our business is that we use our skills to our advantage,” said Raghunath Medge, president of Nutan and a third-generation dabbawalla, and despite never having completed high school, can spit out management jargon with lightning speed. “We’re all uneducated, but we do much better than educated people because we rely on our excellent memories and on physical labour, both areas in which the educated need assistance.”

The business started in 1880 with just 25 customers. Today, Nutan has a website, accepts orders via email and even hosted Prince Charles when he visited India a few years ago.

What brings together this community of box labourers isn’t necessarily the profession but the labourers’ ethnic and communal ties. All hail from the same area outside the Maharashtran city of Pune, 170 kilometres from Mumbai.

Vital Savanth, 33, has been a dabbawalla for 13 years, like his father and grandfather before him. He bikes a three-kilometre route for his daily collection of 20 boxes.

“This is a good job,” said Savanth. “We work hard moving the boxes onto and off the trains, but we’re quick and we enjoy our work.”

For Deepti Trivedi, whose husband and daughter work as lawyers in the city’s financial district, the service is a godsend.

“I’ve been using the dabbawalla service for the past four years. I send home-cooked food because it’s so much healthier and more nutritious than restaurant food, and it’s also much cheaper.”

At Andheri station in Mumbai’s northern suburbs, a few dozen dabbawallas bring their boxes together every morning and sort them on the platform according to the code.

Prabhakar Laxman Adhawa, 55, has been delivering the boxes for 35 years. Both his sons also work as dabbawallas. “I knew all about the business before I came here. It was a guaranteed job when I got to the city because we work as a community and we look out for one another. This has been my first and only job in all these years.”

Adhawa also pointed to dignity of self-employment as one reason for his happiness.

“Look, with our education we could be workers in an office earning a paltry salary or working as a servant in someone’s house. This way we employ ourselves, and we earn a decent income.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

Mass conversions spark violence in India, but rival tribes’ quest for state funds also at play
September 22, 2008
SONYA FATAH

The Toronto Star

KANDHAMAL, India–Rabindranath Pradhan grabbed his wife and son and took shelter amid the lentil stalks of a nearby field.
Cowering in fear, Pradhan, 45, who had left his paralyzed brother inside the house, watched as 200 right-wing Hindu youngsters entered his brother’s bedroom, poured gasoline over his body, and burned him alive.
“I could hear him screaming for me to save him, but I was unable to move,” said Pradhan, recounting the horror of his brother’s suffering on Aug. 24. Unarmed and outnumbered, Pradhan and his neighbours could only watch as his brother’s shrieks faded and their homes and church were burnt to the ground.
Afterwards, the area’s 37 Christian families took refuge in the nearby hills. While torching their homes, the crowd had chanted “Jai Bajrang Dal!” revealing themselves as members of the youth brigade of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a right-wing group that aims to cleanse the Hindu soul of mother India and end the slaughter of cows and conversions to Islam and Christianity across the country.
Increasing conversions to Christianity in Kandhamal, one of India’s most “backward” regions, have triggered a reaction among India’s right-wing Hindu organizations.
Foreign and local missionary groups of varying denominations have been proselytizing in the area for decades, but now they’re facing a staunch Hindu right that’s determined to counter Christian missionary zeal with a bit of their own.
What’s happening in Kandhamal, however, is also a struggle between two dominant tribal groups over acceptance into India’s complex affirmative action system, which gives communities defined as “backward” better access to education and jobs.
The targeting of Christians, their homes and places of worship began after the murder of VHP leader Swami Laxmiananada Saraswati on Aug. 23. Although the government blamed Maoists, VHP leaders and the Bajrang Dal blamed militant Christians and set about taking revenge. Since Aug. 24, at least 20 people have been killed, countless houses burnt and at latest count 20,000 people had taken shelter in relief camps under the protection of regular police deployments, paramilitary squads and riot police.
Kandhamal, in India’s eastern state of Orissa, is an unlikely place for a religious confrontation. Lush green valleys dotted with small fields of rice paddies and lentil plantations are flanked by forested hills. On the face of it, its villages demonstrate religious harmony; their short commercial stretches boasting both churches and temples. Beneath the surface, however, tension has been building.
Many in Orissa’s political establishment trace the problem to Christian missionary work.
“So much money comes into the state for missionary efforts,” said MP Tathagata Sathpathy, a member of the ruling Biju Janata Dal party. “These guys offered Dalits better chances by offering them jobs, free education and other benefits … That’s one reason why there have been mass conversions to Christianity.”
Kandhamal’s people rely mostly on subsistence farming to survive. Some 650,000 people live in the area, according to the 2001 census. Members of the Kandha tribe are predominantly Hindu. The Panos, who were Dalits, the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy, have over the years embraced Christianity.
Orissa is 95 per cent Hindu. Christians only make up 2.5 per cent of the population. But in Kandhamal district, Christians make up roughly 25 per cent of the population.
Since Saraswati’s death, they’ve been hounded, killed and made to retreat from the areas that have been their homes for centuries.
“It’s not simply a religious issue,” said a district official in Kandhamal. “Religion is being used for this purpose, but essentially the Kandhas and the Panos are fighting for access to (job) reservations.”


