Whether the government, the private sector or NGOs should deliver development is a question which will not have much relevance unless India's wealth continues to grow to pay for that development.
English is one of the advantages India has which are said to be propelling it to economic superpower status.
There are all those Indians who speak excellent English. It's the mother tongue of the elite and effectively the official language of the central government. Then there is the growing number of parents who now aspire to give their children an education through the medium of that language. But is the craze for English an unmixed blessing?
Back in the sixties the British regarded Indian English as something of a joke. The comic actor Peter Sellers had mocked it so comprehensively that I found it well nigh impossible to get the BBC to allow anyone with even the faintest Indian accent on the air.
In India, we native English speakers laughed at quaint phrases like "please do the necessary and oblige", or more simply "please do the needful", and "it is suggested that the meeting be preponed", which appeared regularly in Indian official correspondence.
Feted writers
A senior British diplomat once suggested that his PA should find some less geographically specific way of answering the telephone when he couldn't take the call than saying, "Sahib is not on his seat". Much to the diplomat's dismay a colleague told him that his PA had misunderstood the instruction and been even more specific. He'd told the colleague, "Sahib is in the lavatory."
Now with Indian writers carrying off the major literary awards, and Westerners in the IT and BPO industries talking of being "bangalored" when they are replaced by English-speaking Indians, Indian English is anything but a joke.
But could the very success of English in India "bangalore" India's own languages?
The linguist Professor David Crystal speaking in Delhi said: "A language is dying every two weeks somewhere in the world today. Half the world's languages will no longer be spoken in another century. This is an extremely serious concern, and English has to share the blame." Others put it less politely, describing English as a killer language.
But should India worry if English kills off some of its 22 officially recognised and hundreds of its not-so-official languages?
Perhaps the answer is no.
In his book comparing the future of India, China, and Japan, the former editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, said India fell short of China in almost every measure except the ability to speak English.
So why shouldn't India build on its one advantage? One practical reason is because, looking back over the history of India since it became independent in 1947, it is clear that any threat to Indian languages has the potential to provoke a violent backlash.
Mark Tully is a writer and former BBC India correspondent. This is an edited extract from his new book, Non Stop India, published by Penguin Books, India
TOI NEW DELHI: For the first time in many years, fewer Indian students are going to the US for higher study, while the number of Chinese students has jumped. But, also for the first time, the number of US students in India has jumped by over 44%.
According to theOpen Doors annual surveyby the US'International Institute of Education(IIE), students from India decreased by 1% to a total of 104,000. "Yet, India, as a destination for US students study abroad, increased 44.4%," said the survey. Despite the decline though, Indian students represent 14% of all international students in UShigher educationand the nation is by far the favourite destination forIndian students overseas.
The spike in Chinese students in the US, the survey said, is largely responsible for the country registering a 5% growth in international students in its colleges and universities during the 2010-11 academic session. China has increased its student population in the US to about 158,000 by 23%, pushing it to the top of foreign sources of students in the US.
Interestingly, India has jumped to 14th place as a destination for US students going overseas. At 3,884, US students in India have climbed by 44%, moving India up from the 21st spot the year before. China remains a greater favourite, with 13,910 US students in China, or a rise of 2% from last year. The beeline for India and China is explained by the global interest in these two rising nations.
According to the study, the college campuses that reported increases in the international student intake also recorded more foreign government sponsorships. This applies for a large number of students from China, said others familiar with the flow of international students to the US. Indian students are overwhelmingly private citizens and depend on funding from scholarships and teaching assistantships. After the recession, many of these have dried up, and this may have had an effect on the student flow, they believe. The Open Doors survey said almost 70% of the funding for international students comes from outside sources.
Usually, the number of international students at colleges and universities in the US increased by 5% to 723,277 during the 2010-11 academic session. It said, this was a record high number of international students in the country, the fifth straight year of student increases - fast emerging as a major service sector earner for the US. "Higher education is among the United States' top service sector exports, as international students provide significant revenue not just to the host campuses but also to local economies of the host states for living expenses, including room and board, books and supplies, transportation, health insurance, and support for accompanying family members," the survey said.
