Marriage couldn't be more unattractive – the number of us getting hitched has slumped to the lowest level since records began, 150 years ago. By next year, it's predicted that singletons will be in the majority.
There are all sorts of reasons why we don't fancy tying the knot any more – and the biggest is undoubtedly cost. The average wedding now won't leave you any change from an astonishing £21,000 – twice as much as a decade ago. In a recession, anyone contemplating such financial lunacy needs to start saving years ahead, or embark on married life in debt. You could buck the trend and do it simply – but if you're participating in a dying ritual, then surely you'll want it to be memorable?
No wonder the age we get married has risen over the years, to 30 for women and 31 for men – about 10 years older than our parents. Another factor in the decline of marriage is the lack of tax incentives – why bother going through with it if you're no better off? Labour has been so anxious not to discriminate against single mothers and one-parent families, and so keen to provide financial assistance to the disadvantaged, that they've omitted to sufficiently reward those who are in a stable relationship, raising children within the framework of a marriage. The result? Young women who have kids and claim housing benefit without marrying, and who marginalise men.
A long-term partnership like marriage is not an attractive option; they want to live without the restrictions of a full-time, live-in partner. Instead, they have a series of relationships, producing children who treat a succession of men as temporary dads.
By contrast, a couple in their twenties contemplating marriage have almost no chance of finding a place to live that they can afford to buy. After school or college, young people are stuck at home for longer than any previous generation (their grandparents would have buggered off at 16 or 18). They're living in their childhood bedrooms – with a smaller living space than many prisoners – and thousands are crippled with massive student loans. Last week, graduates were told to set their sights low, if they wanted work, so what chance of ever affording the luxury of a wedding? It all begins to sound like something you only see in the movies. And if it takes you longer to leave home, get a job and finally taste independence, who'd want to chuck it all up to get hitched? Doesn't sound that appealing somehow.
The church can bleat on about marriage being a "life-time commitment" but that's not how people think these days. In an age of social networking, speed dating and internet chat-rooms, young people are genuinely confused about what constitutes a relationship, let alone one that's supposed to last more than a couple of months.
Peaches Geldof's short-lived marriage to New York musician Max Drummey is typical – it lasted only 186 days. Apparently her elder sister, Fifi, read they had decided to divorce on the internet, and was the family member who told father. But I don't blame Peaches; she's just 19, and Max 24. I went through a bonkers marriage to an unsuitable young man in Las Vegas which didn't last as long as they managed, and I was 49 at the time.
Another reason why we're shunning marriage is the expense of splitting up. If you make a mistake, or just get bored with each other, the only people who benefit are the lawyers. There's a lot to be said for Islamic law – sharia – and just saying "I divorce thee" three times; it would certainly have saved me many thousands of pounds. Are men being put off marriage because of the large settlements some high-profile wives such as Karen Parlour and Heather Mills McCartney have managed to win in recent years? I'm not sure, because the number of men who then go on and remarry a woman who just looks like a younger version of their first wife is definitely on the increase. In divorce, ultimately it's middle-aged women who suffer the most, because their chances of remarriage are very slim indeed.
Marriage is going out of fashion for a variety of reasons, and I don't think things will change. I just hope we don't all end up poor, single and alone in our old age, with only a load of old photos of the fun times along the way to keep us company, because that's the future for the me-generation.
Shane Warne will rightly be celebrated as the greatest legspinner of all time, especially after an individual performance in The Ashes that has few rivals. But if he is widely acknowledged to have made legspin fashionable again in the 1990s, one man - Abdul Qadir - took the first, necessary step of making it acceptable in the '80s. On his 50th birthday and nearly 28 years after he hopped, skipped and danced into cricket, we speak to the original modern-day legspinner about his career, his art and Warne.
You are 50 today. How would you look back at your time in cricket?
I am very thankful that I got to play in such a good era for the game and with so many great players. Obviously I am also proud that I revived an art like legspin, especially in a time when there were hardly any spinners who had any success. I am happy that I was involved in bringing alive an art that was so valuable but had become redundant. My time was dominated by fast bowlers and to have taken 236 Test wickets in that is something I am very proud of. Then, pitches wouldn't assist turn that much, especially not on the first or second day as they do now, and to have played and played well then is an achievement.
Why did you take up legspin in that time?
It just happened, starting off in the street matches we used to play. But legspin became like a love affair with me, like you would have with a woman. I used to sleep with the ball by my side at night. I picked up all the variations myself because I loved it so much, I wanted to discover more about the art, find out how it can work, what makes it tick, what makes it special, how it can succeed in different conditions.
What attributes do you need to be a good legspinner?
You need courage, above all. With the ball, you need to have complete control over line and length - this is absolutely crucial. So many legspinners can get good turn and bounce but just don't have any control and thus aren't successful. You also need to be a good thinker about the game, more than other bowlers I think. That is why Shane Warne is successful, because he really thinks about his game. Variation is crucial as well. Field placings and having an idea of what fields to bowl to is important; you can't just rely on the captain to set fields for you. Finally, an ability to use the crease well, although it is underrated, is very important.
What do you make of the state of legspin today?