Popularity: 5% [?]

A view of the vineyards at Sula Vineyards, one of India’s largest wine producers, with 1,800 acres under cultivation with 10 varietals.

Wine made its debut in the 1980s but country’s economic boom has seen vineyards mushroom

September 01, 2008
SONYA FATAH
The Toronto Star

NASIK, India–Rows of grape vines wrapped around steel frames are set in long, neat lines that stretch across the expanse on this side of the horizon.

The varietals are common: Chenin Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Red Zinfandel, Merlot to name a few. But this is not old wine country. Set against the rolling green plains around Nasik, a sort of Napa Valley in western India, this is Sula Vineyards, one of India’s largest wine producers with 1,800 acres under cultivation and 10 varieties of whites, reds, roses and dessert wines to offer the Indian consumer.

Wine is not new to India. Its oldest vineyards – Château Indage and Grover Vineyards – have been around since the 1980s. But the wine industry has only mushroomed after Sula’s entry, a change that is partially attributed to its founder, Rajeev Samant, a 41-year-old Stanford-university educated engineer turned winemaker, who set his sight on the potential a boom in wine consumption. But it’s also partially attributable to a growing economic boom in the country.

Indeed, as India has rolled into the 21st century with consumers ready to spend their rising disposable income on fine dining and wining, the business of wine making has become quite the in-thing. In the state of Maharashtra alone a handful of wineries have found more than two-dozen new neighbours.

“The future for Indian wine is very bright,” said David Banford, who heads the Wine Society of India, an organization that promotes wine education through information sessions, courses and wine tastings. Banford and his partners first started such a concept in the United States — the Wine Society of America — when the U.S. still had an unfriendly attitude toward wine. Today, the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of wine. India, too, is headed in that direction, Banford said.

“Wine culture is here to stay. People here see wine as part of a civilized, western-oriented lifestyle.”

Of course, consumption in India is still quite marginal, making up 1 per cent of total alcohol sales by volume. About 1.2 million cases of wine are consumed annually, but the national alcohol diet is heavily skewed in favour of beer and liquor. By comparison, more than 70 million cases of beer and 70 million cases of spirits are consumed annually. Simply said, there are about 5 million wine consumers compared with 300 million liquor consumers.

If those numbers don’t impress, the rate at which the wine industry is rapidly growing surely will.

Since Samant harvested and fermented grapes for his introductory round of bottled wines, his business has increased by many multiples. That year — in 2000 — some 5,000 cases of wine were consumed across India. Today, Sula Wines contributes 250,000 to India’s one million plus consumption total.

Add to this a change in tired, old laws disallowing wine licenses and a 2005 move to delink wine and liquor in some states, have made inroads in changing perceptions about wine.

In some Indian states big supermarkets can now carry wines extending the influence of sellers to India’s large middle and upper-middle class.

Of course, the savvy Samant is also a keen marketer of his wines. At Sula Vineyards he has a tasting room with an outdoor patio overlooking the vineyard. He’s also started an annual harvest festival at the vineyard’s amphitheatre, which he designed. By October a trattoria restaurant will have opened serving vegetarian Italian food, Nasik’s first Italian restaurant. Recently he also started renting out Beyond, a three-bed bungalow where visitors can enjoy the green pastures of India’s wine country.

