Anand Giridharadas

change of url and rss feed

2010-04-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

Dear reader,

As of last Saturday Anand's blog switched to his new site. If you still receive this post in your RSS feed, you can update your feed to the new site:

feed://anand.ly/feed

Or visit the new site at

http://anand.ly/

where you can sign up for the email list to get updates on his forthcoming book, post comments, et cetera.

Thanks for your subscription and hope you will join the new site and participate in the discussion.

Best regards,

Maarten (on behalf of Anand)

Director

mmott visual LLC

Design for print and interaction

http://www.mmott.com

maarten@mmott.com

(+1) 443 844 3464

The Triumph of the Ordinary Cellphone

2010-04-09T06:46:00.000-07:00

April 9, 2010

The Triumph of the Ordinary Cellphone

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — What if, globally speaking, the iPad is not the next big thing? What if the next big thing is small, cheap and not American?

Americans went gaga last weekend with the iPad’s release. But even as hundreds of thousands here unwrap their iPads, another future entirely may be unfolding overseas on the cellphone.

Forgotten in the American tumult is a global flowering of innovation on the simple cellphone. From Brazil to India to South Korea and even Afghanistan, people are seeking work via text message; borrowing and lending money and receiving salaries on cellphones; employing their phones variously as flashlights, televisions and radios.

And many do all this for peanuts. In India, Reliance Communications sells handsets for less than $25, with 1-cent-a-minute phone calls across India and 1-cent text messages and no monthly charge — while earning fat profits. Compare that with iPad buyers in the United States, who pay $499 for the basic version, who might also have a $1,000-plus computer and a $100-plus smartphone, and who could pay $100 or more each month to connect these many devices to the ether.

Not for the first time, the United States and much of the world are moving in different ways. American innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are heading toward fancier, costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.

The United States does not share the romance of the phone that prevails elsewhere — even in wealthy Europe. Since returning last year from India, I have been struck by how often calls drop here and surprised that text-messaging, so vital to Indians, has yet to entrench itself in the United States, where so much messaging travels on the Internet.

A recent report by the World Economic Forum and Insead, the French business school, concluded that the United States ranks below 71 other nations in its level of cellphone penetration, even though it leads in other areas of connectivity. Some Americans are not connected at all. But millions of others are beyond the phone, so to speak: they own one; they use it; but they own other devices, too, and the phone is not a be-all and end-all.

But it is from Kenya to Colombia to South Africa that cellphones are becoming the truly universal technology. They are the kind of places that have built cellphone towers precisely to leapfrog past the expense of building wired networks that have linked Americans for a century.

The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a trade group. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.

Because it reaches so many people, because it is always with you, because it is cheap and shareable and easily repaired, the cellphone has opened a new frontier in global innovation.

Two organizations — Babajob, in Bangalore, India, and Souktel, in the Palestinian territories in Israel — offer job-hunting services via text message. Souktel allows users without Internet access or fancy phones to register by sending a series of text messages with information about themselves. A user who texts in “match me” will receive a listing of suitable jobs, including phone numbers to dial.

In Africa, the cellphone is giving birth to a new paradigm in money. Plastic cards have become the reigning instruments of payment in the West, but projects like PesaPal and M-Pesa in Kenya are working to make the cellphone the hub of personal finance. M-Pesa lets you convert cash into cellphone money at your local grocer, and this money can instantly be wired to anyone with a phone.

These efforts arise from a shortage of bank accounts in Africa. But they create the possibility of peer-to-peer finance in the developing world that could be useful even in wealthy countries — for example, allowing small businesses in rural areas to collect money without credit-card systems.

I called Western Union, the money-transfer service based in Colorado, to ask if I could send money to a mobile phone. “Basically, we do not have that kind of option right now,” the agent said.

A U.S. company, Obopay, does offer phone-to-phone payments. Its founder, Carol Realini, got the idea when volunteering in Africa.

The cellphone has also moved to the center of community life in many places. In Africa, urban churches record sermons with cellphones, then transmit them to villages to be replayed. In Iran and Moldova, cellphones helped to organize popular uprisings against authoritarian governments. In India, the cellphone is now used to allow citizen election monitoring and to equip voters, via text message, with information on candidates’ incomes and criminal backgrounds.

Recognizing the role of cellphones in developing nations, the White House made a point last year of releasing President Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world, in Cairo, in 13 languages via text message. It has made no similarly publicized gesture in the United States, even though not everyone has Internet access. (The administration proposes to remedy that by widening broadband access.)

All of which suggests the presence of an innovation gap between the world’s richest societies and the poorest — not in device design so much as in usage. And there is a question about whether the United States, which gained so much from the Internet revolution, would similarly profit from the entry of billions more people from the developing world into a massive worldwide middle class — consumers now but not yet rich, with a simple cellphone and a less-is-more sensibility.

Certainly, innovative new devices may find important roles in the United States — for example, as platforms for distributing news and books and entertainment, which have struggled to adapt to the digital age. That alone could make their invention revolutionary.

But is desire replacing need as the mother of American invention? Will domestic demand for even sleeker, faster, fancier devices over the long run make it harder for Americans to innovate for the vaster, less opulent world outside, still dominated by frugal wants? Perhaps.

Ken Banks, a British entrepreneur who works in Africa and developed FrontlineSMS, a text-messaging service for aid groups, put it this way: “There’s often a tendency in the West to approach things the wrong way round, so we end up with solutions looking for a problem, or we build things just because we can.”

Well, yes. Then again, the cellphone itself began that way. A quarter-century ago, when Michael Douglas famously carried one in “Wall Street,” it was an exorbitant gadget for high rollers.

Now it’s more common than a toilet.

E-MAIL: pagetwo@iht.com

Mine Operator Escaped Extra Oversight After Warning

An announcement

2010-04-05T08:21:00.000-07:00

Friends, my book at long last has a title. It will be "India Calling," a phrase that you may recall from this essay I wrote late in 2008.

The Struggle of the Global Placeless

2010-03-26T07:20:00.001-07:00

March 26, 2010

The Struggle of the Global Placeless

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — On a deck in Boston, seven friends recently gathered for dinner. At the table was a white American man; his wife, an Italian woman he met in Switzerland; a Swiss citizen raised in Kenya; a German of Korean origin; a woman with Haitian, Chinese and European ancestry; the son of a black American and a German Jew; and an American with Indian blood.

It took a while to get through the where-are-you-fromming, as it often can these days.

There is a modern myth that globalization is new. But the world has integrated before, disintegrated in war, and integrated fitfully again. Goods and peoplehave swirled for a long time, and in the 17th, 18th or 19th century you might have found on any ship a crew and passengers made up of slaves, traders, cooks, officers, colonizers and pilgrims more diverse than our dinner table.

What is arguably new is the influence of the placeless and the elevation of placelessness, in some quarters at least, to a virtue.

The placeless are no longer just the flotsam and jetsam of empires and colonies. They are the president of the United States now; they are among our leading thinkers and bankers, philanthropists and public servants.

Placelessness — variously defined, at varying levels of privilege — might even be seen as becoming the center of gravity of the human condition. Millions now live in one country and work in another, some crossing a border on foot each day, others putting on fake accents and telemarketers’ headsets, migrating by pretense. Millions are pouring out of their villages and into deracinating cities, with human civilization recently becoming urban in majority for the first time. Millions are being raised in a language their ancestors never spoke.

And yet the placeless still find themselves colliding with a place-bound world.

For the placeless person of privilege, it may be no worse than wrestling with the question “Where are you from?” You wonder every time: Do they want the five-second pick-one-identity answer, or the 30-second geography-biography, or the five-minute story?

But for the more vulnerable, the stakes are higher. Mexican laborers are encouraged to work in the United States but chased away by armed vigilantes. In India, northern migrants to coastal, cosmopolitan Mumbai are beaten by armed cadres of a sons-of-the-soil political movement. In China, untold millions of rural dwellers have been drawn to the city to make the roads and buildings to fuel the country’s boom. But, under the reigning hukou system of residency permits, they find themselves without the rights of locals in the big city, without guaranteed access to education and medical care, vulnerable at any time to being sent back to the village.

Officialdom struggles to process people without a place. Census forms don’t understand them. Commercial television and cinema create few characters in their image. Tax collectors insist that they choose one of their many countries as the real one. Politicians represent particular places, not ideas or industries or genders, and so if you are a Somalian-born American working in Paris for Nissan, you live in a democracy but without meaningful representation, with no public servants driven to take up your battles.

But the problem is not just external. The placeless often also suffer a gnawing tension within, a love-hate relationship with roots.

They find that their connections can run worldwide but only an inch deep. They may find it easier to ask friends in five countries for a favor than to ask a neighbor for sugar. They may know something of the foods of every continent but be unable to cook expertly in any one cuisine. They may have visited a greater fraction of the 10 largest cities in the world than of the neighborhoods of their own city.

Placeless souls of means have a way out. They find ways of splitting the difference, living rootlessly and yet making space for roots. They travel far from home to study, but then major in the study of their own race or culture or language. Or, in the case of someone like the artist Youngjoo Cho, a native of South Korea who studied in Paris and divides her time between Berlin and Seoul, they use art to soothe the unease of not belonging.

In a mixed-media piece of hers called “Motherland Visiting,” the detritus of a visit to her native country is springing out of a suitcase after the trip. The work is meant to suggest “the relationship of the placeless to localness,” her Web site says, “a relationship that is becoming more complex in an increasingly mobile world.”

Barack Obama, that politician of so many places, has shown a similar interest in roots. A child of many homes, with parents from different races and continents, he has built an adult life more rooted. He traveled in search of his African roots, wrote a book about his quest, worked at the grass roots of community organizing in Chicago, married a woman long rooted there, and built the kind of grounded family that his own childhood had lacked. Indeed, for many placeless people, it is romantic partnership more than a specific patch of earth that gives roots.

These days, it is often placeless people who flock to restaurants peddling their rootedness in place: restaurants like Blue Hill in New York, whose Web site talks of “local food” and “nearby farms” and “producers who respect artisanal techniques.” It is the placeless who seem most to loathe the McDonald’s vision of food that scholars have called the “placeless foodscape.”

In a recent lecture at Princeton University, Sudhir Kakar, a prominent Indian psychoanalyst and cultural writer, suggested that this longing for place can be buried or denied or suppressed in the placeless, but that it will never truly go away.

The postmodern notion of “multiple identities” has become fashionable, he said, with its notion that “migration is an opportunity to reinvent one’s identity.” But this vision, though liberating, denies the role of place in forming consciousness, particularly in childhood, he argued.

The placeless dream has the “danger of underplaying if not denying the psychic pain of the migration process and the persistence of the past in the present,” said Mr. Kakar. “The emphasis on multiplicity can divert attention from what is enduring in the person.”

E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com

Taking Stock in the Testimony of the Crowd

2010-03-12T10:40:00.001-08:00

March 12, 2010

Taking Stock in the Testimony of the Crowd

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Could wiki technology find Osama bin Laden?

Imagine if anyone in the rugged far reaches of Pakistan or Afghanistan could send an anonymous text message to the authorities suggesting where to look. Each location could be plotted on a map. The dots would be scattered widely, perhaps, with promising leads indistinguishable from rubbish. But on a given day, a surge of dots might point to the same village, in what could not be coincidence. Troops would be ordered in.

This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world these days, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into foreign places with little good information.

One force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we label as truth.

After Kenya’s disputed election in 2007, violence erupted. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, Ory Okolloh, who was based in South Africa but had returned to Kenya to vote and observe the election, received threats about her work and decided to return to South Africa. She posted online the idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people anonymously to report violence and other misdeeds. Some technology whizzes saw her post and built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend.

The site collected user-generated reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths. It collected more testimony — which is what ushahidi means in Swahili — with greater rapidity than any journalist or election monitor could. Ushahidi had found a quintessentially 21st-century way of bearing witness.

When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went again into action. An emergency texting number, 4636, was advertised over the country’s radio waves. Ushahidi received thousands of text messages reporting the location of trapped bodies. The messages were translated by a diffuse army of Haitian-Americans in the United States and each was plotted on a “crisis map.”

Ushahidi volunteers at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts, ran a situation room from which they instant-messaged with the U.S. Coast Guard in Haiti, telling them where to search for lives. When the Chilean earthquake struck, Ushahidi redeployed again.

A mind-boggling number of things could go wrong with this model. People could lie, get the address wrong, exaggerate the severity of their situation. But as data points aggregate, crisis maps reveal underlying patterns of relevance. How many kilometers inland did the hurricane kill? Are the rapes broadly dispersed or concentrated near military barracks?

Ushahidi suggests a new paradigm in humanitarian work. The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on calamity and dispense aid with whatever data they can get.

The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: the victims are re-imagined as agents who supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates the text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use this information to target the most pressing problems.

But Ushahidi also represents a new frontier of innovation. Silicon Valley has long been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its ecosystem of universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less rather than on selling you new and improved stuff. And so bright people from Nairobi and New Delhi and Nanjing can today take their place at the leading edge of industries from cellphones to banking to car making.

Because Ushahidi originated in crisis, no one tried to patent and monopolize it. Because Kenya is poor, with computers out of reach for many, Ushahidi made its system accessible by cellphones. Because Ushahidi had no venture capitalists backing it, it had to use open-source software and was thus free to let others remix its tool for their own projects.

Ushahidi remixes can be found all over the Internet. They have been used in India to monitor elections; in Africa to report medicine shortages; in the Middle East to collect reports of wartime violence; and in Washington, where The Washington Post built an Ushahidi-powered site called “Snowmageddon” to map road blockages and the location of available plows.

Think about that. The capital of the sole superpower is deluged with snow, and to whom does its local newspaper turn? Kenya.

“What we’re showing with Ushahidi,” said Patrick Meier, a graduate student at the Fletcher School who directs Ushahidi’s crisis-mapping operation, “is that some of the most cutting-edge software development and innovative thinking in the tech space can actually come from places like Nairobi, and be used by volunteers at a university in Boston to be saving lives in Haiti, and then go on to use it in Chile.”

With every new application, Ushahidi alters the notion of how you bear witness in tragedy. For a very long time, this was done first by journalists in real time, next by victim-writers like Anne Frank and, finally, by historians when the dust settles. But in this instantaneous, virtualizing age, that kind of testimony confronts a new variety: a testimony of aggregate, average, good-enough truths.

“We’re moving beyond the idea that information is completely true or completely false,” Mr. Meier asserted.

Using a new technology called Swift River, Ushahidi plans to give testimonials “veracity scores.” If a lone person reports violence in Tehran, the veracity score would be low. But if dozens send in photographs of violence from the same place and same time, from cameras of various resolutions, the original account’s score would climb.

The argument against user-generated “facts” is that they lack the authority and authenticity that professional truth gatherers provide.

But in coming years will the triangulated crisis map be regarded as the new first draft of history?

They say that history is written by the victors. But now, before the victors win, there is a fresh chance to scream out, with a text message that will not vanish. What we would know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, between Germans and Jews — and indeed would it have happened at all — if each of them had had a chance to declare and be heard saying: “I was here, and this is what happened to me”?

E-MAIL: pagetwo@iht.com

My interview on India then and now

2010-03-06T08:34:00.000-08:00

Link here via Radio Open Source

Radio interview on personal branding and the "me" economy

2010-02-27T05:28:00.000-08:00

Link here via CBC Radio

Branding and the 'Me' Economy

2010-02-26T08:17:00.000-08:00

February 26, 2010

Branding and the 'Me' Economy

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — For Benjamin Franklin, it was “early to bed and early to rise.” For Dale Carnegie, it was the dictate “to do and dare.” For Stephen Covey, it was seven simple habits.

The gospel of self-improvement has taken varied forms throughout history and is perhaps America’s most successful export. But in the digital age, the idea of improving yourself is under siege by a similar-seeming but utterly different gospel: that of self-branding.

The Internet-connected class worldwide faces growing pressure to cultivate a personal brand. Ordinary people are now told to acquire what once only companies and celebrities required: online “findability,” thousands of Google hits and Twitter followers, a niche of their own, a virtual network of patrons, a personalWikipedia page and dot-com domain.

“The Internet has forced everyone in the world to become a marketer,” said Dan Schawbel, a personal-branding guru and the author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success.” (Mr. Schawbel, 26, has more than 100,000 Google listings for his name, 70,000 Twitter followers and a self-styled niche as the “personal branding expert for Gen-Y.”)

The rise of the personal brand reflects changing economic structures, as secure lifetime employment gives way to a churning market in tasks. It suggests a new unscriptedness in institutions as we evolve from the broadcast age to the age of retweets. It augurs a future in which we all function like one-person conglomerates, calculating how every action affects our positioning.

The personal-branding field traces its origins to the 1997 essay “The Brand Called You,” by the management expert Tom Peters. But only with the rise of easy-to-use social-media tools has one-person brand management become practical. Columbia University and other institutions now teach it; training firms peddle it in India and China; Microsoft has sought to bring its precepts to the poor; PricewaterhouseCoopers this week announced a Personal Brand Week, providing free online tips for college students.

What distinguishes personal branding from other self-cultivation is its emphasis on reputation over talent, on “explicit self-packaging,” as the scholars Daniel Lair, Katie Sullivan and George Cheney have observed: “Here, success is not determined by individuals’ internal sets of skills, motivations, and interests but, rather, by how effectively they are arranged, crystallized, and labeled.”

As personal-branding experts see it, they are merely responding to new economic realities. It is no longer enough, they say, to join an organization and ride its brand for decades. Companies are outsourcing aggressively; globalization is creating and destroying industries more rapidly than before; the Web is fostering job-hopping; the recession is throwing millions on the street.

In this new world, personal branders argue, self-packaging rules.

Employees are told to run permanent marketing campaigns to build an audience that follows their tweets and maintains ambient Facebook-level awareness of what they are doing. This audience belongs to you, not your organization, branders say; it will follow you and attract employers to you.

Strenuous personal branding is now seen among unelected politicians who speak daily (often via assistants who do the typing) to massive audiences through social media. Corporate employees build reputations online without spokespeople supervising them. Journalists, too, blog, tweet and Facebook about their reporting, instead of simply reporting.

But among the more remarkable places to watch the spread of off-message personal branding is in the very message-conscious world of diplomacy.

In the United States, for example, the State Department has allowed tech-savvy senior officials like Jared Cohen, Alec Ross and Katie Stanton to maintain robust personal brands. On Twitter, they report on affairs of state and encourage giving to Haiti, while also offering lighter fare, from daily minutiae (“best diplomacy training is coaching my 7 y/o’s basketball team”) to film reviews (“Soderbergh’s ‘The Informant’ was pretty mediocre”).

Mr. Ross and Mr. Cohen have Twitter fan bases of around 300,000 each, while the State Department’s official channel has about 14,000.

Recognizing this disparity, the State Department sent an unconventional delegation to Moscow last week with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the actor (and feverish tweeter) Ashton Kutcher and the tech-savvy Mr. Cohen as models of what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls “21st-century statecraft.” Some at the State Department worry about security risks and misstatements by diplomat-tweeters. But Ms. Stanton, who once worked at Google, said that personal brands — her Twitter biography is “Mom. Public Servant. Cupcake Connoisseur” — might convince skeptical foreigners to give the United States another look.

“It’s easier to trust individuals than institutions,” she said.

For those who bemoan the scriptedness of public officials or the brainwashing of corporate advertising, personal brands can be deliverance. If broadcast television over decades encouraged institutions to funnel their message into one voice, the rise of social media is restoring multiplicity. Institutions are going off-message again.

But Shashi Tharoor, the deputy foreign minister of India and a diplomat-Twitterer with more than 650,000 followers, told me that off-message communication can, by personalizing officials, “strengthen the acceptability of the official message.”

“Ministers in India are generally seen as unknowable and unapproachable by the average citizen,” he said. “Sharing my thoughts, and details of my work, my life and preoccupations, is partly an effort to show the public that their leaders are people they can relate to.” Old-guard politicians are less enthused about Mr. Tharoor’s tweets, however, and he has attracted criticism for defying protocol.

Companies, too, are wrestling with personal brands. Jonny Bentwood, the head of analyst relations for the public-relations firm Edelman, told me that many clients were torn between the view that multiple voices cheapen a brand and an emergent sense that attracting talent requires tolerating brands-within-a-brand.

In a much-blogged-about episode, Forrester Research, a market-research firm, this month moved to prohibit star analysts from publishing analysis on personal blogs. The move was widely interpreted as a backlash against personal brands.

Personal branding will, of course, change not just big institutions but also the lives of brandable individuals. Will it improve job security or simply increase our anxiety? Will it divert power and influence from the well-educated to the merely well-branded? Will brand-building distract us?

There is great pressure from personal audiences to say hello from Beijing, to speed-review “Avatar,” to broadcast the meeting’s latest insight.