The top 10 most popular fields of study for international students in the US continue to be business and management (22%), engineering (19%), mathematics and computer science (9%), physical and life sciences (9%), social sciences (9%), fine & applied arts (5%), health professions (5%), intensive English language (5%), education (2%), humanities (2%) and agriculture (1%).
Justice Markandey Katju, Chairman, Press Council of India, argues that the media has a very important role to play in helping the country make the transition from an old feudal society to a modern industrial one quickly, and without much pain.
The Role the Media should be playing in India
by Justice Markandey Katju, (former Judge, Supreme Court of India), Chairman, Press Council of India
To understand the role which the media should be playing in India we have to first understand the historical context.
India is presently passing through a transitional period in its history, transition from feudal agricultural society to modern industrial society.
This is a very painful and agonizing period in history. The old feudal society is being uprooted and torn apart, but the new, modern, industrial society has not yet been entirely established. Old values are crumbling, everything is in turmoil. We may recollect the line in Shakespeare's play Macbeth: "Fair is foul and foul is fair". What was regarded good earlier e.g. the caste system is regarded bad today (at least by the enlightened section of society), and what was regarded bad earlier, e.g. love marriage, is acceptable today (at least to the modern minded persons).
One is reminded of Firaq Gorakhpuri's Urdu couplet:
"Har zarre par ek qaifiyat-e-neemshabi hai
Ai saaqi-e- dauraan yeh gunahon ki ghadi hai"
In a marvel of condensation this sher (couplet) reflects the transitional age. Zarra means particle, qaifiyat means condition, e means of, neem means half, and shab means night. So the first line in the couplet literally means
"Every particle is in a condition of half night".
Urdu poetry is often to be understood figuratively, not literally. So this line really means that (in the transitional age) everything is in flux, neither night nor day, neither the old order nor the new. Also, in the middle of the night if we get up we are dazed, in a state of mental confusion, and so are people in a transitional age.
In the second line, saaqi is the girl who fills the wine cup, but she is also the person to whom one can confide the innermost thoughts in one's mind. The poet is imagining a girl, to whom he is describing the features of the transitional era. 'Yeh gunahon ki ghadi hai', i.e. it is the time of sin. In this transitional age it is a 'gunahon ki ghadi' from both points of view. From the point of view of people of the old, feudal order it is a sin to marry according to your choice, and particularly outside one's caste or religion, it is a sin to give education to women, it is a sin to treat everyone as equal. At the same time, from the point of view of modern minded people the caste system is a sin, denying education to girls is a sin, and love marriage is quite acceptable. Thus old and new ideas are battling with each other in the transitional age.
It is the duty of all patriotic people, including the media, to help our society get over this transition period quickly and with less pain. The media has a very important role to play in this transition period, as it deals with ideas, not commodities. So by its very nature the media cannot be like an ordinary business.
If we study the history of Europe when it was passing through its transition period, i.e. from the 16th to the 19th Centuries, we find that this was a terrible period in Europe, full of turbulence, turmoil, revolutions, wars, chaos, social churning and intellectual ferment. It was only after passing through this fire that modern society emerged in Europe. India is presently going through this fire. We are passing through a very painful period in our history.
Historically, the print media emerged in Europe as an organ of the people against feudal oppression. At that time the established organs were all in the hands of the feudal despotic authorities (the king, aristocrats, etc). Hence the people had to create new organs which could represent them. That is why the print media became known as the fourth estate. In Europe and America it represented the voice of the future, as contrasted to the established feudal organs which wanted to preserve the status quo. The media thus played an important role in transforming feudal Europe to modern Europe.
In the Age of Enlightenment in Europe the print media represented the voice of reason. Voltaire attacked religious bigotry and superstitions, and Rousseau attacked feudal despotism. Diderot said that "Man will be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest". Thomas Paine proclaimed the Rights of Man, and Junius (whose real name we still do not know) attacked the despotic George III and his ministers (see Will Durant's 'The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution'). Louis XVI, while in the Temple prison saw books by Voltaire and Rousseau in the prison library and said that these two persons have destroyed France. In fact what they had destroyed was not France but the feudal order. In the 19th Century the famous writer Emile Zola in his article 'J' Accuse' accused the French Government of falsely imprisoning Captain Dreyfus in Devil's Island only because he was a Jew.