Samant’s success aside, developing a wine culture in India has been a slow process. Most men here drink beer and spirits and women form a minuscule portion of the country’s drinking population. For wine lovers and businessmen, the negative publicity around alcoholism and drinking hard liquor may do wonders for the image of wine in India.

Wine makers are trying hard to present it as a healthy alternative, one that can be savoured by men and women. Anecdotal examples of their success can be seen among the young men and women who drive out to Sula’s vineyards to taste its wines or who are becoming regulars at specialty wine stores that have propped up in some of the country’s metros. Samant himself is a partner in Saunte, a chain of wine stores in Mumbai and Pune that sell domestic and imported wines.

Château Indage, too, has a wine bistro, Ivy, in Mumbai and a series of specialist wine stores.

The newness and the range are allowing India’s upwardly mobile youth to experiment with changing tastes.

At the outdoor patio bar at Sula, three young men, all recent medical school graduates, ordered three different wines and sat discussing the differences in bouquets among their chosen drinks; a glass each of shiraz, red zinfandel and rose.

“We used to think that roses were a girl’s drink,” said Nikhil Pawar, 22, who hails from neighbouring Nasik, and who, on his third visit to Sula Vineyards, had dragged along two other friends. “But we’re experimenting with all sorts of wines now. We want to know what is the difference between dry and semidry, and whites and reds.”

For his friend, Saurabh Shivishkar, a 22-year-old medical resident in Mumbai, an afternoon at the vineyards brought out the romantic in him.

“I can just imagine myself travelling between Bordeaux and Marseille and stopping here in between. It feels like heaven. It’s such beautiful country. The clouds, the countryside, the wine.”

Young men like Pawar, Shivishkar and their friend are recent converts to wine. By Indian standards, Nasik with a population of just over one million according to the 2001 Indian national census, is a second-tier city after the more cosmopolitan urban Indian centres like Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore. But ever since Samant and Sula Wines set their footprint in this area, Nasik has quickly become India’s fastest growing area for wine consumption.

The mini wine revolution isn’t restricted to elite urban consumers. Farmers on contract to sell wine grapes to vineyards like Sula and Château Indage, also in Maharashtra state, and are beginning to sample and enjoy the product of their labour.

“Many of the farmers around here drink wine now instead of liquor,” Samant said after presiding over a 10-year annual meeting with his contract farmers who previously plied the much less successful business of table grapes.

That means new drinkers are beginning to opt for wine over hard liquor. In Nasik, women, too are beginning to swirl goblets of wines grown virtually in their backyard.

“My mother never used to drink,” said Pawar. “She’d occasioning have a small rum with my father. But now she’ll have wine with her friends. Last year, she came to Sula Vineyards with 14 of her friends and they were all drinking wine.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

SONYA FATAH
THE TORONTO STAR, August 16, 2008

MUMBAI–”Antilia” isn’t the only skyscraper dotting the city’s long, curving, southern coastline. But this particular tower, on Altamont Rd. – one of the wealthiest and most expensive residential streets in all of India – is home to a particularly sensational project. India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is building this 27-floor, 173-metre skyscraper as a home for his family.

Forbes rated the 50-year-old Ambani, India’s wealthiest industrialist and petrochemicals czar, as the world’s fifth richest man, with an estimated net worth of $43 billion. The half-constructed Antilia, named after a mythical Greek island, is Ambani’s demonstration of what he can do with that wealth.

India’s steadily rising financial elite lives like the rich and famous anywhere, but in Mumbai, where some 60 per cent of the population live in slums, Ambani’s fancy skyscraper isn’t leaving everyone breathless with awe.

With property prices going wild in the Indian financial capital, many residents fear the brash demonstration of wealth will rapidly destroy the charming architecture and culture of the city. But, for many young Indians, inspired by recent exhibitions of wealth, the scale of Antilia is a welcome change, a sign of India’s rise as a 21st-century financial city.

With shantytowns and slums within walking distance, Antilia has its share of critics.

