I N D I A | 2008 - 2013
I spent nearly five years in Mumbai as a business writer for the Associated Press. The AP has a generous idea of what constitutes a business story, so I got to write about all kinds of things: rat catchers, the 2008 attack on Mumbai, Sri Lanka after the war, many varieties of human endurance and some of the people who were pushing this great, shuddering place forward. These are some of my favorites.
S O C I E T Y
MICROFINANCE: LENDER'S OWN PROBE LINKS IT TO SUICIDES
MUMBAI (AP) - First they were stripped of their utensils, furniture, mobile phones, televisions, ration cards and heirloom gold jewelry. Then, some of them drank pesticide. One woman threw herself in a pond. Another jumped into a well with her children.
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AS INDIA RISES, ITS RAT CATCHERS TOIL IN DARKNESS
MUMBAI (AP) — Sabid Ali Sheikh stands on a prairie of trash — old onions, excrement, animal bones — slowly rotting its way back into an earth riddled with rat burrows. Sometimes the ground gives way under his feet. It is after midnight, and Sheikh is after the rats. He listens for them. He tries to catch their red eyes
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INDIA STATE GOV'T PUSHES MICROFINANCE PROSECUTIONS
MUMBAI (AP) - The government of India's Andhra Pradesh state said Monday it would push prosecutors to move ahead with 76 criminal cases against employees of Indian lenders it believes were involved with driving overindebted borrowers to suicide.
B O L L Y W O O D
“Slumdog Millionaire” took the Oscars by storm while I was in Mumbai. It was magic for the two kids, Azhar and Rubina, who grew up in a slum not far from my house, got cast in the movie and ended up walking the red carpet at the Oscars. I loved these kids and the story of how fame was --and was not -- changing their lives. Their houses still got torn down. Their slum still flooded. In the midst of it all was Rubina, back from her trip to Hollywood, splashing in fetid flood water with her friends, all joy.
NO HAPPILY EVER AFTER EVER YET FOR 'SLUMDOG' KID STAR
MUMBAI (AP) - Rubina Ali's house is flooded with sewer water, and her feet itch. She's discovered a world of creepy-crawlies in the opaque gray water: scorpions, rats and slithery creatures with lots of legs. Two months ago, the child star of the hit movie "Slumdog Millionaire" was worrying...
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'SLUMDOG' CHILD STAR'S HOME TORN DOWN
MUMBAI (AP) - The 10-year-old child star of "Slumdog Millionaire" was awakened Thursday by a policeman wielding a bamboo stick and ordered out of his home. Minutes later it was bulldozed along with dozens of other shanties in the Mumbai slum he calls home. "I was frightened," said Azharuddin
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NO CLASS, NO CASH: 'SLUMDOG' KIDS MISS SCHOOL
MUMBAI (AP) - The slum kid stars of "Slumdog Millionaire" want a lot of things in life_new houses, a car, trips to London and Paris_but they aren't too interested in school. Ten-year-old Rubina Ali has missed nearly 75 percent of her classes and her co-star hasn't done much better
B U S I N E S S
TATA NANO IS A NICE CHEAP RIDE - TEST DRIVE
PUNE (AP) - To drive India's new $2,000 automobile is to consider all the things you thought you needed in a car but really don't.Engineers stripped away everything they could on Tata Nano, which goes in sale in India next month. There is no cup holder, glove box, or clock. The upholstery is gray vinyl, which you may think you've seen
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INDIA'S RETAILERS, FARMERS FACE UNCERTAIN FUTURE
MUMBAI (AP) - Ashok Kokane sits amid his strawberries at Mumbai's Crawford Market with a handwritten ledger across his knees and a fan of dirty 10-rupee notes at his left hand. Above him, torn tarps speak of worn out effort. The lazy, dust-encrusted ceiling fans are far past cleaning. There is a sense of timelessness here,
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LAND WARS BEDEVIL INDIA'S RUSH TO INDUSTRIALIZE
SANAND (AP) - It doesn't look like he's won much from industrialization. Take his face, weathered beyond his 30 years, or the earth stuck to his bare ungainly feet. Jaisar Khan Pathan, one in a long line of farmers, is simply too scrawny. But Pathan, and scores like him who live in the shadow of a new factory
P R O F I L E S
NANDAN NILEKANI
ID'ING THE MASSES MAY SOLVE INDIAN IDENTITY CRISIS
MUMBAI (AP) - It's a problem of mind-boggling complexity: How do you identify 1.2 billion people without documents, who sometimes rely just on word of mouth to establish who they are? The man tasked with solving this problem is outsourcing guru Nandan Nilekani, who rose to prominence as a founder of Infosys
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AJAY PIRAMAL
INDIAN TYCOON HAS TONS OF CASH, NOWHERE TO INVEST
MUMBAI (AP) - Ajay Piramal is sitting on a mountain of cash. Yet the billionaire Indian tycoon, working in one of the world's fastest growing economies, is struggling to decide what to do with the money. The problem isn't opportunity, he said. It's India. "Every large investment, there was no transparency,"
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GIUSEPPE MOZZILLO
ITALIAN FINDS INDIA IS A NICE PLACE TO MAKE CHEESE
PANCHKULA (AP) - It was an average sort of beast gray, thick shouldered, with fat curling horns spotted from the window of a moving car. But to Giuseppe Mozzillo, who grew up outside Naples in Italy's buffalo mozzarella heartland, the animals dotting the Indian countryside looked enticingly familiar.