In my opinion the Indian media should be playing a role similar to the progressive role played by the media in Europe during the transitional period in Europe. In other words, the Indian media should help our country get over the transition period and became a modern industrial state. This it can do by attacking backward, feudal ideas and practices e.g. casteism, communalism and superstitions, and promoting modern scientific and rational ideas. But is it doing so?
In my opinion a large section of the Indian media (particularly the electronic media) does not serve the interest of the people, in fact some of it is positively anti-people.
There are three major defects in the Indian media which I would like to highlight.
1. The media often diverts the attention of the people from the real issues to non issues. The real issues in India are socio-economic, the terrible poverty in which 80% of our people are living, the massive unemployment, the price rise, lack of medical care, education, and backward social practices like honour killing and caste oppression and religious fundamentalism etc. Instead of devoting most of its coverage to these issues the media focuses on non issues like film stars and their lives, fashion parades, pop music, disco dancing, astrology, cricket, reality shows, etc.
There can be no objection to the media providing entertainment to the people, provided this is not overdone. But if 90% of its coverage is related to entertainment, and only 10% to the real issues facing the nation (mentioned above) then there is something seriously wrong with the media. The whole question is of proportion. In the Indian media the sense of proportion has gone crazy. Entertainment got 9 times the coverage that health, education , labour, agriculture and environment together got. Does a hungry or unemployed man want entertainment or food and a job?
To give an example, I switched on the T.V. yesterday and what did I see? Lady Gaga has come to India, Kareena Kapoor standing next to her statue in Madame Tussand's, tourism award being given to a business house, Formula one car race etc. etc. What has all this to do with the problems of the people?
Many channels show cricket day in and day out. Cricket is really the opium of the Indian masses. The Roman Emperors used to say "If you cannot give the people bread give them circuses". This is precisely the approach of the Indian establishment, duly supported by our media. Keep the people involved in cricket so that they forget their social and economic plight. What is important is not poverty or unemployment or price rise or farmers suicides or lack of housing or healthcare or education, what is important is whether India has beaten New Zealand (or better still Pakistan) in a cricket match, or whether Tendulkar or Yuvraj Singh have scored a century. The Indian media so much hyped up the cricket match at Mohali between India and Pakistan that it became a veritable Mahabharat War!
Enormous space is given by our media to business, and very little to social sectors like health and education. Most media correspondents attend the film stars, fashion parades, pop music, etc. and very few attend to the lives and problems of workers, farmers, students, sex workers, etc.
Recently 'The Hindu' published that a quarter million farmers committed suicide in the last fifteen years. A Lakme Fashion week was covered by 512 accredited journalists. In that fashion week women were displaying cotton garments, while the men and women who grew that cotton were killing themselves an hour's flight from Nagpur in the Vidarbha region. Nobody told that story except one or two journalists locally.
The media coverage of the education field concentrates (if at all) on the elite colleges like the I.I.Ts, but there is very little coverage of the plight of the tens of thousands of primary schools, particularly in rural areas where education begins.
In Europe the displaced peasants got jobs in the factories which were coming up because of the Industrial Revolution. In India, an the other hand industrial jobs are now hard to come by. Many mills have closed down and have become real estate. The job trend in manufacturing has seen a sharp decline over the last 15 years. For instance, TISCO employed 85,000 workers in 1991 in its steel plant which then manufactured 1 million tons of steel. In 2005 it manufactured 5 million tons of steel but with only 44,000 workers. In mid 90s Bajaj was producing 1 million two wheelers with 24,000 workers. By 2004 it was producing 2.4 million units with 10,500 workers.
Where then do these millions of displaced peasants go? They go to cities where they became domestic servants, street hawkers, or even criminals. It is estimated that there are 1 to 2 lac adolescent girls from Jharkhand working as maids in Delhi. Prostitution is rampant in all cities, due to abject poverty.
In the field of health care, it may be pointed out that the number of quacks in every city in India is several times the number of regular doctors. This is because the poor people cannot afford going to a regular doctor. In rural areas the condition is worse. The government doctors posted to primary health centres usually come for a day or two each month, and run their private nursing homes in the cities the rest of the time.