“I just see it as a kind of rather public and vulgar kind of exhibitionism,” said Ram Chandra Guha, an Indian historian and social commentator. “It is in poor taste. It is telling the other citizens of Bombay (Mumbai) – I don’t care for you. I am so much greater than you.”

The new building is said to be a “green project,” complete with hanging gardens and large garden rooftop spaces. But it also features gymnasiums, rooftop helipads, six floors of parking, and an ice room where Ambani and his family – his wife, mother and three children – can cool off.

Newspaper reports stated that the project, slated at $2 billion, is the most expensive private home ever built. But sources close to the project insist the numbers have been inflated. Fearing negative publicity, the family has clammed up.

The project has caused concern among those who want to protect the architectural heritage of a city known to have one of the world’s largest surviving art deco neighbourhoods.

It doesn’t help that the 4,500-sq.-ft. plot of land upon which Antilia stands was bought way below market price from a trust that originally planned to build an orphanage for Mumbai’s countless orphans.

“Half of the city lives in slums. There is a desperate need to rectify that situation,” said a senior engineer who did not want to be named. “I think (Antilia is) disgraceful and disgusting … There’s a degree of callousness which I think is unbelievable… Even (Greek tycoon Aristotle) Onassis’s yacht wasn’t that lavish.”

But as the well-travelled and wealthy flock to Mumbai for jobs and to settle, many more Antilias – tall, spacious and offering views of the Arabian Sea – are on the rise.

“As an architect, I am concerned, because a project like Antilia appears to be a green project, but it is not green building,” said Akhter Chauhan, director of the Rizvi College of Architecture in Mumbai. “We like to promote sustainable architecture. Architecture that is humane and that is more humble.”

The Ambani family isn’t winning any points for humble living. But that’s okay with some Indians, who see Ambani as a pioneer leading India’s new generation of entrepreneurs and industrialists to believe they, too, can follow in his footsteps.

The Indian public, after all, has long held the Ambanis’ rags-to-riches story in awe. Ambani’s father, Dhirubhai, came from a poor, rural background, but used his business acumen and politicking skills to ensure his polyester business thrived at a time when the biggest companies were in the hands of the country’s elite old families.

Although many analysts later accused the senior Ambani of using underhanded, sometimes desperate and dirty, means to succeed, many Indians also saw him as a symbol of a new India in which futures didn’t have to be determined by class, caste and background.

Still, some see it as a nasty reminder of colonial life.

“The British and the maharajas used to live with great opulence,” said Pankaj Joshi, a conservation architect. “They had opal rooms and crystal rooms and pearl rooms. That was the lavishness of those days. It took a different form. Today, these businessmen are our new colonial rulers.”

THE AMBANI FAMILY
Mukesh Ambani, 50, is the son of the late Dhirubhai Ambani, India’s first successful rags-to-riches entrepreneur, who emerged from a small town in Gujarat state and gradually built his fortune in the polyester business.

Dhirubhai’s success earned him a great deal of respect in Indian business circles because he made his way through a tightly woven bureaucracy that was unfriendly to new entrants. His tactics – winning lucrative government licences by bribing high-level officers – were detailed by Australian writer Hamish MacDonald in The Polyester Prince. (The book is banned in India for its exposé.)

Dhirubhai’s company, Reliance Industries, which became publicly listed in 1977, is today worth a little over $85 billion.

Dhirubhai’s male heirs – his sons Mukesh and Anil, now 48 – fought each other for control over Dhirubhai Ambani’s empire after his death in 2002. Mukesh and Anil’s mother brokered a settlement between the brothers in 2005.

For years, Dhirubhai Ambani, his sons and their families, including senior staff at Reliance, lived in Sea Wind, a 22-floor building in Cuffe Parade, an elite residential neighbourhood in southern Mumbai. After the father’s death, when infighting between the two brothers made it difficult to live under the same roof, Mukesh Ambani, pictured below, set about building Antilia, where he will live with his children, wife, left, and mother, right.

Popularity: 5% [?]

But scientists condemn treatment in India as `potentially dangerous’

Sonya Fatah
The Toronto Star, July 28, 2008

NEW DELHI–Inga MacVicar was 4 years old when she fell from a barn roof onto her feet and sustained serious, life-long back injuries.