This is the most fulfilling thing for me. When I started, it was unheard of to bowl legspin, especially in ODI matches. To bowl to batsmen like Ian Botham in a match and get their wickets with legspin - that didn't happen. And now, the highest wicket-taker in the world and one of the greatest bowlers of all time is Shane Warne. Close behind him is another great, Anil Kumble, and in Pakistan, we had Mushtaq (Ahmed) after me and now Danish Kaneria. This is vital for the game itself and for viewers because they get to see some really accomplished performers executing a rare art. After me, there has been a mela (festival) of legspinners and that is great for the game. It's just great to see bowlers like that in a game now and having so much success.
What did you think of Warne's performances in the Ashes series?
Absolutely amazing and full credit to him; 40 wickets in any series is an unbelievable haul. But I would like to point out that English players play legspin so badly that at times it is inevitable bowlers will succeed against them. I would go as far as to say that several club batsmen in the subcontinent would play legspin better than some of the English batsmen today. You wouldn't have batsmen being bowled around their legs like some English players were. They can't use their pads properly against balls pitching around leg stump and find it impossible to read from the hand. Above all, sweeping a legspin bowler is one of the worst ways of playing him. You can't account for the bounce or the turn so it becomes too dangerous.
He [Warne] is simply one of the greatest bowlers ever. His record speaks for itself. The best thing about him, what sets him apart, is his heart and bravery
How would you rate Shane Warne?
There is no rating - he is simply one of the greatest bowlers ever. His record speaks for itself. The best thing about him, what sets him apart, is his heart and bravery. Legspin is mostly about being brave. You know you might get torn apart, you know, occasionally, you might bowl a loose delivery but you also know you will take wickets and to keep that attitude is the most important thing. Also he has tremendous control. He can do pretty much what he wants with the ball, the amount of spin he wants to impart, where he wants to land it. If you have control as a legspinner, then you have a basic ingredient to be successful. It also helps if you have a reputation like he does. So many batsmen are already lost before they even step out on the pitch against him that even when he does bowl a loose delivery they still end up either getting out to it or not scoring off it.
What do you think of Danish Kaneria?
He is an excellent bowler but the only thing I worry about is his attitude and just how aggressive he gets. It's good to have aggression but when you have just gotten rid of Justin Langer after he has almost scored a double century and you celebrate like you have won and give him a send-off, that is not good. You have to have respect for good players and especially those who have dominated you. He should worry that he got him out after such a huge score and not early on. Brian Lara really hit Kaneria everywhere and dominated him but when Danish got him, with a poor ball as well, he celebrated like no tomorrow. As a bowler he doesn't really have many weaknesses - good action, variety and control but it is his attitude that is a concern I think. You have to respect your opponent, especially players of calibre. Also he is playing so much county cricket, he has exposed himself to batsmen. I avoided it because I didn't want to sell my art, I didn't want batsmen to know my tricks. But with Danish, they might have a better idea of how to play him now, having seen him play at county level so often. He should be a matchwinner against England in this series and I hope he will be.
It was always said that you had a lot of variety, which was the key to your success. Nowadays it can be argued that bowlers like Kumble and Warne may be don't possess the variety you did but are still so successful. How important then is variety in a legspinner's armoury?
This is a good question. See today, the performances of Warne and Kumble are there. Nobody can or should doubt their achievements. But there is no fun there in the bowling. Partially, I guess it is due to a decline in the quality of batsmanship today. Because it has gone down, that variety is not actually needed because you can get them out repeatedly with one or two types of balls - they are unable to cope with it. When I was playing, you used to have batsmen like Imran (Khan), Kapil (Dev) and Hadlee coming so low down the order and they were quality players. It is an indication of how strong top orders were then. Now because batting is not of the standard it used to be, you don't need to have too much variety to succeed.
You said that you had three deliveries: the googly, legbreak and the flipper. Where did your variety come from?
These are all part of the art. This is what makes it what it is, the building blocks. The variety comes from how you use them. So you use the crease, approach it from different angles, get different amounts of turn. I developed two googlies, one that came from the back of the hand and the other that was a finger-spinning googly delivered with a conventional legbreak action. If you bowl from close to stumps, you get more spin but from wider it spins less. I used to do all sorts of things not just different types of balls. Going wide of the crease, coming closer to the stumps, bowling from behind the crease, dropping your shoulders a little, bowling the same ball but with different grips or actions; all of it should be part of the package of a legspinner.
You had a very distinct, unique action and you once said it was a construction.
Yes, it was an artificial action. As I became more experienced, I started realising the importance of uncovering the psyche of batsmen and playing on it. The action was for show really, to create a physical aura, to give them that feeling of `wow, who and what is this coming in to bowl?' and work on their minds even before I bowled to them. My natural action was very different, quite beautiful. It was like Wasim Raja's action only right-arm. It was also designed for deception, to shield the ball from batsmen. It is important with legspin to not allow batsmen to read from your hand because those who can will play you really well. Our whole job is about deceiving batsmen and so hiding your grip is important. So the action worked in that way as well. Actually, that is one thing about Warne - he doesn't hide his hand too much and good batsmen should be able to read him fairly easily because he has such an open action. My first advice to any budding spinner: you should hide your hand as much as is possible from batsmen. Obviously though, 600 wickets later, we can't really say to Warne that he should change his action!
