By Sonya Fatah — Special to GlobalPost

Published: October 30, 2009 06:45 ET

KARACHI, Pakistan — On large billboards across Karachi, three smiling faces that would seem more at home on Broadway stare out at passers-by. The trio is better known to theater-goers half a world away as Donna and the Dynamos, from the musical, “Mamma Mia!” Now, a small but savvy Pakistani audience is itself swinging to a “best of” selection of Abba songs and local performers are bowing to standing ovations.

The musical’s 15-day run was short by American standards, but packed the Karachi Arts Council auditorium to capacity — 425 people — every show. And while many schools and universities across the country remain closed in the aftermath of a series of attacks — one on an educational institution in Islamabad on Oct. 20 that killed six — fear of being targeted by terrorists didn’t stop some 7,000 Karachiites from turning out.

During the 11 years of authoritarian rule by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, between 1977 and 1988, the arts in Pakistan suffered debilitating blow after blow. But the country underwent a cultural revival of sorts under Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who oversaw the establishment of the National Academy for Performing Arts in 2005. Now, a new generation of Pakistanis, governed by civilians but faced with the seemingly ever-present threat of terrorist (mainly Taliban) attack, appears unwilling to have a rare outlet for social and cultural expression taken away.

“At a very basic level, its family-style entertainment,” said Nida Butt, the director, whose company, Made for Stage Productions, staged the show. “It’s escapism. You forget about your problems, you make people happy.”

Butt, 28, also directed the musical “Chicago” last year, a show that ran a total of 32 nights, first in Karachi and then in Lahore — two of Pakistan’s biggest, wealthiest and most cosmopolitan centers. She’s already thinking about a third musical and planning to tour “Mamma Mia!” outside of Karachi.

Butt hopes that providing a space for musicals and theater will encourage the birth of a homegrown commercial theater industry: “I had to fly to another country to see my first musical on West End. I was 25 years old! A lot of young people have come and watched this. I hope that maybe this makes them think that they can be actors, singers and dancers and that can be their profession.”

Setting that example is 29-year-old Kiran Choudhry, who plays the lead role of Donna Sheridan. Educated as a lawyer and a graduate of Oxford University who started singing early under the tutelage of Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, an internationally acclaimed vocalist and a star in the complex domain of eastern classical music. In 2006, after taking voice lessons from VoxBox in London, Choudhry ditched her job and her career as a corporate lawyer and returned to Pakistan to pursue her true passion: singing. She is now the lead singer of her band, Caramel, despite her father’s wish that she would one day become the president of Pakistan.

In “Mamma Mia!,” Choudhry captivated audiences with her vocal range and adaptation of the lead role.

A theater industry by Western standards may be a long way off, but Made for Stage productions, which focuses on commercial, entertaining theater, is working hard to increase its visibility. Its chief sponsorship for “Mamma Mia!” came from McDonald’s.

During Zia’s time, the only performing arts that were allowed were folk dance and music. Many Pakistani artists were either silenced or went into exile. It’s only in recent years that an effort has been made to make up for lost time.

The National Academy for Performing Arts, Karachi’s main theater academy, largely focuses on more serious performances than “Mamma Mia!” Its latest work was an Urdu language translation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”

Even if the scale and scope of “Mamma Mia!” was larger, Karachi, a city of anywhere between 9 and 15 million residents (depending whose statistics you believe), a performance in English priced at 1,500 rupees (about $20) can hardly be called a mainstream success.

To the audiences that poured in to watch “Mamma Mia!” every night for 15 nights, that seemed largely irrelevant. A happy humming cacophony of Abba tunes could be distinctly heard in the Karachi sky.

Even the city on alert with Tehrik-e-Taliban setting off bombs in public spaces across the country, didn’t dampen spirits.

Changing the mood in Pakistan — that is partly what drove Butt and her team as they staged “Mamma Mia!”

“Given all this negativity that is reigning supreme in our country, we need pockets of vibrant life and joy,” Choudhry said. “On one level it destroys that negativity, it breaks its hold … I’ve absolutely no issues if the Taliban are around the corner. It makes me want to get on stage even more and shake it out.”

India has big plans to industrialise more of its economy. Inconveniently for some Indian farmers, they’re not part of it.