That was 54 years ago, and since then, after a few more falls, the Penticton, B.C., resident had endured consistent physical pain. For the last eight years she has suffered from severe back pain, walked with the aid of crutches, and has needed to use a wheelchair for longer distances.

After doctors at home and elsewhere in Canada were unable to help her, attributing her increasing pain and muscle loss to multiple sclerosis, MacVicar began an Internet search for treatments abroad. She decided to travel some 11,000 kilometres away, to the bustling Indian capital city of New Delhi, where, since 2002, a maverick doctor has been offering an unorthodox treatment to return function to atrophied or lifeless limbs.

The doctor, 41-year-old Geeta Shroff, treated MacVicar over two separate visits to New Delhi between December 2007 and May 2008 with injections containing human embryonic stem cells.

Today, MacVicar says she feels like a different person.

“I’ve been able to pick up my feet,” she said in a phone interview from Penticton. “I can walk normally, and the pain is gone from my back. My feet were purple and swollen and they’re not any more because my circulation is back.”

MacVicar is one of four Canadians suffering from terminal or degenerative illnesses who have travelled halfway around the world to NuTech MediWorld in south Delhi in the hope that fresh stem cells injected into their bodies would cure their ailments.

Many scientists, particularly those in the West, consider Shroff’s approach worrisome.

“I think what she is doing is potentially dangerous … and I would have serious doubts about the quality and safety of the cells she is using,” wrote Dr. Stephen Minger, senior lecturer at the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory in King’s College in London, in an email interview.

“I think her clinic should be shut down immediately.”

Many countries have imposed moratoriums on human embryonic stem cell research or the production of new human embryonic stem cell lines because of ethical or legal issues.

U.S. President George W. Bush, for instance, capped public funding for human embryonic stem cell research, citing moral concerns, thereby limiting the ability of U.S. scientists to pursue research.

Most doctors say it is too early to know whether such treatments can lead to complications.

But Shroff and her partner, anesthesiologist Dr. Ashish Verma, have no patience for that view.

“I have a vision that (embryonic stem cell therapy) will become the first line of therapy for the so-called terminal illnesses,” said Shroff. “It should be available immediately.”

In India, doctors have voiced their criticism based largely on Shroff’s refusal to publish her findings in journals of scientific repute so that peers in the scientific community can validate her discovery.

“There are no shortcuts in science,” said Dr. R. K. Mani, head of the pulmonology department at Fortis Hospital in New Delhi. “Everything must pass through the rigour of scientific scrutiny.”

Shroff said she took the condemned route escaping scientific scrutiny because she wanted to protect her research from theft, a potential outcome of sending scientific papers to international journals and scientific periodicals. Recently, she filed a patent application to protect her discovery. “I am ready to write articles now that my work is protected,” she said. “I am working on it right now.”

Shroff has published a book containing 100 case studies of people she treated between 2002 and 2005 but these, too, are not acceptable proofs for the scientific community.

“Case-controlled studies are the lowest form of evidence in medicine,” argued Mani. “Why should it be any different for stem cell treatment?”

Repeated condemnation of Shroff’s work in the western community, however, hasn’t fazed Shroff’s patients, either in India or in Australia, Canada and the United States, who attribute changes in their bodies since undergoing treatment with her.

Leah Roland, 32, broke her neck in a skiing accident nine years ago and became an incomplete quadriplegic. She tried all sorts of therapies, undergoing brutal hours of physiotherapy, acupuncture, gym work, and other treatments.

By the time Roland came to India for her first treatment in May this year, she was walking with a cane. She was bent over, her back was crooked, her right hand was rolled into a tight fist, and her right knee was constantly hyper-extending.

Three months later, Roland says she is walking tall and straight with the aid of her cane. She claims she can almost unfurl her right hand, and her knee isn’t hyper-extending any more.

“What Geeta is doing is amazing, and I’ll be back in September for my next round of treatment,” said Roland.

It’s not a miracle cure, according to Shroff. It’s merely a discovery.

“My therapy works because of the use of human embryonic stem cell lines, which have been grown from a surplus fertilized egg from a single embryo.”