You also had a successful one-day career - not many legspin bowlers used to play in ODIs.
I thought it was a great injustice when I wasn't picked early in my career as an ODI player. I could bat handily as well at times so I used to get very annoyed. I actually fought with Imran Khan to be picked for the ODI squad. I asked him, as a captain, what do you want from me? He said, any bowler who gives away roughly 40 runs in ten overs and not more I will pick. I said to him the day I give 41 runs you drop me from the team. Like this I fought to get into the side. And in my first match I took 4-21 against New Zealand at the World Cup.
Did you go in with a different attitude to a one-day match?
See, it depends on the situation of the match. If you are defending a small total, then I find it best to attack, go all out, and crowd the batsman with fielders. If you have been dismissed for 150 runs, then you just have to bowl them out so you take a chance and attack as much as you can. That is something you don't always see from bowlers, any bowlers, today. The whole game has gone so much in favour of batsmen that it is difficult for bowlers to attack.
Who was the most difficult batsmen you bowled to?
You know it all depended with me on how I was feeling. If I didn't have any rhythm then even tailenders used to frighten me. But if I had some rhythm then nobody could scare me. I remember one Test where I had to bowl to Geoff Lawson and I was in such low confidence and poor rhythm that I spent an evening worrying about how badly he could hit me and how he would sweep a legbreak from outside off-stump to the fine leg boundary. But if I was in the mood and feeling good, then nobody scared me. It is part of my psyche, whether at Test level or club level. If you can conquer me do so, but if you can't, then I will be all over you. All or nothing, do or die. If I got a wicket early then I would run through but if I didn't then I could go for over a hundred runs for none.
9 for 56 vs England, Lahore, 1987-88
Unfortunately remembered more for umpire Shakeel Khan's itchy finger than Qadir's wrists, this was nevertheless vintage. He came on after only 10 overs and began by deceiving fully Graham Gooch with a googly. He continued for another 37overs, teasing, taunting, appealing, bemusing and getting the occasional dodgy one from umpire Khan to end with the best bowling figures by a Pakistani.
6 for 16 vs West Indies, Faisalabad, 1986-7
The genesis of Qadir's torment of the West Indies. Chasing 240 to take the series lead, the visitors crashed to 53 all out in just over 25 overs. Qadir bowled nine of them and in a twinkling of googlies, legbreaks and the occasional flipper, deceived six batsmen, including the batting heart - Richie Richardson, Larry Gomes and Sir Viv Richards.
7 for 96 vs England, The Oval, 1987
The pitch, according to Qadir, offered nothing but runs. The other spinners - John Emburey, Phil Edmonds and Tauseef Ahmed bowled 162.3 overs between them for three wickets; Qadir bowled 97.4 overs for ten wickets, thus proving Qadir's own theorem-where no one else can succeed, legspin can find a way. His 7-96 in the first innings set up the chance for a win and only dropped catches and stodgy rearguard from Mike Gatting and Ian Botham in the second prevented it.
5 for 44 vs Sri Lanka, Leeds, 1983 (World Cup)
In 1983, playing a legspinner in an ODI was cricketing taboo. Qadir fought with Imran for his selection, Imran fought with the selectors and on his debut Qadir befuddled New Zealand with 4 for 21 and the match award. Two matches later, with Sri Lanka cruising at 162-2 in pursuit of 236, Qadir removed Roy Dias, Duleep Mendis and Arjuna Ranatunga to induce a startling collapse. He finished with five and Pakistan squeaked home by 11 runs.
4 for 83 vs West Indies, Trinidad, 1988
Qadir left his mark not only on the fiercest rivalry of the 80s, but also one of the decade's best series. Although his role with the bat - permanently undervalued - was crucial in eventually scrapping a draw, he feasted on a strong middle order in the first innings, getting rid of Gus Logie and Carl Hooper. But his dismissal of Richards, chewing gum and swinging bat, both threateningly, for 49 runs that kept West Indies to a controllable 174 was essential. Richards' violent century in the second confirmed the form he was in. The pitch and umpiring, says Qadir, could only be defied by his legspin and Imran's reverse.
The number of farmers who have committed suicide in India between 1997 and 2007 now stands at a staggering 182,936. Close to two-thirds of these suicides have occurred in five states (India has 28 states and seven union territories). The Big 5 - Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh- account for just about a third of the country's population but two-thirds of farmers' suicides. The rate at which farmers are killing themselves in these states is far higher than suicide rates among non-farmers. Farm suicides have also been rising in some other states of the country.
It is significant that the count of farmers taking their lives is rising even as the numbers of farmers diminishes, that is, on a shrinking farmer base. As many as 8 million people quit farming between the two censuses of 1991 and 2001. The rate of people leaving farming has only risen since then, but we'll only have the updated figure of farmers in the census of 2011.
These suicide data are official and tend to be huge underestimates, but they're bad enough. Suicide data in India are collated by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a wing of the Ministry of Home Affairs, government of India. The NCRB itself seems to do little harm to the data. But the states where these are gathered leave out thousands from the definition of "farmer" and, thus, massage the numbers downward. For instance, women farmers are not normally accepted as farmers (by custom, land is almost never in their names). They do the bulk of work in agriculture - but are just "farmers' wives." This classification enables governments to exclude countless women farmer suicides. They will be recorded as suicide deaths - but not as "farmers' suicides." Likewise, many other groups, too, have been excluded from that list.