It’s one of those development stories that pits a new way of life against an old one, and the desire for modern new factories over the fields and fishponds of agrarian society.

So far it’s generating more heat than light. But what heat! As we hear from Sonya Fatah in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

Scroll down to the February 2 – 8 show, and listen to the documentary at: http://www.cbc.ca/dispatches/
OR listen to the entire podcast of the Feb 2 show: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/dispatches_20090202_11594.mp3

January 26, 2009

NEW DELHI – Inside the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, an oil painting of Jesus at the Last Supper looked down upon the congregation as a priest led some 200 in prayer.
The Mass here was underway and the hymns in Hindi wafted up among the high vaulting arches, but this air of peace and tranquility inside the cathedral contrasted sharply with the ominous feeling that has descended over India’s minority Christian community in recent months.
Throughout the fall, scores of Christians were killed in India, thousands made homeless, their churches destroyed. Hindu extremists are suspected in many of the attacks.
What’s more, the violence, which started in the eastern state of Orissa in late August, didn’t stop there. Instead, it spread to Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and even Goa, a state better known for its rave parties, hippie ghettos and coastal seafood fare.
Christians form only 2.3 percent of India’s population. But given the country’s size, its Christian population – 24 million according to the 2001 Indian census – is hardly small.
For years, Christians coexisted peacefully with India’s 82 percent Hindu majority, but the growth of fringe fundamentalism has begun to tear at India’s largely secular fabric.
Of late, Christian missionary work and terror attacks blamed on Muslim extremists have fueled anger among splinter Hindu extremist groups, whose self-professed goal is to fully convert India into a nation for Hindus.
Over a cup of tea recently, Catholic Archbishop Vincent Michael Concessao puzzled over the escalating scale of attacks carried out by the Sangh Parivar. The Sangh Parivar is an umbrella group that comprises several right-wing organizations, including its more acceptable political face, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“There is fear about what will happen, even in places with strong Christian communities like Mangalore,” Concessao said.
In October, churches and congregations in Mangalore, a southern Indian city, were systematically attacked for the first time.
“Mangalore is the sort of place that has never had this trouble either in the recent past or going way back,” said Rhoda D’sa, who retired from the Reserve Bank of India and now teaches in Bangalore. “We share a common language and a common culture — we’ve been neighbors — and we were never aware of a feeling of alienation,” D’sa added.
Religious violence isn’t new to India, which still carries scars from the 1947 partition that created India and Pakistan. A million people died in primarily Hindu-Muslim violence.
For most of the past 61 years, however, secularism has been India’s predominant belief. It’s only recently that Hindu right-wing parties have grown in strength. Their mission: to rescue Hinduism from the evangelical forces of Christianity and what they perceive as the perils of Islam.
Targeted Christian attacks began this year after a right-wing Hindu leader was murdered Aug. 23 in Kandhamal. Hindu militant outfits blamed Christians and took revenge.
Kandhamal is a sort of battleground for faith wars. A majority of its population is tribal. India’s original inhabitants, who historically followed localized nature-based rituals, number roughly 84 million. Hindu and Christian groups have undertaken serious missionary efforts to bring them into their fold.
Conservative Hindu groups have been pushing for a ban on conversion and the eradication of cow slaughter. Cows are sacred in Hinduism and their slaughter is outlawed in most Indian states. Several states have also passed anti-conversion laws.
Many Hindus are opposed to Christian missionary work — they lambast it as insensitive to the Hindu religion. In some cases extreme Christian groups have been disrespectful to Hinduism, although judging by published accounts such events seem relatively rare.
“So much money comes into (Orissa) for (Christian) missionary efforts” from overseas, said Tathagata Sathpathy, a minister of Parliament. “These guys offered dalits better chances by offering them jobs, free education, and other benefits that any poor community needs. That’s one reason why there have been mass conversions to Christianity.”
Most Indian Christians, roughly 70 percent, are from India’s dalit community, previously known as “untouchables” in India’s caste hierarchy. Conversions to Christianity occurred over centuries. Recently, however, Hindu militant groups have begun forcing groups of Christians to re-convert to Hinduism, spreading terror in rural Christian communities.
Babu Kumar Nayak, a 16-year-old Christian from Kandhamal, watched his home burn in September before walking 350 kilometers to safety.
“Those who attacked us were my classmates,” Nayak said. “Some of them I have known all my life. I was watching, as they were singing: ‘Hindu, Hindu, brothers all/We won’t keep the Christians among us/No other faith will be allowed to spread/If it does, we will burn it down.’”
This kind of hostility, many Christians say, used to be rare.
“The country had never known the power of the vote of religion, and that vote was capitalized when the BJP played the Hindu card and came to power in 1998,” said Maxwell Perreira, former joint commissioner of police in New Delhi.
To fight the rising trend of communalism, many Christians hope that Indians will exercise their preference for secularism in the general elections early next year.
“We have not done enough to gather the secular forces in the country,” mused Concessao, the archbishop. “It’s the lay man who needs to be at the forefront of this movement.”