Shroff extracted the cell lines from a single embryo left over after an in vitro-fertilization cycle. She started her career as a fertility specialist.

Still, fellow scientists remain skeptical and concerned.

“If she was a reputable clinician she would apply for clinical approval for her work within India like any other reputable clinician and carry out appropriate clinical trials to validate her claims,” said Minger.

Almost all of the people interviewed for this article held fundraisers in their communities to pay for the treatment, which ranges from $20,000 to $40,000 per visit. (This includes a two-month stay at Shroff’s hospital, meals, maid service, Internet access and TV.)

In Penticton, Inga and her husband, Lorne MacVicar, hope to spread news of Shroff’s treatments to others in Canada.

“I’m going to be in touch with the Rick Hansen Spinal Cord Research organization and let them know the results that we have seen,” said Lorne.

Popularity: 4% [?]

June 30, 2008
SONYA FATAH
THE TORONTO STAR

BAGHPAT, INDIA–Six years ago, Sandhya Sharma lived in a mountain village in Himachal Pradesh, the land of snowy mountains that is nestled in the western Himalayan range.

Sharma, 26, had never left her village before she was brought here, to the Indo-Gangetic plains of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most densely populated state, married to a man whose language and culture were unknown to her.

Sharma talked about the deep isolation she felt immediately after her marriage.

“At first I never spoke to people. When I did, no one would understand me, so I cried a lot,” said Sharma as she gently fussed over her year-old twins.

Such set-ups are neither marriages of convenience, nor of choice. But in the northwestern states of Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, such arrangements are on the rise. It’s a trend that seems strange in a culture where language, caste and regional identity are so deeply and separately treasured. But take one look at the 2001 national census and the numbers offer an explanation – they reflect the sad saga of the killing of baby girls and aborting female fetuses in India.

As the Indian population has grown, the country’s ratio between girls to boys has declined. With a national average of 927 girls for every 1,000 boys, the ratio for children from infancy to age 6 is 798 girls to 1,000 boys in Punjab, 819 girls in Haryana and 916 in Uttar Pradesh, according to the 2001 census of India.

Over 27 per cent of India’s 593 districts have an adult population ratio of under 900 females for every, 1,000 males, indicating a long-standing practice of female infanticide and feticide.

That means thousands of men can’t find brides in their areas, a shortage that is felt particularly in states where the practice of female infanticide, and now feticide, is practised and accepted.

The British medical journal The Lancet recently estimated that 500,000 female fetuses are aborted each year in India solely because of their gender.

It’s hard to tell whether marriages of majboori or helpless compulsion are a rising trend. The stories, to date, are anecdotal, and research on them is limited. But social workers documenting the impact of female infanticide and feticide on society insist that such marriages are on the rise.

“They are importing women from all over,” said Davinder Singh Dhamo, who runs the Navodya Lok Chetna Kalyan Samiti, a non-governmental organization that has worked hard to advocate for the rights of girls, and that has fought against ultrasound clinics that are aiding the feticide business.

“In every village there are a few women who have come from far-flung areas – from Assam, from Bihar, and Jharkhand, for example.”

Loneliness and culture shock shape the experiences of many of the women who’ve been traded casually by their families, poor mountain dwellers or impoverished rural folk for whom the spectre of dowry and the lifelong financial burdens it promises ease the crime of selling or sending their daughters far, far away.

Beyond the interstate marriages fixed through personal ties and word-of-mouth, is the more sinister trade in trafficking women, which analysts say, is on the rise. Dhamo has a vault full of horrific tales about women sold off through auctions. Among them is the tale of Sonia, a young woman from Banaras who was sold for $1,000 before a sea of curious faces.

The business in trafficking women for marriages wouldn’t be thriving quite so much if female feticide and infanticide were under control. In April, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh termed female feticide “a national shame.”

“The practice (of female feticide) is rising and it’s all about money,” said Sabu George, a researcher and activist who has worked in this area for several years.

“There are increasing numbers of doctors getting involved in this profession. Let us wait for the 2011 census and we will see.”

More marriages of a forced nature are taking place every day, according to George, who fears that failure to implement laws against feticide will only add to this small but growing population of unnatural unions.