The spate of farm suicides - the largest sustained wave of such deaths recorded in history - accompanies India's embrace of the brave new world of neoliberalism. Many reports on that process and how it has affected agriculture have been featured right here, on the Counterpunch site. The rate of farmers' suicides has worsened particularly after 2001, by which time India was well down the WTO garden path in agriculture. The number of farmers' suicides in the five years - 1997-2001 - was 78,737 (or 15,747 a year on average). The same figure for the five years 2002-06 was 87,567 (or 17,513 a year on average). That is, in the next five years after 2001, one farmer took his or her life every 30 minutes on average. The 2007 figures (detailed below) place that year, too, in the higher trend.
What do the farm suicides have in common? Those who have taken their lives were deep in debt - peasant households in debt doubled in the first decade of the neoliberal "economic reforms," from 26 per cent of farm households to 48.6 per cent. We know that from National Sample Survey data. But in the worst states, the percentage of such households is far higher. For instance, 82 per cent of all farm households in Andhra Pradesh were in debt by 2001-02. Those who killed themselves were overwhelmingly cash crop farmers - growers of cotton, coffee, sugarcane, groundnut, pepper, vanilla. (Suicides are fewer among food crop farmers - that is, growers of rice, wheat, maize, pulses.) The brave new world philosophy mandated countless millions of Third World farmers forced to move from food crop cultivation to cash crop (the mantra of "export-led growth"). For millions of subsistence farmers in India, this meant much higher cultivation costs, far greater loans, much higher debt, and being locked into the volatility of global commodity prices. That's a sector dominated by a handful of multinational corporations. The extent to which the switch to cash crops impacts on the farmer can be seen in this: it used to cost Rs.8,000 ?($165 today) roughly to grow an acre of paddy in Kerala. When many switched to vanilla, the cost per acre was (in 2003-04) almost Rs.150,000 ($3,000) an acre. (The dollar equals about 50 rupees.)
With giant seed companies displacing cheap hybrids and far cheaper and hardier traditional varieties with their own products, a cotton farmer in Monsanto's net would be paying far more for seed than he or she ever dreamed they would. Local varieties and hybrids were squeezed out with enthusiastic state support. In 1991, you could buy a kilogram of local seed for as little as Rs.7 or Rs.9 in today's worst affected region of Vidarbha. By 2003, you would pay Rs.350 -- ($7) -- for a bag with 450 grams of hybrid seed. By 2004, Monsanto's partners in India were marketing a bag of 450 grams of Bt cotton seed for between Rs.1,650 and Rs.1,800 ($33 to $36). This price was brought down dramatically overnight due to strong governmental intervention in Andhra Pradesh, where the government changed after the 2004 elections. The price fell to around Rs.900 ($18) - still many times higher than 1991 or even 2003.
Meanwhile, inequality was the great man-eater among?the "Emerging Tiger" nations of the developing world. The predatory commercialization of the countryside devastated all other aspects of life for peasant farmer and landless workers. Health costs, for instance, skyrocketed. Many thousands of youngsters dropped out of both school and college to work on their parents' farms (including many on scholarships). The average monthly per capita expenditure of the Indian farm household was just Rs.503 (ten dollars) by early this decade. Of that, 60 per cent roughly was spent on food and another 18 per cent on fuel, clothing and footwear.
Farmers, spending so much on food? To begin with, millions of small and marginal Indian farmers are net purchasers of food grain. They cannot produce enough to feed their families and have to work on the fields of others and elsewhere to meet the gap. Having to buy some of the grain they need on the market, they are profoundly affected by hikes in food prices, as has happened since 1991, and particularly sharply earlier this year. Hunger among those who produce food is a very real thing. Add to this the fact that the "per capita net availability" of food grain has fallen dramatically among Indians since the "reforms" began: from 510 grams per Indian in 1991, to 422 grams by 2005. (That's not a drop of 88 grams. It's a fall of 88 multiplied by 365 and then by one billion Indians.) As prof. Utsa Patnaik, India's top economist on agriculture, has been constantly pointing out, the average poor family has about 100 kg less today than it did just ten years ago - while the elite eat like it's going out of style. For many, the shift from food crop to cash crop makes it worse. At the end of the day, you can still eat your paddy. It's tough, digesting cotton. Meanwhile, even the food crop sector is coming steadily under corporate price-rigging control. Speculation in the futures markets pushed up grain prices across the globe earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the neoliberal model that pushed growth through one kind of consumption also meant re-directing huge amounts of money away from rural credit to fuel the lifestyles of the aspiring elites of the cities (and countryside, too). Thousands of rural bank branches shut down during the 15 years from 1993-2007.
Even as incomes of the farmers crashed, so did the price they got for their cash crops, thanks to obscene subsidies to corporate and rich farmers in the West, from the U.S. and EU. Their battle over cotton subsidies alone (worth billions of dollars) destroyed cotton farmers not merely in India but in African nations such as Burkina Faso, Benin, Mali, and Chad. Meanwhile, all along, India kept reducing investment in agriculture (standard neoliberal procedure). Life was being made more and more impossible for small farmers.