But is the society always better off with the undigested utterance, the instantaneous attempt at positioning? And in marketing ourselves, will we neglect the pursuit of actually improving?

Waking Up From American Dreams

2010-02-12T09:16:00.001-08:00

February 13, 2010

CURRENTS

Waking Up From American Dreams

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — The recent Super Bowl triumph of the New Orleans Saints fit the traditional narrative of limitless American possibility: a long-shot victory by a written-off team from a fate-battered city. But for the 38.6 million Americans who kept their televisions on after the game to watch the new reality show “Undercover Boss,” a different narrative was on offer, with a darker portrait of the extant American Dream.

American Idol-style contests have dominated reality television in the United States in recent years, with the Horatio Alger-style story line that anyone with talent and pluck can rise. “Undercover Boss” was built very differently, for a nation that is day by day growing more skeptical of that story line and more susceptible to other, less hopeful narratives.

Each week, the show dispatches a top executive at a leading American company to labor anonymously among his rank-and-file workers. It plays not on the traditional American fantasy that you, too, can begin in the mailroom and become C.E.O. Instead, as the viewer comments online suggest, the show taps into a feeling that many Americans once considered un-American: pleasure in seeing the high and mighty humbled.

In the first episode, Larry O’Donnell, the president of Waste Management, a major garbage processor, is stunned to discover working-class realities. He is shocked that workers must punch in after lunch and lose two minutes of pay for every minute they are late. He encounters a worker with chronic kidney problems who must keep working. He is fired for the first time in his life.

This being American television, there is, of course, a narrative twist. Mr. O’Donnell returns to his real life, shaken by his excursion among the people.

He summons his new working-class friends to headquarters one by one to disclose his identity. But it is revealing of present American realities that he makes no effort to change the system over all, to make it systemically easier for them to become him. Rather, he throws them scraps — changing the lunch-tardiness policy, switching a working mother he met from an hourly to a salaried position.

“That’s just unbelievable,” the woman says after receiving the news.

For many Americans today, her good fortune is not believable indeed.

The Horatio Alger narrative maintains its hold in the United States. A Gallup/USA Today poll last year found that three-quarters of Americans still believe that if you work hard and follow the rules, you can achieve the American Dream.

But a large number of people also tell pollsters that it is becoming harder to get ahead, that tension is rising between rich and poor, that the rich are rich because of connections and fortunate birth. And for this writer, who recently returned to America after six years in India, it is hard to ignore a quiet turning in the culture, away from a once-sacrosanct faith in the malleability of fortune, toward ideas more familiar in feudal places: that class is a fate, not a situation; that the contest is rigged against the underdog.

In India, a suffix enforces such stratification. It is “-wallah,” and can be added to a service to denote the kind of person who provides it, generation after generation. A dhobiwallah is an inevitable launderer, a chaiwallah an inevitable server of tea. At times, it feels as if America, too, is becoming a Wallah Society.

Two sociologists, Greggor Mattson and Claude Fischer, surveying the vast literature on American social divisions, recently concluded in the Annual Review of Sociology that class, among the least-discussed fault lines, has become the most salient — even more salient than race or ideology. Increasingly, they write, rich and poor Americans live in separate, impermeable worlds: one of relatively plentiful salaried jobs, vibrant neighborhoods, high marriage and low divorce rates and two-adult homes; and another that sees those things, and the larger dream, receding.

The shift can be sensed in American restaurants. What once distinguished them from restaurants elsewhere was an idea of classlessness: that the person with the grease-stained notepad and aching feet could, with luck and effort, become the person at the table; that there was no essential difference between them.

But the archetypal American waiter today is no longer the eager-eyed college student, paying his way through school, hatching big plans. Waiting tables is increasingly a profession, as in France, with older, brusquer servers whose vision of the world is tinged with resentment.

There is a quiet but unmistakable defensiveness in their voices, which ask in every interaction, “What, you think you’re better than me?”

No statistic can quantify this feeling. But to fly in the United States today or to hire a moving company or to speak to a taxi driver who is not a fresh-faced immigrant is to encounter workers who seem tired by their own histories, who seem angry from the moment your custom begins, who carry the pardonable frustration of sensing that time is working against them.

Humor can be more revealing than seriousness, and fiction more revealing than truth. So a good place to watch this turning in American ideas is “30 Rock,” the hit television show about a television show.

Jack Donaghy, played by Alec Baldwin, is a suave, arrogant, heavily bonused television executive who lives in a world of private jets, secret restaurants and bespoke suits. If earlier New York comedies like “Seinfeld” and “Friends” airbrushed class, giving everyone nice apartments regardless of occupation, “30 Rock” depicts a Goldman Sachsed America where the rich and not-rich spin in different orbits.

Alexis de Toqueville once marveled at an America where servants were “equals of their masters,” differing in circumstance but not essential stock. Yet in Jack Donaghy’s America the classes have so diverged as to be physically distinct. When Mr. Donaghy crashes a younger colleague’s high-school reunion and blends right in, he explains it thus: “Rich 50 is middle-class 38.”

In another episode, in an echo of recent economic history, Mr. Donaghy convinces Kenneth, an NBC page with limited upward prospects, to surrender his life savings of $4,000 to be invested on his behalf.

Kenneth excitedly returns after a time to add another $10 to the fund.

“Next stop: homeownership,” Mr. Donaghy mocks. “I’m just kidding. The middle class is dying. You’ll be renting forever.”

Moments later, Kenneth learns that the stock has collapsed. All his money is lost.

Latest column: What Adam Smith really thought about capitalism

2010-01-29T05:22:00.000-08:00

January 30, 2010

CURRENTS

Selling Short a Humanistic Economist

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — One evening late last year, the conservative American television personality Glenn Beck was venerating capitalism once again. He pointed to one of the folds under his jaw.

“If I could sell sponsorships on this chin right here, I would,” he said. “It would just say, ‘Third chin sponsored by Goodyear.”’ He called himself “the most enthusiastic capitalist since Adam Smith.”

Not long before, on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington, Steve King, an Iowa Republican, had similarly resurrected the Scottish philosopher. “On this side of the aisle are the people that believe in free enterprise, the invisible hand, Adam Smith’s vision, Adam Smith’s dream,” he said. “You folks,” he told his Democratic colleagues, “do not.”

Adam Smith, free-market partisan: this image dominates, even in market-weary times. Politicians invoke him as a near-deity. Think tanks and consulting firms use his name as a synonym for free-market policies. So dogmatic is he imagined to be in his famous book “The Wealth of Nations” that the feminist writer-activist Riane Eisler not long ago wrote a corrective titled “The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics.”

The implication that his economics was uncaring might have disturbed Adam Smith, for he was hardly the man that many now think him to be.

While he believed that markets could channel self-interest into efficient aggregate outcomes, he argued that this was no excuse for selfishness: “When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self-love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many.” That quotation is not from “The Wealth of Nations,” Smith’s best-known work, but from “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” his lesser-known opus. It was republished by Penguin this week to mark its 250th anniversary, and it offers a reminder that Smith was a subtle, complex thinker whose ideas about markets and those who use them would embarrass many of his present-day devotees.

“The Theory of Moral Sentiments” is about human nature, not markets. It was published before “The Wealth of Nations,” but brought out by Smith in several editions after that other book was published. Yet the humanistic book fell into obscurity in the 19th century, and Smith became singularly known for his economic doctrines, and above all for his assertion that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Today, according to data from Google, people look up “The Wealth of Nations” 120 times more often than “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” “While some men are born small and some achieve smallness, it is clear enough that Smith has had much smallness thrust upon him,” Amartya Sen, a Harvard economist and Nobel laureate, writes in the introduction to the new edition. (Disclosure: Dr. Sen is one of my teachers at Harvard.)

Smith is often treated like the philosopher of the Goldman Sachs bonus, as the defender of an anything-goes capitalism. But in “Moral Sentiments” he tartly criticizes the idea that self-interest is enough.

A healthy society, Smith believed, requires trust, so that bankers lend. It requires care for the poor. It requires sympathy: the book’s first words extol the feelings in every person that “interest him in the fortune of others.” It requires prudence: simplicity, honesty, thrift, the deferral of gratification, industry, a refusal to risk fortune and tranquillity “in quest of new enterprises and adventures.” And it requires regulation, transparency and other mechanisms of fair play.

“In Smith’s vision, greed is socially beneficial only when properly harnessed and channeled,” Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton economist and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. “When these conditions fail to hold,” he added, “greed is not good.”

But “Moral Sentiments” does more than just balance our understanding of Smith. It is also a thorough analysis of money and the human character. If “The Wealth of Nations” was Smith the economist describing the workings of the market, “Moral Sentiments” is Smith the social psychologist describing how humans actually employ that market.

In it Smith serves as a kind of economic Tocqueville, offering sharp insights into the behavior behind the present economic crisis.

“To what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world?” Smith asks. We ever insist on “bettering our condition,” he writes, not out of necessity, not to feed or clothe ourselves, but for vanity: “To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy.” Even as Washington and other capitals speak of tightening the regulation of banks worldwide, Smith reminds us of the mingling of economic and noneconomic desires that makes banking culture so hard to change. His words seem strangely relevant to this age of elusive dinner reservations and fractional jet ownership and nightclub bottle service — the outward trappings of a banking culture that seems, on Smith’s view, to mask a lonely burning for validation underneath.

Smith saw, as well, how the powerful — think Tiger Woods or the nameless bankers once adulated as “masters of the universe” — are encouraged in their vanity by the rest of us: how we puff them up, hang on their deeds, pay more attention to them than to the unfortunate, and gradually make them sense that they can get away with anything. The ambitious man, Smith writes, comes to believe “that the lustre of his future conduct will entirely cover, or efface, the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation.”

It is this sense of impunity that worried Smith about the wealth pursuit. And he wrote in “Moral Sentiments” of a rage and resentment that rise from such behavior — not unlike the feelings now stirring in the ailing, job-shedding, bonus-giving countries of the West.

“If you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects,” he wrote. “We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility and want of feeling.”

Delivering Fusion Food for Thought

2010-01-05T07:02:00.000-08:00

January 6, 2010

CURRENTS

Delivering Fusion Food for Thought

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA — We tend to think that machines connect the world, but it is really in fact people. In the past, it was pilgrims and explorers and colonizers who, in variously benign and cruel ways, drove interchange among peoples. It was they who gave this pastel-hued city on the Caribbean its Spanish-Islamic arches, a cuisine that might blend tamarind and steak and corn in a single dish, and salsa songs equally indebted to the European and African pasts.

Today it is not pilgrims or colonizers who bind us, but a new class of the globally connected who are relentlessly cross-pollinating the human community. They are becoming some of the world’s most culturally consequential people, but we know little about them as a class.

I have had close encounters with them in Mumbai and New Delhi, Washington and Cambridge, Bangkok and Hong Kong, and now in this percussive Colombian city. I have seen how they are stitching the world together one restaurant recommendation and friend request at a time, and this column is in their honor.

They come in several types, though some of them straddle more than one:

THE ANOINTERS They are geographic early adopters: investors who bet on places still thought risky, then see fat returns when the fearful finally join the bandwagon; tourists who venture to countries thought unsafe, as Colombia is thought by many, benefiting from the lower prices and thin crowds, and then spreading word of the new reality to the less-daring; buyers from Bergdorf Goodman who decide whether Moscow’s or Cape Town’s fashion week has become big enough to attend; event managers who decide where to gather a film festival, software conference or corporate confabulation.

THE REPLICATORS They are corporate colonials: expats, country heads and corporate transfers seeking to spread not civilization but best practices. They come from New York and Seoul to build foreign offices of Goldman Sachs and Hyundai. HSBC has a special squad known as the “Marines,” who must be ready to relocate on a few days’ notice. Replicators bring world-class managerial techniques to the countries they inhabit; the best of them imbibe new ideas from the locals that they relay to headquarters. They often spend a disproportionate amount of time ensconced in five-star hotels, but they are adventurers doing business where it is not yet fashionable and raising everybody’s game.

THE APPRENTICES They travel abroad from less-connected countries, apprentice in the best universities or companies in the world, then rush home to apply their discoveries. They are not interested in hanging around. They have worked back home; they know the opportunities and gaps; they come to learn what cannot be learned easily at home. Upon returning, they tend to bring in better systems and processes, and they adapt alien models to local realities. If Replicators bring cellphone towers from the West to India, Apprentices create Indian companies that let village-dwelling farmers bank on their phones.

THE DOCKS They are the globalized locals in less-connected societies who serve as receivers for the outside world. They are in a place to stay. They are the keepers of its institutional memory, but speak in a language that foreigners understand. They know what in their society will most appeal to outsiders; they are expert explainers who do not tire of giving the same late-night tour. They live on the social-networking sites Facebook and Orkut and aSmallWorld. They possess insider knowledge: in Shanghai and Buenos Aires, they will tell you which local dive is best and which tailor won’t rip you off. They are respected within their societies because they broker access to foreigners and foreign opportunities.

THE SWITCHBOARDS They do not live in interesting, out-of-the-way places themselves, but they know everyone who does. When in university, they make friends with the foreign students; five years later, they have a guest room awaiting them in a dozen countries. They are collectors of internationals, and connectors, too. Someone working on children’s issues in Zimbabwe may be too enmeshed in the cause to come upon someone similarly engaged in Bolivia. Their mutual Switchboard friend will insist that they connect and perform a Switchboard’s favorite art: the intro e-mail, with a clever subject line.

THE FUSIONISTAS They are bi-everything, or almost everything — biracial, bicultural, bilingual. They are diplomats’ children, first-generation immigrants, the returned offspring of émigrés. They long agonized over a split identity, and perhaps suffered through high school with their inability to answer the question “Where are you from?” Now it’s payback time. They have figured out how to turn hyphenated confusion into a competitive advantage by serving as cultural bridges. They own East-meets-West fashion boutiques in the developing world; they throw dinner parties with soul food and kimchi in rooftop New York apartments.

This connective population deserves further study. They are not necessarily the richest people in their societies, but they often belong to the educated upper-middle class. They share a restless bent of personality. They fancy themselves as adventurers, although in a way they are quite conservative: far from being hippies and backpackers, they roam the world for the sake of work, not play. They hope to join the establishment, not overthrow it.

They can fear commitment — tending to be renters, not buyers, for example, even when they can afford to buy. They find it hard to mate with those less restless and seafaring than they. But they also struggle to hold steady relationships with others of their ilk, bouncing around the world. Video calls on Skype soothe the anomie that comes with ambition.

At first, it was an extra-helpful, eccentric friend here and there. Then there seemed to be more and more such people, but clustered in particular cities like New York and Shanghai. But, increasingly, they are everywhere, connecting, bridging, even in out-of-the-way tropical towns like this one.

So the next time you eat Greek-French food in Tokyo or watch a Chinese-American’s avant-garde film about Beijing or hear in Berlin that Beirut is the new vacation spot, you will be watching the pilgrims and explorers of our own age at work.

On India, China, climate and leapfrogging

2009-12-20T11:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/weekinreview/20anand.html

Reflections on the First Decade of the 2000s

2009-12-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

December 5, 2009

CURRENTS

Reflections on the First Decade of the 2000s

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

When calendrical milestones pass, however arbitrary they are, they induce reflection. We look back with a feeling of incredulity at all that happened in what feels like no time. We peer into the fearsome, onrushing future. We catalog and schematize and make lists.

List-making for the end of the first decade of the 2000s is in full swing. At least in the United States, which loves to order priorities, we are being told who were the most important celebrities, the crucial leaders, the most corrupt tycoons. But when those celebrities and leaders fall from memory, what will be the decade’s legacy in ideas?

What follows, with thanks to several thoughtful interlocutors, is an admittedly rough draft of a brief history of ideas for the 2000s.

THE END OF EXCEPTIONALISM: It dawned on the West in these years, and America especially, that its preeminence and specialness could end. Cave-dwelling clerics and ragtag insurgent squads waged war against the great Western powers, often making up in brutal effect what they lacked in sophisticated firepower.

Vigor and energy seemed to transfer to a resurgent third world, which began to export not just things, but also innovations like a $2,000 car. Western politicians found themselves pledging to discover jobs that other countries could not do for less; fewer and fewer were found.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP: Public and private purpose blurred. Governments worldwide outsourced public duties — in the case of the United States, even warfare — to private firms, while private firms turned to public coffers to socialize their risks. In George W. Bush, the United States had its first M.B.A. president. His predecessor, Bill Clinton, leaped from public service to making millions, while doing more to fight AIDS through private organizing than as president. A social enterprise, blending the profiteering and do-gooding instincts, became a vocation of choice for educated elites globally.

Market dogma saturated the former socialist world, where governments imposed capitalism from above. A new culture of ethical consumption offered the promise of serving public ends through private buying.

THE FUSION CLASS: If identity politics defined earlier decades, identity straddling defined this one. The traditional brain drain became brain circulation as developing-world émigrés began to move back and forth between adopted and home countries. The United States elected president a biracial man whose present-day relatives speak Cantonese, French, German, Hebrew, Igbo, Indonesian, Luo and Swahili.

The writers who dominated prizes and imaginations were products, and chroniclers, of in-betweenness: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Orhan Pamuk.

The words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, channeled by Ms. Lahiri, became an anthem: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.”

THE CLASH OF PAROCHIALISMS: As the fusion class air-kissed, parochialisms also flourished, offering the promise of return to a simpler, often imaginary or illusory past. It was the parochialism of those who waged jihad and the parochialism of those who fought back, leaders who could not pronounce “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” but believed they could change them.

It was the enthusiasm for proudly parochial politicians, from Sarah Palin in America to Euroskeptics or Islam-bashers across the Atlantic to Evo Morales in Bolivia. The world seemed bound to be stewarded by a new crop of rising powers, led by India and China, of a more parochial bent, less interested than the West, for good or ill, in transcendent rights or injustices or in other nations’ business in general.

VIRTUALLY ANONYMOUS: The decade contained a milestone: The human population became majority-urban for the first time, defined ever less by the tight weave of village society and ever more by the city’s anonymity. Anonymity thrived in the workplace, too, with the growth of outsourcing and offshoring, which chopped large tasks like making an iPod into tiny pieces performed in different countries by colleagues who might never meet.

Such virtual connectedness quietly became ordinary around the world: We grew comfortable with virtual mate-seeking, virtual business meetings, virtual friends and friending, virtual trading of credit-default swaps. Anonymity became human.

LIVE NOW, PAY LATER: Mortgage was an important word for the decade, but as a verb, too, not just a noun. The 2000s were in so many different ways about a present financed by the future. The future financed an archipelago of indebtedness from Dubai to Iceland. The world’s poor were taught, to much celebration, to take micro-versions of the loans that addict the rich.

Some of the decade’s most impressive new companies commanded huge valuations in the present based on future hopes, not present-day profits. An awareness dawned that present human consumption levels amounted to a massive redistribution of wealth from future generations to ourselves.

TRUTH IS SOCIAL: Humans have always wondered what makes something true. We have imagined truth to come from what the ancients wrote, what our ancestors believed, what repeatable experiments established.

But truth became social — truth as what we collectively think it is, with the most important truths being those about us. The idea of professionally produced, neutral, paid-for information about situations not related to the self suffered. Blogs, Youtube, Facebook, crowd-sourcing, Wikipedia and LonelyGirl15 filled the void.

Public and private happenings traded places: the former seemed to bore a new generation. Exhibitionism become a mainstream ethic. “Yes, You,” Time Magazine said when it made “you” the person of the year in the middle of the decade. “You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”

A modest healthcare idea

2009-12-08T11:43:00.001-08:00

I want to get your feedback for a healthcare idea I have been batting around:

What if we picked a random basket of 535 Americans, representing all shades of the country, all regions, socioeconomic classes, races, health conditions. A government office would keep track of what health insurance they managed to have year to year – which policies, what was covered and what wasn’t, how reliable reimbursement was, quality of service. And then, on a random basis, members of the U.S. House and Senate would be assigned, for a one-year rotating term, to a real American family, to enjoy the health insurance for themselves and their own families that the corresponding family enjoys (or doesn’t enjoy). The members would be forbidden to buy additional insurance. And so if some Americans were uninsured, that same fraction of the House and Senate would go uninsured. If the uninsured were suddenly insured through an act of policymaking, then the members would all be insured the following year. If premiums rose or fell, if service improved or declined – whatever would happen, the legislators would live the consequences just like everyone else.

Might this align incentives and encourage lawmakers to pass health legislation that would satisfy not just one party’s base or another’s, but a vast coalition of people who could reasonably believe that Congress felt their pain?

A radio and a television appearance

2009-12-04T14:38:00.000-08:00

TVO television in Canada, on "buycotting"

---

CBC Radio in Canada, on the Age of Metrics:

Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?