Several decades ago, men from villages in these parts trekked across India in search of brides. Almost all such marriages were second marriages, borne of desperation – a widower’s desire to remarry after being spurned by a village girl on account of his age.

That was the fate of Tanjala, 35, from Bihar, who was married 20 years ago to Lal Mohammad, now 60, in Ibrahimpur, in Uttar Pradesh. Her friend and village mate, Sameema, 32, also from Bihar, was married to a man 28 years her senior when she was just 17.

“It was hard for my husband to find a young woman willing to marry him so they looked outside the state,” said Tanjala.

“It was so difficult when we first came,” said Sameema, whispering so that other women in the village would not hear her. “People would call us names and abuse us under their breath.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

June 10, 2008
SONYA FATAH
THE TORONTO STAR

NEW DELHI–The black-and-white photographs carefully taped onto the inside of the wooden bedroom door capture a distant past. In one of them, a younger Rita Sikand, now 86, is dressed in a sari, her lips richly painted, and laughing as she waltzes in her husband’s arms. In another, dressed in lily white, she is watching a polo match.

Today, abandoned by her daughters, Sikand rarely has visitors. Her companions, lying neatly in the middle of her bed, are a motley collection of stuffed dolls and teddy bears.

Sikand’s experience is no longer unusual in India. Like a growing number of elderly Indians, she is living out her old age away from friends and family in a seniors’ home, counting on the kindness of strangers – salaried staff and volunteers from neighbourhood schools – to see her through.

Economic opportunities, labour migration and an increasing number of women in the workplace, are slowly breaking down the once sacred traditional family system.

Where once young Indians would have shuddered at the thought of sending their parents to old folks’ homes, a rising number of such facilities reflect how many Indians are finding it easier to institutionalize their parents rather than tend to their needs at home.

With life expectancy on the rise and with India lacking a social security net for its growing population of seniors, an increasing number of the elderly are finding themselves in the throes of loneliness – abandoned, destitute and on the fringes of society.

“There’s a sizeable shift in family structure, and the centre of gravity is moving toward nuclear families” with seniors no longer wanted by their children for various reasons, said Mathew Cherian, chief executive of Help Age India, an international non-profit organization that advocates for the changing needs of elderly people.

More than 75 million elderly people live in India, according to the 2001 census, more than twice Canada’s entire population.

“There has been a dramatic increase in the number of old age homes,” said Cherian. “Earlier, there were limited free spaces for abandoned people, but even the middle and upper classes are now moving into old age homes and `pay and stay’ residences have become a recent trend.”

Today, there are more than 4,000 old age homes, according to Help Age India. In 1995, there were just 1,392.

While many elderly people continue to live with their children, the increasing number of needy senior citizens provoked a response from the Indian government last year.

In December 2007 it passed a law to protect the welfare of seniors. Under the law, the elderly can file applications against their children if they have taken their property and thrown them out.

But such protection is seen as largely cosmetic.

“Think about it,” said S.P. Agarwal, 77, who once taught university-level physics, and now lives at Gharaunda, a free home set up on the outskirts of New Delhi by the Paras Foundation trust. “How many parents are going to take their children to court? Even if they do, how many years will it take for litigation?”

The government has also committed to building old-age homes, one in each of India’s 610 districts. It won’t be enough for larger districts like Medinipur in West Bengal, where almost 10 million people reside, but it’s a start.

The growing demand has attracted private foundations, religious societies, and even individuals to set up retirement centres.

Bessie Mathews opened Johns Daycare and Boarding for Senior Citizens in 2003, partly as penance.

“I think back and I wish I could have given my parents’ more time. I was so busy with work and my own children I couldn’t give them the time they deserved.” Her 11-room facility provides seniors with many comforts.

Sikand’s accommodation, too, is one of the finest around. At Har-mit Trust, Sikand lives in an air-conditioned one-bedroom apartment. Residents pay a monthly $300 fee for space in the tastefully decorated “home away from home” located in a posh south New Delhi neighbourhood. Among its offerings are a bright courtyard, a common dining room with a library, a recreation and television space, healthy meals and a manicured garden.

For most Indians, however, $300 is a princely sum; most live in free retirement homes where they receive little love and care.