In 'Shining' India, the child malnutrition figures are the worst in the world. According to U.N. data, the percentage of under weight children below the age of 5 years in the poorest countries in the world is 25 per cent in Guinea Bissau, 27 per cent in Sierra Leone, 38 per cent in Ethiopia, and 47 per cent in India. The average family in India is consuming 100 kilograms of food grains less than it did 10 years ago (see P. Sainath's article 'Slumdogs and Millionaires').
All this is largely ignored by our media which turns a Nelson's eye to the harsh economic realities facing upto 80 per cent of our people, and instead concentrates on some Potempkin villages where all is glamour and show biz. Our media is largely like Queen Marie Autoinette, who when told that the people have no bread, said that they could eat cake.
2. The media often divides the people: Whenever a bomb blast takes place anywhere in India (whether in Bombay or Bangalore or Delhi or anywhere) within a few hours most T.V. channels starts showing that an e-mail or SMS has been received from Indian Mujahideen or Jaish-e-Muhammad or Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islam claiming responsibility. The name will always be a Muslim name. Now an e-mail or SMS can be sent by any mischievous person who wants communal hatred. Why should they be shown on T.V. screens, and next day in print (the T.V. news at night often sets the agenda for the print media news next morning)? The subtle message being sent by showing this is that all Muslims are terrorists or bomb throwers. In this way the entire Muslim community in India is demonized, when the truth is that 99 per cent people of all communities are good, whether they are Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or Christians, and of whatever caste, region or language.
India is broadly a country of immigrants. About 92 to 93 per cent people living in India today are descendants of immigrants, and not the original inhabitants (who are the pre-Dravidian tribals or adivasis, comprising of only 7 to 8 per cent of our population). Because we are broadly a country of immigrants there is tremendous diversity in India – so many religions, castes, languages, ethnic groups, etc. Hence it is absolutely essential if we wish to keep united and prosper that there must be tolerance and equal respect to all communities living in India. Those who sow seeds of discord among our people, whether on religious or caste or lingual or regional lines, are really enemies of our people.
The senders of such e-mails and SMS messages are therefore enemies of India, who wish to sow the seeds of discord among us on religious lines. Why should the media, wittingly or unwittingly, become abettors of this national crime?
3. The media promotes superstitions
As I have already mentioned, in this transitional age, the media should help our people to move forward into the modern, scientific age. For this purpose the media should propagate rational and scientific ideas, but instead of doing so a large section of our media propagates superstitions of various kinds.
It is true that the intellectual level of the vast majority of Indians is very low, they are steeped in casteism, communalism, and superstitions. The question, however, is whether the media should try to lift up the intellectual level of our people by propagating rational and scientific ideas, or whether it should go down to that low level and seek to perpetuate it?
In Europe during the Age of Enlightenment the media (which was only the print medium at that time) sought to uplift the mental level of the people and change their mindset by propagating ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity and rational thinking. Voltaire attacked superstitions, and Dickens criticized the horrible conditions in jails, schools, orphanages, courts, etc. Should not our media be doing the same?
At one time courageous people like Raja Ram Mohan Roy wrote against sati, child marriage, purdah system etc. (in his newspaper 'Miratul Akhbar' and 'Sambad Kaumudi'). Nikhil Chakraborty wrote about the horrors of the Bengal Famine of 1943. Munshi Premchand an d Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyaya wrote against feudal practices and women's oppression. Manto wrote about the horrors of Partition.
But what do we see in the media today?
Many T.V. channels show astrology. Astrology is not to be confused with astronomy. While astronomy is a science, astrology is pure superstition and humbug. Even a little common sense can tell us that there is no rational connection between the movements of the stars and planets, and whether a person will die at the age of 50 years or 80 years, or whether he will be a doctor or engineer or lawyer. No doubt most people in our country believe in astrology, but that is because their mental level is very low. The media should try to bring up that level, rather than to descend to it and perpetuate it.
Many channels mention and show the place where a Hindu god was born, where he lived, etc. Is this is not spreading superstitions.
I am not saying that there are no good journalists at all in the media. There are many excellent journalists. P. Sainath is one of them, whose name should be written in letters of gold in the history of Indian journalism. Had it not been for his highlighting of the farmers suicides in certain states the story (which was suppressed for several years) may never have been told. But such good journalists are the exceptions. The majority consists of people who do not seem to have the desire to serve the public interest.
