Gandhiji's Ashes Immersed

Several Indians among 2007 Young Innovators Under 35

Each year Technology Review magazine announces the top young
innovators under 35. Each year I read these listing I am amazed at the
quality of work and the research that goes into each innovation.

From TR magazine --
"Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young
innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today
that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists,
all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing,
communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our
world."

Go to this link to find the complete list with bio's and other details --
http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/

Eight Indian Americans in 'junior Noble' race

Indian American kids have continued to perform well and impress. Here
are a few more that are making waves --

From MSN India --
"Eight Indian American high school seniors are among forty high school
seniors named finalists in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search
2008. The competition, often called the junior Nobel Prize, is
America's oldest and most prestigious high school science competition.
Each finalist will receive at least $5,000 in scholarships and a new
laptop.

The finalists will display their research at the National Academy of
Sciences and meet in Washington, D.C. in March for a rigorous judging
process, meetings and interactions with national leaders and leading
scientists. The top winner will receive a $100,000 scholarship from
the Intel Foundation. The finalists' independent research projects
include diverse areas and interesting findings."

For the full report and complete details ---
http://news.in.msn.com/international/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1218086

Jolie-Ash may have common ancestors

Yeah, here is some very important research to spend valuable time on
and to invest valuable resources into!!! Jeeze!!!

A report from MSN --
"Top actors Aishwarya Rai and Angelina Jolie may have common
ancestors. If a research is to be believed all people with blue eyes
can trace their ancestry back to one person who probably lived about
10,000 years ago in the Black Sea region.

Scientists studying the genetics of eye colour at the University of
Copenhagen found that more than 99.5 per cent of blue-eyed people who
volunteered to have their DNA analysed have the same tiny mutation in
the gene that determines the colour of the iris.

Professor Hans Eiberg of the university said he has analysed the DNA
of about 800 people with blue eyes, ranging from fair-skinned,
blond-haired Scandinavians to dark-skinned, blue-eyed people living in
Turkey and Jordan. "All of them, apart from possibly one exception,
had exactly the same DNA sequence in the region of the OCA2 gene. This
to me indicates very strongly that there must have been a single,
common ancestor of all these people," he said.

The study reported in the journal Human Genetics indicates that the
mutation originated in just one person who became the ancestor of all
subsequent people in the world with blue eyes. "From this we can
conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same
ancestor. They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same
spot in their DNA," Professor Eiberg was quoted as saying by The
Independent daily of Britain on Thursday.

Even though the scientists are unable to pinpoint the exact date when
the mutation occurred, evidences suggested it probably arose about
10,000 years ago when there was a rapid expansion of the human
population in Europe as a result of the spread of agriculture from the
Middle East."

Two Million Minutes

There has always been a dialog about the type of education one
receives in countries in India and China, versus the kind of education
in the US. There is now a new documentary that speaks to this effect,
and compares American students with those in India and China.

An excerpt from an article in US News and World Report --
"Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination follows six students
through their senior year of high school in the United States, India,
and China. Brittany Brechbuhl is a 17-year-old who's in the top 3
percent of her graduating class at Carmel High School in Indiana. She
aspires to become a doctor but also wants to join a sorority and
"party." Neil Ahrendt, 18, is another talented Carmel student who is
the senior class president and former quarterback of the football
team. These American teenagers' attitudes toward academics differ
sharply from those of their peers in India and China, who seem more
motivated and focused. Take, for example, 17-year-old Apoorva Uppala,
who attends Saturday tutoring sessions to prepare for her university
entrance exams. She wants to become an engineer, which she calls "the
safest" profession in India. In Shanghai, Jin Ruizhang, 17, preps for
international math tournaments. He is already the top math student at
his school and hopes to get into a prestigious university offering an
advanced math program."

View the trailer here--

Full article at --
http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/2008/01/30/comparing-american-students-with-those-in-china-and-india.html

The film's website is at --
http://2mminutes.com/characters.html

Why do Indian voters support Bobby Jindal?