C O N F L I C T
SRI LANKA WAR REFUGEES FACE UNEASY HOMECOMING
BATTICALOA (SRI LANKA) - Three years ago, Vairamuttu Bavani left her home in eastern Sri Lanka to attend her cousin's wedding in the north. She didn't make it back until September. Trapped by the civil war, Bavani, a Tamil, lost six members of her family and both her legs to a bomb.
SRI LANKA STILL WAITING FOR ITS PEACE DIVIDEND
PUNANI (SRI LANKA) - Inside, there are no victims, no killers, and no questions. There are only bright white lights and the click-clack of sewing machines in this new garment factory in war-torn eastern Sri Lanka. Outside, the land is littered with memories from the island's
MUMBAI GUNMAN DESCRIBES INDOCTRINATION IN PAKISTAN
MUMBAI (AP) - An Indian court that heard a stunning confession from the lone surviving gunman in the Mumbai terror attacks put a gag order on his latest testimony a message to his handlers in Pakistan and a description
REPORTING FROM INDIA
Shortly after I arrived in Mumbai, ten young men stuffed dried fruit, Nokia
phones, AK-47s, grenades, pistols
and ammunition into their
backpacks and sailed from Karachi
to a fishing village not far from my
office.
They fanned out across the city,
killing 164 people in a three-day
siege. I watched people banging
on the windows of the burning Taj
Mahal hotel, trying to escape
through windows that would not
open. Firetrucks could not get too
close because of the bullets.I broke the story of how India’s
leading microfinance company, SKS
Microfinance, covered up its role in
borrower suicides as it pursued
breakneck growth ahead of its
IPO. SKS pushed loans onto poor
borrowers and then used tactics so
aggressive to collect the debt that
one woman jumped into a well
with her two children. Neighbors
spotted them hours later, dead,
clothes billowing in the water.I met children who thought that
having rat bites on their heads was
normal. I wished very much that I
could write as well as Katherine Boo
did in “Behind the Beautiful
Forevers.”I stood on the jelly-ground of a
dump and tried to get a young
man to talk about his ambitions in
life. He had none -- beyond getting
a regular job with the city catching
rats, sometimes with his bare
hands. He was wearing flip-flops. I
was worried about sinking. It was
near midnight and very dark. Where
he lived, people still talked about
bubonic plague. A few hours later,
he loaded a bloody sack bulging
with rats into a rickshaw. We
followed in a car and watched as
the rickshaw driver pulled over to
vomit.I got to test-drive a Tata Nano. I
went to Sri Lanka after the war, was accused of being a terrorist and met
a Buddhist monk in the jungle who had the chest of soldier and racial ideas that would have alarmed his American donors.I also met an Italian who moved to
Haryana and opened a mozzarella
factory in a dusty field outside
Chandigarh because he realized
Indian buffalo looked just like the
ones outside Naples. I watched
Michelle Obama dance on a
presidential visit. I learned how to
prepone meetings and do the
needful. I loved India.
BOOKS ABOUT INDIA I LOVED
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Katerhine Boo
Maximum City
Suketu Mehta
Pink Sari Revolution
Amana Fontanella-Kahn
Arzee the Dwarf
Chandrahas Choudhry
Bombay Then, Mumbai Now
Jim Masselos, Naresh FernandesIndia: A Million Mutinies Now
V.S. Naipaul (1990)Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of
Bombay’s Jazz Age
Naresh FernandesShantaram
Gregory David RobertsA Fine Balance
Rohinton MistryIndia After Gandhi
Ramachandra Guha (2007)Amar Chitra Katha comics
great LOCAL NEWS SOUCES
Scroll
http://scroll.in/
The Hindu
http://www.thehindu.com/
Mint
http://www.livemint.com
Quartz India
https://qz.com/india/
Economic & Political Weekly
http://www.epw.in/