Community-building measures between India and Pakistan lost as blame game heats up

SONYA FATAH
My heart sank when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his first national address after the Mumbai terror attacks, said that a foreign hand was involved.

Last year, Singh made the endearing admission that he wished in his lifetime to see a day when he could breakfast in New Delhi, lunch in Lahore and dine in Kabul. Since last month’s ghastly attack, that dream seems desperately distant.

I am Pakistani and Muslim. My husband is Indian and Hindu, and I have lived in New Delhi for two years as a journalist with the Canadian media.

As a Pakistani growing up in a hostile Indo-Pak environment, I never imagined that India and Pakistan could ever get along. Yet here I am, a testament to that change, not only living among Indians but also happily married to one.

Over the past six years, a series of community-building measures have matured the India-Pakistan relationship. Education exchanges and fashion shows have taken place.

Indian crowds boisterously cheered on Pakistani cricket players during a recent club tournament. There has been people-to-people diplomacy, and trade has significantly multiplied.

Moreover, despite the challenges of our notorious bureaucracies, new, lasting, long-term partnerships like my own have developed. At a personal level, our families have embraced one another. And in travelling India as a journalist, I have found that a cross-section of Indian society – rickshaw drivers, store owners, students, activists, police officers, government officials and many others – have been demonstrably hospitable. Many consider the South Asian faceoff a reflection of establishment, not people-to-people, hostility.

All that goodwill promises to change.

After the Mumbai attacks, I watched the coverage with deep anger at the young, urban-clad terrorists who massacred innocent people in the name of a religion they clearly don’t know. But as I watched the Indian media report the grisly event, I began to panic. Before the first night was out the nation was certain that Pakistan was responsible.

The media began whipping their viewers into an anti-Pakistan frenzy. Suddenly, regular citizens – housewives, students and young professionals, mostly from the country’s middle to upper classes – began chanting the mantra, “Let’s bomb Pakistan.” On a nationally televised show, television host Simi Garewal began calling for carpet bombing Pakistan.

This kind of sentiment is especially dangerous. Many Indians think a quick bombing sortie on Pakistani terrorist camps will solve the problem. They forget that Pakistan has one of the world’s better armed forces bristling with modern weaponry and, like India, nuclear warheads. The human toll of any such engagement would be catastrophic.

I’m no stranger to Pakistan’s problems. As a journalist I’ve covered Pakistan fairly extensively, from the Pak-Afghan border areas to Pakistani Kashmir. Militancy is indeed on the rise and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, remains an extra-constitutional actor. Elite and middle-class Pakistanis know this but are in denial.

People paid special attention only when Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel, a haunt of the elite, went up in flames in September. Similarly in India, bombs have gone off in middle-class markets and in trains packed with lower class passengers. Only now, when the elite has been attacked, is there any sense of urgency for retaliation.

The reality is that Pakistan cannot afford war. Today, counterinsurgencies are underway in Balochistan and in the North-West Frontier Province. The country’s economy is in shambles, and young, disillusioned Pakistanis are happily joining a growing cult of militancy.

A war would play into Al Qaeda’s hands by distracting the Pakistani military’s attention and allowing Al Qaeda to ramp up its operations.

So, where do we go from here? Today, India is a South Asian leader. It needs to bring in stronger, more mature leadership that can rise above the blame game that has typically characterized the relationship.

It has work to do at home and abroad, though. It has to show that secularism works. It must act with speed in situations like in Orissa where Hindu mobs recently killed scores of Christians and set fire to their villages. It has to overcome the grisly history of the 1992 razing of the Babri mosque, and the killing of more than 1,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

Closure has been difficult because of the rise of Hindu extremism; an Indian army officer is being investigated for the 2007 Samjhauta Express bombing – the friendship train between India and Pakistan, in which 68 people, mostly Pakistanis, died.

