India is no longer the “one-medal nation”. Sushil Kumar ensured that by winning a bronze medal on Wednesday, just a week after shooter Abhinav Bindra struck gold in Beijing.

Kumar beat Leonid Spiridonov of Kazakhstan in a bronze medal bout of the men’s 66kg freestyle wrestling event.

Bindra had won India’s first ever individual Olympic gold medal in the men’s 10m air rifle event on August 11.

And another medal is assured with Indian pugilist Vijender Kumar surviving in the boxing event.

On Wednesday, Sushil Kumar became the first Indian to win a wrestling medal at the Olympics since 1952.

Join us in congratulating him.

It’s official. Vodafone will sell the 8GB 3G iPhone for 31,000 rupees ($712) and the 16GB model for 36,100 rupees ($828). And this for a 3G model when India does not even have 3G services yet.

Vodafone and Airtel will launch the 3G Apple iPhone in India on August 22. Airtel is yet to announce its price for the phones but it’s unlikely the pricing will differ much.

The price of the 8GB model in the U.S. is $199 and $299 for the 16GB model. So is buying the iPhone in India worth it or will the grey market rule?

Who will buy the new iPhone? All those who had pre-booked? The ones who want to get the latest gizmo on day one of its official launch in India or the geeks who cherish anything Apple?

The other night I was surprised to see my seven-year-old son walk out of bed, shivering, crying and barely able to speak.

Calming down after 10 minutes, he said that he was getting regular nightmares about bomb blasts.

India has seen a series of bombings in recent years, this year serial blasts have rocked three major cities.

The first was in the western city of Jaipur on May 13, killing more than 60 people.

At least 16 bombs exploded in Ahmedabad on July 26, a day after blasts in the southern Indian city of Bangalore killed one person and injured several.

Television channels have flashed footage of the bombings time and again and my son has asked me endless questions like “why do people set off bombs and kill”?

I consulted a child psychologist the other day, who gave me a patient hearing and said my son was probably getting panic attacks. He advised me to take him for a counselling session as a precautionary measure.

This incident got me thinking about the effects of violence in children and I wonder how people have been coping with this problem.

A colleague asked me to keep my son away from the television for a while.

Is this the only solution? I am still searching for answers.

As the country watched in horror after terrorists exploded bombs in Ahmedabad and Bangalore ahead of Independence Day last month, a small village in far north-eastern Manipur had just finished a symbolic ritual in its efforts to end its grief over a crime purportedly unleashed by state actors.

Friends, families and human rights groups observed the last rites of 24-year-old Thangjam Manorama Devi, four years after she was allegedly raped and killed by personnel of the Assam Rifles paramilitary force. By performing the rites, they broke a pledge not to conduct the ceremony until their demands for punishment of the guilty and the repeal of the controversial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act from the state were fulfilled.

Like the Manorama Devi episode, excesses by security forces (I won’t add the word “alleged” because I have personally experienced it, being kicked, punched and shoved in the face with the nozzle of an SLR rifle while walking back home one night after attending church service), coupled with a sense of government neglect continues to alienate citizens of less-developed areas like the northeast and Naxal-dominated regions of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa.

Lack of economic opportunities is also a key factor in the proliferation of militant groups - in Manipur alone, there are reportedly 30-odd militant groups operating - perhaps joining an underground group is just another form of employment?

In other parts of the country, there are many who feel alienated because of their ethnicity, or religion. Muslims face profiling even in cosmopolitan cities (I know of a good friend, a senior journalist at that, who was unable to find accommodation in posh south Delhi. Landlords he approached told him they don’t rent to Muslims). Allegations of innocent people being framed and tortured by police following terror attacks have also been reported by newspapers.

The diabolical bombings in Bangalore and Ahmedabad also appear to have been carried out by home-grown extremists with a grouse against the state, trying to justify their actions with atrocities committed against a particular community.

Some time ago during a media event, I was trying to explain the security situation in the northeast to a senior journalist over dinner, when he suddenly stopped me in mid-sentence. “That’s the difference between people who come from your region and the rest of us,” he said, continuing “When we talk about the army, we just say ‘the army’ or ‘our army’, whereas you, wittingly or unwittingly, call them ‘the Indian army’, as if they were some foreign occupying force.”