A very interesting article from Harvard Crimson by Jessica Sequeira,
who is the Crimson's Editorial Editor --

"Hearing his policies and not his name, Louisiana's recently
inaugurated governor sounds like a traditional Southern conservative.
He has a track record of supporting permanent military presence in
Iraq, legislating against a woman's right to an abortion, allowing
government surveillance without a warrant, upholding tough immigration
enforcement, shooting down gun control laws, and prohibiting human
embryonic stem cell research. Indeed, the main reason Bobby Jindal—the
state's first minority governor since Reconstruction—catapulted to
victory was that he was so utterly indistinguishable from the mostly
white voting base.

Why, then, do so many Indian-Americans support him? After all, Indians
voted for Kerry over Bush in the 2004 election by a four-to-one ratio,
and are overwhelmingly registered as Democrats. Jindal, however, is
all business and no bleeding heart. As Times of India columnist Shashi
Tharoor writes in his scathing piece "Should We Be Proud of Bobby
Jindal?" "Many Indians born in America have tended to sympathize with
other people of color, identifying their lot with other immigrants,
the poor, the underclass… None of this for Bobby." The unpleasant
truth is that he's a desi hero for the wrong reasons—lauded not for
his beliefs but for his race.

This is not to say that Indians in the States don't have their doubts
about Jindal; some do. For many, though, any qualms over Jindal's
neoconservative politics are overcome by pride in his brown skin and
the progress this supposedly signifies. Unfortunately, this perception
is mostly wishful thinking. Unlike the immigrant families I know who
still proudly hang diwali lanterns and shop at the local Bharat
Bazaar, Jindal has done the best he can to assimilate by erasing his
cultural origins. Changing his name as a child from the Punjabi Piyush
to that of his favorite character on The Brady Bunch, converting from
Hinduism to Christianity as a senior in high school (and later asking
his wife to do the same), attending Brown University and Oxford as a
Rhodes Scholar, working as a consultant at McKinsey, and adopting a
flat Louisiana drawl—the only part of "Indian-American" he embodies
lies after the hyphen.

This raises an unsettling question: does a minority have to "act
white" to get elected? As is the case with many politicians, it's hard
to discern Jindal's genuine beliefs from statements designed to cater
to the average Louisiana voter. Although his broad platform promise to
"end corruption in Louisiana" is universally appealing, you can bet
that the more extreme viewpoints he dishes up to white Republicans get
omitted from the soothing "heritage" speeches he gives at
Indian-American fundraising dinners. Jindal has been very successful
indeed at working his innate advantage and tapping the latent ethnic
pride (some would call it racism) felt by other people of his color.

Race-based politics are nothing new, of course—you can trace the
effect of racial issues on government all the way from the civil
rights movement to the debate over Barack Obama's "electability"
raging today. Whether or not the Indian vote actually affected the
election, however (the magnitude of Jindal's victory makes it
unlikely), it's a pity that so many influential members of the Indian
community unquestioningly followed the lead of a man with whom they
shared only superficial similarities.

Reactions to Jindal by Indians in the homeland have been more negative
than those in the American Diaspora. But the mentality there, as well
as here, is telling. Following the news of Jindal's win, the Times of
India telephoned Bobby's cousin Gulshan. "It's a great honor not just
for our family, but Punjab and the nation as well, [for] the son of
this soil [to] have achieved something really big," he said.
Meanwhile, celebrations were erupting in Jindal's ancestral village of
Khanpura, as locals shared sweets and danced exultantly to bhangra
music. Nobody asked what Jindal stood for. "

Article at --
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521628

Simple, powerful mobile tools for developing economies

Tapan Parikh, 33, University of Washington, has been named 2007
Humanitarian of the year by Technology Review magazine.