Equally worrisome is the large increase in bomb attacks by Indian Muslims.

South Asia, in particular Pakistan, is in a fragile state.

Yet there is reason for hope.

Recently, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told Indians via live satellite at a leadership summit interview – televised in India and Pakistan – that Pakistan has adopted a no-first-strike nuclear policy, the first such promise from a Pakistani leader. Zardari said he was for “change and reconciliation,” and endeared himself to Indians when he said, “I do not know whether it is the Indian or the Pakistani in me that is talking to you today.”

This week, Pakistani security forces arrested 15 people connected with the outlawed militant outfit, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India holds accountable for the Mumbai attacks.

Perhaps now both countries have an opportunity to solve the regional crisis. They should finally put Kashmir – the longest dispute in modern history – on the table for resolution.

On a personal level, as a Pakistani living in India and married to an Indian, it worries me that partnerships like ours, which could be one key to regional peace, must survive in an oasis of hysteria and at the edge of communal tension. Every day we hope for a day when economic, political and human relationships are real and sustainable. And yet, it takes only a handful of terrorists to strike at the heart of a small piece of trust that has taken decades to cultivate.

Joanna Harries is reconsidering her decision to spend a year in Mumbai.
December 01, 2008

SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI–When Joanna Harries was deciding whether to head to India or Pakistan after learning she had been selected for the Acumen Fund’s year-long fellowship program, she opted for India.

“I said `no’ to Pakistan because I figured it would be a dangerous place for a woman,” the Toronto native said.

The irony of that decision isn’t lost on her.

Harries, 28, arrived in Mumbai two weeks ago. She was at a reception at the Cricket Club of India in the south of the city when the news of the attacks reached her. “There was absolute chaos. Everyone was stranded in south Mumbai and wanted to get out. There were 10 to 12 people in each cab, and we knew that bombs had gone off in some cabs but we couldn’t do anything.”

She and her colleagues made it to the safety of their homes in the northern suburbs, but the experiences of that night and the past few days have left her rattled.

Harries, who worked as a brand manager with Unilever in Canada and the United States, was married last year but didn’t want to pass up the Acumen Fund opportunity, so she and her husband are spending the year apart. Acumen, which also operates in Pakistan and Africa, is a non-profit social venture fund that invests in “sustainable and scalable” businesses to tackle poverty.

In Mumbai, Harries has been working for DIAL 1298, a private ambulance service operating in a city starved for good public medical care. During the three-day siege in Mumbai, DIAL 1298 played a significant role in aiding government, police and hospital officials.

Its 51 ambulances, half outfitted with state-of-the-art advanced life support, some charged by solar panels, scurried from location to location ferrying hostages from the city’s two premier hotels.

“I spent the night in the call centre just watching and trying to be helpful, talking to blood donors, and watching what was going on, on television … I don’t know how to evaluate what has happened. In Canadian terms, this number of deaths never happens.”

These are days of second thoughts. She says she feels fine, but she is questioning whether being in Mumbai, away from a new spouse and the safety and security of home, is a smart decision.

Her family in Toronto is deeply concerned about her safety. Although they understand her reasons for being in India and taking on the fellowship, they would be happy if she returned home to Canada, Harries said.

“I’m going around talking to many people – Indian and otherwise – to see what they think. I feel safe in my apartment but I don’t want to spend the rest of my year here holed up in there.”

SUPPLIED PICTURE
Charles Cannon, left, spoke of ordeal. Larry Koftinoff, of Kelowna, B.C., turned to meditation during hotel siege.

December 01, 2008
SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI–Days after they escaped the besieged Oberoi hotel, many of the surviving members of a meditation group are still traumatized by their experience.

Lured to India in search of spirituality, the group of 25 meditation practitioners from Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand instead found themselves in a prolonged terrorist attack.

By the end of their 45-hour ordeal, two members of the group had died and three – including Montreal actor Michael Rudder who was shot three times – were recovering in Bombay Hospital.