To remedy this defect in the media I have done two things (1) I propose to have regular meetings with the media (including electronic media) every two months or so. These will not be regular meetings of the entire Press Council, but informal get-togethers where we will discuss issues relating to the media and try to resolve them in the democratic way, that is, by discussion, consultation and dialogue. I believe 90% problems can be resolved in this way (2) In extreme cases, where a section of the media proves incorrigible despite trying the democratic method mentioned above, harsher measures may be required. In this connection I have written to the Prime Minister requesting him to amend the Press Council Act by bringing the electronic media also under the purview of the Press Council (which may be renamed the Media Council) and by giving it more teeth e.g. power to suspend government advertisements, or in extreme cases even the licence of the media houses for some time. As Goswami Tulsidas said 'Bin bhaya hot na preet'. This, however, will be resorted to only in extreme cases and after the democratic method has failed.
It may be objected that this is interfering with the freedom of the media. There is no freedom which is absolute. All freedoms are subject to reasonable restrictions, and are also coupled with responsibilities. In a democracy everyone is accountable to the people, and so is the media.
To sum up: The Indian media must now introspect and develop a sense of responsibility and maturity.That does not mean that it cannot be reformed. My belief is that 80 per cent people who are doing wrong things can be made good people by patient persuasion, pointing out their errors, and gently leading them to the honourable path which the print media in Europe in the Age of Enlightenment was following.
Adrianne Yamaki, a 32-year-old management consultant in New York, travels constantly and logs 80-hour workweeks. So to eke out more time for herself, she routinely farms out the administrative chores of her life — making travel arrangements, hair appointments and restaurant reservations and buying theater tickets — to a personal assistant service, in India.
Kenneth Tham, a high school sophomore in Arcadia, Calif., strives to improve his grades and scores on standardized tests. Most afternoons, he is tutored remotely by an instructor speaking to him on a voice-over-Internet headset while he sits at his personal computer going over lessons on the screen. The tutor is in India.
The Bangalore butler is the latest development in offshore outsourcing.
The first wave of slicing up services work and sending it abroad has been all about business operations. Computer programming, call centers, product design and back-office jobs like accounting and billing have to some degree migrated abroad, mainly to India. The Internet, of course, makes it possible, while lower wages in developing nations make outsourcing attractive to corporate America.
The second wave, according to some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and offshoring veterans, will be the globalization of consumer services. People like Ms. Yamaki and Mr. Tham, they predict, are the early customers in a market that will one day include millions of households in the United States and other nations.
They foresee an array of potential services beyond tutoring and personal assistance like health and nutrition coaching, personal tax and legal advice, help with hobbies and cooking, learning new languages and skills and more. Such services, they say, will be offered for affordable monthly fees or piecework rates.
"Consumer services delivered globally should be a huge market," observed K. P. Balaraj, a managing director of the Indian arm of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.
But globalization of consumer services faces daunting challenges, both economic and cultural. Offshore outsourcing for big business thrived partly because the jobs were often multimillion-dollar contracts and the work was repetitive. In economic terms, there were economies of scale so that the most efficient Indian offshore specialists could become multibillion-dollar companies like Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Technologies.
It is not all clear that similar economies of scale can be achieved in the consumer market, where the customers are individual households and services must be priced in tens or hundreds of dollars.
Then there are the matters of language, accent and cultural nuance that promise to hamper the communication and understanding needed to deliver personal services. Already, some American consumers voice frustrations in dealing with customer-service call centers in India. At the least, the spread of remotely delivered personal services will be a real test of globalization at the grass-roots level.
Even optimists acknowledge the obstacles. In a report this year, Evalueserve, a research firm, predicted that "person-to-person offshoring," both consumer services and services for small businesses, would grow rapidly, to more than $2 billion by 2015. Yet consumer services, in particular, are in a "nascent phase," said Alok Aggarwal, chairman of Evalueserve and a former I.B.M. researcher. "It's promising, but it's not clear yet that you can build sizable companies in this market."