As costs rose, credit dried up. Debt went out of control. Subsidies destroyed their prices. Starving agriculture of investment (worth billions of dollars each year) smashed the countryside. India even cut most of the few, pathetic life supports she had for her farmers. The mess was complete. From the late-'90s, the suicides began to occur at what then seemed a brisk rate.
In fact, India's agrarian crisis can be summed up in five words (call it Ag Crisis 101): the drive toward corporate farming. The route (in five words): predatory commercialization of the countryside. The result: The biggest displacement in our history.
Corporations do not as yet have direct control of Indian farming land and do not carry out day-to-day operations directly. But they have sewn up every other sector, inputs, outlets, marketing, prices, and are heading for control of water as well (which states in India are busy privatizing in one guise or another).
The largest number of farm suicides is in the state of Maharashtra, home to the Mumbai Stock Exchange and with its capital Mumbai being home to 21 of India's 51 dollar billionaires and over a fourth of the country's 100,000 dollar millionaires. Mumbai shot to global attention when terrorists massacred 180 people in the city in a grisly strike in November. In the state of which Mumbai is capital, there have been 40,666 farmers' suicides since 1995, with very little media attention.
Farmers' suicides in Maharashtra crossed the 4,000-mark again in 2007, for the third time in four years, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. As many as 4,238 farmers took their lives in the state that year, the latest for which data are available,?accounting?for a fourth of all the 16,632 farmers' suicides in the country. That national total represents a slight fall from the 17,060 farm suicides of 2006. But the broad trends of the past decade seem unshaken. Farm suicides in the country since 1997 now total 182,936.
To repeat, the five worst affected states?- Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh?- account for two-thirds of all farmers' suicides in India. Together, they saw 11,026 in 2007. Of these, Maharashtra alone accounted for?over 38 per cent. Of the Big 5, Andhra Pradesh saw a decline of 810 suicides against its 2006 total. Karnataka saw a rise of 415 over the same period. Madhya Pradesh (1,375) posted a decline of 112. But Chattisgarh's 1,593 farm suicides mean an increase of 110 over 2006. Specific factors in these states nourish the problem. These are zones of highly diversified, commercialized agriculture where cash crops dominate. Water stress has been a common feature, and gets worse with the use of technologies such as Bt seed that demand huge amounts of water. High external inputs and input costs are also common, as also the use of chemicals and pesticides. Mindless deregulation dug a lot of graves, lit a lot of pyres.
Maharashtra registered a fall of 215 farm suicides in 2007. However, no other state even touches the 3,000 mark. And AP (with 1,797) and Karnataka (2,135) - the next two worst hit states - together do not cross Maharashtra's 4,000-plus mark. A one-year dip of 221 occurred in 2005 too, in Maharashtra, only to be followed by an all-time high of 4,453 suicides in 2006. The state's trend shows no turnaround and remains dismal.
Maharashtra's 2007 figure of 4,238 follows one and a half years of farm "relief packages" worth around Rs.5,000 crore ($1 billion) and a prime ministerial visit in mid-2006 to the distressed Vidharbha region. The state has also seen a plethora of official reports, studies and commissions of inquiry over 2005-07, aimed at tackling the problem. However, the 12,617 farm suicides in the same years is its worst ever total for any three-year period since the state began recording such data in 1995. Indeed, farm suicides in Maharashtra since that year have crossed the 40,000 mark. The structural causes of that crisis seem untouched.
Nationally, farmers' suicides between 2002-07 were worse than for the years 1997-2001. NCRB data for the whole country now exists from 1997-2007. In the five years till 2001, there were 15,747 farmers' suicides a year on average. For the six years from 2002, that average is 17,366 farmers' suicides each year. The increase is distressingly higher in the main crisis states.
P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. A regular contributor to CounterPunch, he can be reached at psainath@vsnl.com.
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The film Slumdog Millionaire is billed as the feel-good film of the year, enjoying both critical acclaim and commercial success in English-speaking countries around the world.
Almost comically, the film about an Indian orphan who chances on millionaire-success while appearing on a quiz show modelled on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has only just been released in Asia to what would be termed "mixed" critical reviews in the region. The fact that Asians do not like foreigners making their points for them has been brought out by the plethora of film reviews sent to me by my Indian and other Asian friends.
In the spirit of the film itself, and to make the viewing decisions more dramatic if not compelling, I present below a list of multiple-choice questions for the benefit of Asia Times Online readers.