Moreover, old-age homes remain a largely urban phenomenon. Some years back, the government of Maharashtra built 42 homes in the western state.

“People didn’t feel taken care of,” said Cherian. “There’s more care available from informal connections – neighbours and others in the village. People prefer that to an old-age home that is isolating and unclean.”

For urban Indians, too, accepting life in an old-age home isn’t easy, and almost everyone has a painful story to share.

Like Baboo Lal Avasthi, 78, and Prem Lata Avasthi, 77, who moved into Gharaunda after their five children abandoned them.

“Children only care for their parents when their parents have money,” said Baboo Lal, his voice cracking. “If they don’t have money, they desert them. I spent all my money on my children. My biggest mistake was not to save some of it. If I had, we would not be in this situation.”

The couple shares a small room inside Gharaunda’s two-storey building that isn’t fancy, but it’s clean, and its residents have formed an unlikely community, bonded through stories of shared pain.

Shantya Mukherjee, for instance, lost her son four years ago when he was stabbed to death. Three months ago, her daughter packed Makherjee’s bags and didn’t tell her where they were going.

“They lied to me and when we got here they told me that I have to stay here and try it out,” said Mukherjee, 70. “I have left everything behind. This is our fate.”

There are no simple solutions for the growing alienation of India’s sizeable population of seniors.

“You can’t legislate love,” said Cherian talking about government measures. One thing Help Age is gunning for, however, is an All India pension plan that would give seniors financial independence.

Meanwhile, with large-scale sociological changes happening fast, India’s seniors find themselves prey to market forces.

“You can tell how I’m feeling every day because when I’m happy I turn her this way,” said Sikand, showing off the smiling face of a rag doll. “But when I’m sad, I just turn her the other way.” On the flip side, the smile on the doll has disappeared and tears stream down her face.

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‘Foreign terrorists’ cited as 60 die in synchronized bicycle bombings in ancient tourist town of Jaipur
The Toronto Star, May 14, 2008

Sonya Fatah

NEW DELHI–At least 60 people were killed in the walled city of Jaipur after a series of bombs ripped through six different locations last night, including a blast at one of India’s most popular tourist destinations.

More than 150 people were injured in the co-ordinated terror attack in Jaipur, also known as the Pink City, which is in India’s western state of Rajasthan.

The seven bombs, which went off within 15 minutes of one another, and that occurred in the city’s most crowded areas, were in plastic bags tied to parked bicycles and were composed of iron ball bearings and clock timers.

They were detonated using mobile phones, according to intelligence officials, who said they had no prior warning of the attack.

One bomb detonated near the Johari Bazaar, the city’s jewellery market popular with tourists, badly damaging the Lakshmi Mishtaan Bhandar, one of the oldest sweetmeats shops in Jaipur.

The high tourist season ended in March, however, and there was no immediate indication that foreigners had been caught in any of the explosions. Another bomb exploded near the popular temple of the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman, inside the walled city.

The first of the bombs went off at 7:45 p.m. local time and the remaining six exploded in quick succession in crowded market areas. Police said an eighth bomb was found and defused by police.

“Such acts of terror will not be tolerated and the perpetrators will be brought to book,” Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Rajasthan’s chief minister, told reporters.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, president of the country’s ruling party, the Indian National Congress, also condemned the attacks.

No group claimed responsibility but officials in India’s home ministry were already suspecting the hand of “foreign terrorists,” a label that is commonly understood to refer to India’ strategic foe and long-time rival, Pakistan.

There was plenty of speculation that the attacks could also be the work of militant outfit, Lashkar-e-Toiba or the Students Islamic Movement of India.

Security analysts were quickly computing possible triggers for the attack. Some suggested that the attack could a response to recent skirmishes along the line of control, one of the most militarized zones in the world that separates the disputed territory of Kashmir.

The timing of the attack might be linked to today’s 10th anniversary of Pokhran, one of five nuclear tests conducted in 1998 in the state of Rajasthan, when India and Pakistan almost went to war, according to security expert B. Raman.

Last November, a series of bombs attached to bicycles, went off outside courts in three cities in Uttar Pradesh state, killing 13 people.

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