An excerpt from TR magazine --

"When fishermen from the Indian state of Kerala are done fishing each
day, they have to decide which of an array of ports they should sail
for in order to sell their catch. Traditionally, the fishermen have
made the decision at random--or, to put it more charitably, by
instinct. Then they got mobile phones. That allowed them to call each
port and discover where different fishes were poorly stocked, and
therefore where they would be likely to get the best price for their
goods. That helped the fishermen reap a profit, but it also meant that
instead of one port's being stuck with more fish than could be sold
while other ports ran short, there was a better chance that supply
would be closer to demand at all the ports. The fishermen became more
productive, markets became more efficient, and the Keralan economy as
a whole got stronger.

This story demonstrates an easily forgotten idea: relatively simple
improvements in information and communication technologies can have a
dramatic effect on the way businesses and markets work. That idea is
central to the work of Tapan Parikh, a doctoral student in computer s
cience and the founder of a company called Ekgaon Technologies. Parikh
has created information systems tailored for small-business people in
the developing world--systems with the mobile phone, rather than the
PC, at their core. His goal is to make it easier for these business
owners to manage their own operations in an efficient and transparent
way, and to build connections both with established financial
institutions and with consumers in the developed world. This will help
them--they'll be able to get money to expand their operations and,
ideally, find better prices for what they sell--and it should be a
boon to development as well."

Read the full article at -
http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/Profile.aspx?TRID=619

What would we do if the Internet failed?

I keep wondering, our dependency on things like the Internet, cell
phones, electricity, etc. has become addictive. What would we do
without them. The other day I forgot my cell phone at home and I felt
like I was cut off from the world. I go into panic mode if I can't
check my email in the morning...

From CNN News --

"Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their
high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread
Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and
left others struggling to cope.

Hi-tech Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently
caused by a cut undersea cable.

One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started
Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.

India's Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half, The Associated
Press reported, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to
reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia.

Reports say that Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab
Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain are also experiencing severe problems.

Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel -- whose
traffic uses a different route -- and Lebanon and Iraq. Many Middle
East governments have backup satellite systems in case of cable
failure.

An official at Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information
Technology, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was believed
that a boat's anchor may have caused the problems, although this was
unconfirmed, AP reported. He added that it might take up to a week to
repair the fault.

Rajesh Chharia, president of India's Internet Service Providers'
Association, explained that some firms were trying to reroute via
Pacific cables and that companies serving the eastern US and the UK
were worst affected, AP added."

Read the full article at -
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/31/dubai.outage/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Indian Gang Accused of Stealing Human Kidneys

An excerpt from the abc news article --

"It sounds like the old urban legend of people lured into an apartment
or house and then being robbed of their kidneys.

But in India, it is no legend.

A kidney transplant ring has been busted up in India in which hundreds
of poor people were forced into having their kidneys removed.

The mastermind behind the scam is believed to be Dr. Amit Kumar (also
known as Dr. Santosh Raut), whom Mumbai police have been chasing since
1993, according to the Indian Express newspaper. The doctor had
previously been arrested in Delhi in 2000 for involvement in the
illegal trade of organs.

Officials said that 500 to 600 kidneys were stolen or purchased from
victims in Gurgaon, a high-tech city on the outskirts of New Delhi.
The kidneys were transplanted into the bodies of wealthy Indians or
foreigners. Five foreign tourists, including two Americans, were found
in what police described as a "luxury guest house" owned by the doctor
on Saturday awaiting a kidney. There was a waiting list of some 40
foreigners from at least five countries."

Read the full article at --
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4201900&page=1

Indira Nooyi Speaks From Davos

In India's Huge Marketplace, Advertisers Find Fair Skin Sells

This has always been a fixation with Indians. "Fair" skin has been a
big plus, whether it is for a new born baby or for a woman of
marriageable age. This recent article in the Washington Post has a
very interesting perspective of "fair skin."