1. The protagonist of the film Slumdog Millionaire is:
a. An orphan working as a tea boy b. A Caste-based politician c. An Indian criminal leading a mafia group d. A hardworking educated Indian
2. The preferred method of torture in Indian police stations as per the film:
a. Electrocution b. Attacked by mad dogs c. Being forced to dance on broken glass d. Watching a typical Bollywood film
3. The brother of the film's hero becomes what after growing up:
a. A rapist mafia underling b. A violent psychopath c. Hardworking and self-effacing coolie d. A local politician
4. The little boy with the hero is blinded because:
a. Blind beggars earn more than sighted ones b. He cannot then escape the beggar mafia c. He was eyeing the don's daughter d. His eyes are needed to give sight to a rich Indian
5. The female lead in the movie becomes what in order to survive:
a. Prostitute b. Homemaker c. Exotic but virginal dancer d. Female suicide bomber
6. When the hero as a child jumps into his own fecess in order to get an autograph from a movie star, what social observation is being made:
a. India's poor are desperate to take every chance they can get b. Muslims have to denigrate themselves to live in India c. It is actually cow dung and therefore good for Indians to bathe in d. Indians have no toilets
7. The American tourist taken in by the hero's guile at Agra does what after discovering the tires of his car have been stolen:
a. Gives the hero a hundred dollars b. Sends him to Guantanomo Bay c. Bombs Iraq and Afghanistan d. Shrugs and walks away
8. The call center that the hero works in has staff serving customers in which foreign country:
a. The UK b. Germany c. United States of America d. China
9. What particular sport is shown as the favorite of Indians:
a. Cricket b. Field Hockey c. Golf d. Football
10. The seminal one-liner in the film relates to the death of the hero's mother. He says: "But for X and Y, my mother would still be alive." X and Y are:
a. Ram and Allah b. Gandhi and Jinnah c. Destiny and luck d. Marx and Nehru
Spoiler alert: To avoid the suspense, the correct answer is (a) in all cases; (c) would be the answer in a Bollywood film while (d) is the answer I would have gone for or created should such a venture ever come under my purview.
Notes: Despite living in one of the world's poorest countries by many measures, Indian middle classes love to fantasize about a beautiful and peaceful country all around them that is growing at much the same breakneck pace as the Indian economy itself was until very recently. Mention the millions of destitute peasants and their eyes usually glaze over: you will be beseeched to look at the dynamic information technology corridors of the country, the blazing economic growth and ballooning savings across the corporate and individual sectors.
As a general rule, I detest Indian films ("Bollywood" in the vernacular), my golden rule remains that watching any five minutes of the usually sorry 200-minute sagas is enough to provide all the necessary plot and acting details that one would want to glean out of sheer intellectual curiosity. To the reel, these films are poorly scripted, awfully directed and acted out even worse; as if a retinue of 17th-century Shakespeare actors from the theater had suddenly been resurrected.
Thus it is almost poetic justice that when an "Indian" film comes along to critical acclaim one discovers all too quickly that the main parts - production and direction - were helmed by foreigners and even the acting was left to people of Indian descent rather than "true" Indians, by and large.
There is much to hate in this film, and it certainly doesn't appear as a "feel-good" venture by a long shot. Still what it brings to the table in terms of realism as well as presenting vast vignettes of unintended comedy through the use of mixed metaphors makes the experience worthwhile. In particular, I heartily recommend the film to the Indian middle classes and in particular to anyone still harboring communist sympathies in the country.
For what it shows above all else is that the most important ingredient of any emerging economy is the dynamics of development. Political and religious differences matter little when the basic impetus to growth and progress is missing. This is precisely the case in India today where the government gets away with making welfare payments but without infrastructure investments; where communist sympathizers monopolize the distribution of government funds to the point where waste is a national pastime and the frustrations of the underclass are ever increasing.
It is not a big exaggeration to highlight the importance of this film for Indians. That said, it is highly likely that Indians would themselves like to pretend that the film was never made, particularly if it fails to win any further accolades. For that reason alone, perhaps this film deserves to secure an Academy Award. For how many other times can these awards actually claim to have to reset the course of a billion people?
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Why should marriage plus kids equal happiness? A Post-Modern Spinster makes her case for life without marriage
Kate Mulvey
Kate, a married friend, said to me in that kindly patronising tone reserved for mad old women and naughty children: "Don't you think it's time you stopped running around like a middle-aged teenager and tied the knot before it's too late?"
"Too late for what?" I thought - a lifetime membership of Ikea and a man who is going to turn from Mr Perfect into Mr Sulk/Unfaithful/Slob within two years. The truth is, while wedded bliss is great for some women, there are those of us who are not cut out to find a man, marry and reproduce. I am 43, unmarried, without a child and I am not crying myself to sleep.
Why should I? This is not the 19th century: I am not going to freeze to death in a workhouse. Nor is it the 20th century: I am not going to write an angsty desperate-to-be-married Bridget Jones-style diary or worry about the biological time bomb.
Welcome to the world of the Post- Modern Spinster. Sane and still in demand, the PMS has chosen her go-it-alone existence. She is part of a sisterhood that has forgone the traditional markers of conventional happiness - marriage, children - in favour of life on her terms.
It is not strictly a question of not finding Mr Right. I have been proposed to three times. I have been in a couple of long-term relationships. Each time the M-word has cropped up, I get the heebie-jeebies. I just don't have the marrying gene. It is not that I have anything against finding the man, it is the notion of the domesticity of settling down that makes me uncomfortable. The idea of jostling together, the never-ending compromises, the hours spent considering the needs of the family - ferrying kids to and from parties or having to wake at 5am because your husband has an important meeting in Paris - doesn't sound like fun.
And a lot of women, like me, are waking up to the idea that there is an alternative to the constraints of marriage and the drudgery of bringing up children. Over the past ten years the numbers of women who have decided to opt out of the family game have risen. According to statistics, 50 per cent of educated, professional women are unmarried and childless and, of those, two thirds have elected to be so.