I never realized it before, but he was right. And as a journalist trying to maintain an objective perspective, I have since taken care every time I have a discussion on the subject, But there are many others who, wittingly or unwittingly, still use that phrase - perhaps a manifestation of an underlying sentiment.

Sixty years after the country gained independence, many things have changed for the better, and we can afford to be proud of the nation’s achievements, our democracy (chaotic as it may be), and the many great men and women who have brought us to where we are.

But there is always the other side of the coin, and the truth is that there are many who feel they have been deprived, who still don’t feel like celebrating their independence.

When the tri-colour flutters and the nation erupts in celebration on August 15, some places in the northeast and Jammu and Kashmir will probably observe bandhs, with the possibility of bombs exploding, as it has been the case in previous years.

In his address to the nation last year on Independence Day, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he had a “vision of an India that is undivided despite diversity…. where every citizen feels proud to be an Indian.” Are we there yet?

By Erik Kirschbaum:
Abhinav Bindra won India’s first ever individual Olympic gold medal on Monday with a thrilling come-from-behind victory in the men’s 10m air rifle.

Bindra had been fourth after qualifying but had a brilliant final round and even hit a near perfect 10.8 on his last shot to pull in front of Henri Hakkinen of Finland, who dropped to bronze with a poor final shot of 9.7.

That allowed China’s Zhu Qinan, the defending Olympic champion and heavy favourite, to pass him on his final shot and win the silver medal.

“It’s just great,” Bindra told Reuters just before climbing on to the podium.

And — the celebrations have begun .

Babli Bindra, Abhinav’s mother, quipped: “Now I have lots of work ahead as he is the country’s most eligible bachelor.”

Already, the 25-year-old shooter’s female fan base is growing.

“Abhinav, will you marry me? My parents will have to buy that much less GOLD now,” read one congratulatory message posted by ‘Kaveri’ on the Reuters website.

Join us in congratulating Bindra.

The bombings that killed 45 people in the communally sensitive city of Ahmedabad have shaken India’s establishment. It is now sinking in that India faces homegrown Islamist militant groups operating with a scale and sophistication unheard of in
previous years.   

A group called “India Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the attacks, the same group that said it carried out the bombings in Jaipur in May that killed 63 people.

For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.

But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.

It only takes 0.0001 percent of India’s roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me.    

And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people.    

“We have crossed the tipping point,” he said.

Has India being ignoring a simmering revolt from disaffected Muslim youth? Over the last two years there have been a wave of bombings, nearly all blamed by the government on some local Islamist groups funded or backed by Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Reading the Indian newspapers, they are quick to blame Pakistan and Bangladesh. The home-grown front — perhaps the banned Students Islamic Movement of India — is seen as having its roots abroad.   

But there has been signs of growing dissatisfaction within the Muslim community, especially since the 2002 riots in Gujarat when around 2,500 people, mainly Muslims, were massacred by Hindu mobs.

Take the Gujarat riots. Hardly anyone has been brought to justice. The Hindu-nationalist chief minister at the time, Narenda Modi, was accused of turning a blind eye during the riots, is now a rising political star in India.

Data also shows that Muslims are one of the poorest segments of Indian society, and some of the most neglected people.   

The years since Gujarat has also coincided with a rise in global Islamist consciousness, with television and the Internet providing people in remote Indian villages with news of what is going on in Iraq and Guantanamo.

Some commentators point to the fact that ultra-conservative versions of Islam like Wahabism have been making inroads into India in recent years.

There has been a “well-funded effort to bring these ideas and these ideologies to Muslim communities across India,” said Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management.

In May, the Indian Mujahideen threatened senior Muslim clerics including Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa, or Islamic religious school, in Lucknow, over their pacifist stance.

Rasheed said his peace movement had received support from the influential ultra conservative Darool-Uloom Deoband madrasa in northern India, whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But how many young Muslim youths are now ignoring these clerics? How will these bombings in India’s most entrenched Hindu-nationalist state be received among alientated and poor Muslim youth in other parts of the country?

Or will the Indian Mujahideen tactics of bombing hospitals as well as many in their own Muslim community backfire?