The remaining three Canadians, Helen Connolly of Toronto, who was grazed in the arm by a bullet, and Kelowna, B.C., couple Larry and Bernie Koftinoff, are well and looking forward to returning home.

The group’s leader, known to members as Master Charles Cannon, told reporters yesterday of the harrowing hours during which the group mustered its strength, he said, to emerge from the experience feeling profoundly more spiritual.

Cannon, 63, paused from time to time to check his emotions as he talked about the group’s ordeal.

“As I sat in that room in the Oberoi hotel with the door barricaded and guns and bombs going off for over 45 hours … thinking that the next moment the door would be blown away and life would be ended, I kept trying to look into myself and see what sense I could make of the situation,” the American said.

In the end, he said, the experience was an “affirmation of life, of compassion, of love, kindness and of the oneness of humanity.”

Larry Koftinoff, 56, who introduced Cannon to reporters, appeared calm and composed. But he said some of the group’s members were starting to show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It’s this time when the post-traumatic stress starts – a lot of the women especially – now that they are now coming out of the shock that you’re in originally and realize what has happened.”

Koftinoff and his wife, Bernie, also turned to meditation during the siege.

“We had each other,” Koftinoff said. “For some of the other people, it’s harder because they don’t have anyone else there to help balance the tensions.”

The group arrived in India on Nov. 15 for a two-week meditation course under Cannon’s leadership. Cannon heads the Synchronicity Foundation, which he started up in 1983, as a “modern mystic” and a “master of meditation” after spending 12 years in India. The foundation, a non-profit organization, focuses on meditation and has a 180-hectare sanctuary not far from Charlottesville, Va. On the Wednesday evening of the attack, most of the group’s members had retired to their rooms after returning from a meditation session.

Rudder, Connolly and four Americans had opted to dine at Tiffin, a restaurant in the hotel, when gunmen entered the room and sprayed the guests with bullets.

Cannon said all six dove under the table for cover. Survivors watched in horror as the gunmen went table to table and sprayed bullets at those cowering underneath. Two Americans, Alan Scherr, 58, and his 13-year-old daughter Naomi, were killed while they held onto each other. Connolly held their hands and felt their lives ebb away as the attackers stormed the hotel.

After the gunmen left, a waiter whispered, “If you can move, follow me.” The surviving four – three of them with bullet wounds – crawled to safety and left through a back entrance. All four were taken to hospital, and Rudder, who was in critical care at first, is recovering and expected to be in Bombay Hospital for another two weeks after undergoing surgery.

For the remaining 19 members of the group, gun battles, explosions and the sounds of footsteps of terrorists running between the floors, continued for 45 hours before their release was secured.

Cannon, who was in his room with two of his assistants, broke the thick glass of the hotel window when fire broke out and smoke began to fill the air. In his room on the 12th floor, Koftinoff did the same.

“What was amazing was that a lot of people in Canada sent us a lot of prayers, energy and healing across,” said Gautam Sachdeva, who heads Yoga Impressions.

“We got calls and emails and heard about a lot of special prayers held for the group. People got together in ashrams and prayed for them.”

Despite experiencing loss and feeling low, neither Cannon nor any in his group seem to blame anyone for their ordeal.

Yesterday afternoon, Cannon visited the three members in hospital.

He said one of the injured women told him, “We are not the victims of terrorism, we are the victors over terrorism. We chose the affirmation of life, we chose love and we forgive.”

MUMBAI–Worried relatives and friends rushed to the city’s many hospitals yesterday, hoping their search for the missing would not take them down the road to the mortuary.

Police teams and paramilitary troops stood guard on the sprawling 26-hectare grounds of the 160-year-old Jamshedji Jijibhoy Hospital in the heart of Mumbai, keeping journalists at bay as family members gathered in the hospital’s lobby to pore over the lists of the dead at a makeshift control centre.

Many of the dead were brought to this hospital. Nurses helped people look for names but many were on a hospital-to-hospital hunt for loved ones who were still missing.

The smell of dead bodies hung heavily in the air just outside the hospital’s mortuary. A family huddled together, waiting to receive the body of a loved one. One man anxiously leaned over the information counter asking for help.

“I’ve been looking in all the hospitals. His name isn’t on any list. Can you help me find him?”

The harried man behind the desk replied: “The names are all on the list. I don’t have any other information.”