This new breed of woman leads an interesting and fulfilling life. "I have so much free time to pursue my goals," says my friend Emily, a chef who has spent the past year doing an MA in art. "My married friends spend most of their time worrying about their relationships or their children."
Of course, happiness depends on what you consider to be personal contentment.
I have a fulfilling, uncompromised career, while most of my married friends have had to put their career on the back burner. I have a large circle of friends. I can go to the cinema whenever I please or just lounge in bed drinking cappuccinos and reading trashy celebrity magazines.
The PMS is a free spirit but, and I am the first to admit it, there is a price to pay for a refusal to compromise on my lifestyle and sleep quotient - not having the knowledge that there will always be someone waiting at home for you with a cup of cocoa and a cuddle can be daunting. And, yes, sexy and single can soon morph into wrinkly old lady surrounded by cats, but marriage doesn't guarantee a man for life either.
So a word to my judgmental friend. The next time you want to call someone a middle-aged teenager, ask yourself who's having the most fun.
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For Andrew Witty, it's a question of redefining the unwritten contract that major drug companies have with society. For critics of big pharma, it's about addressing widely felt concerns about an industry that has often seemed heartless. Either way, the changes proposed by the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline goes to the core of one of the most toxic debates of our time.
The most serious charge against such firms is that they put profits ahead of poor people's lives. It's an allegation GSK has not escaped, even though it has cut the prices of its Aids drugs in developing countries and has promised efforts to develop a malaria vaccine.
The low point came in 2001, when GSK was among 39 multinational companies that took legal action against the South African government to try to prevent it importing cheap drugs. Amid an international outcry, the drug companies backed down. "I don't think anybody can claim that was handled well," said chief executive Andrew Witty.
He admits the industry could have done more in the past, but claims the problem was a fixed mindset. "I would say people tried really hard within a set of rules which haven't really been challenged very hard ... I guess what I'm just challenging a little bit is like why can't those rules be flexed a bit?" Witty says drug companies have an obligation to respond to society's needs and demands. "It's been obvious for a while, I think, that efforts have to be made to really reassert and strengthen that contract with society."
That goes to the very core of the business. Drug companies are criticised for failing to deliver for the rich world as well as the poor - for the UK and US as well as Tanzania or Ethiopia. They stand accused of focusing their efforts on making "me-too" blockbusters - barely altered copies of other companies' billion dollar sellers for indigestion or heart disease - rather than working on diseases where there are few treatments, such as Alzheimer's.
Transparency is a major issue. Witty has pledged to publish all clinical trial data, whether positive or negative - and be open about GSK's payments to doctors.
He has also signalled his willingness to negotiate on price, in a climate where value for money is increasingly discussed and other countries are contemplating setting up a version of Nice, the National Institute for Healthcare and Clinical Excellence, which decides whether drugs are cost-effective for the NHS.
Another part of the social contract is ending practices that cause public anxiety, he said. About eight weeks ago, GSK announced without fanfare that it would commit never again to experiment on great apes.
"People said that's a mistake, because you might one day have to go back and do those experiments," he said. "Society will accept a degree of experimentation with animals provided it has a purpose, provided there are no alternatives and provided it is done compassionately and humanely, but they trust us to shut the door behind us when we don't need to do it any more."
He likens this to the risk he admits he is taking that dropping prices in the poorest countries will result in cheap drugs being shipped clandestinely back for sale in the rich world.
"It's not a reason not to do it. Of course it creates risk but now it's our job to work with the Europeans and the Americans and whoever else is involved to try and get them to understand why it is important it doesn't all get reimported, why it's important that you don't benchmark the price in New York to the price in Ethiopia, because it's just wrong to do that. It's almost as wrong to do that as it would be not to do it in the first place."
GSK would love to undermine the Indian and Chinese generics companies, which sell copies of their drugs at rock-bottom prices in Africa and Asian countries where patents do not apply, because - since nobody had the money to buy their drugs - pharma companies did not take them out.
But mostly this is about diseases for which there are no drugs. There has been mounting pressure from the World Health Organisation and non-governmental organisations for action, especially on patents. Witty said he had spent many years in Africa and Asia and seen "the consequences of these diseases at a kind of personal level ... and also the damage it does to a society - the way entire populations become hollowed out and almost inevitably are consigned to not being able to progress properly."
He is trying, he said, to start a different kind of discussion with the various stakeholders. "If we can just make one piece of progress on one disease which hasn't had any progress for 40 years it has to be worth it."
Generic companies were capable of producing drugs at lower prices than big pharma could manage, because of the lower costs of manufacture. GSK's combination HIV drug Combivir had been reduced from $730 (£506) in 2001 per patient per year and now sells at $197 in the least developed countries.
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By David Gelles Published: February 11 2009 21:20 | Last updated: February 11 2009 21:20
An overenthusiastic employee from the computer supplies maker Belkin posted an offer online last month – $0.65 for anyone willing to write a positive review of Belkin products on Amazon.com. Several people took up the offer, producing gushing appraisals of Belkin products they had never used.
After a blogger exposed the scam, news organisations jumped on the story. The offer was removed and Belkin's president weighed in with an apology. The incident was a public relations disaster for Belkin. It was also a prime example of "Astroturfing", the unsavoury marketing practice of generating fake grassroots enthusiasm for a product.