Here is an excerpt from a Washington Post article --
The presence of Caucasian models in Indian advertisements has grown in
the past three years, industry analysts say. The trend reflects deep
cultural preferences for fair skin in this predominantly brown-skinned
nation of more than 1 billion people. But analysts say the fondness
for "fair" is also fueled by a globalized economy that has drawn ever
more models from Europe to cities such as Mumbai, India's cultural
capital.

"Indians have a longing for that pure, beautiful white skin. It is too
deep-rooted in our psyche," said Enakshi Chakraborty, who heads Eskimo
India, a modeling agency that brings East European models here.
"Advertisers for international as well as Indian brands call me and
say, 'We are looking for a gori [Hindi for white] model with dark
hair.' Some ask, 'Do you have white girls who are Indian-looking?'
They want white girls who suit the Indian palate."

Indians' color fixation is also evident in classified newspaper ads
and on Web sites that help arrange marriages. The descriptive terms
used for skin color run the gamut: "very fair," "fair," "wheat-ish,"
"wheat-ish-medium," "wheat-ish-dark," "dark" and "very dark."

Read the full article at --
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/26/AR2008012601057.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Annual Bhangra Contest in Miami

An Annual Bhangra Competition was held in Miami recently.

Excerpt from an article in Miami New Times --

"What do you get when you cross Dancing With the Stars, downtown Miami
and Bollywood? The first-annual Bhangra Competition, that's what.

While salsa may be the dance and music of choice of the Magic City,
the rest of the world has gotten hip to all things Punjab; Bhangra is
the percussion-heavy, high-energy craze that hails from India. On
Saturday night at the Gusman Theater downtown, teams from 10 colleges
from as far away as British Columbia swayed, danced and shimmied to
the music. It was like a Bollywood movie come to life: the women wore
colorful veils and the men wore turbans.

Everyone seemed to be dressed in combinations of pink and purple, blue
and yellow, red and gold. Some danced, while others did backflips and
a few played traditional Indian instruments and sang live. To the new
Bhangra lover (which would be me) the performances seemed a little
frenzied at first, a riot of color and sound. But everyone grinned
while dancing, and it was difficult not to be happy while watching the
groups dance."

See the full article at --
http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2008/01/the_bhangra_competition_what_d.php

From a car to a truck...

AFP reports that India's Tata Motors mulls US debut with electric
truck: company. Excerpt below --

" India's Tata Motors, which recently unveiled the world's cheapest
car, may make its US debut with a tie-up to sell an electric version
of its popular Ace mini-truck, an official said Thursday.
"We're looking at that opportunity to sell a vehicle on the Ace
platform with an electric motor" in association with a US company, the
senior official said, asking not to be named.
"It's premature to give more details," he added.
India's Hindu Business Line newspaper reported earlier this week that
Tata Motors had signed a contract with Chrysler's electric vehicle
unit Global Electric Motorcars (GEM) to market an electric version of
the Ace for US sale.
US automakers are gearing up to meet tighter fuel emission standards
starting in 2012.
The Ace mini-truck was introduced by Tata Motors, India's top
commercial vehicle maker, into the domestic market three years ago and
became a runaway hit with small businesses. It launched a passenger
variant last year.

Read full article at -
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g-uVfiynOIkSxc1PhM7CJCXOFefA

First Jet Airways, now Kingfisher airlines...

I have to admit that I am very excited. If the quality of these
domestic airlines is maintained in their International flights as
well, these airlines will beat the others by a landslide. My last
visit to India I primarily flew Kingfisher, and was I impressed with
their cleanliness, food, quality of service, and especially the
patience with which the staff took care of my tired and jet-lagged 3
year old.

India eNews Reports--

"As Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher Airlines readies to fly to the US from
August 2008, it has decided on Terminal Four of the John F. Kennedy
International Airport in New York to cater to growing business from
the nation's east coast.

The decision follows Kingfisher chairman Vijay Mallya's visit to New
York last week when he inspected two contenders for his flights -- the
JFK International Airport and the Newark Airport in adjacent New
Jersey, officials said.