Veterans of the business offshoring boom predict an emerging market, but most are not investing. Nandan M. Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys, said there is "definitely an opportunity in the globalization of consumer services," and he listed several possibilities, even psychological counseling and religious confessionals. But, he added in an e-mail message, "This is just 'blue sky' thinking! We have no business interest at this point in this direction."
What the offshore consumer services industry needs, it seems, is a solid success story in some promising market.
A leading candidate to watch, according to analysts, is TutorVista, a tutoring service founded two years ago by Krishnan Ganesh, a 45-year-old Indian entrepreneur and a pioneer of offshore call centers.
Concerns about the quality of K-12 education in America and the increased emphasis on standardized tests is driving the tutoring business in general. Traditional classroom tutoring services like Kaplan and Sylvan are doing well and offer online features. And there are other remote services like Growing Stars, Tutor.com and SmarThinking.
Yet TutorVista, analysts say, is different in a number of ways. Other remote tutoring services generally offer hourly rates of $20 to $30 instead of the $40 to $60 hourly charges typical of on-site tutoring. By contrast, TutorVista takes an all-you-can-eat approach to instruction. Its standard offering is $99 a month for as many 45-minute tutoring sessions as a student arranges.
TutorVista also stands out for its well-known venture backers, its scale and its ambition. The two-year-old company has raised more than $15 million from investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Silicon Valley Bank. TutorVista employs 760 people, including 600 tutors in India, a teaching staff it plans to double by year-end. Its 52-person technical staff has spent countless hours building the software system to schedule, monitor and connect potentially tens of thousands of tutors with students oceans away.
"Our vision is to be part of the monthly budget of one million families," Mr. Ganesh said.
It is a long-term goal. To date, TutorVista has signed up 10,000 subscribers in the United States, and its British service, rolled out in September, has 1,000.
Further gains will depend on winning over more customers like the Tham family in California. Since he was in elementary school, Kenneth has had stints of conventional tutoring, often in classroom settings with up to 10 other students. At times, this cost the family up to $500 a month. Last year, Ernest Tham, a truck driver, noticed a reference to TutorVista on a Web site and suggested his son give it a try.
"Kenneth was apprehensive at first, and I wasn't sure how it would work," Mr. Tham said. "But, shocking to say, it's gone very well."
Kenneth said he initially found it "very unusual, not seeing another person. You get used to it, though. It's not a problem." He schedules one or two sessions nearly every day, mainly for English and chemistry. With a digital pen and palette, he writes sentences and grammar exercises, for example, and his work appears on his computer screen and on the screen of his tutor. They discuss the lessons using Internet-telephone headsets.
"You can also get help with homework problems," Kenneth said, "but they're not supposed to do all your homework for you."
In a year with the TutorVista service, Kenneth has improved both his grades and standardized test scores, his father said.
Ramya Tadikonda has tutored Kenneth Tham, among many others, from her home in Chennai, India. To achieve its ambitions, TutorVista must recruit, train and retain thousands of tutors like her.
Ms. Tadikonda, 26, is a college graduate who had previously worked as a software and curriculum developer for a math Web site for students, but left to raise her children. Earlier this year, she joined TutorVista, took the company's 60-hour training course, followed by tests and practice sessions for two months. She now works about 24 hours a week as a math and English tutor and makes about $200 a month.
Ms. Tadikonda says she enjoys tutoring and the flexible hours. "You can have a career and still spend time with your family," she said. "I never thought I could do that."
The timing is right for global tutoring, according to John J. Stuppy, TutorVista's president and a former executive at Sylvan Learning, the Educational Testing Service and The Princeton Review. Improved Internet technology and the ability to tap of vast pool of educated instructors at low cost are crucial ingredients. "It becomes possible to make high-quality, one-on-one tutoring affordable and accessible to the masses," said Mr. Stuppy, who joined TutorVista last year.
Steve Ludmer, 28, and his partner Avinash G. Samudrala, 27, are betting the time is right for another kind of global consumer service. They left lucrative jobs in management consulting and private equity to start a remote personal assistant service, called Ask Sunday, which began in July.
The company is based in New York, but its work force is mostly in India. It is one of a handful of startups trying to create a business in offshore personal assistant service. Some, like GetFriday, charge hourly rates of $15 or so, but Ask Sunday has a per-request model, $29 a month for 30 requests a month or $49 for 50.