2009-11-20T07:36:00.000-08:00

November 21, 2009

CURRENTS

Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — The Trixie Telemetry company believes in hard, quantifiable truths. It believes that there is a right time and wrong time to breast-feed a baby. It believes that certain hours and rooms are better for a child’s naps than others and that data can establish this, too. It believes that parents should track how long their infants have gone without soiling a diaper and devote themselves to beating this “high score.”

To these ends, the company sells what is a coveted service in this age: a dashboard. It invites you to enter data on your baby’s life, and it produces color-coded charts, Sleep Probability Distributions, digestive analysis and such, to help parents make data-based decisions.

Don’t laugh, because Trixie Telemetry is made from the essence of our age.

Computers have become an extension of us: that is a commonplace now. But in an important way we may be becoming an extension of them, in turn. Computers are digital — that is, they turn everything into numbers; that is their way of seeing. And in the computer age we may be living through the digitization of our minds, even when they are offline: a slow-burning quantification of human affairs that promises or threatens, depending on your outlook, to crowd out other categories of the imagination, other ways of perceiving.

Self-quantification of the Trixie Telemetry kind is everywhere now. Bedposted.com quantifies your sexual encounters. Kibotzer.com quantifies your progress toward goals like losing weight. Withings, a French firm, makes a Wi-Fi-enabled weighing scale that sends readings to your computer to be graphed. There are tools to measure and analyze the steps you take in a day; the abundance and ideological orientation of your friends; the influence of your Twitter utterances; what you eat; the words you most use; your happiness; your success in spurning cigarettes.

Welcome to the Age of Metrics — or to the End of Instinct. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try. World Metrics Day was declared for the first time this year.

The once-mysterious formation of tastes is becoming a quantitative science, as services like Netflix and Pandora and StumbleUpon deploy algorithms to predict, and shape, what we like to watch, listen to and read.

These services are wondrous. They also risk lumping us into clusters of the like-minded and depriving us of the self-fortifying act of choosing. What will it mean to prefer one genre of song when you have never confronted others? It is one thing to love your country because you have seen the world and love it still; it is quite another to love it because you know nothing else.

In the Age of Metrics, vocation after vocation is discovering numbers. Doctors are going quant with evidence-based medicine, which promises to improve care by quantifying different treatments’ probabilities of success. Wall Street has gone quant, with financial models automating trading — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disastrously. Academia has gone quant, with once-humanistic fields like politics, on which I work at Harvard, studied in a more rigorous way, but at the price of having ever less to say about the world’s big questions. Even charity, built on the instinct of altruism, has gone quant.

Philanthropists were once satisfied with a fuzzy feeling and, in the United States at least, tax benefits. Increasingly, though, they insist on precise metrics of their “social return on investment.” They want to know how much money is funding vaccines and not staplers at the charity’s offices. And so the Rockefeller Foundation and other groups have created the new Impact Reporting and Investment Standards, a set of metrics that make causes rigorously comparable.

“The power of metrics is that it enables us to deploy our marginal dollar to the best problem-solver, not just the best storyteller,” said Antony Bugg-Levine, a managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation.

But there are also worries. What will be the fate of causes, like women’s empowerment, that produce something not easily counted? Will metrics encourage too much outside second-guessing of charities? Will metrics encourage charities to work toward the metric (acres reforested), not the underlying goal (sustainability)?

Focusing on the wrong metrics already distorts policy-making around the world, according to a fascinating new study commissioned by the French government.

We use gross domestic product to measure everything. It makes it easy to compare economies, but it makes us undervalue what cannot be measured, the report said. Trees are killed because the sales from paper are countable, while a forest’s worth is not. Unemployment grants are cut because their cost is plain, while the mental-health cost of idleness is vague.

In short, what we know instinctively, data can make us forget. But the commission’s solution was revealing of our times: not more balance between qualitative and quantitative, but more metrics: new statistics on human well-being and economic sustainability to contend with data on production.

The commission’s chairman, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and the author of a forthcoming book, “Freefall,” on the Great Recession, has been a critic of the world’s saturation by business logic. I asked him what he made of metricocracy. He said metrics were valuable tools but were in danger of squelching other ways of perceiving. But he argued that his commission had no choice but to speak in metricese.

“In this world in which we are so centered on metrics, those things that are not measured get left off the agenda,” he said. “You need a metric to fight a metric.”

Technology brings ever more metrics. The strange thing is that nothing in them prevents us from using other lenses, too. But something in the culture now makes us bow before data and suspend disbelief. Sometimes metrics blind us to what we might with fewer metrics have seen.

The future’s challenge to us — when we are rearing children, making economic choices, picking the songs to live and dance by — may be to decide how metrics might inform our decisions without becoming them.

Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge

2009-11-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

November 7, 2009

CURRENTS

Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — In the autumn of 1963, the American magazine Popular Mechanics heralded an innovation that seemed bound to change the world: the “teacherless classroom.”

The magazine told of a new building at the University of Miami, doughnut-shaped and carved up into 12 rooms. Professors stood in the hole and had their image projected into every room simultaneously. Faculty productivity was said to have soared. What was lost in intimacy would, readers were assured, be made up for by feedback buttons on students’ chairs, including one for “I don’t understand.”

Fate and technology have pummeled many professions since 1963, from bookseller to travel agent to auto worker. But teachers have resisted the powerful forces reorganizing industry. The dream of the teacherless classroom has remained just that.

Today the dream has returned. Thanks to broadening Internet access, advances in multimedia and the market potential of millions of historically underserved learners among the developing world’s youth and the rich world’s adults, modern versions of the doughnut building are flowering globally: systems through which chunks of teaching can be “scaled up,” in business jargon, and beamed to hundreds of thousands worldwide.

The Open Courseware Consortium, started by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has enlisted universities around the world, from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa to the University of Tokyo, to post courses online free, including professor’s notes, video and exams. The portal iTunes offers lectures from Berkeley and Oxford and elsewhere. The new University of the People, founded by an Israeli entrepreneur, provides tuition-free bachelor-level degrees through what it calls “peer-to-peer teaching” — students learning not from teachers but each other, trading questions and answers online.

Teacherless or virtual-teacher learning is described by enthusiasts as a revolution in the making. Until now, they say, education has been a seller’s market. You beg to get in to college. Deans decide what you must know. They prevent you from taking better courses elsewhere.

They set prices high to subsidize unprofitable activities. Above all, they exclude most humans from their knowledge — the poor, the old, people born in the wrong place, people with time-consuming children and jobs.

Champions of digital learning want to turn teaching into yet another form of content. Allow anyone anywhere to take whatever course they want, whenever, over any medium, they say. Make universities compete on quality, price and convenience. Let students combine credits from various courses into a degree by taking an exit exam. Let them live in Paris, take classes from M.I.T. and transfer them to a German university for a diploma.

“This is putting the consumer in charge as opposed to putting the supplier in charge,” said Scott McNealy, the chairman of Sun Microsystems, the technology giant, and an influential proponent of this approach. He founded Curriki, an online tool for sharing lesson plans and other materials, and was an early investor in the Western Governors University, which delivers degrees online.

It is hard to say whether this technology-tinted vision is friendly or hostile to teachers. A market in instruction will help the best teachers extend their audience far beyond campus. But if you’re a second-rate physicist at a middling university, the sudden availability of free M.I.T. courses could feel threatening.

Mr. McNealy compared university instructors today to the tens of thousands of pianists who performed in movie halls during silent films a century ago. “Technology figured out how to play music in a film, and all of a sudden two piano players moved to L.A. and took all of the business,” he said. The result was a higher average music quality for audiences but many instantly obsolescent pianists. “They had to go and do more productive things,” he said — more productive things being, for Mr. McNealy, not piano-playing.

He argues that many teachers will have to re-imagine themselves as coaches, not content creators, focused on motivating and customizing material to students, while piping in others’ superior teaching.

This view is increasingly commonplace among business leaders and free-market champions. But it has triggered vociferous criticism from educators and educational traditionalists.

Some of the anxiety about the market approach is territorial, from . Some of it is about the repercussions of unbundling the university: profitable offerings like introductory courses subsidize less-profitable undertakings; and, if low-cost competitors lure “customers” away from these offerings, the larger project of the university might suffer, from laboratories to free-thinking tenured faculty to the campus environment itself.

But there is a further worry that a market in instruction will alter education’s very meaning, will degrade it even as it disperses it more widely.

Education, re-imagined as a consumer product, will become about giving the young what they want now, not what they need or might later want, critics say. They worry that universities will cede their role in civilizing us and passing down the heritage of the past, and will become glorified vocational schools.

Education’s goal, the novelist Mark Slouka wrote in Harper’s Magazine, should be “to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily — one might say incidentally — about producing workers.”

As the digital classroom comes, we will face hard questions. What will happen when teachers, like banks and retail outlets, are consolidated by the market, with favored professors teaching hundreds of thousands and regular Joes relegated to night school? Will there be a night school? Will a freer marketplace generate more ideas, or narrow the diversity of ideas as certain teachers crowd out others?

How will students design their curriculums? Does a 20-year-old know what she wants to know at 40? Will the most-downloaded lectures become the new equivalent of the classics?

How will teachers change when the goal becomes to titillate the widest audience, not just connect with the room? Will teaching for the cameras undermine pedagogy or widen knowledge’s appeal?

Will the best teaching, beamed globally, silence voices that might otherwise have spoken? Or, in spreading knowledge, will it help the silent speak?

A Webliography of further reading on the teacherless classroom

2009-11-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

For those who are interested, some good resources on the subject of the virtualization of education:

Time Magazine on the future of the classroom

Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school

The Cost of Education

The 1963 Teacherless Classroom

Ideal Classroom for Video-Based Instruction

An Education Stimulus for the Developing World

New Meaning for Night Class at 2-Year Colleges

Stephen’s Web

The South Asian Idea Web blog

The Theory and Practice of Digital Theory

Center for History and New Media

Higher Education and Research in India

Tech Blogs:

Academic Productivity

digital digs

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

http://www.uopeople.org

http://www.curriki.org/

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/

http://www.wgu.edu/

http://p2pu.org

Around the World:

http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/03/12/links-from-the-talk-open-education-around-the-world/

http://www.elearning-africa.com/themes.php

http://www.obhe.ac.uk/the_obhe_global_forum__malaysia/welcome

http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/knowledgenetwork.asp

Distance Learning in Developing World:

http://members.tripod.com/stewart_marshall/index.html

An Economy in Need of Holistic Medicine

2009-10-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

October 24, 2009

CURRENTS

An Economy in Need of Holistic Medicine

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — The American economy is having what doctors call an acute episode.

Employment won’t throb. The circulation of capital remains weak. Industry is breathing, but barely. And if we can agree on anything one year into this mess, it is that there is little we can do when the patient arrives already this bad.

That is why the talk now is so often of prevention. Prevent the next crisis through health insurance and a green-energy sector, the American president says. Prevent it by cutting spending and nurturing personal responsibility, American conservatives retort.

But the truth is that politicians, and not just in the United States, are rarely willing to invest in a problem that hasn’t occurred. Consensus and action are easier to come by after a 9/11 or a Lehman Brothers than before. Problems in the embryonic, soluble phase don’t interest us; and those that do interest us are often too big to solve.

Which is where acupuncture comes in.

Western medical practices have attracted similar criticisms in recent years, for an emphasis on intervening in disease rather than preventing it beforehand and promoting quotidian well-being. But in health, unlike politics, an alternative approach called wellness has emerged, focused on investing in health before it breaks down.

What can wellness tell us about our present economic malady? As it moves from fringe to mainstream — with wellness programs in the health care reform proposals now in Congress, wellness manifestos on the best-seller lists and a U.S. Army wellness program that asks soldiers to introspect and meditate — I asked experts about the approach’s core tenets and how they might be applied to the body politic.

Nip it in the bud. Wellness argues for cultivating health a little every day, not just restoring it during calamities. We increasingly accept that it is better to monitor a diabetic’s blood sugar with regular clinic visits than to amputate her limbs. We accept that businesses can avoid costly cancer treatments by encouraging workers to stop smoking. But in our political life, we prefer to wait until things reach the emergency room.

We barely regulate financial markets for years, thinking regulation oppressive, until we are compelled to nationalize private firms. We avoid expensive investments and controversial new methods in public education, then pay the price in lower social mobility and vast prison populations. We neglect building roads and bridges and Internet highways, fearing the cost, and then reap the much greater costs of whole regions falling off the economic grid.

“With a lot of social problems, we’re not sure how to prevent it, and therefore we don’t spend money on it, because we always have a lot of other priorities,” said David Cutler, a Harvard economist who has advised both the Clinton and Obama White Houses on health care.

Go to the roots. Western medicine tends to fight symptoms, whether suppressing coughs or flooding the brains of the depressed with serotonin. Wellness is interested in underlying causes. It is inclined to see an infertile woman, for example, as a stressed woman rather than a woman with defunct ovaries, and may suggest that she eat and work differently rather than take ovary-manipulating pills.

In public policy, a symptom bias rules. A housing crisis? Enact a tax credit! Bank failures? Bail them out!

There is nothing wrong with such steps — except for what they leave out, as most economists will tell you.

Even amid all this action, we have virtually ignored the complex weave of issues beneath the issues: meager savings, a debt addiction, a congenitally spendthrift political system, an almost pathological craving for stuff. And, with our topical cures, we should not be surprised to see new symptoms of the old maladies appearing: insurance again being packaged into derivatives, bonuses again soaring on Wall Street.

“We treat symptoms, and we do not look at the causes of the symptoms,” Deepak Chopra, the famed alternative-medicine and wellness guru, said when asked to extend the wellness metaphor to the economy. “We are totally at this moment looking at it in a reductionist manner. The reductionist manner is a bailout. And somehow that’s supposed to solve the problem, whereas the problem occurred because we were thinking reductively.”

Look within. Wellness sees the causes of and remedies for ailments as lying within us. Avoid infection by building immunity. Defeat disease by eating foods that help the body heal itself.

With the economy, we look everywhere but within. It’s the fault of greedy Wall Street bankers. It’s Washington’s fault. Bush’s fault. Obama’s fault. Greenspan’s fault. Somebody fix it!

But what about us? Why can’t we acknowledge that it was us who bought all those unaffordable houses, us who listened to that zero-gravity financial “advice,” us who bought and bought and never kept a rainy-day fund? And why, in solving the problem, do we expect the state to create substitute dynamism instead of renewing the culture of decentralized dynamism that made the U.S. economy so vital to begin with?

“Conventional medicine is very unbalanced in placing all its emphasis on external interventions rather than looking to advance that internal capacity to maintain healing,” said Andrew Weil, founder of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the author of several books on wellness. Likewise with the economy, he said: “Instead of simply identifying external threats and developing weapons and strategies against them, we should instead identify and strengthen immunity and resistance.”

A politics of wellness would transcend party. It would emphasize the up-front investments that Democrats like in order to achieve the long-run fiscal solvency on which Republicans insist. It would fulfill the liberal belief in a positive role for government in maintaining well-being but would honor the conservative conviction that government’s chief role is to help the social organism heal itself. It would acknowledge, with the left, the complex lattice of cultural and institutional influences that govern a society’s well-being, while emphasizing, with the right, the limits of what any external healer can do.

Think wellness in these hard times. The most urgent problems, after all, may be the ones we haven’t had yet.

My Q and A with Arun Shourie of the BJP at Harvard

2009-10-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

[ From Tuesday, October 6, 2009 ]

Arun Shourie is an Indian author, thinker and politician and a principal voice of the country’s political right. As a high official in the Bharatiya Janata Party and a former cabinet minister, he has ridden the ascendency of the Hindutva – or Hindu nationalist – agenda in recent decades and ridden its apparent decline with the BJP’s defeats in 2004 and 2009. As a former investigative journalist and editor and the author of several books, Mr. Shourie is also a sharp observer of old surrendering to new in modern India.

In an intimate question-and-answer session at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Mr. Shourie discussed with me the role of the right in a churning India, including such questions as these: How committed is the party to the vision of genuine Indian pluralism? Does the future of the party belong to those who emphasize the Hindutva agenda or to those more interested in the free-market, pro-business, pro-American policies that the party has also pressed? After two successive electoral defeats, is the Hindu right dead? And how might it be reborn?

FULL AUDIO HERE:

Boycotts Minus the Pain

2009-10-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

October 11, 2009

Boycotts Minus the Pain

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Craigie on Main here is one of those socially conscious restaurants where the food is as moral as it is tasty. The chicken had roamed freely. The vegetables had sprouted locally. I could only assume that the tuna, before being sashimied, enjoyed a massage and that the fennel had signed consent forms to be crushed into ice cream.

When the steak arrived, the chef himself appeared to announce that the cow had been well tended.

“You mean, before they killed him?” I thought to myself.

It has many names: “buycotting,” ethical consumerism, moral economics, latte activism, critical consumption. Whatever you call it, buying is getting ever more political across the affluent world.

A car is no longer just a car, nor a cup of coffee just a cup of coffee. In the age of hybrids and fair trade, the mall is a forum to express convictions and hopes.

Today one can buy not just carbon offsets, organic fruit and recycled paper, but also a iPod whose purchase combats mother-to-child H.I.V. transmission in Africa; a sneaker from Timberland made of biodegradable wool and organically tanned leather; “green weapons” like reduced-lead bullets from BAE Systems, the British armaments maker; and fair-trade condoms, made with sustainable latex (marketing pitch: “for guilt-free lovers who want to feel good in every way”).

On the surface, all seems well. But, as the trend has gathered stream, a debate has begun over the political meaning of buycotting: is consumption an exciting new form of citizenship? Or is it a sign of how corroded citizenship has become that shopping is the closest many of us are willing to come to worrying about labor laws, trade agreements, agriculture policy — about good old-fashioned politics?

Political consumption is not new; its history streaks through the civil-rights movement, the campaign against apartheid and other causes. What is new is that boycotting is surrendering to buycotting, the sending of positive, not just negative, signals; and that it is practiced increasingly by mainstream shoppers, not just die-hard activists.

Political consumption also perhaps supports a new-age behavioral theory: that human beings, long imagined by traditional economists to be rational, utilitarian creatures, in fact have more complex longings, and often are willing to sacrifice economically for an idea or feeling.

A study published this fall in the Political Science Quarterly found that 62 percent of Americans were willing to pay $5 extra for a $20 sweater produced more ethically, and three-quarters would spend 50 cents a pound more for fair-trade coffee.

Proponents of buycotting see these premiums as pure political expression: citizens’ parting with money to refine the world. Some even argue that cash-voting goes further than ballot-casting: we buy, and thereby incentivize producers, every day; but we vote far less often.

“We are convinced that how people buy can be more effective than how they vote,” said Francesco Galante, a director of Comitato Addiopizzo, a civic group in Palermo, Sicily, that has taken on the mafia using an analogue of fair-trade labeling. In 2004, some volunteers in Palermo decided to bypass politicians: they approached local businesses, many of which paid the mafia “pizzo,” or bribes, and asked them to certify that they paid pizzo no longer; in exchange, the Comitato brought them business from pizzo-averse Sicilians.

Today 400 businesses and 9,000 customers have joined, even though products from law-abiding companies often cost more.

But, like all apparently wonderful things, ethical consumption has begun to attract critics.

One set are free-enterprise champions who argue that politicizing consumption distorts prices and spurs overproduction while imposing arbitrary conditions on producers — like insisting that developing-world farmers enroll their children in school — that might sound good to Westerners but ignore complex local realities.

Insisting on the noblest production methods conflicts, these critics say, with the very function of markets: to bring the most goods to the most people as cheaply as possible.

Another group of critics doesn’t deny political consumption’s power. Rather, they bemoan that citizenship has come to this.

Citizenship, for them, is about voting, marching, writing — about being involved. In the modern age, they say, we have begun to turn inward, bowl alone, shirk our public duties. And now comes this cheap (in the moral, if not economic, sense) way to participate just a little, assuage guilt just a little, involve ourselves just a little in AIDS and trade, feel just a little of activism’s thrill.

In an article last year in The Lancet, the British medical journal, the scholars Colleen O’Manique and Ronald Labonte strongly condemned RED, the marketing campaign for iPods and other products whose purchase helps to finance the battle against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa.

“Be wary of the 21st century’s new noblesse oblige that replaces the efficiency of tax-funded programs and transfers in improving health equity with a consumption-driven ‘charitainment’ model,” they wrote.

Market citizenship, as critics call it, lets the state off easy, they say. Public goods like health systems should be publicly provided, they say. If organic vegetables are better, then we should all eat them, instead of just the elite. And privatizing compassion may tempt the state to neglect problems; then, when a recession slows shopping, AIDS orphans languish waiting for you to buy sunglasses.

It is worth asking which problems demand politics and which the mall. Child labor in Vietnam and unscrupulous intermediaries in the coffee trade lent themselves to buycotting. What can the market do about Darfur or health care in the United States?

The question, at bottom, is this: have we, with our ethical cars and condoms and carrots, found a way to make markets humane? Or have we rather found a way to make politics bearable to us by turning it into shopping?