Global consultancy Accenture is presently working on the merger of Air
Deccan with Kingfisher and also looking into route rationalisation of
international sectors for both airlines, an official explained.

When completed, it will permit Mallya's airline to fly abroad by
fulfilling the government requirement of a carrier having flown for at
least five years in the domestic sector, with a minimum fleet size of
20 aircraft."

Read the full article at --
http://www.indiaenews.com/business/20071130/83567.htm

Shekar Kapur Spoke to Heath Ledger the Night Before

Desi connection to a major news story.

People Magazine reports --

Photo -- Shekhar Kapur (left) and Heath Ledger on set in 2002
PHOTO BY: EVERETT

Article from People Magazine --

Director Spoke to Ledger Night Before His Death
By Stephen M. Silverman

Heath Ledger's director on the 2002 adventure movie Four Feathers,
Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, had plans to meet up with his former
star – until tragic fate intervened.

"I last spoke to him the night before he died. I had just arrived in
New York last night, he said he could not see me that night but really
wanted to meet me the next day," Kapur, 62, whose films also include
the two Elizabeth movies starring Cate Blanchett, says in a posting on
his personal Web site.

Adds Kapur: "He made me promise that I would call him in the morning
and wake him up. I tried. Little did I know that his soul had already
left his body."

Lamenting his loss, Kapur writes, "In Heath I have lost a younger
brother He was one the most gentle, the most honest, most caring and
most compassionate persons I had met. And one of the most honest
actors I worked with."

Of Ledger's talent," I often told him that he had the ability to
completely bare his soul in front of the camera, and all I needed to
do was make sure the camera could look into his eyes, and through his
eyes, the audience could clearly look into his soul," says Kapur.

The moviemaker concludes, "Farewell Heath. I always knew you had an
ancient soul. I always said you had a wisdom beyond your years. And
somehow I always knew that your spirit was too restless. Goodbye, my
brother."

Read article at --
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20173473,00.html

Cell Phone Banking in India

The Ideas section of this Sunday's Boston Globe, featured a huge two page
article by Jeremy Kahn titled "Third World First". This article is
about rising cell phone banking in India, something that has not even
caught on in the so called "developed countries" This article claims
that, "The rise of cellphone banking in India highlights a new trend:
technology developed in the Third World is flowing back to the First."

Here is an excerpt from the article --
"New Delhi: Bapi Das, seated next to an open sewer in a teeming slum
on the outskirts of this Indian city, combs his hand through his hair,
smooths his moustache, and prepares to enter the global financial
system.

Das, a 42-year-old commercial painter, grins as a worker for a local
micro-finance group frames his face with a digital camera and zooms
in. It is an important moment. His photo will adorn a smart card that,
with help from a mobile phone and a fingerprint reader, will allow Das
to store money electronically, make small cash withdrawals, and send
money to his family on the other side of the country. It is the first
bank account he has ever had.

This might seem like a classic example of the Third World struggling
to catch up with the First. After all, people in the United States and
Europe have been using ATM cards and the Internet for years to perform
the simple banking tasks Das is only now able to do. But look again:
The technology used to bring slum-dwellers like Das their first bank
accounts is so advanced that it isn't available to even the most
tech-savvy Americans - at least not yet.

Soon, however, it may help you purchase groceries, withdraw cash from
an ATM, or ride the T. Already in the past year, Citigroup has taken a
mobile banking system it pioneered in India and brought it to the
United States. And a host of other companies, from Ford to Microsoft,
are following suit: piloting new technologies and ways of doing
business in the developing world, and only then bringing these
products and services to wealthier consumers in more mature markets.

This represents a stunning reversal of the traditional flow of
innovation. Until recently, consumers in the Third World also had to
tolerate third-rate technology. Africa, India, and Latin America were
dumping grounds for antiquated products and services. In a market in
which some people still rode camels, a 50-year-old car engine was good
enough. Innovation remained the exclusive domain of the developed
world. Everyone else got hand-me-downs.