There were also many unidentified bodies, including those of two foreigners, waiting to be collected by the overworked mortuaries.

Throughout the day at the city’s southern hospitals – Breach Candy Hospital, St. George’s Hospital and Bombay Hospital – ambulances with wailing sirens brought in more casualties and injured folks as evacuation proceedings continued at the Oberoi hotel along Marine Dr.

Despite the additional pressure, however, hospital workers were efficient and tried their best to help the many on city-wide desperate searches.

MUMBAI–Mumbai is usually India’s busiest city, legendary for its bustling commercial culture and its frustrating traffic jams.

But today, more than 24 hours after the co-ordinated attacks on the city’s elite southern suburbs, Mumbai was still paralyzed.

Air traffic to the city was significantly down, with early-morning flights from New Delhi carrying less than one-third their capacity.

The domestic airport, normally jam-packed with business people and tourists, was like a ghost town, quiet and subdued, matching the mood of the city.

“Things are better today than they were yesterday,” said Vinod Sharma, 42, a taxi driver who has been driving in the city for the last year.

“Yesterday no one was stepping out of their homes. Today at least there are cars on the street.”

Sharma was working Wednesday night when he witnessed one of the first attacks – a bomb explosion inside a fellow cab driver’s vehicle.

“I was standing barely 200 metres away,” he said. “The light had just turned green and the taxi shot ahead carrying this passenger.

“Who knows if he was the terrorist or not but all of a sudden there was a massive explosion and there was absolute carnage.

“I’m still shaking at the memory.”

Sharma said the roof of the taxi was blown so far away it couldn’t be found.

“There were limbs and blood and body parts everywhere. And one poor guy on a motorbike right there lost his life, too.”

Although the streets of Mumbai were quieter than usual, there were signs of a return to life in this city of 14 million. While some stores and offices remained closed in the area close to the Oberoi Hotel, one of the terrorists’ targets, a few public buses made their rounds past the area cordoned off by police.

Journalists and onlookers crowded around the barricades around the hotel.

There were reports that up to 30 hostages had been rescued today and were being taken away in a bus to safety but it was difficult to ascertain from the distance because riot police trucks had blocked off the street. Behind the hotel, a white tourist bus was parked outside and a steady stream of hostages emerging from the hotel began boarding it. Most appeared to be foreigners.

Beyond the public barricade, a bevy of fire trucks were parked still, and there was no sound of activity.

Earlier, police had told guests in the hotel to stay in their rooms.

“The situation is almost over but they are firing shots inside so we have to wait it out,” said police officer Tanaji Ghardze.

November 27, 2008
SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

NEW DELHI–Nabbing a table at Leopold Cafe in Colaba, a south Mumbai neighbourhood that rubs shoulders with the Arabian Sea on one side, likely involves a wait.

The cafe, which opens up onto a bustling shopping street, has a string of tables that are practically on the pavement. The street is filled with makeshift stalls that are set up every morning to lure travellers.

Leopold Cafe is a favourite among the constant stream of backpackers to Colaba but it’s also a south Mumbai institution.

The cafe was always popular but became an international destination after the escaped Australian convict-turned writer Gregory David Roberts made numerous references to it in his 2004 bestseller, Shantaram.

In addition to its long-time local reputation, it’s high on the Lonely Planet checklist of places-to-eat-in.

Colaba is also a stone’s throw from the Gateway to India, a colonial arched structure that forms the city’s southern-most point of entry from the jetties that take people to villages and sights across the water.

The Taj Hotel, one of the city’s oldest hotels that dates back a century, is just across from the Gateway and overlooks a long glimmering stretch of the Arabian Sea.

Its Victorian architecture makes it a landmark building for just about everyone: taxi drivers, visitors from the suburbs, people from the elite cocoon of South Mumbai and, of course, a place to stay for those who can afford its pricey rate, often north of $400 a night.

It was built in 1903 by Jamsetji N. Tata, the Indian industrialist, who believed that Bombay (as Mumbai used to be known) needed a grand hotel to take its place among the great cities of the world.

The Taj was built by the Tata family, and is one of India’s most popular luxury chain hotels, with some properties overseas as well.

South Mumbai is really an enclave of the city’s rich and famous. The streets are broad, flanked in many places by large green parks, fountains, and a mix of turn of the century art deco buildings and earlier Victoria-era structures that remind the city and India of its British colonial heritage.