Anand Giridharadas writes the column “Currents,” on ideas, for The International Herald Tribune and nytimes.com.

Edging Out Congress and the Public

2009-09-29T06:40:00.000-07:00

September 26, 2009

CURRENTS

Edging Out Congress and the Public

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — It took just eight months for the joy that filled the Washington Mall at the chilly January inauguration of Barack Obama to give way to the sign-waving that filled it at a recent rally: the president depicted as the Joker and taunted by the declaration that “Hitler gave good speeches too.”

Memories of hearing even some Republicans back then speak of a “historic moment” of healing and of turning a page were drowned out in the summer heat by the shrill debate about health care, and by the vitriolic questioning of President Obama from left and right.

Among the most strident criticisms was that he is overreaching, abusing his mandate, tucking too many ideological priorities into his purportedly neutral response to the Great Recession. And, though such criticisms simmer mostly on the right, they play into a lively debate among some liberal thinkers who spent years bemoaning the “imperial” Bush presidency and have recently become concerned that this new president, whom they admire, may change the use of presidential power less than they had hoped.

In a recent essay in the magazine Dissent, Sanford Levinson, a legal scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that “constitutional dictators” have become the American norm. The Constitution created carefully calibrated checks and balances and gave tightly limited powers to the federal government. Because those powers have not expanded to keep up with the increasingly complex economic and security challenges that government faces, presidents “have an incentive to declare emergencies” and assume “quasi-dictatorial powers,” Mr. Levinson writes.

The criticism is, in a sense, that American democracy functions more and more the way democracy sometimes does in Europe, where parties that win large majorities in countries like Britain or France can do virtually as they please.

Mr. Levinson is among those who regard former President George W. Bush as possibly the “absolutely worst president.” But in his essay, published this summer, he suggested, as do others of his peers, that Mr. Obama may be no different in his vision of presidential authority. He cites, for example, the words of one of the legal architects of Mr. Bush’s war on terror, Jack Goldsmith, who has written that “for generations the Terror Presidency will be characterized by an unremitting fear of devastating attack, an obsession with preventing the next attack, and a proclivity to act aggressively and pre-emptively to do so.”

Mr. Levinson writes, “It might be morning in America for many of us still enthralled by the Obama presidency, but it should be equally clear that Obama has done nothing to challenge Goldsmith’s observation.” Mr. Obama, he added, has talked of expanding the war in Afghanistan without renewed congressional authorization for a battle launched eight years ago (although it now seems Washington may hesitate to send many or any more troops).

Likewise, in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, the writer Garry Wills complains that Mr. Obama has failed to break free of “the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the Cold War and the Cold War with the ‘war on terror,”’ citing the new administration’s continued secrecy in security matters and its “extraordinary rendition” of terrorism suspects.

One reason that his supporters placed so much faith in Mr. Obama was the hope that he would break with everything that they had come to loathe about the Bush administration. But it is becoming clear that politics as conducted by the Obama White House, on domestic as well as foreign policy, can be every bit as aggressive and hard-nosed.

Through this prism, the rage that has erupted over Mr. Obama’s health care reform plans can perhaps be seen as a revolt against what some perceive as a deepening tendency in American life to wring from emergencies political victories that would be impossible in calmer times.

There are, of course, profound differences between the uses of emergency under the current and former administrations. Mr. Bush’s war against Iraq and tightening of American civil liberties after Sept. 11, 2001, is of a different nature than Mr. Obama’s pressing for health care reform and renewable energy and other liberal priorities in the wake of the Great Recession.

But what worries Bush critics like Peter Alexander Meyers, a political theorist affiliated with Princeton and the Sorbonne in Paris, about Mr. Obama’s presidency is precisely that Mr. Bush, whatever his faults, was merely “acting out and through much larger historical forces.”

In his recent book “Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen,” the first installment in a trilogy about post-9/11 American democracy, Mr. Meyers argues that Mr. Bush’s response to those attacks only accelerated a concentration of power in the presidency that had been steadily accruing since the nineteenth century, edging both Congress and the public out of decision-making during anything claimed to be a crisis.

Beginning arguably with President Grover Cleveland’s clampdown on the railroad strikes using emergency authority, which paved the way for broader regulation of the railroads and eventually of national commerce under subsequent presidents, Mr. Meyers contends that the boundary between foreign war and domestic crisis has slowly blurred in the public mind.

Mr. Meyers is particularly alert to the role of culture in bolstering this trend. As it is, the federal government has limited constitutional authority and ever more intricate problems to manage.

The effect of television and the Internet in an event like 9/11 or the Great Recession, is, he shows, to amplify and rerun and spread the sense of alarm. The result is that citizens have effectively acquiesced over time to two propositions that he believes to be dangerous when held in tandem: that, in crisis, the president knows best; and that a crisis is whatever the president says it is.

Mr. Meyers, also politically sympathetic to Mr. Obama, believes that Mr. Bush did not create on his own the culture of emergency for which his presidency is often blamed, and that Mr. Obama, as a consequence, will not reverse what is not merely one administration’s doing.

“It was a monumental mistake to think that ‘everything changed on 9/11,”’ Mr. Meyers said in an e-mail message. But, he added, “I, with great regret but without surprise, would say that those who think that ‘everything changed on November 4’ are fooling themselves again.”

Democracy 2.0 Awaits an Upgrade

2009-09-11T11:17:00.000-07:00

Currents - Democracy 2.0 Awaits an Upgrade - NYTimes.com

September 12, 2009

Currents

Democracy 2.0 Awaits an Upgrade

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Perhaps the biggest big idea that gathered speed during the last millennium was that we humans might govern ourselves. But no one really meant it.

What was really meant in most places was that we would elect people to govern us and sporadically renew or revoke their contracts. It was enough. There was no practicable way to involve all of us, all the time.

The headlines from Washington today blare of bailouts, stimulus, clunkers, Afpak, health care. But it is possible that future historians, looking back, will fixate on a quieter project of Barack Obama’s White House: its exploration of how government might be opened to greater public participation in the digital age, of how to make self-government more than a metaphor.

President Obama declared during the campaign that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.

Federal agencies have been directed to release online information that was once sealed; reporters from Web-only publications have been called on at press conferences; the new portal Data.gov is asking citizens to create their own applications using government datasets. But the most revealing efforts have been in “crowdsourcing” — in soliciting citizens’ policy ideas on the Internet and allowing them to vote on one another’s proposals.

During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizens’ Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the President receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, Mr. Obama’s friend and adviser, wrote to supporters.

They received 44,000 proposals and 1.4 million votes for those proposals. The results were quietly published, but they were embarrassing — not so much to the administration as to us, the ones we’ve been waiting for.

In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas, twice as popular as nationwide Wi-Fi. Revoking the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than raising funding for childhood cancer.

Once in power, the White House crowdsourced again. In March, its Office of Science and Technology Policy hosted an online brainstorm about making government more transparent. Good ideas came, but a stunning number had no connection to transparency, with many calls for marijuana legalization and a raging (and groundless) debate about the authenticity of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate.

If the Internet needed a further nudge from its pedestal, the health care debate obliged. From the administration’s point of view, the Web arguably proved better at spreading deceptions about “death panels” than at spreading truth, and at turning town halls into brawls than at nurturing the unfettered deliberation that some imagine to be the hallmark of the Internet.

There is a lively debate in progress about what some call Gov 2.0. One camp sees in the Internet an unprecedented opportunity to bring back Athenian-style direct democracy. The vision is captured in a recent British documentary, “Us Now,” which paints a future in which every citizen is connected to the state as easily as to Facebook, choosing policies, questioning politicians, collaborating with neighbors.

“Can we all govern?” the movie asks at the outset. (It can, of course, be viewed on the Web.)

The people in this camp point to information technology’s aid to grassroots movements from Moldova to Iran. They look at India, where voters can now access, via text message, information on the criminal records of parliamentary candidates, and Africa, where cellphones are improving election monitoring. They note the new ease of extending reliable scientific and scholarly knowledge to a broad audience. They observe how the Internet, in democratizing access to facts and figures, encourages politician and citizen alike to base decisions on more than hunches.

But their vision of Internet democracy is part of a larger cultural evolution toward the expectation that we be consulted about everything, all the time. Increasingly, the best articles to read are the most e-mailed ones, the music worth buying belongs to singers we have just text-voted into stardom, the next book to read is one bought by other people who bought the last book you did, and media that once reported to us now publish whatever we tweet.

In this new age, our consent is gathered every few minutes, not every few years.

Another camp sees the Internet less rosily. Its members tend to be enthusiastic about the Web and enthusiastic about civic participation; they are skeptical of the Internet as a panacea for politics. They worry that it creates a falsely reassuring illusion of equality, openness, universality.

“We live in an age of democratic experimentation — both in our official institutions and in the many informal ways in which the public is consulted,” James Fishkin, a Stanford political scientist, writes in his new book, “When the People Speak.” “Many methods and technologies can be used to give voice to the public will. But some give a picture of public opinion as if through a fun house mirror.”

Because it is so easy to filter one’s reading online, extreme views dominate the discussion. Moderates are underrepresented, so citizens seeking better health care may seem less numerous than poker fans. The Internet’s image of openness and equality belies its inequities of race, geography and age.

Lies spread like wildfire on the Web; Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, no Luddite, warned last October that if the great brands of trusted journalism died, the Internet would become a “cesspool” of bad information. Wikipedia has added a layer of editing — remember editing? — for articles on living people.

Perhaps most menacingly, the Internet’s openness allows well-organized groups to simulate support, to “capture and impersonate the public voice,” as Mr. Fishkin said in an e-mail exchange.

There is no turning back the clock. We now have more public opinion exerting pressure on politics than ever before. The question is how it may be channeled and filtered to create freer, more successful societies, because simply putting things online is no cure-all.

“At this moment, the conversation is not whether the Internet is important and is going to be widespread,” said Clay Shirky, an Internet theorist and the author of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.” He added, in a telephone interview: “Now that it is so important, it’s actually too important not to think through the constitutional and governance issues involved.”

A search is on for the right metaphor. What is the new role for government: A platform? A vending machine, into which we put money to extract services? A facilitator? And what, indeed, is the new role for us — the ones we’ve been waiting for?

Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

2009-07-11T22:37:00.001-07:00

July 5, 2009

THE WORLD

Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI, India — The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to leave it.

The country was lost to us in America, where I was born. It had to be assembled in my mind, from the fragments of anecdotes and regular journeys east.

Now, six years after returning to the country my parents left, as I prepare to depart it myself, the mind goes back to the beginning, to my earliest pictures of it.

India, reflected from afar, was late-night phone calls with the news of death. It was calling back relatives who could not afford to call you. It was Hindu ceremonies with saffron and Kit Kat bars on a silver platter.

India, consumed on our visits back, was being fetched from the airport and cooked a meal even in the dead of night. It was sideways hugs that strove to avoid breast contact. It was the chauvinism of uncles who asked about my dreams and ignored my sister’s.

It was wrong, yet easy, to feel that we did India a favor by coming home. We packed our suitcases with things they couldn’t get for themselves: Jif peanut butter, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Gap khakis. These imports sketched a subtle hierarchy in which they were the wanting relatives and we their benefactors.

My cousins in India would sometimes ask if I was Indian or American. I saw that their self-esteem depended on my answer. “American,” I would say, because it was the truth, and because I felt that to say otherwise would be to accept a lower berth in the world.

What it meant to be American was to be free to invent yourself, to belong to a family and a society in which destiny was believed to be human-made.

I looked around in India and saw everyone in their boxes, not coming fully into their own, replicating lives lived before. If only they came to America, I told myself, so-and-so would be a millionaire entrepreneur; so-and-so would be as confident in her opinions as her husband; so-and-sos’ marriage would be more like my parents’, with verve and swing-dancing lessons and bedtime crossword puzzles; so-and-so would study history and literature, not just bankable practicalities.

I moved to India six years ago in an effort to understand it on my own terms, to render mine what had until then only belonged to my parents.

India was changing when I arrived and has changed dramatically, viscerally, improbably in these 2,000 days: farms giving way to factories; ultra-cheap cars being built; companies buying out rivals abroad. But the greatest change I have witnessed is elsewhere. It is in the mind: Indians now know that they don’t have to leave, as my parents left, to have their personal revolutions.

It took me time to see. At first, my old lenses were still in place — India the frustrating, difficult country — and so I saw only the things I had ever seen.

But as I traveled the land, the data did not fit the framework. The children of the lower castes were hoisting themselves up one diploma and training program at a time. The women were becoming breadwinners through microcredit and decentralized manufacturing. The young people were finding in their cellphones a first zone of individual identity. The couples were ending marriages no matter what “society” thinks, then finding love again. The vegetarians were embracing meat and meat-eaters were turning vegetarian, defining themselves by taste and faith, not caste.

Indians from languorous villages to pulsating cities were making difficult new choices to die other than where they were born, to pursue vocations not their father’s, to live lives imagined within their own skulls. And it was addictive, this improbable rush of hope.

The shift is only just beginning. Most Indians still live impossibly grim lives. Trickle down, here more than most places, is slow. But it is a shift in psychologies, and you rarely meet an Indian untouched by it.

Grabbing hold of their destinies, these Indians became the unlikely cousins of my own immigrant parents in America: restless, ambitious, with dreams vivid only to themselves. But my parents had sought to beat the odds in a bad system, to be statistical flukes that got away.

What has changed since they left is a systemic lifting of the odds for those who stay. It is a milestone in any nation’s life when leaving becomes a choice, not a necessity.

My parents watch me from their perch outside Washington, D.C., and marvel at history’s sense of irony: a son who ended up inventing himself in the country they left, who has written of the self-inventing swagger of a rising generation of Indians, in a country where “self” was once a vulgar word.

At times, my mother wonders if they should have remained, should have waited for their own country’s revolution instead of crashing another’s. And as I leave India now I can only wonder how history would have turned out if the ocean of change had come a generation earlier.

Because it came between their generation and mine, the premise of our family story has been pulled out from beneath us. We are American citizens now, my family, and proudly so. But we must face that we are Americans because of a choice prompted by truths that history has undone. They were true at the choice’s making; in India, I saw their truth boil slowly away.

They don’t crave our mayonnaise and khakis anymore. They no longer angrily berate America, because they are too busy building their own country. Indian accents are now cooler than British ones. No one asks if I feel Indian or American. How delicious to see that unconcern. How fortunate to live in a land you needn’t leave to become your fullest possible self.

And how wondrous, in this time of revolutions, to have had my own here.

I grew up in America defining myself by the soil under my feet, not by the blood in my veins. The soil I shared with everyone else; the blood made me unbearably different. Before I loved India, I loathed it. But that feeling seems now like a relic from a buried past.

I leave now on the journey’s next stretch, with sadness and with joy, humbled by India, grateful to have been at the revolution and to have known the revolutions within.

Some happy news...

2009-07-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

http://saja.org/articles/saja-celebrates-15th-anniversary-announces-award-winners

Once-Clear Thoughts Are Clouded

2009-06-18T03:10:00.000-07:00

June 19, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

Once-Clear Thoughts Are Clouded

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI — There has always been a lush, adjectival richness to foreign correspondence from India. We write of creaking bullock carts, curled moustaches, stinking latrines, sallow-cheeked farmers, smoky air, sweltering megalopolises and aching villages. We relentlessly describe.

We write about India this way because India is beautiful — not beautiful like Paris, sumptuous and elegant, but beautiful in its distillation of the extremes of human experience. To go into a Mumbai slum or a rain-starved Rajasthani village is to know how beautiful ugliness can be.

But description tempts us, too, because India is mystifying. Correspondents send home answers. India withholds reliable answers. Correspondents schematize reality. India waits for the schema, then cruelly disproves it. The temptation to write 1,000-word tone poems is fierce in a country easier to describe than to explain, and easier to explain than to understand.

I will leave India soon for America, from where I came. I have spent six years seeking to understand. Before going, I wanted to write a column saying something conclusive about India, why it matters, what it means.

But India is a place for seeking, not concluding, and here the chasm between what I wonder and know has widened with time. So I decided instead to write down the questions that still haunt me after 2,000 days here, about justice, love, culture, power, freedom — questions I hope someone abler will answer someday.

The first thing you see in India is indignity: filthy slums, boulevard defecation, puffed-out bellies. You feel shocked but also noble in your compassion. Then it becomes normal. You see that the true degradation is in human relationships, in the belief that people come in different levels of humanness. The idea is so pervasive and tempting of your vanity that, in time, it infects you, too.

And so I wonder: At what moment does a child learn her level of humanness? How did so many in this generation suddenly defy those destinies, as their parents never dreamed? How can callousness to poverty mingle so closely with the warmth that Indians rain on family? Which will change India first, the trickle-down of compassion or the trickle-up of rage?

Some of what I wonder was clear to me until India clouded it.

Indian love — family love, romantic love — once felt alien. It was not easy to spend time in giant, multigenerational households. Love meant scolding, meddling, judging, people obsessing about your eating, telling each other why their skin is too dark or their frame too thin. In romance, too, love was understated and assumed, given through sacrifice. It never aimed to fascinate, exhilarate.

Then I began to see the power of love in which it’s not about you.

Now I wonder: does love mean never taking another for granted, as it often does in the West, or is it the serene liberty to do so? Which is more of a gamble, marriage by arrangement or by love? Is love more durable when it is just the two of us or when it weaves together tribes?

Then there is the question of what you keep.

In the Davos Age, there is a formula for developing nations: low tariffs, privatization, sushi, English fluency, jazz bars, Bellinis, fashion weeks, consumptiveness, thinness, the purging of superstitions. These nations must in a decade Xerox a way of life that rich countries built over centuries.

But India is an ancient, continuous civilization, and Indians feel excitement but also pain in the dueling pressures to be someone else and be themselves: to subscribe to their astrology charts, schedule things on “auspicious days,” dance to the beats of Punjab’s plains, drink lentil soup.

Can one be “global” without being a mimic? Does the English language obliterate or liberate, disguising the caste and class of those who master it? Why is more culture flowing into India today than flowing out?

I wonder, too, about Indian power. This week, at a summit meeting in Russia, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, stood shoulder to shoulder with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the dubiously re-elected president of Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad might have listened to Mr. Singh: India and Iran are cultural cousins, sharing elements of language and culture. Millions of Indians claim Persian descent. India buys Iranian oil.

But this week, as Iran trampled on the values that Indians hold so dear, Mr. Singh found nothing meaningful to say.

Why, when the world sees India as a great power, does India see itself as Burundi? Beyond its own affluence, what kind of world does India want? What will it do to build it?

And what can the world’s Irans learn from Indian democracy?

I once asked Mufti Shabbir Alam Sidiqi, an important Islamic cleric, whether disenfranchised Muslims were losing faith in India and taking solace in fundamentalist ideas.

“What you have in India you have in no other country,” he replied. “In this republic there are rights. We can demand our rights, speak out. In other countries: eat, drink and shut up. Go to Saudi Arabia: you can’t speak. There is Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai, Iraq, Iran. These things are nowhere. They are all dictatorships.”

Indian democracy should not work. Indians share no language. They cling to their identities. Most live below that level of middle-classness beyond which democracy supposedly thrives.

But the system holds. The coups, election theft and statecraft-by-murder that afflict much of the developing world don’t happen here. Democracy brings little to the poor, the state is corrupt, politicians lack principles and ideas. Yet those with no reason to believe continue to believe, vote, speak, petition.

And I wonder: Is India reinventing democracy — democracy designed not for colonial Virginia, but for societies like this: poor; inequitable; ethnically, religiously, linguistically balkanized; in the throes of convulsive change? Would India, if it summoned the will, be a more persuasive lecturer on democracy’s merits than America?

Then there is one more question. This one I will seek to answer — not now, but in my next and final letter from here.

Is a land with such beauty and possibility, with these vast questions still to answer in my lifetime, a land whose addiction can ever be escaped?

Happy news!

2009-06-12T07:20:00.001-07:00

http://www.sopasia.com/awards/2009/groupa.asp

Love in the Time of Diaspora

2009-06-05T23:58:00.000-07:00

June 7, 2009

Love in the Time of Diaspora

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

THE PRAYER ROOM

By Shanthi Sekaran

382 pp. MacAdam/Cage. $25

By now, you recognize the Indian novel. Every week, it seems, there are new additions to the subcontinent’s thriving subgenre of immigrant literature, all of them sharing a few tell-tale elements: lush language; the vitality and musicality of India’s crowded gullies; its ancient spirituality counterpoised against a crass new materialism; its émigrés’ struggles to balance tradition and modernity.

Shanthi Sekaran’s first novel, “The Prayer Room,” contains all of these familiar and sumptuous treats, all the multicultural exotica we have come to expect. But it does not contain — and perhaps doesn’t need to contain — much more.