But today, some emerging economies are starting to leapfrog ahead. Why
build a network of telephone wires out to remote areas when you can go
straight to a cutting-edge mobile network at a fraction of the cost?
Why burn fossil fuels for electricity and cooking if cleaner - and in
some cases cheaper - alternatives, like solar and biogas, are
available? Why electrify rural villages with incandescent bulbs if
longer-lasting, environmentally friendly options like LEDs or new
fluorescent bulbs exist? In many cases, it is mature markets like the
United States and Europe, tethered to older systems, that find
themselves playing catch-up."

Read the full article at --
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/20/third_world_first/

India on a roll, or the benefits of celluloid soft power

An commentary by Shashi Tharoor in Lebanon's, The Daily Star

The world has heard much about India's extraordinary transformation in
recent years, and even of its claims to a share of "world leadership."
Some of that is hyperbole, but in one respect, India's strength may be
understated.

What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, military
strength, or economic development? By all of these measures, India has
made extraordinary strides. It is on course to overtake China as the
world's most populous country by 2034; it has the world's
fourth-largest army and nuclear weapons; and it is already the world's
fifth-largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity and
continues to climb - though too many of its people remain destitute.

All of these indicators are commonly used to judge a country's global
status. However, something much less tangible, but a good deal more
valuable in the 21st century, may be more important than any of them:
India's "soft power."

Take Afghanistan, for instance - a major security concern for India,
as it is for the world. But India's greatest asset there doesn't come
out of a military mission: It doesn't have one. It comes from one
simple fact: Don't try to telephone an Afghan at 8:30 in the evening.
That's when the Indian TV soap opera "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi,"
dubbed into Dari, is telecast on Tolo TV, and no one wishes to miss
it.

"Saas" is the most popular television show in Afghan history, with a
90 percent audience penetration. It is considered directly responsible
for a spike in the sale of generator sets and even for absences from
religious functions which clash with its broadcast times. "Saas" has
so thoroughly captured the public imagination in Afghanistan that, in
this deeply conservative Islamic country where family problems are
often literally hidden behind the veil, it's an Indian TV show that
has come to dominate (and sometimes to justify) public discussion of
family issues.

That's soft power, and its particular strength is that it has nothing
to do with government propaganda. The movies of Bollywood, which is
bringing its glitzy entertainment far beyond the Indian diaspora in
the United States and the United Kingdom, offer another example. A
Senegalese friend told me of his illiterate mother who takes a bus to
Dakar every month to watch a Bollywood film. She doesn't understand
the Hindi dialogue and can't read the French subtitles, but she can
still catch the spirit and understand the story, and people like her
look at India with stars in their eyes as a result.

An Indian diplomat in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only
publicly displayed portraits as big as those of then-President Hafez
al-Assad were of the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan.

Indian art, classical music and dance have the same effect. So does
the work of Indian fashion designers, now striding across the world's
runways. Indian cuisine, spreading around the world, raises Indian
culture higher in people's reckoning; the way to foreigners' hearts is
through their palates. In the UK today, Indian curry houses employ
more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries
combined.

When a bhangra beat is infused into a Western pop record or an Indian
choreographer invents a fusion of kathak and ballet; when Indian women
sweep the Miss World and Miss Universe contests, or when "Monsoon
Wedding" wows the critics and "Lagaan" claims an Oscar nomination;
when Indian writers win the Booker or Pulitzer Prizes, India's soft
power is enhanced.

Likewise, when Americans speak of the IITs - India's technology
institutes - with the same reverence they accord to MIT, and the
"Indianness" of engineers and software developers is taken as
synonymous with mathematical and scientific excellence, India gains in
respect.