One of the most striking things about the weekend’s bomb attacks in Gujarat was the mixture of savagery and sophistication.

Savagery because of the way a second wave of bombs were detonated at a hospital, apparently to target the crowds of concerned relatives who had gathered there. Had they been watching Contract, a recently released Bollywood film with a similar plotline?

Sophistication because of the way the coordinated attack was planned and executed without the intelligence agencies getting a sniff of it, even though dozens of people must have been involved.

It also looks as though the IP address of an American living in Mumbai was hacked to send an email just before the first blasts. Perhaps the perpetrators remembered how Daniel Pearl’s kidnappers were traced in 2002 from a email sent from a cybercafe in Karachi. This time the sender of the email will be harder to trace.

The bombers also stayed one step ahead of the police by not using mobile phones to detonate Saturday’s blast. That allowed the bombers to detonate the second set of bombs without having to worry about the mobile phone network being closed down (as police in Bangalore did on Friday). It could also will rob the police of some potentially valuable leads.

By reportedly using old, rented bicycles instead of newly bought ones, as they did in Jaipur, the bombers may also have covered their tracks more carefully.

The email from the Indian Mujahideen was professionally put together, even if its message was one of hatred. In it, the group insisted that “each and every Mujahid belongs to this very soil of India”, and mocked the “cunning ones who call themselves the ‘Intelligence Bureau’”.

So far the police seem to have few leads on the Indian Mujahideen, but this level of sophistication and planning will undoubtedly lead some people to suspect the presence of a foreign hand.

It already has made some people wonder if India’s intelligence agencies are well enough equipped and resourced to cope with this sort of threat.

But there is one thing I simply do not understand. The email says the attacks targeted Gujarati Hindus. But if that was the case, why were some of the bombs left in the Muslim-dominated old city? But I guess the working of a Mujahid’s mind are not always easy to understand.

Much as he tries astrologer Rajan Chopra can’t keep the pride out of his voice as he speaks to me for the second time in 24 hours.

It’s victory march at 7 Race Course Road after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wins a closely-fought vote of confidence 275 to 256 in parliament and the temptation for Chopra to say “I told you so” is overwhelming. But Chopra, a political and corporate astrologer who predicted yesterday that the government would win the trust vote, says “it’s a victory for astrologers as well”.

If popular predictions are anything to go by then stargazers say the strong Saturn in Congress President Gandhi’s astrological chart is to be thanked for the government’s victory and the Congress party will be wise to look heaven wards for further guidance before general elections next year.

“As I have said before, Samajwadi Party general secretary Amar Singh will play a very crucial role now, along with party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav,” Chopra says. “I am basing my prediction on three things - the chart of the Congress party, that of opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and of Sonia Gandhi.”

Don’t the stars of Manmohan Singh count for anything? His answer confirms something that non-stargazers suspected all along. “Gandhi is the main force behind him.”

Kanpur-based astrologer Ramesh Chintak who strongly believes there is no branch of astrology that can help predict the future of a political party or outfit, says Saturn is strong in Gandhi’s stars which may have led to Tuesday’s turn of events.

However, he cautions that astrological predictions of any single individual cannot be trusted to foretell the fortunes of the party as a whole. He prefers rather to strengthen his prediction with safer bets.

“I heard the speeches made by (leader of opposition) L K Advani in parliament and I think he indicated even then that the opposition may not in the end win the motion. You also have to take into account the general word on the streets that the government is likely to win the vote,” he says.

When I tell Chopra that India’s Science and Rationalists Association dismisses astrology as superstition, he assures me that he is “a scientific astrologer and a paramedic man on top of that”.

Chennai-based astrologer K.B. Gopalakrishnan was quoted on websites with astrological charts to bolster his claim that Manmohan Singh was safe on the trust vote. Although astrologer M N Kedar, a member of the Indian Council of Astrological Sciences, strongly predicted that the planetary position was not in favour of the government.

July is the season for shareholder meetings, an annual rite of passage for Indian companies, with directors, shareholders and reporters trooping into large, badly-lit auditoriums to hear the chairman speak glowingly of the achievements of the past year, and a litany of woes from shareholders.