Given the anonymity afforded by the internet, it is hardly surprising that deceptive marketing is on the rise. Consumers are spending more time online and companies are seeking new ways to reach them.
But now, in an effort to regulate how employees behave on the web, companies and industry groups are developing their own online codes of ethics. They want to ensure that when staff do engage with social media, they act ethically.
Last year, Coca-Cola established its own set of social media guidelines and distributed them in a memo to all employees. The policy emphasises the need for transparency and encourages employees to use common sense when discussing the brand online. "We've always had very diverse channels to reach consumers," says Adam Brown (pictured), digital communications director. "Wherever they are, that's where we go. That's now evolved into the need for a social media policy."
So when Mr Brown went online to promote Coca-Cola's Super Bowl advertisements, he followed the guidelines. On Facebook, Mr Brown announced that he was a Coke employee and pointed other users to the Coke ads on YouTube. On Pittsburgh Steelers fan forums, Mr Brown, who is from Pittsburgh, named his employer and then directed fans to the Coke blog, which had an interview with Steelers' defensive star Troy Polamalu.
Mr Brown said more deliberate engagement with online conversations was a necessity for a global company such as Coca-Cola. "We're mentioned several thousand times a day on blogs, and there are several hundred tweets about us on Twitter," he says. "There is a lot of conversation taking place about our brand without us. Where appropriate, we wanted to start getting involved."
Companies began interacting with social media years ago. But only recently have those involved with the industry perceived a need to develop ethical standards. Among the first to do so was The Word of Mouth Marketing Association, an organisation for the viral and buzz marketing industry. Womma published an ethics code in 2005, emphasising honesty of relationship, opinion and identity.
Since then, many companies have used the Womma code as a blueprint for their own guidelines. "Companies are learning every day that there is a right way and a wrong way to engage with social media," says Paul Rand, vice-president of Womma's board and head of its ethics project. "Some companies are learning by touching the burning pot; some companies are learning from the mistakes of others."
One company that "touched the burning pot" is Shelfari, a social networking site for book lovers, owned by Amazon. As it battled for market share in late 2007, it came under fire for its poor design and clunky user interface. Soon, comments appeared on more than 50 blogs attesting to Shelfari's greatness. "I have been on Shelfari for a couple of months now and absolutely love it," read one. "Shelfari is such a great site. I joined a couple of months ago and I have been hooked on it ever since," read another.
But all the comments were posted by the same user, "schaufferwaffer", who was soon exposed as a Shelfari employee. Shelfari's chief executive admitted to the Astroturfing (he blamed it on an intern who knew no better), and promised it would never happen again.
Such behaviour is declared out of line in the "disclosure best practices toolkit", an ethics code drawn up by the Blog Council, an organisation for heads of social media at big companies. The document advises employees and agencies to announce whom they work for when communicating with blogs or bloggers. It also encourages employees to provide a means for contacting them directly, if someone they interact with via social media wants to follow up with a two-way conversation. The toolkit also warns against using pseudonyms.
IBM was one of the first companies to develop its own social media policy. In 2005, it published its "social computing guidelines", which insist that employees write under their own names, using the first person, and make it clear they are speaking for themselves and not on behalf of IBM. It also prohibits employees from referencing clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
UPS is developing its own online ethics policy after recognising how damaging Astroturfing and other online misbehaviour can be for a company's reputation. "If one of our airplanes goes down, we have a very clear plan for getting information to the media," says Norman Black, director of global media services. "We realised we did not have a good plan for responding to a crisis on the internet."
In some countries, deceptive marketing practices are not only frowned upon but also illegal. In the UK, the law identifies "falsely representing oneself as a consumer" as a punishable offence. And in 2006, the US Federal Trade Commission issued regulations stating that word-of-mouth marketers must disclose their relationships. But in spite of these new rules there has been little enforcement of the measures.
Even without prosecution, Belkin seems to have learnt its lesson. Melody Chalaban, speaking for the company, says Belkin will soon be holding seminars to teach employees how to interact ethically with social media, and is also considering joining Womma. "We want to stress that this is an isolated incident," says Ms Chalaban. "We don't endorse or condone unethical practices like this."
● Flogging. Fake blogs can help companies get a personal voice behind a marketing campaign – but they risk a PR disaster if they are uncovered. When Sony tried to boost sales of its PSP portable gaming unit, it started a blog supposedly by two boys who wanted PSPs for Christmas. When it was revealed as a fake, Sony apologised and took it down.
● Astroturfing. A technique that gets its name from the practice of generating fake grassroots enthusiasm. One Florida company, PayPerPost, serves as a matchmaker between companies willing to pay for good press and bloggers willing to plug products that they have never used. After receiving criticism, PayPerPost now requires bloggers to disclose that their posts are sponsored. ● Comment spamming. Flooding the comment fields of blogs with enthusiastic notes about a company, even with full disclosure, is not welcomed by web users. When a Motorola employee commented on dozens of posts on a technology blog – each comment a plug for the new Motorola Krave – bloggers responded with snide criticisms of his spamming, which duly ceased.
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Given the anonymity afforded by the internet, it is hardly surprising that deceptive marketing is on the rise. Consumers are spending more time online and companies are seeking new ways to reach them.