The requests can be unusual. A few subscribers had Ask Sunday search online dating services for short lists of people who meet their criteria. But the requests are mainly to help busy people like Ms. Yamaki, the New York management consultant, free up time and outsource hassles.
During a late meeting at the office recently, Ms. Yamaki said, she sent a one-line e-mail message from her laptop that told Ask Sunday to order her usual meals from her favorite Manhattan restaurant, for delivery at 9:30 p.m. When the meeting ended, her take-out food was waiting.
To handle such personal chores, Ms. Yamaki has handed Ask Sunday a wealth of personal information, including credit card numbers, birth dates of family and friends and phone numbers for doctors, car services, favorite restaurants and others. She finds the convenience well worth it.
"The service is great in a pinch to make your life a little smoother," Ms. Yamaki said. "And it's available 24 hours a day, which is more than you can expect from a personal assistant at work."
'I should have started my writing career much earlier'
Nov 2, 2011, 12.00AM IST
He's famously controversial and extraordinarily prolific. Born in 1915 and close to 97 years now, author, humorist and political commentatorKhushwant Singh could be the oldest journalist in the world - but this hasn't sweetened his bite too much. Speaking with Humra Quraishi, Singh discussed childhood memories, contemporary politics and facing death - with a spirit of celebration:
How are you spending your days currently?
By not meeting anyone. In fact, i'm happiest when left alone. I have never ever felt lonely. There are books to give me company. I keep readingall through the day and before going to beda¦my hands have begun to shake but i still somehow manage to write longhanda¦
I wake up even earlier than before now and sit and think about what all has to be written and done during the day. I watch news on the television. Often i brood about my childhood - our ancestral village, Hadali, was in undivided Punjab, now Pakistan. Before Partition, my village had a majority of Muslims - almost 95%. There were only some Hindu and Sikh families and only one gurdwara, but just no communal tension... much after the Partition, on the two occasions i visited my village, they were so emotional. How they welcomed me, putting up banners and what not! It was touching. These days, these memories keep coming back.
Yet, your penchant for contemporary political commentary hasn't gone - broad comments on what's happening in the country today?
We have an honest and able prime minister but there is rampant corruptiona¦I don't believe the likes of Anna Hazare can do a thing about this corruption. Only Mahatma Gandhi would have been able to arouse mass consciousness to halt this corruption spreading all around. Meanwhile, on the other side, it's so obvious that chief minister Narendra Modi is targeting officers in Gujarat who dared to bare the truth.
But going by your long journalistic experience, is such disorder unique to India?
Well, the recent rioting in the UK pained me. The student days i spent there were my happiest. I defend the English today. I blame immigrants for that unrest, for they don't want to integrate. Why go abroad if you don't want to mix? If you don't want to integrate, stay put!
Your age is always a matter of public comment; do you privately think about death?
Yes. I think of death very often. I think of all my friends gone and wonder where they area¦I wonder why we don't discuss death in our homes. It's one of those realities no one can escapea¦I also believe in the Jain philosophy that death ought to be celebrated. Years ago, i'd sit at the cremation grounds. That had a certain effect on me, worked as therapy. And years ago, i'd written my own epitaph: 'Here lies one who spared neither man or God/ Waste not your tears on him, he was a sod/ Writing nasty things he regarded as great fun/ Thank the Lord he is dead, this son of a gun.'
Clearly, you have few regrets; is there anything you wish you could have done differently?
I should have started my writing career much earlier - i wasted several years pursuing the legal profession. The other regret is not to have written more against religious fundamentalists hell-bent on causing divides between communities of this land. They have to be dealt with severely. My worry is over the rise of right-wing fascist parties in the country. We have to save our country from these destructive forces.
New Delhi: Heres a compelling argument for education reforms in the country: student suicides increased by 26% from 2006 to 2010,with metros Bangalore,Delhi and Mumbai having most victims,in that order.And this is just the official data. While 5,857 student suicides were reported in 2006,the figure jumped to 7,379 in 2010,according to data released by the National Crime Records Bureau.In other words,20 students killed themselves every day in 2010,something both academicians and mental health professionals blame on a flawed education system where performance pressure ranks above all else.