In the information age, as Joseph Nye, the guru of soft power, argues,
it is not the side with the bigger army, but the side with the better
story, that wins. India is already the "land of the better story." As
a pluralist society with a free and thriving mass media, creative
energies that express themselves in a variety of appealing ways, and a
democratic system that promotes and protects diversity, India has an
extraordinary ability to tell stories that are more persuasive and
attractive than those of its rivals.

And there's the international spin-off of India just being itself.
India's remarkable pluralism was on display after national elections
in May 2004, when a leader with a Roman Catholic background (Sonia
Gandhi) made way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime
minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) - in a country that is 81
percent Hindu. No strutting nationalist chauvinism could ever have
accomplished for India's standing in the world what that one moment
did - all the more so since it was not directed at the world.

There's still much for India to do to ensure that its people are
healthy, well fed, and secure. Progress is being made: The battle
against poverty is slowly (too slowly) being won. But India's greatest
prospects for winning admiration in the 21st century may lie not in
what it does, but simply in what it is.

This commentary can be found at --
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=88232

Robbery behind Indian student's murder in North Carolina

From SIFY News --

"The only motive behind the killing an Indian doctoral student at an
engineering college in North Carolina could be robbery, campus
authorities suspect. The body of Abhijeet Mahato, 29, an Indian
Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur alumnus doing his second year
Ph.D. at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, Durham, was
found on Friday in a pool of blood at his home in an apartment complex
off campus.

Mahato was a bachelor and lived with a roommate who is not a Duke
student and who has been away travelling in India. Mahato's killing
was reported by friends, including Sandeepa Dey, who is also pursuing
a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Duke. They came by his apartment to check
on him after his phone had stopped responding for a few hours.

The autopsy was completed on Sunday and the body will be flown to
India as desired by his family in Jharkhand's Sereikela Kharsawa
district. They have authorised a family friend - a professor at
Michigan University - who will fly to Durham to do the needful. The
Indian embassy in Washington is flying out on Monday two officers,
Sanjay Sinha and Alok Pandey, to meet the university president,
Richard Broadhed.

They will also meet investigators and render assistance required in
flying the body to India, Rahul Chhabra, embassy spokesperson, told
IANS. The police have not come out with any theory on the motive or
the suspected killers. They are treating the incident as a homicide
and have determined the cause of death to be a gunshot wound.

But Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs at Duke, told
IANS: "It appears to be a case of robbery." He ruled out other
possible motives under the circumstances. "A sweet, incredibly
intelligent Mahato had no enemies," he said.

When told that in the absence of a possible motive, the Louisiana
university double murder of Indian doctoral students last month was
suspected to be a hate crime, Moneta said: "There is no basis for
suspecting Mahato's shooting to be a hate crime. There is no prejudice
or history of targeting Indian students here."

The North Carolina incident comes less than two months after two
Indian scholars were shot dead in another US campus. Chandrasekhar
Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allam were killed in the Louisiana State
University (LSU), Baton Rouge. In that case too, the police have yet
to find a motive or arrest any suspects.

There are around 200 Indian students and faculty at Duke, Moneta said.
With over 12,000 graduate and undergraduate students, Duke is one of
the biggest campuses in the US as well as being one of the most
racially and ethnically diverse, with 117 nationalities."

Read the full story --
http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14592084

In India, Women Leaders Have a Legacy

From NPR -- "As the United States contemplates the possibility of its first female president, we look at India, which in 1992 mandated a place for women in local governments. Esther Duflo of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab found that women there lead differently than men."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18016575

Carnatic Music Festival

I'll never forget my winters as a young child attending the Carnatic Music concerts in mid December, in my silk pavadai, all decked up and pretty, holding my grandparents and parents hands and listening to some of the greatest stalwarts of carnatic music, watching some of the best Indian dancers perform, enjoying the best of tamil dramas and theater. The music (or fine art)festival is a cultural phenomenon. The breaks between the concerts and the hot mouthwatering tiffins from the makeshift cafeterias were a divine treat.

NPR did a recent story on this festival. Listen to it at --

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18146238