The tale is this: In 1974, George Armitage, a young Ph.D. student from England, ventures to Madras to work on a dissertation about Indian temples. He does less research and more flirting than he expected, and ends up returning to England “on a Pan Am airliner with his new small wife beside him.”

He has, we are told, a history of regretting his purchases.

George’s new wife is an Indian named Viji, from a traditional family. They have married at the insistence of her mother, who was devastated to learn of Viji’s white lover at a time when even dinner dates were carefully arranged. Now Viji sets off, as so many Indians did in that era, to make a life with George in the West — first in England, then in suburban Sacramento.

George is a frustrated intellectual; Viji is lonely and ill equipped for a bewildering new land. It’s not a promising foundation for romance, and the trouble only deepens when George’s lecherous, tactless father crosses the Atlantic to move in. What emerges is a chronicle of lukewarm love: love that is initially coerced, then becomes a pleasant habit after triplets are born, then sputters into boredom and resentment as time wears on, driving Viji to walk out and leading both of them toward infidelity before their love finally, if tepidly, returns.

The story is simple. But, as with so many novels of the Indian diaspora, the plot matters less than the language.

Sekaran is a master of cadence, and as she displays her intimate knowledge of India, England and America, there’s jazz on nearly every page: the “first striated fumes” of a cigar evoking a British pub, Sacramento’s longing “to be a city other than itself,” a sing-song Indian accent that betrays “affection for the syllables themselves.” In India, a phone booth “keeled into the sari shop, which butted against the sweet shop, which rammed into the grungy teahouse, which crashed into the tailor’s.”

Such observations shine a bright light on the cultural collisions at the heart of this novel. Yet we slowly realize that the book is little more than the sum of its beautiful details. Sekaran’s sentences may be loose gems, but she hasn’t strung them together to make jewelry. While she treats us to descriptions of a “possibly malnourished” lizard and a “small bikini that dripped gray puddles onto the linoleum,” she never convincingly tells us what it’s like for Viji to bear the children of a man who doesn’t love her, or how she reaches the decision to leave George, or what her impressions of America are. Nor does Sekaran compensate for this lack of interior life with a corresponding exterior gaze — we don’t learn who is president at the time, what is happening in the society, what George’s academic interests are.

To be sure, “The Prayer Room” has its pleasures. But because it remains more interested in the colorful cross-cultural manifestations of human motivation than it does in human motivation itself, it goes down like a five-course repast of gelato. No individual bite is unappetizing. But nothing collects; and at the end you fold your napkin with the faint feeling that you have been satisfied but not filled.

Anand Giridharadas, a columnist for The International Herald Tribune, is writing a nonfiction book about modern India.

Market Economics, Indian Style

2009-06-04T04:31:00.001-07:00

June 5, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

Market Economics, Indian Style

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI — It is surreal to live in the so-called third world, in a country belatedly stumbling on capitalism, and to hear Americans, of all people, heralding its end. It feels like watching your parents fight for the first time.

Nations like this, that used to suppress money, now bow at its altar. But as tens of millions of Indians and Chinese and Russians enter the age of malls and MasterCard, they may be stunned to hear from rich lands that greed is out. It’s hollow, this capitalism. It’s derivatives of derivatives, money making money on money. Private jets are sin. Debt is dumb. Restless wanting is so pre-2008.

“To straighten a bent stick,” Michel de Montaigne wrote, “we bend it in the contrary way.” But a stroll through this money capital of India may remind capitalism’s new doubters of why they believed in it to begin with, and may warn against bending the stick too far.

On the streets of Mumbai, still in the early stages of capitalist development, one sees not the emptiness of money but rather its vitality: a power to breathe dignity into the poor, to foster social change, to spur a culture of self-improvement, even to rinse away unearned privilege.

And one sees, as well, when capitalism begins to sour: when it becomes bigger, boxier, an abstract video game for managers.

At its roots, however, the market in India is dynamism. Far from the bustle of Mumbai, in small towns and villages, people wait and wait, thumbing newspapers, gossiping, with history on pause. But in this town, there is money to make; people move constantly, selling tomatoes and shooting films and ferrying pipes with fundamentalist fervor. They do not ask if you’re Hindu or Muslim or Christian. If you want to buy, buy. If not, bye-bye.

Markets bring dignity. In most of India, the poor cower before their betters. But visit the Mumbai fish market, and see deference disappear. Time is money; fish are more valuable at 6 a.m. than 8 a.m. And so customers at the market, however well-dressed, are pushed and berated by slum-dwelling women carrying catch on their heads. If you have lived in India long enough to be sickened by servility, such pushes can inspire.

Markets quantify hope. They spur self-improvement, for what is measurable can be improved. You know how good you must be to graduate from motorcycle to car and car to S.U.V. Even as consumption loses favor in the West, it is worth remembering that accumulating stuff is a more peaceful, democratic, healthy form of tribalism than light- or dark-skinned, Sunni or Shiite, gentile or Jew.

Markets bring change. Traditional societies like this one saw time cyclically; life’s goal was to replicate lives lived before. Markets usher in linear accumulation, enabling people to build on the past and venture in new directions. Where markets have reached in India, women and homosexuals and the young have found voice. Where the preserving impulse reigns, silence predominates.

Markets, of course, are not perfect. They are bringing an intellectual narrowness to India, leaving few ideas of the good life besides self-development. With their dogma that anyone can rise, they can blind the fortunate to the plight of the suffering.

But their real dysfunction begins not when there is too much market, but when business grows detached from that original street hustle.

In India, street capitalism is slowly surrendering to skyscraper capitalism: tea stalls ceding to espresso-bar chains, corner stores to supermarkets. And so, one Excel spreadsheet at a time, efficient managers grow ever more remote from the actual marketplace and from their deeds’ human impact.

At India’s corner stores, the service is impeccable. They deliver. They take back spoiled fruit, even after a bite. Now the free market has brought big-box stores to India, air-conditioned and clean. But the staff doesn’t care if you buy. They don’t remember faces. They are all training and no instinct.

The USB port on my BlackBerry once broke. My mobile provider, one of India’s top companies, took weeks to inspect the phone, then told me I had “manhandled” it and quoted an extravagant repair charge. Then a friend told me of a man with a small shop who could sort me out. He was, unlike my provider, vulnerable to the market: he collected the phone, fixed it for a few dollars and delivered it back to me.

Likewise, Mumbai street food is consistently delicious because market forces give vendors no second chances. In the finest restaurants, where dishes can cost one hundred times more, the food is often good and often revolting. These restaurants become entrenched and powerful, and people go because they always have; the feedback on which a real market depends erodes.

The line from such restaurants to credit-default swaps is shorter than it seems. Markets bring scale; scale brings remoteness; remoteness rids markets of the nimbleness and human sensitivity that are best in them.

Now that this is plain to many, what shape might capitalism take, here or in the West?

An answer offered by these streets may be to return capitalism to its origins. In a new age of slow food and local energy grids and community gardens, perhaps we might reinvent a community capitalism: a capitalism with all the advantages of the lean, leveraged, synergized, just-in-time world that markets have made, but a capitalism whose soul remains somehow in the sweaty, throbbing, life-giving bazaar.

Will India Lose Its Charm as It Becomes 'World Class'?

2009-05-21T17:39:00.000-07:00

May 22, 2009

LETTER FROM AMERICA

Will India Lose Its Charm as It Becomes 'World Class'?

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

WASHINGTON — “But you haven’t eaten anything! Come, come, you must have something. At least take some bread. Please.”

They barely serve peanuts aboard American airlines these days. But just a few years ago, in India, it was not uncommon to encounter flight attendants who took it personally when you did not eat.

Their behavior was not that of a pre-programmed employee following a script. It was the universal response of an Indian to an Indian, a horror at the thought that someone in your charge might go hungry.

Then the Indian airline industry became what business-book writers label “world class”: it got with the global program, signing on the dotted lines of the contract with modernity.

Delays waned. Aerobridges were erected. New airlines were born.

Thinner, younger flight attendants were employed. Miniskirts replaced saris. To fly the Indian skies today is to have a perfectly modern experience.

But it is not to have a very Indian experience, because they don’t care if you eat anymore.

These thoughts stirred as I traveled in America in recent days, on a short break from life in India. Here, of course, the notion of flight attendants’ caring if you eat sounds laughable, since they don’t even serve you food much of the time. And yet it is toward this colder, more detached relationship between customer and employee that India is heading.

India has long been a jazz republic, functioning without a written score. People involve themselves in each other’s lives without regard to propriety or privacy. They insist on feeding you even when you want nothing. They insist on paying a price other than the price listed.

They pack as many cars onto a road as possible, without regard to the painted lanes. They pay as little tax as they can get away with.

If you call Domino’s after closing time, you can sometimes cajole them to reopen and deliver a pizza anyway. Everything is a negotiation; everything is improvised. Things are a “no” in India until they are a “yes.”

But a kind of modernity is coming to India, with a Western emphasis on regimentation and formalization. The flight attendants now walk down the aisles carrying out their detailed training, offering food if you want it, moving on if you don’t. A new breed of companies resists hiring the cousins and friends of senior managers; they insist on children’s educating themselves and working hard in order to inherit the family business. More and more people faithfully pay their taxes.

And yet now when I visit America, where I grew up until moving to India six years ago, I wonder if this is where India is bound: a society that is fairer and more ordered, but in which something of the warmth of improvisation is gone.

It is especially visible in customer-service relationships. In India, those relationships are often hierarchical and tinged by a blend of fear and reverence in the service giver’s eyes. But India has not yet crossed that line beyond which such transactions lose their human aspect.

Moving through America, I was struck again and again by the superficial politesse and underlying coldness of so many customer-service moments.

In restaurants, the waiters have become performers, not merely hosts seeking to tend to a guest: “May I ask if it’s your first time dining with us? Wow! Well, it’s wonderful to have you here. Can I begin by telling you about our wonderful specials?” And then the sparkling-or-still-water dilemma, and the practiced Disappointed Look when you want tap water. And the 50-percent-too-elaborate “Are you finished enjoying that?”

Language was invented to connect us, but it sometimes drives us apart.

You see it, too, when you fly. There are the airport-security officials who grimace at you with a “What? You think you’re better than me?” face when you ask them to replenish the stack of trays. Or you finish your glass of water on a flight, and now you wonder about asking the flight attendant, who is now just moving forward to the next row, for a refill. She might do it; but she might, glaring at you in the manner of a headmistress, tell you that she has to serve other customers first and that she will get to you, sir, thank you very much.

And she is right, in a way. Why should you drink twice before others drink once? The attendant’s fidelity to her training is impeccable.

But one senses something robotic at work, cutting between what are, at the day’s end, just two human beings.

And yet, with India as the foil, one can see a deeper meaning in the brusqueness and coldness. So much of this behavior seems intended to draw a red line of dignity around the individual, to declare to the world that she is somebody whom no one can push around, that no one is better than anyone else.

But which is more real, this cold dignity or India’s warm servility?

In my six years there, India has begun to go the formal way. An oversweet, artificial politesse is audible now on certain airlines and customer-service calls and in restaurants and bars. The rules, which have long existed in abundance in India, are no longer things to be broken. People seek space for themselves and give space to others.

They fuss less and less over others, including over whether they have eaten.

And one wonders whether, as modernity comes, India will lose a certain warmth, a certain tender involvement of everyone in everyone. Is the warmth that lingers just a product of this stage of history, residually feudal and agrarian and poor, a stage from which India will eventually move on?

Is destiny the barriers between us?

In Cellphone, India Reveals an Essence

2009-05-07T03:37:00.000-07:00

May 8, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

In Cellphone, India Reveals an Essence

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

VERLA, INDIA — For America in the 1950s, it was the car and the open interstate.

For India today, it is the cellphone.

Sometimes a technology comes along and crystallizes a cultural moment. Not since the automobile and the American, perhaps, have a technology and a people wedded as happily as Indians and their mobiles, small and big, vibrating and tringing, Blackberry and plain vanilla. And neither India nor the cellphone will be the same from the pairing.

India now sells more new cellphone connections than anyplace else, with 15.6 million in March alone. The cost of calling is among the lowest in the world. And the device plays a larger-than-life role here than in the wealthy countries where it was invented.

Of course, in so vast a country, India’s nearly 400 million cellphone users still account for only one-third of the population.

But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, and a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states. The average bill is less than $5 per month, and, if present trends continue, every Indian will have a cellphone in five years.

What makes the cellphone special in India? It is partly that India skipped the land-line revolution, making cellphones the first real contact with the outside world for hundreds of millions. It is partly that with few other machines selling so briskly, the cellphone in India also serves variously as a personal computer, flashlight, camera, stereo, video-game console and organizer. It is partly that India’s relative poverty compels providers to be more creative to survive.

But it is also that the cellphone appeals deeply to the Indian psychology, to the spreading desire for personal space and voice, not in defiance of the family and tribe but in the chaotic midst of it.

Imagine what it was like, back in the Pre-cellular Age, to be young in a traditional household. People are everywhere. Doors are open. Judgments fly. Bedrooms are shared. Phones are centrally located.

The cellphone serves, then, as a technology of individuation. On the cellphone, you are your own person. No one answers your calls or reads your messages. Your number is just yours.

And yet the young Indian rebel, unlike his Western counterpart, does not rebel totally. He wants to savor his new individuality, but do so while sitting with his parents having dinner, listening to his grandmother implore him to get married. He listens, then taps a few keys on his cellphone to escape, then listens some more, and taps, and listens.

The cellphone appeals, too, because it plays into the Indian need to place people. Cellular differences today perform the role that forehead markings and strings around torsos and metal bracelets once did: announcing who outranks whom.

Small people have small phones, and big people have big ones.

Small people have numerical-soup numbers, and big people have numbers that end in 77777 or something like that. Small people have one phone, and big people have two. Small people set their phones merely to ring, and big people make Bollywood songs play when you call them.

The cellphone, in short, has made itself Indian. There are 65 times more cellphone connections than broadband Internet links, and the gap is widening. And so those who wish to influence Indians are not waiting for the computer to catch on, but are seeking ways to migrate onto the cellphone the things Westerners do online.

Indian companies have invented methods, via simple cellphone text messaging, to wire money to temples, pay for groceries, find jobs and send and receive e-mail (on humble phones with no data connection).

But the most intriguing notion is that cellphones could transform Indian democracy.

Even in this election season, Indians are famously cynical about their senior-citizen-dominated, dynastic, corrupt politics. The educated often sit out elections. But with cellphones’ becoming near-universal, experiments are sprouting with the goal of forging a new bond between citizen and state, through real-time, 24-hour cellular participation.

In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, citizens who file a right-to-information request can now check its status via text message. Anyone who has been to an Indian government office, begging men in safari suits to do their job, will welcome this service.

A number of civic groups, meanwhile, have devised cellphone-based ways of informing voters about candidates for Parliament. If you text your postal code to the Association for Democratic Reforms, it will reply with candidate profiles like this:

DEORA MILIND MURLI (INC) Crim. Cases - No, Assets 175373142, Liab 0, Edu graduate_professional

MOHMAD ALI ABUBAKAR SHAIKH (BSP) Crim. Cases - Yes (1), Assets 445015617, Liab 2489959, Edu illiterate

A new interactivity is dawning in the news media, too. Now, via cellphone, citizens are talking back to the press, creating a continuous feedback loop between reporters and the public opinion they shape. Channels solicit text messages during broadcasts to air opinions and conduct opinion polls. Comments crawl across the screen as talking heads talk.

In 2006, a court acquitted Manu Sharma, a politician’s son, in the murder of a model, Jessica Lall, even though several witnesses had seen him shoot her. This was nothing new in India. But a groundswell of text-message anger made its way onto television screens and compelled officials to retry Mr. Sharma. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to life.

Imagine the future: A young woman sits on her sofa. With a few taps, she checks that her tax return has been cleared. With a few more, she learns that her local legislator is a criminal, and she switches to the other candidate. She wires a campaign contribution by text. And then she notices on television a debate on her favorite topic, and listens to the arguments and taps hurriedly into her phone words that will soon scroll across the screen.

It is not Athens, but it would be a start: in the world’s largest democracy, government not by passive consent, but by something like a conversation.

Big Election, Teeny, Tiny (if Any) Ideas

2009-04-23T03:44:00.001-07:00

April 24, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

Big Election, Teeny, Tiny (if Any) Ideas

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

VERLA — “This time the DMK alliance is a truncated one and includes the Congress and the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK). Jayalalitha’s AIADMK has stitched up a coalition that includes the PMK, MDMK, CPI and the CPI(M). She claims she has an ‘unbeatable combination.’ With the CPI, CPI(M) and the MDMK moving over to her side, all indications are that the AIADMK will get ahead with a majority. The DMK alliance, though, may not be demolished completely.”

I know, I know. The beginning of a newspaper article should be gripping, and comprehensible at the least.

Sorry. You see, with election fever roiling India, I thought you might like a taste of the great contest of ideas under way in the biggest election on the planet.

Well, as it turns out, there are no ideas in Indian elections anymore.

So I thought I’d give you the next best thing: a sample of the nonsense that Indians must imbibe (this nonsense from Outlook, a respected English-language news weekly) as they wait for their politics to become less soul-crushingly trivial.

Most of the world ignores India until it (a) takes their jobs or (b) chooses a leader. Outsiders love its elections. The foreign-correspondent Standard Narrative is dusted off for its quintennial tour: “The world’s largest democracy is having the world’s largest election, like, ever!”

But, even as foreign reporters pour in to tell that prefabricated story, it is difficult to fight the feeling that this big, big election is in fact pitifully small. The understanding of democracy is small. The candidates are small. The conversation is small.

The quoted paragraph distills this election well: no ideology, no larger-than-life leaders, no causes, no principles at stake. Instead, just alphabets, this lot siding with that lot and these people with them — a process resembling a children’s game show, not the solemn selection of leaders for 1.2 billion human beings.

This large ritual of democracy is easy to celebrate if we define democracy in the smallest possible way. If democracy is voting every five years, then Jai Ho! But if it asks something more, if it implies a certain way of life, then we must keep the Champagne corked.

Perhaps democracy means leaders not asking you to cast votes according to your caste. Or citizen confidence in the rule of law. Or a police force that you trust will solve your burglary instead of stealing more of your stuff. Or civic enthusiasm vigorous enough that educated people follow traffic rules and even choose public service over private gain. Or empathy for the nation’s hungry other half.

Perhaps it means the democracy of the day-to-day: equality not just in a constitution, but also in quotidian human interactions: the waiter and the customer, the chauffeur and the driven, conversing rather than barking and meekly taking orders.

The candidates are as small as the definition of democracy.

There are the old-guard leaders like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Lal Krishna Advani, the major contenders to run India. At 76 and 81, respectively, they would appear to make wonderful grandfathers, with soft laps and lots of tales to tell. But they simply cannot connect with one of the youngest populations on earth, buzzing, fired up and ready to go.

As alternatives, there are younger state-level populists like Kumari Mayawati and Narendra Modi. They have impassioned flocks, but they are small in their own way, narrow-casting to particular religious and caste cohorts, alienating others. Their broad-based appeal is questionable.

There are the so-called young MPs, but their youthful achievements are diminished by the fact that they are usually the sons of important men.

And there are the new candidates from the educated elite, who seem decent, who campaign vigorously on Facebook, but who struggle to convince anyone that they really care about latrines and rice subsidies.

But it is, above all, the smallness of the national conversation that baffles. The debate never rises above the battle tactics of who is with whom, and who ditched whom, and who said what in reply to what the other one said. The politicians, seemingly incapable of ideas, are wise not to attempt any. But the press, whose task is to challenge them, plays along, writing drivel analyses like the analysis with which I began, treating the thing like a sport, tit-for-tat, tat-for-tit, until it is time to go home.

India’s election must rank with the least ideological elections in the world. Which thinkers have inspired each party’s philosophy? What are their core principles? Why do politicians switch parties so effortlessly, without having to explain their shift in positions?

I have asked politicians these questions. It is like speaking to them in Creole, because the questions are not phrased in the only language they understand, the language of whether the ABC will merge with the XYZ to form the EIEIO.

Beyond the realm of government, it is a dizzyingly exciting moment in India, one of those rare moments in the life of a nation when everything remains to be decided, when a hundred alternative fates are possible.

What do Indians want to do with Pakistan, their nuclear-armed rival that is also like a younger sibling in rehab? What is their solution to stubborn, blood-curdling poverty? How can they balance growth and greenness? What of the old culture should they keep? What brand of capitalism do they favor, a borrowed market-is-god dogma or an approach bespoke for their situation? What values will they champion abroad?

These questions matter. They matter to Indians; they matter to the world, because every sixth human is Indian.

But they will not be answered in these coming days of frantic electioneering or, if these days are any guide, in the five years of tragic banality that lurk just around the bend.