Victoria Terminus – named after Britain’s long-reigning queen – and now more proudly known as the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, after a local historical warrior figure, is one of Mumbai’s tributes to Victorian Gothic architecture that can be seen in several South Asian cities.

As the headquarters of the city’s busy central railway line that brings commuters from the suburbs and into the old city, it’s one of the busiest areas of India’s railway stations, not simply a place for commuters but also a must-see destination for anyone visiting the city.

NEW DELHI–For months, Ajit Singh had been chasing off calls from collection agencies. The calls then turned into home visits with threatening overtones. Finally, a collector came to his home, hurled a volley of abuse at him and threatened to beat him up.

Singh, 31, called the city’s police hotline, and was rescued just in time. But others, who have amassed vast debts in a scramble to be part of India’s new consumer culture, haven’t been so lucky.

India today boasts roughly 10 million credit-card customers. But consumer credit is relatively new here. Transactions have historically been cash-based.

Without a federal credit-checking system, and no legal apparatus to make cardholders responsible for their payments, companies have resorted to outsourcing recovery companies, which send out thugs and goons to intimidate clients, and in some cases beat them up.

Over the last few years, banks have targeted India’s rising middle class, an estimated 300 million strong population that forms India’s mass consumer market. They’re the target market for advertisers using massive billboard ads, full-page newspaper advertisements and television promos featuring Bollywood actors.

“There has been a geometric growth in credit card holders among the Indian middle classes in the last 10 years,” said S.R. Khanna, of Consumer Voice, a volunteer organization that seeks to improve consumer awareness. “Borrowing for consumption was not a part of the social practice in traditional India.”

But now the rush to purchase glitzy new products – from washing machines and fridges to the latest in cellular technology – has been intense over the last few years. Those purchases have been possible thanks to a liberal handout of credit cards, leading to massive amounts of individual debt that is now beginning to cripple those who splurged in their desire for an elevated, more fanciful lifestyle.

That’s exactly what Singh did.

After he got a job as a sales manager last year with Bajaj-Allianz, a major insurance company and began earning a monthly salary of 19,000 rupees (roughly $460), Singh found his desk flooded with offers from credit card companies. He accepted them all, and before he realized it, he’d amassed about $2,950 in debt.

Consumer aid organizations claim banks tack on additional charges and fees, aside from the interest rate, forcing customers to pay much more than they legally owe.

“One lady came to me in complete distress,” said C.V. Giddappa, general secretary of the Credit Card Holders Association, a voluntary organization formed in 2001 to protect the interests of cardholders.

“She had bought a television for 10,000 rupees (approximately $246) on her Standard Chartered credit card, and she was making monthly payments of $24. She made 17 payments, and after she had paid almost double the cost of the original item, her balance had reached a ridiculous ($566).

Giddappa’s organization recently filed a suit for a refund of some $1.2 billion. “We have investigated the balance sheets of these credit card companies and its clear to us that they are looting customers,” said Giddappa.

Others believe the onus also lies with the Indian consumer to take responsibility for poor borrowing practices.

“There are two sides to every coin, and the situation is complicated because Indian consumers don’t want to pay their monthly balances either,” said S.K. Virmani with the National Consumer Hotline. “They know they can just get another credit card and keep purchasing so they try to trick the system.”

Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that banks have resorted to all sorts of means to recover bad debt. In the western Indian city of Ludhiana, last month, Vivek Uppal, a businessman who had reached a settlement to end his financial woes, was picked up by two strongmen and a police officer, taken to a warehouse and beaten up.

“They abused and tortured me to pay 250,000 rupees as a recovery of the credit card,” Uppal wrote.

In the end, Uppal had to hand over an extra $2,000, despite official letters from the bank that stated otherwise.

Uppal’s case is not unique.

In mid-October this year, a family of four in Mumbai who were renting an apartment in a plush suburb of the city, committed suicide after debt accumulating on their 72 credit cards became enormous.

It’s likely that things won’t look up unless clients are better informed, and unless a federal system of credit checks is enforced.

“(The middle class) have been systematically trapped into debt,” said Giddappa. “The bank issues them one credit card, and … before they know it they have 10 to 12 credit cards, and they’re wrapped in a vicious cycle of debt.”