As a reporter who has covered many of these meetings of some of India’s largest companies, I have quickly learned that shareholders’ questions have little to do with family squabbles, succession policy, ill-advised acquisitions, or unflattering media reports.

Instead, they usually range from pleas for factory visits and bigger dividends to the quality of the snack served at the meeting. A few will ask about the cost of printing the annual report, and offer up suggestions for new advertising campaigns or congratulatory verse on the company.

Rare is the instance when shareholders pose tough questions, let alone dissent.

Contrast that with the narrow escape the chief of British retailer Marks and Spencer had in one of the biggest shareholder rebellions in recent years, with shareholders questioning the departure of a senior official and calling for the separation of the roles of chairman and chief executive that Stuart Rose held.

Other British firms have faced shareholder ire over such matters as CEO pay hikes, stock bonuses and merger plans, with shareholders forcing CEOs to shelve these plans and even to quit.

In India, some shareholders had questioned Tata companies on falling profits years ago. A few others have also asked consumer goods maker Hindustan Unilever for updates on a thermometer factory in southern India which Greenpeace had accused of causing pollution.

But years of robust economic growth and a six-year bull market have meant shareholders have been by and large pleased with earnings growth and unwilling to ask many tough questions.

“We don’t have enough large shareholder associations that monitor and exercise control over corporates,” said Jayati Sarkar, an associate professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research.

“Also, older small investors are culturally very tied to the company, and are not given to criticism.”

But younger shareholders are less inhibited, and as more shareholding passes into the hands of bigger, more powerful mutual funds and other financial instutions, they will have greater clout, she said.

Perhaps size does matter, after all.

PepsiCo has ended a 10-year relationship with Sachin Tendulkar, reportedly because the beverage giant felt the master batsman, at 35 and in indifferent form, is not as big a youth magnet as he used to be.

Also, at 40-50 million rupees a year (about $1 million), he was a tad pricey.

Pepsi, which recently also parted ways with former captains Rahul Dravid and Saurav Ganguly, has signed on such young cricketers as Ishant Sharma and Rohit Sharma for its “youngistan” campaign, targeted at a younger demographic in a country where half the population is below the age of 25 years.

At least one ad in the new campaign features Shah Rukh Khan, the 42-year old super star, although in the role of an older — the glasses are the giveaway — guardian to the young actor Deepika Padukone and beau Ranbir Kapoor.

So are ageing movie stars surer bets than ageing cricketers? Tough question in a country that’s obsessed equally with both. But there are some telltale signs.

Ever heard of an actor’s house being vandalised after a movie bombed at the box-office? Even Dhoni has had his home attacked after recent defeats.

In the world of celebrity advertising, marketers appear to have a lemming-like approach to cricket: one big knock or wicket haul has them all beating a path to the door of the cricketer du jour, with the result that the recent Twenty20 extravaganza was a blur of cricketers on field and off it, endorsing everything from styling gel to lubricants.

But cricketers are at the mercy of our board, which adds and axes at will, and advertisers are known to have “escape clauses”, particularly for younger players, that allows them to abandon a contract if the player is say, dropped from the national team.

Tendulkar, whose roster includes Adidas, Airtel, TVS Motor and Aviva, has been a top endorser for more than a decade, considered a lifetime in the notoriously fickle ad industry.

Some argue it is the uncertain nature of cricket that forces our players to embark on a seemingly exhausting round of endorsements.

Bollywood stars are equally non-discriminating, smiling for products ranging from luxury watches to fountain pens.

But who leads the crop there? Khan and the Big B, our evergreen hero, who command the highest prices, and between them endorse about two dozen brands.

What does SRK or the Big B have that a Tendulkar or a Ganguly don’t?

“It does seem counter-intuitive, if brands say they want to connect with the youth, and there are so many younger actors to choose from,” said Sumanto Chattopadhyay, executive creative director for south asia at Ogilvy & Mather.

“But clearly, SRK’s not perceived as old, and no one else has that kind of superstar power.”

So while Khan and Bachchan senior can be assured of a long inning, our cricketers have to resign themselves to even shorter stints as endorsers, he said, because of “overexposure” from the sheer amount of cricket they play, and because younger players are popping up with a greater frequency.

How about some sympathy — and some change — for our boys in blue.