Interview with TVO's "The Agenda"

2009-04-23T02:29:00.000-07:00

Watching the Empire Move on

2009-04-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

April 10, 2009

LETTER FROM AMERICA

Watching the Empire Move On

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS -- The woman reached for my ticket. I had entered the parking lot two hours and a few minutes earlier. The first two hours were free, but I had stepped just across the line into paying territory. Would she let it slide?

She appeared East African; I am an American who lives in India; I imagined that she and I might have a shared sense of the situation. I was just a few minutes over, and in our Old Countries I might have been waved through with a flexible shrug.

But not here, not in America, where there are rules to bring human caprice under control. She asked for $2, and I paid, with a feeling of sadness at the coldness of our interaction and yet also a sense of admiration for the great human accomplishment -- the invention of patterns that apply to everyone always, not selectively and sometimes -- behind that coldness.

You notice things when you come home. I grew up in America but have been living for nearly six years in India. I returned home this time in a storm of terrible words: crisis, downturn, recession. And what struck me about the gloom, coming from overseas, is that it is both deeper and shallower than most Americans think.

The crisis seems deeper because it is not, at least to these foreign-returned eyes, simply a matter of subprime mortgages and credit-default swaps and A.I.G. and Ponzi schemers.

It can seem a natural outgrowth of a way of life that jars one upon landing in America: an entire society induced to want more and more, to consume more than they earn, more than 1,000 beings elsewhere might consume; a society that has invented, for $4, a ''skinny hazelnut latte'' but has diminished the odds of the guests in the coffeehouse speaking to another human being rather than to their laptops; an obsession with perpetual movement that sometimes drowns out the question, ''Why are we doing this?''

But as I drank America in, I also could not help but feel that the crisis was shallower than Americans think: that America, which has spread these woes to the world, has special powers to escape them, powers that the countries it has infected may lack: powers of regeneration and reinvention.

Diversity is not normal. Most people in most places live and work with people who look like them, eat what they eat, share their sense of right and wrong. Back in India, even today, if you pluck two names out of the phone book, chances are that they would not be able to dine together: different notions of pollution and purity, vegetarian and nonvegetarian; different assessments of each other's level of humanness.

But, from Washington to Brooklyn to Boston, it struck me again and again how American faces don't match. They mouth different languages. They live in a thousand idiosyncratic styles. And, exposed to so many others' idiosyncrasies, they cross-pollinate and invent.

Then there is the power of creative destruction. There must always be something better, a new new thing to replace the old new thing. It is a political system that alienates the world by making an enemy called Hussein and then pivots to elect a president called Hussein.

And there is the power of democracy: not the democracy of casting a vote at regular intervals, but the democracy that weaves into everyday human interactions, a culture in which no one is thought to be better than anyone else, in which the idea of a taboo against ''commoners'' touching a queen is strange.

It is coffee shops where you bus your own cups. Important officials who drive themselves to work alone, not with phalanxes of needless hangers-on around them. A ceaseless flurry of ''thank you'' and ''please,'' which sound to foreign-returning ears like pro forma phrases, but which suggest a concern about taking people for granted, about assuming that anyone owes you anything simply because of their rank and yours.

The American superstructure is burning down. But the foundation, of diversity, creative destruction, democracy -- these things live on and will, one imagines, underpin a revival before long.

I worry far more for the developing world, for places like India, which has been mimicking the American superstructure without building an equivalent foundation, pursuing the effect without the cause.

India seems, on the surface, to have arrived. There are the requisite global luxury boutiques; restaurants that serve sophisticated food in tiny portions with something called coulis drizzled across the plate; Indian firms that make multibillion-dollar acquisitions; software companies that write code for the world; songs that win Oscars and hearts many thousands of miles away.

But perhaps it has all come too quickly, and served to crowd out the hard slog of constructing a modern society in more than name alone. Yes, India has Louis Vuitton, but how easy is it to be gay there? Yes, its companies have dazzled the world, but why do their workers complain still about the hierarchical, soul-draining work culture? Yes, it won an Olympic gold medal last year, but why has it been so hard to recast servants as people paid, not born, to serve?

Success is distracting, and it distracts one, above all, from failures. And so the result in India is a revolution that feels borrowed, without all the preceding layers on which to stand.

Today in America a whole way of life is crumbling. But, just as fast, new visions are taking hold. New notions of permissible state intervention in the economy; a new questioning of the culture of debt. As an old superstructure withers, the robust foundation seems ready to birth the eternally improbable new.

But in India, to which I will soon return, one fears that the society will succumb yet again to the empire's joke. Empires bring an alien way of life to a land; and then they leave and move on. But the colonized, cut off from the source of their own behavior, keep repeating the old patterns, which is why Indians still say ''cantonment'' and ''alight,'' long after most Britons have ceased and desisted.

Will it be the same this time around, with the arduous pupil converted to the Washington Consensus way of life in the very hour that that consensus crumbles, without the capacity to invent the next way of life, with nothing to go on but someone else's time-worn ideas?

My interview on India with Canadian television

2009-04-10T10:11:00.000-07:00

Behind Facebook's success: It takes a village

2009-03-26T14:11:00.000-07:00

By Anand Giridharadas

Thursday, March 26, 2009

VERLA, India: Twitter and Facebook are, OMG, so last millennium.

Or so it seems as I look out through my window in the forested Indian village where I am living, one of those places that the future has yet to invade.

A row of modest houses faces me. All day long, as I write, their inhabitants talk. And I have discovered through their talk that the age-old sociability of the village ambient sociability, one might call it harbors a strange likeness to the social-networking culture we think to be so new.

They don't do one-on-one conversation here. They broadcast. If you have something to say, yell. Bring water! Go to school! Why did you tell her that thing? The people do not limit their talk to their own homes. Their scolds and praise and commands are for the village.

Privacy means little. Their doors are scraps of fabric. People come and go; it is hard to say who owns which house. Committing adultery or defaulting on a loan would be social suicide: everyone would know. A bargain has been made: There is more to gain from being in the network than from anonymity.

They stand in a stream of soothingly mindless hubbub. They hear opinions even when they do not ask, receive advice they do not need, get a little love from everyone and a lot from no one. Village sociability is not about sharing feelings. It doesn't dwell on you. It asks for little. It just buzzes.

And what do the Internet's social networks offer if not this village buzz? You build networks wider than your circle of close friends, and immediately you, too, stand in Hubbub Creek.

One friend "has been caring for an indescribably adorable baby bunny," your Facebook news bulletin tells you. Another is "leaving for 10 days of backpacking!" Another's iPhone has survived a "swim." Once they are in your network, you are compelled, as in the village, to know their business. It's strangely nice.

This is not about deep bonding. For that, stick to e-mail, the phone and remember it? human interaction. Social networks offer only ambient love. They maintain not your 10 key relationships, but your hundred semi-key mini-relationships. They are not about understanding or soul-baring, but about being simply, ambiently present about knowing as soon as a relationship has ended, as they do in a village, even if you never learn why.

Villages once blanketed the earth. Then towns congealed, then cities, and the West in particular urbanized intensively, adopting the city's weaker, more anonymous links.

Material affluence grew. But it came at the price of increasing isolation: vast high rises, far-flung and atomized suburbs, long commutes, a withering civic life, families separated by the pursuit of careers, fraying marriages and, above all, what the late novelist David Foster Wallace called "a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself."

That does not mean villages are ideal. They are home to unpardonable cruelties. They pigeonhole; they stifle. Many of India's villagers hunger for the urban life, boarding trains by the millions each year to get out.

But one senses that the West's social-network devotees, born in Mr. Wallace's lonely culture, are driving the opposite way. The world feels too anonymous, homogeneous, with no tribes or castes to cling to. It is a climbing wall in polished marble, without nooks for our feet.

And to socially network is to make a big world feel small, to belong as in our village pasts, to live in that gentle, loving buzz.

In India's smaller settlements, shame governs. Umred, a heartland town of 50,000, functions on mutually assured destruction. If a woman is seen on a motorcycle with a man, she is toast: the witness will tell. In so doing, the witness effectively denies herself the same activity. People participate in this because it enforces shared norms, which give them identity.

In the West, a certain anonymity once prevailed, then was voluntarily surrendered. People now post drunken photographs of themselves, announce whereabouts, disclose activities that could return to haunt them. There are risks for employment. There are risks for relationships "No, I was at a work dinner," you say, before the party photographs are uploaded. There are risks for offending friends when you visit a city without telling them.

But we make the same bargain as villagers: that, in surrendering privacy, we gain community.

In Ludhiana, a northern town, honor culture runs deep. The sexes are carefully segregated; men rarely ask women out. Instead, a man might circle a woman's block on foot. He and his friends might hang out in the quarter. Then, having registered a regular, ambient presence, he might graduate to calling her and meeting her. In India prospective mates generally cannot spring out of the blue, but must come with context, connections, a history.

This may sound medieval to a Western ear. But has social networking not brought Indian-style courtship to the West? If a Westerner met someone at a party 10 years ago, one had to ask for a number or risk losing touch. Today, people can be found the next morning on Facebook and "friended." An ambient presence can slowly be registered, a virtual if not physical circling of the block. Then, as in Ludhiana, one can close in when risk has abated.

And when you friend someone you've just met, you can know, before venturing out on a date, the person's age, religion, politics, education, job history. I thought Indians alone still did such reconnaissance. But now Facebook Casanovas are adopting the village ways, in which "bio-data" are shared first and kisses later.

The West has, in effect, retraced the life path of Ram Jatan Pal.

He began in a teeming Mumbai slum, much like a village, where doors were open, toilets were shared and gossip and opinions flowed swiftly through the gullies.

Then he moved up in the world; he got "development." The government offered him an apartment with his own toilet. Which seemed like a good idea, until Mr. Pal went inside and shut a front door for the first time in his life.

"It's like being caged in a poultry farm," he complained.

Like Western beneficiaries of "development," Mr. Pal felt there was something missing. There used to be friends everywhere, playing cards, eating, drifting among homes. Step outside, and you saw everyone you knew.

They were not your best friends. It was ambient. They were there.

It was enough.

What Mr. Pal misses, perhaps we also miss. We have tired of coming home, shutting the door and living in our own heads. So we soothe ourselves as best we can, with this cool, gushing stream of sweet networked nothings.

Traditional luxury vs. the modern kind -- India at a crossroads

2009-03-20T08:02:00.000-07:00

By Anand Giridharadas

Friday, March 20, 2009

VERLA, India:

Mukesh Ambani is recession-proof.

He is among the richest men in India and worth billions. His interests span mobile telephony, supermarkets and oil refining. He is building a skyscraper of a mansion, with 27 stories stretched to the height of 54, in Mumbai. He has the private plane for quiet reading time, the helicopter for the tight weave of Mumbai traffic, the Zimbabwean wildlife getaways for family bonding.

But global luxury cant crack even the richest latter-day maharajah.

How about a custom-stitched Brioni suit? Actually, Mr. Ambani prefers a white short-sleeved shirt and dark pants, like Indian bureaucrats wear. Fine Bordeaux wines? He prefers coconut water. Gucci loafers? He prefers those rounded black shoes worn by the $300-a-month salarymen on the train. Fancy restaurants? He prefers street snacks; the first time he dined at Nobu in New York, he suggested to a companion afterward that they go eat now.

Mr. Ambani is the furthest thing from the average Indian, and rather far ahead of the rest of the Indian elite. But he distills an Indian personality trait that may be the great dilemma for Western luxury brands here.

Those brands have built flagship stores in India and have begun to sell. But sales have seldom lived up to expectations, and it may be because Indias affluent classes are bipolar on matters of luxury: with a little of the renouncing, homespun ascetic in them, and a little of the mansion-building maharajah. Luxury brands are locked in the awkward middle, peddling things that are, strangely, both too luxe for India and not luxe enough.

To put it another way: there is, even in this downturn, no dearth of funds. Plenty of Indian women, for example, have the equivalent of $3,000 to spend. The challenge is to get them to spend the money on a bag, a kind of luxury that can still feel alien to them.

A woman will remember just a few years ago, when she avoided spending even one-hundredth of that amount at a restaurant: so the purse is too luxe. And she will remember going to the tailor with her grandmother and getting a years worth of clothes custom-stitched to her exact form by artisans who knew her since birth: so the purse is not luxe enough.

Each polarity has its history.

The maharajah streak derives from the countrys earlier, feudal age. When looking at what the world is now trying to sell India, it is worth remembering that luxury is not a new concept here.

Sanchita Ajjampur, an Indian clothing designer who divides her time between Bangalore and Milan, offered this list of the Indian meanings of luxury over the centuries: emeralds, rubies and pearls; gold watches and silver platters; Persian carpets; ivory tableware; Dhaka muslin; silk embedded with precious stones; pistachios, pine nuts and sweets coated with thin layers of silver or gold foil; saffron; opium; attar, the natural perfume of flower extracts; live performances of ghazals and poetry; palanquins; Bentleys; hunting; massages; diamond paper weights; gold thread woven into fabric.

Of course, few Indians ever saw these things. Most were, then as now, too busy toiling without thanks to keep the maharajahs purring. But that is not to say that feudal luxury had no broader impact, for it did: it shaped a culture, still very influential, in which luxury meant personalized service and heirloom things, from saris to jewelry to suits.

It was the shawl wallah who came to your living room and unfurled shawl after shawl, coaxing and cajoling until you spent thousands of dollars on one. You may not have had air conditioning, but you bought his shawl. It was jewelry shops where relationships went back decades and women custom-drew designs. It was gold and diamonds and carpets and silverware inherited over five generations. It was bespoke tailoring. And it was the tale behind everything, the vendors whispering to you like storytellers of the winding odyssey of this silk or that cashmere from the village to you.

So when Yes Bank, an Indian financial house, writes in a report on luxury in India that the market will only explode as Indians become more and more refined in their tastes and preferences, one wonders if a lack of refinement is really the problem.

With these folk memories of luxury lingering, it can be hard for the perfectly nice things available from Western luxury houses to compete whether, to quote offerings from Vogue India, it is auto-vibrating mascara from Lancôme (7,000 vibrations a minute) or a $3,500 Ralph Lauren leather belt.

The other polarity is Gandhis. Modern India has strayed from his vision, but a shadow of his abstemiousness still lingers, even in elite imaginations: certain kinds of consumption remain easier for Indians to swallow than others. Hard assets and things that protect the family go down more smoothly than what feels frivolous. Many who own private jets still avoid eating too often in posh restaurants; many who build cavernous mansions still fail to see the value in handcrafted lambskin moccasins.

I grew up in a newly independent India, and we were told Gandhi would disapprove of any product or service that didnt build the nation, Shobhaa De, a prominent Indian columnist who began her career as a model, wrote in an e-mail message. Anything superfluous (nearly all that I lusted after fell into this category) was discouraged. This included eating out (Whats wrong with home food?), taking cabs (Buses! So convenient.) and chicken (Gandhiji says a vegetarian diet is better for health).

Until the 1990s, in line with this philosophy, India made it virtually impossible to import luxury goods. So what was Ms. Des idea of luxury growing up?

Kraft cheese was considered the ultimate treat, she said. Splurging was restricted to buying a pink frock from a fancy store on a birthday. Pastries and ice creams over weekends. Movies once a month. And, much later, imported cardigans from Scotland during Delhis harsh winters.

For others, it was Reebok sneakers. Pizza at Nirulas. White Staedtler erasers. A tape deck. Jansport backpacks. A 15-rupee coffee at the Taj Mahal hotel. Taxis. Air-conditioned train compartments. An airplane ticket, in economy. It is not easy persuading people, even rich ones, to pay up when these were their ideas of indulgence.

Sheetal Jain, a mother of two in Bombay, said that, just 10 years ago, luxury to her meant buying pre-cut produce instead of spending less and chopping it herself. Today, definitions stretch. She buys Indian designer wear and eats at five-star hotels. But the mores of two different eras still tug at her.

There is a feeling of do we have to pay this much for a meal? she wrote in an by e-mail message. But the thought is quickly banished as we pay with a credit card (again, a luxury then but a necessity now) and console ourselves inwardly with why stint when we work so hard to get here in the first place? This luxury is now a right that we dont want to feel apologetic about!

Go Away Guilt, Over to Luxe: that is how Yes Banks report described the elites drift toward indulgence. The drift is happening, not least because many now feel a need to keep up with the Kumars, so to speak, even if they dont understand the fuss.

The drift is from an investment mentality (buy a house) to a consumer mentality (buy a bag). From the avoidance of labor (spend on drivers, butlers, waiters and cleaners) to the collecting of things (spend on cars and cigars and perfumes). From private luxuriating (house parties) to public luxuriating (parties at Wasabi and Indigo). From inherited treasures (great-grandmothers sari) to store-bought treasures (a designer sari with Japanese printing). From spending based on past earnings (at age 60) to spending based on future earnings (at age 30).

But the drift may be slow; and that is partly because something in the psyche tells Indians to resist luxury, and partly because something in the psyche tells Indians that they invented luxury.

Anand Giridharadas, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, is writing a nonfiction book about modern India.

These Days, No Reporting Behind a Nation’s Back

2009-03-12T05:14:00.000-07:00

March 15, 2009

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

VERLA, India — They sat before me, husband and wife, and explained why they wanted a divorce.

In a dingy Indian courthouse, the couple had agreed to be interviewed for an article on the fraying of Indian marriages because their counselor had told them that I was a foreign correspondent; my work would circulate “there,” not “here.” They didn’t mind if people in the Bronx read of their unraveling, but they didn’t want their families or neighbors to.

Normally, it is the interviewed who seek anonymity and we correspondents who discourage it. But in this case, it fell to me to alert them that their counselor’s advice was out of date, and to suggest that they hide their full identities behind their Hindu astrological names.

Foreign correspondence, I explained, is not as foreign as it used to be. “There, not here,” is over.

It is a momentous, overlooked shift in the world: Foreign correspondents no longer cover one place for the exclusive benefit of readers somewhere else. In the Internet age, we cover each place for the benefit of all places, and the reported-on are among the most avid consumers of what we report. If my sources had fully identified themselves, expecting privacy, they might have been surprised to learn who follows Western coverage of India most devotedly.

According to data teased out of the Google Trends service, the phrases “new york times india” and “washington post india” are searched eight times as much in India, as a proportion of all Indian searches, as the equivalent in the United States. By the same measure, “new york times china” is searched more intensively in Beijing than in New York.

This dynamic applies to countries from Brazil to Russia. And Thomas Friedman’s book “The World Is Flat,” in which he cites Bangalore’s transformation as he explains the 21st-century world, is searched more regularly in India than in the United States. The world has flattened in yet another way: the Internet makes it possible, almost everywhere, to see how the world outside sees you, and in real time.

I rang up Roger Cohen, a veteran foreign correspondent-turned-columnist for The New York Times, to get a feel for the world now vanishing.

Mr. Cohen began with Reuters in 1979. Correspondents would roam for days; editors didn’t know where they were and there were no BlackBerrys to use to track them down.

Their work, once published, slowly filtered into the discussion back in Washington or Paris and helped to inform that debate; in time, of course, it could make its way back to the covered countries. Some newspapers, including this one, sold overseas editions in small numbers in dozens of international cities. Émigrés cut out articles for relatives in the old country. Governments monitored foreign press coverage.

But the vast populations that foreign correspondents wrote about remained for the most part oblivious to what was being said about them. And even when they knew, there was no easy way to talk back, except by mailing a letter to the newspaper’s headquarters that, by correspondents’ accounts, was almost never forwarded to bureaus.

I started 26 years after Mr. Cohen, and my generation of correspondents will never starve for feedback. The newspaper’s online edition is available almost everywhere. People in far-flung countries read us like just another newspaper. Others happen to stumble on our Web sites through Internet search engines.

So the reported-on know what we’re saying — and now they can retort. They blog about our work; post it admiringly or disparagingly on Facebook; find our e-mail addresses with a few keystrokes; comment on our Web sites to point out mistakes. In my own experience as a correspondent in India, the majority of this activity has come from within the country. The coverage is available universally, but it is followed most passionately by those being covered.

And the implications for foreign correspondence are far larger than has perhaps been grasped.

“Here” readers are better watchdogs than “there” readers. They catch errors that a Western editor simply cannot. They also form a check on the exoticizing impulse. Certain lenses for seeing a country sell easily overseas: India’s poverty, China’s repression. But a battalion of bloggers is raring to point out the obvious and hackneyed, and they keep us on our toes.

Peter Foster, a correspondent in Beijing for The Telegraph in London and an active blogger, wrote in an e-mail message that his blog “opened up an invaluable discussion/discourse with readers,” but he also noted high levels of nationalism and “vitriol” in this talk-back.

Luke Harding, the Moscow bureau chief for the British newspaper The Guardian, suggested that the vitriol he received for his coverage of last year’s war in Georgia seemed organized. “I suspect — but can’t prove — there is now a new cadre of professional bloggers working anonymous for the Kremlin, and presumably other governments,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

The feedback loops also threaten a correspondent’s ability to bring home the juiciest meat, as Nicholas Kristof, another foreign correspondent-turned-columnist, observed in an e-mail message. Blogging and Twittering and instantaneous publication empower not only readers, but also those most threatened by daring journalism. A column he wrote about Iran, he said, published while he was still there and read by the authorities, led to his temporary detention at the airport.

Moreover, there is a tradition of sources’ telling foreign correspondents what they would not tell a local journalist or official. That is often how a historical record about wars and genocides is assembled: people whispering into the ear of someone soon to leave. Such whispering could shrink in the Web age.

And in this new world it is easy to become addicted to the debate one stirs. The “most e-mailed” lists, the blogs, the online comments — these can tempt one to write what draws the most praise or at least the most “noise,” as Mr. Cohen put it. “You hear a great range of views about what you are writing, and some of those views can be exciting or interesting or lead you in new directions in terms of what you write and subjects you choose,” he said. “My hesitation is that this is a temptation to somehow write into that noise and stir it further and be in the noise because it’s fun being in it, which I think can be a distraction.”

In the 1990s, Mr. Cohen chronicled, in person, the horrors that accompanied Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Today, correspondents doing such work can find their time being sucked away by the profusion online of viewpoints and images and tweets from the scene, which multiply and demand attention. But keeping abreast of the Internet chatter is not the same as bearing witness.

“Instead of looking at a Bosnian village or hillside or being in a room with a group of concentration-camp survivors or bereaved women,” Mr. Cohen said, “you would have just been staring at a screen and dealing with the rage of the Serbian diaspora in Munich or Los Angeles.”

He added, “I don’t regret at all that it wasn’t around then.”

The 'Slumdog' effect: Afflict the comfortable

2009-02-26T06:27:00.000-08:00

By Anand Giridharadas

Thursday, February 26, 2009

MUMBAI: If India's well-to-do ran the world, the film that dominated the Academy Awards this week might simply have been called "Millionaire."

That aspect of the movie - about hope - the well-to-do liked. It was the other aspect, distilled in the word "Slumdog," that was so deflating.

The boom era now fading left two longings among India's globalized rich. The first is a desire for recognition by the West, through magazine covers and Booker Prizes and Grammys. The second is a desire to show the world the most sanitized representation of India, not the stereotypical India mired in poverty and degradation, but an India as pristine as the elite's own posh homes.

Sometimes international recognition and sanitization come in the same work, as in films like "Bride and Prejudice" and "Outsourced." But on other occasions, what might be called the Slumdog Bargain has imposed itself: world acclaim came at the cost of celebrating a vision of India that the elite didn't really want to see.

Until the triumphs of Oscar night won their grudging nods to its success, many affluent Indians were irked by "Slumdog Millionaire." They complained at cocktail parties, in the press and on television: There they go again, those Westerners, making this out to be a land of poverty or something! They found their voice in Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood's best-loved star, who ranted against "Slumdog" in a blog post that fast ricocheted through urban India.

"If SM projects India as Third World dirty under-belly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots," he wrote, "let it be known that a murky under-belly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations."

Supportive comments poured into the site from the elite pool of Indians with Internet access.

"They should realize that SM is not an Indian movie, but a means to sell out India to the world in order to make money," one user wrote. "The West enjoys trashing India as a land of smelly beggars and a land of corruption," said another.

The recognition-sanitization dilemma had struck a few months earlier, as well, when Aravind Adiga won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, "The White Tiger." He was praised in the local newspapers as yet another dazzling Indian novelist. But the book is not exactly a travel brochure. As he surveys India's class divides, he refers to millions of his compatriots as "half-baked," filled with "half-cooked ideas" by dismal schools. He writes of the degraded serving classes as "crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their 30s or 40s or 50s but still 'boys."'

Likewise, Arundhati Roy brought the nation great pride when she won the Booker in 1997 for "The God of Small Things." That is, until the newly affluent classes began to read her nonfiction writing and discovered her criticism of their heedless consumption and their blindness to the plight of the poor.

"There's a kind of insanity in the air and all of it held down by our mesmeric, pelvic-thrusting Bollywood movies," she told The Guardian newspaper in 2007. "The Indian middle class has just embarked on this orgy of consumerism."

Of course, the lifetime-achievement award in this category goes to V.S. Naipaul, a native of Trinidad who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. At the time, his Indian heritage was duly celebrated. Never mind his actual words about India: its "human futility," its "diseased society," its "intellectual depletion," its "evolution downwards, wasted body to wasted body."

The comfortable classes dismiss these ways of seeing India as exploitative, as taking a slice of reality and marketing it to the outside world as the whole. But the truth may be instead that the comfortable are ever less aware of what reality in this country really involves.

Newspapers, magazines and television stations have all but removed poverty from prominence. They give more space to mergers than corruption, to Slumdog than slums. It becomes possible as a New Indian to imagine that India's poverty is some jealous Westerner's invention and to fear that one's own rising status is threatened by it.

That seems to be ultimate anxiety of the well-to-do: not the fact of poverty itself, but what poverty says about them. Poverty complicates the respect they are given on business trips abroad; poverty taints their Harvard degrees.

It is telling that, in my four years of writing about India, no poor person has ever asked me not to write about poverty. Countless rich people have.

I once received an e-mail response to an article of mine from an Indian-born, MIT-trained economist who has lived in the United States, Europe and other parts of Asia.

"I was deeply pained and disappointed to catch a phrase, 'in this overwhelmingly destitute nation'," he said, in language that betrayed the personal, rather than political, nature of his complaint. "Why? Was it your phrase or did the editors insert it? What is the need to reinforce a stereotype of the West?"

But economic development is not Photoshop. There is a difference between making poverty history and making the mention of poverty history. Perhaps this is not part of the economics curriculum at MIT, but the World Bank says that 80 percent of Indians live on less than $2 daily.

The same self-regard was visible in Bachchan's musings. Unlike his counterpart Sean Penn, a heterosexual man who used his spotlight on Oscar night to call for the rights of those less included than he, Bachchan, like my economist interlocutor, seemed most concerned with his own psychic well-being. His words suggested a yearning to feel good about India that was more urgent to him than the change he might have achieved by saying other things: that half of Mumbai's people still live in slums; that half of India's children are still underfed; and that, whatever your taste in movies, something must be done.

Bachchan has done more than most for the poor, including battling polio. But his words on this occasion were about neediness more than the needy, and about Bachchan himself more than the gaunt millions who finance his career. And some visitors to his blog, dissenting from the rest, suggested that he reacquaint himself with reality by taking a short walk.

"If you think that SM movie did not show india as a developed country - you may have to step outside your opulent bungalow and have a look at how most people in india live - they live in villages and slums ignored by the government, celebrities and 'bollywood' filmmakers," a user called "Patriotic indian" wrote.

"Patriotism," the comment continued, "is not about living in an imaginary world but facing the real problems of India and doing something about it."

India's case of Obama envy

2009-02-12T04:16:00.000-08:00

By Anand Giridharadas

Thursday, February 12, 2009

VERLA, India: Call it Obama envy.

This nation, the largest democracy in the East, peers these days at America, the largest democracy in the West, and feels itself wanting.

Its newspapers ask why India can't have its own Barack Obama, why a land so diverse can't elect a Muslim or untouchable-caste prime minister. Many Indians watched Obama's Inaugural Address, fully rapt, even though a good number have never watched an Indian leader's speech in entirety.

The idea of Obama is baffling to many Indians, who have come to define a "leader" as someone over 75, flagrantly corrupt, physically unbecoming, descended from other politicians and oblivious to the realities of their constituents' beleaguered lives. An election looms this year in India, pitting the bookish septuagenarian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, against Lal Krishna Advani, an octogenarian campaigning as fresh blood.

"The leader of the other great democracy is just a 47-year-old who talks like a Churchill and writes like a novelist," S. Prasannarajan, executive editor of the India Today magazine, wrote recently. "In the Age of Obama, India is suffering from political senescence. When change is no longer a cliché but a history-making invocation, we are steeped in our dead certainties."

The magazine fleshed out this thought with a survey of 1,600 young people spread across eight Indian cities. Two-thirds of India's 1.2 billion people are under 35, and the survey found them craving an Obamaesque "new politics," though they had no illusions that such a thing might be possible in India.

Some of this rising generation's attitudes were predictable: Three-quarters said politicians should retire at 60. Nine out of 10 favored criminal background checks on parliamentary candidates.

But there were other, more ominous portents of what can happen when the young and ambitious feel unrepresented by conventional politics.

Nearly half of the respondents agreed that "India can function better only under military rule." The leading choice for prime minister was Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat State, who has been condemned by human rights groups for failing to intervene in a massacre of Muslims in 2002. When asked to choose India's all-time best leader, the young chose Indira Gandhi, the only prime minister to have suspended Indian democracy.

There is, in other words, a swelling sense among the young that the "same old politics," to quote a well-loved Obama phrase, will not usher in results.

The political class in every democracy is a class apart. Though it purports to represent the population, it is a less-than-perfect mirror. To be a senator in America and not wealthy, for example, is to be the odd man out. But in India, where millions of the young are undergoing a total metamorphosis and where old people nonetheless still rule, the gulf between the political class and the next generation of voters is improbably, dangerously wide. This gulf is also, by extension, the great unexploited opportunity for the creative Indian politician.

I called Sumit Jain the other day to ask him about the chasm.

This high-tech entrepreneur is the New India incarnate. He was born in Khatauli, a small northern town where his father ran a small shop. As a boy, he sat at the counter absent-mindedly making sales as he pored over books, dreaming of escape. He escaped, got into India's best engineering college, landed work writing software for Oracle in Bangalore, then left it to create his own start-up.

"I surely feel a big disconnect between us and politicians," he said. "We live in a different world." Jain's world of young, educated, upwardly mobile Indians believes in advancement through performance. The pol's world believes in nepotism and cronyism. Jain's world is first-generation. The pol's world is dynastic. Jain's world is about measuring outcomes. The pol's world is about following procedure. Jain's world is about transparency. The pol's world turns behind closed doors.

Jain's currency is school-bred skills. The pol's currency is connections. Jain's status gauge is money. The pol's status gauge is power.

I asked Jain to characterize the political philosophy of his demographic contingent. There were several elements. One was "privatizing and commercializing things." Another was an end to caste-based affirmative action, so that whoever aces the exams gets in. And: "A politician should behave like a CEO of the country, and see how he can get maximum profit, maximum value, out of anything."

Then another idea occurred to him. When he wanted to get into the Indian Institutes of Technology, he had to take cram sessions for months. When he got the job at Oracle, the first they did was throw him into training. "I think that politicians should be given proper training," Jain said.

I asked him to design a course for prospective prime ministers.

"We need to start from something very general," Jain said, suggesting primers on India and the Hindi language. "Then personality development - the person should be appealing to the community. I would focus on how they should present themselves, how they should speak if they are in public. Then how they can use e-mail, use the Internet, how they can get e-mail on their smart phones. How they should manage their day, their to-dos - time management. How they should manage people."

The great exception Jain would make to the political culture he loathes is Prime Minister Singh.

But Singh, an honest man surrounded by many scoundrels, has proved unable to transcend the system around him, to make India's governance any better by the force of his personal character alone.

He has rarely taken to the airwaves to move Indian public opinion on anything, in a measure of the bubble that politicians inhabit here. (Singh holds an appointed seat in Parliament and has never won a popular election.) He waited 18 hours to go on television after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. He has failed to insist that his cabinet colleagues live up to his own ethical standards. He is a left-leaning economics professor who presided over a massive transfer of land from destitute villagers to deep-pocketed companies.

Jain admires Singh for his integrity and his achievements as a scholar. But I asked him if he could remember a single speech by the prime minister over the last five years, or a single favorable policy change. He couldn't. Among the young and ambitious, he is not alone.

"One thing is that the PM should be educated, and the other is that he should act," Jain said. "The education thing was there, but the action thing was not."

In India, a shift to meritocracy uproots old elites

2009-01-29T05:40:00.001-08:00

By Anand Giridharadas

Thursday, January 29, 2009

VERLA, India: "Oh my god! Akshay is your cousin? He and I went to Cathedral together. What a small world it is!"

It happens at every gathering of well-educated Indians from New Delhi to New Jersey to Nairobi. Two Indians, drawn from 1.2 billion, will suddenly discover an improbable connection.

It is a game of multiple choice: a) They were classmates. b) Their cousins were friends. c) Their fathers worked at Unilever. d) All of the above.

This connection-making was all around me growing up with Indian parents in the United States. I found it charming, never gave it too much thought. But when I came to live here five years ago, I began to see the cruelty built into this small world.

The world seemed small to this class of Anglicized elites because the vast majority of Indians were ineligible for it. Their grandfathers didn't go to one of the certified elite-spawning colleges, so their parents didn't, so they didn't. They didn't speak English in the faux-British accent that elites did, but in their own craggy, sing-song Indian way. Their idea of a great film was not Satyajit Ray's latest somber release, but a long, lush Bollywood musical.

The un-Anglicized formed a majority. But, in order to get ahead in the India now receding, there were certain mannerisms to possess, certain codes to know, certain connections to have. These the majority lacked.

Old-guard elites asked traffic cops, "Do you know who I am?" before speeding away. They filled their homes with servants and used them almost as performance art, their servility part of the status-boosting décor. When they gave directions, they relied less on landmarks than on others in their small world: "You know Anju's house? Take a left after that. Rohan's place is on the right. Cross it and take a left at Bunty's sister-in-law's."

But now it seems to be the end of this world as we know it.

Accounts of India's changes focus on its economic growth, its surging migration, its skyward construction: changes in outward trappings. Less apparent, but no less momentous, is the decline and fall of the Anglicized ancien régime.

Some in the old elite saw change coming. They sold inherited businesses, learned new professions, reined in maharajah-like spending. But many did not, and now a wave of aspirations is rising from dank slums and hopeless towns, crashing at last into the delicate structures of unearned privilege.

Quietly but unmistakably, a whole country is changing hands.

In cities, middle-aged graduates of India's leading colleges struggle to get their children into the same schools. With children of humbler backgrounds aiming higher than ever, even a 90 percent score on the entrance exam is no longer enough. This is the secret reason why, in a new age of Indian opportunity, many rich Indians still send their children abroad for college: not to escape India, but because their children are unable or unwilling to compete in an increasingly fair society.

The newspapers print photographs of those who "top" the exams. They are routinely scrawny and dark-skinned, drawn from the distant suburbs and villages, Indians whose ancestors might have cooked and cleaned for the ancestors of the students they now displace.

Visit the companies staffed by this new meritocracy, and you encounter a new elite. In the Indian offices of, say, Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, the paychecks are fat and the intellects razor-sharp. But they seldom speak English in the old, affected British way. They are coarser and yet more confident. They feel the world is theirs, but are less obsessed than the earlier elites with emulating the West. They are proudly indigenous, often preferring Indian food, music and movies to the alternatives.

They are changing the language. On television, on college campuses, in businesses, you hear new-economy elites who sound much more Indian than their predecessors, their English unapologetically peppered with Hindi: "Let's go have some khana. I'm hungry, yaar."

Rama Bijapurkar, an Indian management guru, has a theory for why Indians from simpler, small-town backgrounds are overtaking urban elites. Those in the former group often have drastically higher earning potential than their parents. The parents, needing retirement security, refrain from telling these children what to do. The children take risks, chase their dreams, do the things that breed success.

Elite children have an incentive not to rock the boat. Apartments cost millions. Cars and servants and cooks are not free, either. If they stay at home, tend to their parents, merely coast, all this can be theirs.

In Mumbai, this dualism is seared into geography. The northern suburbs were once backwaters. But areas like Bandra are now havens of energy, full of young people who come from elsewhere, thrive without parental string-pulling, pay their own rent, cook their own food. Meanwhile, in south Mumbai, the beauty and history of the place mask an impending social obsolescence.

The rot is palpable in the last strongholds of the Anglicized: the Bombay Gymkhana, the Willingdon Club and other such colonial-era hangouts. They are pretty places, steeped in (imperial) history, just splendid for tennis and a gin and tonic.

But to spend time in one of these clubs and then among, say, the employees of Google in Hyderabad is to visit two different countries, one withering, the other roaring.

At the clubs, they still all know one another, as their forebears did. They still utter "chap," "poorly," "atta boy." There are few Indian garments around. But the uncomfortable truth about the clubs is that they also operate today as a kind of insurance for India's nouveau pauvre.

Refreshments at the club are lavishly subsidized for members. It is expensive to join now, but if you were lucky to inherit membership, you can spend your days there, eating for peanuts, maintaining the appearance of prosperity, even if you have suffered in the new meritocracy and have little actual cash.

India's age-old tragedy, a lower-caste leader once told me, was that, in a system where roles were assigned by birth and not talent, everyone ended up in the wrong spot. Today, not all goes swimmingly in India. But it is a kind of forward progress when certain people slide backward, when a nation's elite is more regularly refreshed, fortified by the rigors of having to earn the lives they enjoy.

Horatio Alger Relocates to a Mumbai Slum

2009-01-15T20:13:00.000-08:00

January 18, 2009

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

VERLA, India — It isn’t about cows or cobras, a wedding or outsourcing; it isn’t about gurus or Gandhi. “Slumdog Millionaire,” in fact, may be the first world-traveling film about India in a generation to discard the old, smudged lenses for seeing this country.

Its novelty has given it a dream run in American movie theaters, and last week it was chosen best dramatic picture at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles. It now is given a good shot at the Academy Awards next month.

But the film’s freshness lies not just in how the West sees India. It lies, too, in how Indians see themselves. It portrays a changing India, with great realism, as something India long resisted being: a land of self-makers, where a scruffy son of the slums can, solely of his own effort, hoist himself up, flout his origins, break with fate.

And that may explain the movie’s strange hold over Americans. It channels to them their own Gatsbyesque fantasy of self-invention, and yet places it far enough away as to imply that it is now really someone else’s fantasy. Indeed, after the havoc wreaked on ordinary self-reliant Americans by the impenetrable workings of the markets, after the go-it-alone trading of Bernard L. Madoff, after even President Bush enlisted the government to rescue private markets with a huge bailout, the mythology of the self-reliant self is under siege in America to a degree not seen in a very long time.

The film, which will finally open in India on Friday (this reporter obtained a digital copy of it), follows Jamal Malik, who rises from Mumbai’s shantytowns to compete on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” His life begins in a familiar, eternal India: the India of layers of humiliation, of the swirling crowd that drowns the self.

The director, Danny Boyle, shows us the many clamps on Indian selves. The arbitrary power of the police officer toward the citizen and the gangster toward the slum dweller. The schools where teachers throw books at students and lessons consist of choral echoing of the teacher’s words. The slum where cooking and child-rearing and defecation are semi-public activities, and where it would be hard to develop the mental independence to question an arranged marriage or abuse by the better-born.

In Jamal’s environs, you don’t happen to the world; the world happens to you.

But our hero has his own, larger vision of life. It is, at first, a vision compelled: he and his brother are orphaned and must survive. But in time Jamal parlays that pain into a knack for succeeding, becoming a train vendor, then a tour guide to the gullible in Agra, then a tea wallah in a Mumbai office.

In India, clan is everything. But Jamal needs no one. He has no parents; his brother betrays him; even the game-show host, feigning goodwill, deceives. In India, hierarchy rules. But Jamal treats the mighty no differently from the meek, does not cower even before the police. He is that rare, but increasingly less rare, Indian creature: a man all his own.

The old restraints were formidable: family, caste, religious fatalism, Byzantine bureaucracy. The many forces conspiring to keep uppity selves in check. Even today, India is no free-for-all. But the new pull is centrifugal, toward the lonely periphery and away from the buzzing center, toward a life of one’s making, in a city not one’s own, in a vocation not inherited.

It is the unmarried women working nights in Delhi’s call centers. The brothers leaving brothers to start their own firms. The divorces sprouting where acquiescence ruled. The spreading belief that destiny can, with scars and ardor, be bent.

“Why does everyone love this program?” Jamal, seeing the “Millionaire” show on TV, asks a friend one day.

“It’s a chance to escape, isn’t it?” she replies. “Walk into another life.”

Oceans away, the United States was founded with the promise of such escape. Its early settlers were fleeing restraints much like those in old India. They drove the natives away, then built a nation premised on space and self-making: a frontier land where families had their own acres, own gun, own conscience. That, at least, was the mythology.

But it has been a long time; and now, even as the myth of self-making spreads to India, a pause for second thoughts may have started in America.

It was partly the crash of 2008, in which supposed masters of the universe, unsupervised, tanked the economy, then sheepishly asked to be bailed out. It was partly a dawning sense that policies that promoted the entrepreneur could forget communities and contexts. It was partly the fraying of American families, the “joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation,” as the late writer David Foster Wallace put it.

And so as Indians sever their attachments, Americans reweave theirs.

Harvard Business School now teaches courses like “Entrepreneurship in Education Reform” to satisfy students who want to mix private and public gain. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have argued that they owe their success to a conducive society, and have resolved to give their wealth away.

Scientists, too, are pushing the self-made from their pedestal, arguing that success is social: that certain cultures breed success, that genes influence skills, that there are favorable times to be born. “Personal explanations of success don’t work,” Malcolm Gladwell writes in “Outliers,” his new book on the research. In a magazine interview, he derided “empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can’t be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can’t be.”

The social is back in politics, too. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he famously noted its civic enthusiasm. That penchant flagged in recent decades; Americans were said to be “bowling alone.” But there is now a neo-Tocquevillean flowering online, of Wikipedia editors, Twitterers and bloggers, an unpaid army stirred by that ancient impulse to blow in larger currents.

And the recent election was won by a candidate who is self-made but did not position himself that way; he spoke instead of roots and linkages. Now, he claims a mandate for the largest program of collective government action in decades.

It is roots and linkages that many Indians now seek to shed, and many Americans now seek to reclaim. And that may be the silent allure of “Slumdog Millionaire.” It is a tribute to the irrepressible self, filmed in a society now realizing it has given the self too little, watched in a society now realizing it has given the self too much.

India Has a Soft Spot for Bush

2009-01-10T17:57:00.000-08:00

January 11, 2009

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

HYDERABAD, India — Manmohan Singh leads the largest democracy on earth. But India’s prime minister is gentle of manner and speaks in whispers. One struggles to imagine him professing love without shyness to his own wife. And so it meant something when he recently laid the L-word on a little-loved man: George W. Bush.

“This may be my last visit to you during your presidency,” Mr. Singh told Mr. Bush in Washington in September, “and let me say, Thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you.”

Laura Bush is not alone, after all.

Among the least coveted jobs in the world today, along with grave digging, is the task of burnishing President Bush’s foreign legacy: the complex, competing challenges of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, North Korea, China and what many in Europe and the third world see as a tarnished national brand.

But love is an unpredictable thing, and it is possible that the love-fest stoked by Mr. Singh and Mr. Bush will, with time, come to be seen as President Bush’s enduring overseas accomplishment: the cultivation of India, long prickly about empires, as a partner of the sole superpower.

“The relationship with India is one of the few success stories of the Bush administration’s foreign policy,” said Teresita C. Schaffer, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who ran the State Department’s South Asia desk under the first President Bush.

George W. Bush’s critics often link his idiosyncratic temperament to his administration’s diplomatic misadventures. But among Indians, who in the main have no love for his ideology, even his critics say the traits for which Mr. Bush is so often condemned were, in India’s case, benignly applied: his penchant for unilateral deeds, and his moral conviction that democracies are simply better than non-democracies.

“Mr. Bush is driven by ideology and instincts, not by nuanced thinking,” said Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist and South Asia expert at Brown University. “Bush’s ideology convinced him that, of the two rising stars on the world stage, India was preferable.” (The other is, of course, China.)

Eight years ago, Mr. Bush inherited a peculiar relationship with India: a natural partnership in theory that was in practice unnaturally fraught. Despite their being multiethnic and multireligious democracies with an entrepreneurial streak, the two countries had drifted apart during the cold war, and nuclear politics remained an irritant: When there was a Soviet Union, India was loosely in its orbit, while America’s fierce anti-Communism drove it toward Pakistan, India’s archrival. When India conducted a nuclear test, in 1974, a chilled relationship became cooler still, as the United States blacklisted its civilian nuclear energy program and slapped restrictions on its imports of essential dual-use technologies.

In July 2006, 15 years after the Soviet Union collapsed and five years after Islamic terrorists became America’s principal enemy, Mr. Bush decisively reversed course. Raising India to the status of a strategic ally, he cut a unique exception in the global nonproliferation regime, proposing that India be allowed to keep its military stockpile even as it gained access to technologies and fuel for its civilian reactors. Over the next two years Mr. Bush used dwindling political capital to get the deal approved by the Congress and foreign governments. When Pakistan requested a similar pact, it was told that such deals were reserved for “responsible” states.

This was the diplomacy of the grand gesture, and when this barrier fell others followed. The American and Indian militaries increased joint exercises. They exchanged trade delegations. Their companies won expanded access to the other’s markets. American officials began to talk up India as a rising great power in a new century.

Gautam Adhikari, the editorial page editor of The Times of India, a leading English-language daily, said the turnaround was “on par with the turnaround in U.S.-China ties brought about by Nixon starting in 1972.” In America, the sentiment was echoed by R. Nicholas Burns, who retired last year as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s right-hand man: “Within 20 years, the rise of the new U.S.-India partnership will be considered among the most important developments in U.S. foreign policy in our time.”

As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to take office this month, he has avoided the fawning praise of India that has become fashionable in some Washington circles. But experts on the region say that India-United States ties now have a momentum of their own. Industries in each country now have a vested interest in deepening ties with their counterparts. In Afghanistan, Indian and American teams are working side by side on nation building. And there is the Indian-American lobby in America, which is increasingly influential.

“In 20 years I expect the Indo-U.S. relationship to resemble the Israel-U.S. relationship, and for many of the same reasons,” said Shashi Tharoor, a leading Indian writer and former under secretary general of the United Nations.

But this new focus on India is also potentially dangerous for the world, because it neglects Pakistan and its quest to grow the ranks of its relatively Western-oriented middle class. Stephen P. Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, cited America’s refusal to grant tariff relief to Pakistani textiles — a small measure, compared to the nuclear deal — that he said would have helped to raise the opportunity cost of terrorism in Pakistan.

“Helping India while ignoring the pathological developments in Pakistan was no favor to India, let alone Pakistan,” Mr. Cohen said.

Within India itself, the closer ties to America have actually complicated the effort to develop India’s economy. American trade policy, which has given Indian software engineers easy access to the American market while keeping out destitute Indian farmers, has provoked much anger in India. That anger strengthens the hand of populist leaders who tap anti-American sentiment to block free-market policies.

And yet the “opening” of India is regarded on the whole, by a great many Indians, as a Bush triumph, one whose prescience will fully reveal itself only in time — that is, if India grows into its assigned role as a new leader of a changed free world.

For Americans, days away from a new political era, this may seem a time of renewal. And it may turn out that India will simply join America, as Japan has, as a solid democratic ally in Asia. But, with the financial crisis raging and the National Intelligence Council recently conjuring a 2025 scenario called “A World Without the West,” there is the real, if fainter, prospect of a more fundamental turning: of an American decline that would give India’s rise its greatest significance.

When empires wane, they live on, as the political scientist David Singh Grewal has argued, by embedding their values, systems and standards in a presumptive heir, as ancient Greece did through Rome and as Britain has done through the United States. Should it falter in due course, might America achieve the same through India — the preservation at least of the American idea and way of life?

That is implied in a cherished vision here — that if India does become as dynamic and powerful as China, then democracy, multiculturalism and the rule of law will continue to have a forceful champion, with or without America. So will free expression, irreverent newspapers, the separation of powers, elections that actually oust people, the English language as the medium of business, movies that end happily, reality television and the bedrock belief that the best things in a society happen uncoordinated on its streets rather than in its Central Committee.

Many Indians believe they are the heirs to this tradition, that it is their special destiny to be a new America. It might be an empty boast; but it might not. And in case it isn’t, Mr. Bush will be able to claim credit: for championing that new power before it was fashionable and, ironically, in the view from here, for clearing its path by squandering much of his own country’s carefully accrued sway.

With the spotlight gone, the true India can develop

2009-01-01T22:49:00.000-08:00

By Anand Giridharadas

Thursday, January 1, 2009

NEW DELHI: For romancers of the India Story, the timing couldn't have been crueler.

The Story was going down so well. Blue-chip multinationals had been persuaded to outsource any work they could to Indians fresh from college. Companies going on sale had begun to think of Indian buyers first. Tourists from Paris to São Paulo, once fearful of malaria and cobras, had shed old fears to arrive by the planeful.

And, in the self-fulfilling nature of modern life, Time, Newsweek and other magazines, whose advertisers were among the major new investors in India, obligingly or unwittingly pumped up the value of those investments by devoting dazzling covers to India's "arrival." At times, I was part of this hoopla, part of the chorus that spent more energy heralding this arrival than asking hard questions about it.

Our attention was no accident. The economy was growing swimmingly, and Indian leaders and industrialists had figured out a clever strategy to keep it growing: market it to the world and attract enough investment to diminish the urgency of actually developing the country - filling potholed roads, removing criminals from Parliament, reducing the numbers who die of curable ailments.

The positioning is the thing: When delegates arrived in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum in 2006, they saw a billboard declaring, "India: Fastest Growing Free Market Democracy." When they checked into their hotels, they received iPods packed with Indian songs, pashmina scarves and CD-ROMs full of facts on India.

But 2008 ended badly for this branding campaign. The world economy entered crisis mode. The outsourcing companies began to collapse. Hedge funds deluging the Bombay Stock Exchange with liquidity began to run dry. And then the savage, 72-hour siege of Mumbai drop-kicked a country already teetering on the cliff's brink.

For now, the India Story is suspended. No more magazine covers with the television celebrity Padma Lakshmi's worshipful hand greeting. No more investors who cannot distinguish Kolkata from Kerala pouring their savings into India nonetheless. No more iPods at Davos. No one is looking for the next big seductively risky thing.

The trouble with those souls who come whimsically is that they go whimsically. But now, with the India Story in tatters, it may be time for a truer narrative of India to unfold.

What was forgotten during the long boom is that development involves more than earning the praise of that class of globetrotting Westerners who fly among foreign fashion weeks and business meets and bestow blessings on the latest Country-on-the-Make. It is about building a nation, a grueling task sometimes forgotten when the going is good.

What had happened in the boom was development-by-conference, a little-studied but richly consequential minuet between that global class and its Third World collaborators. They meet at events like the World Economic Forum and a thousand copycat summit meetings and industry conferences in India and across the developing world.

Whole wings of five-star hotels are rented, and everyone benefits: The Indians offer the globals local street cred; the globals offer the Indians much-needed foreign connections. Together, they attend seminars in which, say, one Indian bureaucrat, one American banker and one British chief executive fall over one another to declare this India's century.

Then, an important Westerner flies in to validate the validation. He jokes about spicy food. He praises Indians for becoming more like his country, i.e., lower tariffs. He chides them for not becoming enough like his country, i.e., tariffs still not low enough. He ends with the blackmailing, don't-make-us-take-our-money-and-go question: "Is India on a long-term path of reform, or are we simply looking at 'the Indian moment'?" as Franklin Lavin, a U.S. under secretary of commerce, said in Mumbai in 2006.

The rub with this kind of development is that it concentrates on making countries like India look and smell and sound like a wealthy country on the outside, while ignoring the complex, delicate sequence of events by which currently wealthy countries became so.

Indians relish this idea, for it simplifies, even trivializes, their predicament. They love the word "leapfrogging." It began as a description of agrarian India's rapid evolution of a services industry, absent a solid manufacturing base. But it now signifies the ambition to jump, in that and every other way, from the back to the front.

And so India has not developed as the West did: slowly, systematically; first getting railroads right, then cars, then planes; first bringing drinking water and toilets to people, then figuring out how to bring them Wi-Fi. No: India prefers Last Things First.

Indian engineers are so sophisticated that Airbus has outsourced to them the building of certain airplane doors. But Indians have yet to build doors for their own commuter trains in Mumbai, which carry millions of people every day and kill hundreds of them every year simply because they have no door.

India has become an automotive powerhouse, with a single company, Tata Motors, producing both the world's cheapest car and the expensive Jaguar brand. But it has yet to teach the people in those cars to wear seat belts and stay on their own side of the road.

India roars ahead in education. Its Indian Institutes of Technology are among the world's best engineering schools, and it is building more. Which is good news for everyone - except the millions of schoolchildren who could never dream of getting in, since their teachers are absent, their textbooks arrive months after school begins and they "graduate" unable to read, write or add.

New Delhi is being torn up and rewoven for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Which is fine, but for one question: Who came up with the idea of building stadiums and a housing village for foreign athletes and journalists in a city where one-third of local residents lack a proper home?

Perhaps it was the same people who decided to market India as a medical-tourism hub for the world, even before most Indians had access to reliable primary care.

In recent years, India operated like a Hollywood star: optimizing for eyeballs, seeking the maximum hype for its buck. But now those flatterers are gone, tangled in their meltdown, wary of things too good to be true.

India misses their money. Yet even without them, the revolutions of modern India continue: people rejecting millennia-old family vocations; remaking themselves through migration; questioning, in ways their parents never did, their treatment by the better-born; discovering that destiny is malleable.

The critics may have left their balconies, but the stands remain packed, and the show must go on for all who are in this for more than the latest bull run.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For tips on frugality, look to India

2008-12-18T02:40:00.000-08:00

By Anand Giridharadas

Thursday, December 18, 2008

VERLA, India: Watching Americans try to make themselves frugal is like watching Mongolians try to make Bordeaux wine.

Thrift does not come naturally to a country that turned layaway, zero-interest home loans and pre-approved credit cards into a mode of living. And so as they trudge through a cruel holiday season, Americans are cutting back, but hesitatingly and maladroitly.

They are standing in line by the thousands at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club, pushing and pulling, and on one occasion trampling an obstructive employee to death with their frantic, frugal feet.

They are embracing the alien idea of sacrifice. Mothers are forgoing personal shopping to spend on the family, and, according to Consumer Reports, pet owners are depriving themselves before shortchanging their pets.

Fourteen percent of Americans are making gifts, not buying them, that magazine reported. Twelve percent are plotting to pass on to others the gifts others give them. Many plan to tip less, scale back charity and go shopping accompanied by that leafy commodity so foreign to Americans: cash.

And then it hit me. The jostling in line, the stampeding, the motherly sacrifice, the homemade presents, the regifting, the thick wads of rubber-banded cash: America is becoming India!

India is to frugality as Bethlehem is to Jesus. But in recent years, the megacorporations of the West, not content to foment irresponsibility at home, sent pinstriped missionaries here to nudge genetically predisposed savers to spend.

Citibank sprinkled a borrowing-wary nation with small loans for motorcycles: Live a little! Visa peddled plastic to lovers of gold: Let your hair down!

Millions of Indians converted, but millions of others ignored them - and, for the West, luckily so. As rich countries enter a new era of scarcity, the best practices of the gurus of frugality can serve as a textbook for frugality's new pupils.

The first tip of the Indian frugalist is to wear your money. One rarely misplaces funds when they are kept in gold and hooked through your nose or strung around your neck. Some Indian women wear saris woven with gold thread. The danger of nudity discourages whimsical spending.

The truly frugal segment friends and associates into two camps: those who merit their money and those who don't.

Cellphone calls may cost a cent a minute in India, but why call people who only rate a text? Why text when you can make a "missed call"? Millions of Indians dial and quickly hang up, hoping for the other person to call back and foot the bill.

Your upholstery is not for everyone. Sofas fray and stain; there is, in the final analysis, a cost per posterior. So cover your sofa with bed sheets and remove them for only the best behinds.

So, too, with crockery: Buy a set of expensive plates and keep it in a case where your friends can see them while they eat from the cheap plates you actually set before them.

When eating out, order soups fractionally: a certain number of soups split by a certain number of people. Start with "one into two," the realm of Indian beginners, then graduate in time to "three into five" and "six into seven."

For entrees, count the diners at the table, subtract one and order that many dishes - which, for a table of four, saves 25 percent over the one-person-one-dish norm.

Of course, if you can, avoid restaurants altogether. Weddings are big here, and Indians who keep an ear to the ground can eat free every night. Wedding crashers are not a movie in India; they are a way of life, and I'm told it takes three successful blend-ins before guests begin to take your presence for granted and invite you to their own weddings.

In India, nothing cannot be recycled. Wedding gifts, birthday gifts, anniversary gifts, gifts for Hindu festival of Diwali: forwardable are they all. Presents are opened carefully so that the wrapping paper can wrap again. Plastic shopping sacks are reincarnated as garbage bags. Used, licked stamps are enlisted for further tours when the post office fails to mark them.

And what cannot be reused whole can often be recycled for parts. In Dharavi, the Mumbai slum, workers in dingy rooms sort the jettisoned - plastic spoons, watches, mobile phones.

Every shard of every ware has a value. Each piece is disassembled, then the pieces are melted, reassembled and sold - all for a profit, not as a tax-guzzling government program.

Within the household, Indian frugalists think strategically, like MBA's. They do not let their children study art history. Children are equities, and good investors build a diverse portfolio by rearing one police officer, one software coder, one retail clerk. They sequence their educations such that the eventual profits from each child subsidize the schooling of the next one.

Every MBA graduate knows about "value investing." But only Indian homemakers apply the principle to peas. That's right: Buy peas in winter, when they are plentiful and cheap. Freeze. Defrost and cook in the summer, when prices spike.

Indian companies think like Indian consumers. On business trips, men must sometimes share beds with other men, and women with other women.

I know of a drug company whose managers could fly to meetings in another city but were mandated to take the cheaper, sputtering train back home.

With all their thrifty proclivities, it was inevitable that Indians would one day make the world's cheapest car. But Tata Motors, based in Mumbai, did not revolutionize the car so much as squeeze $10 savings hundreds of times over.

It took out one of the windshield wipers, used glue instead of nuts and bolts in places and stripped out air-conditioning despite the blazing 120-degree Fahrenheit (49 Celsius) summer heat.

And yet my favorite choice was the analog, rather than more accurate digital, speedometer. It was not a huge savings, and a speedometer's accuracy can determine life and death. So I put it to Ashok Taneja, a Tata supplier, some months ago: Why scrimp on something so vital?

"So what if I'm going at 65 or 75?" he said.

I assumed, and hoped, he was speaking of kilometers per hour, not of the duration of a frugally lived life.

Discussing second-generation Indian returnees on NPR's On Point

2008-12-17T11:32:00.000-08:00

After the copious and thoughtful feedback from all of you on my "India Calling" essay, I spent an hour this week discussing the return of second-generation immigrants on NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook. Listen here.

Anand Giridharadas

change of url and rss feed

The Triumph of the Ordinary Cellphone

The Triumph of the Ordinary Cellphone

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MORE IN U.S. (1 OF 35 ARTICLES)

Mine Operator Escaped Extra Oversight After Warning

An announcement

The Struggle of the Global Placeless

The Struggle of the Global Placeless

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Taking Stock in the Testimony of the Crowd

Taking Stock in the Testimony of the Crowd

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

My interview on India then and now

Radio interview on personal branding and the "me" economy

Branding and the 'Me' Economy

Branding and the 'Me' Economy

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Waking Up From American Dreams

Waking Up From American Dreams

Latest column: What Adam Smith really thought about capitalism

Selling Short a Humanistic Economist

Delivering Fusion Food for Thought

Delivering Fusion Food for Thought

On India, China, climate and leapfrogging

Reflections on the First Decade of the 2000s

Reflections on the First Decade of the 2000s

A modest healthcare idea

A radio and a television appearance

Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?

Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?

Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge

Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge

A Webliography of further reading on the teacherless classroom

An Economy in Need of Holistic Medicine

An Economy in Need of Holistic Medicine

My Q and A with Arun Shourie of the BJP at Harvard

Boycotts Minus the Pain

Boycotts Minus the Pain

Edging Out Congress and the Public

Edging Out Congress and the Public

Democracy 2.0 Awaits an Upgrade

Democracy 2.0 Awaits an Upgrade

Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

Some happy news...

Once-Clear Thoughts Are Clouded

Once-Clear Thoughts Are Clouded

Happy news!

Love in the Time of Diaspora

Love in the Time of Diaspora

THE PRAYER ROOM

Market Economics, Indian Style

Market Economics, Indian Style

Will India Lose Its Charm as It Becomes 'World Class'?

Will India Lose Its Charm as It Becomes 'World Class'?

In Cellphone, India Reveals an Essence

In Cellphone, India Reveals an Essence

Big Election, Teeny, Tiny (if Any) Ideas

Big Election, Teeny, Tiny (if Any) Ideas

Interview with TVO's "The Agenda"

Watching the Empire Move on

LETTER FROM AMERICA

Watching the Empire Move On

My interview on India with Canadian television

Behind Facebook's success: It takes a village

Traditional luxury vs. the modern kind -- India at a crossroads

These Days, No Reporting Behind a Nation’s Back

The 'Slumdog' effect: Afflict the comfortable

India's case of Obama envy

In India, a shift to meritocracy uproots old elites

Horatio Alger Relocates to a Mumbai Slum

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

India Has a Soft Spot for Bush

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

With the spotlight gone, the true India can develop

For tips on frugality, look to India

Discussing second-generation Indian returnees on NPR's On Point