Matthias Williams

Bhutan has warned its citizens over cutting down thousands of young trees every year to make prayer flags, a threat to the tiny kingdom's lush scenery and the government's duty to bring "Gross National Happiness".

Himalayan Buddhists put up prayer flags for good luck or to help the dead find the right path to their next life. The more flag poles put up for the departed the better, and Buddhist monks say fresh poles must be used each time.

Having failed to convince its citizens to switch from wood to steel for prayer flags, the government of the Himalayas' last Buddhist kingdom is growing bamboo, which it hopes will be an attractive alternative.

Read the whole story here.

(Photo: Prayer flags in Thimphu, 23 Aug 2003/Kamal Kishore)

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Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's frisking at the Delhi international airport has sparked uproar in the Indian media.

Kalam is one of India’s most popular presidents, his tenure remembered both for his common touch and his earlier role in India’s rise as a nuclear power.

The government has filed a police report against Continental Airlines, whose staff frisked Kalam, violating a Bureau of Civil Aviation Security directive exempting specified VIPs and VVIPs from security checks.

Social networking sites were abuzz with angry Indians wondering how Americans would have reacted if, for example, former U.S. president Bill Clinton had been frisked.

For its part, the airline issued a statement saying both there were no exceptions to its security policy and it believed that Kalam had not been offended.

What do YOU think? Should Kalam have been frisked?

If the early comments on the Great Debate are anything to go by, it seems there is still a lot of goodwill towards Elattuvalapil Sreedharan.

The man behind the Delhi metro, seen as one of India's most successful infrastructure projects, resigned on Sunday after part of a rail bridge in the capital collapsed and killed six people.

Sreedharan had enjoyed a towering profile as a civil engineer who got things done -- and quickly. In the words of his spokesman, Sreedharan "can walk into the prime minister's office. He has a reputation that he carries."

Business students from as far away as Harvard have studied the metro's success.

In contrast to the delays, cost-overruns and red tape that have plagued projects for decades, the subway's first phase finished on budget and nearly three years ahead of schedule, with 99.5 percent of trains running on time.

All eyes were on the second phase, which is due for completion when the city hosts the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

But the deaths have raised questions whether the quick building came at the expense of human lives.

When he submitted his resignation, the 77-year-old Sreedharan won praise for accepting "moral responsibility" for the accident.

I interviewed Sreedharan recently, and his words now seem almost prophetic. His drive for speed was clear.

In his office, as in many others in his organisation, hangs a clock counting down the days to the next deadline.

"For us, time is money," he told me. "We can't allow one day to waste."

But Sreedharan also outlined his well-known spiritual bent which he encourages his employees to follow. He fits yoga and meditation around his workday.

Behind his desk, reads a sign quoting Sanskrit scriptures: "Whatever to be done I do, but in reality, I do not do anything."

He emphasised the importance of integrity, which he said made the government trust his organisation enough to let go of most of the decision-making.

"People should be prepared to take decisions and not pass on the buck," he said. "We should be able to trust people in power, which means people in power should have a proven integrity."

Delhi's chief minister Sheila Dikshit has since persuaded Sreedharan to withdraw his resignation. Many want him to keep his job, saying the project is better off with him on board.

An editorial in the Indian Express said the resignation was "decidedly not what the Metro project needs."

"This, in a sense, is a test case for infrastructure policy: will it continue to revolve around individuals and their differing degrees of commitment to these projects, or can we ensure that these crucial projects, which undergird our economic future, roll out successfully with stronger institutional checks and progress reviews?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has recruited Nandan Nilekani, the engineer-entrepreneur who co-founded Infosys Technologies and helped propel India's rise as an IT giant, to head a government authority on national ID cards.

Singh said India needed experts like Nilekani from outside the political system. Singh may feel the same about Sreedharan.

As Dikshit said: "The metro and the country needs him, because he has done good work not only in Delhi, he has done it all over India."

Why did the murder of a preacher in a Sikh temple in Vienna spark riots in the faraway Indian state of Punjab, in which thousands took to the streets to torch cars, trains and battle security forces?

The root cause may lie in India's caste system that Sikhism officially rejects, but that still grips swathes of India's billion-plus people, including in Sikh-dominated Punjab state in northwestern India.

"Via Vienna, Sikh caste war returns, sets Punjab aflame" ran the headline of the Hindustan Times.

The preacher, Guru Sant Rama Nand, 57, was killed in a gurdwara in the Austrian capital in an attack by six men armed with knives and a gun.

He was from the Dera Sach Khand, a religious sect separate from mainstream Sikhism that has a large support base of Indian Dalits, or "untouchables", and other lower castes.

The leader of Dera Sach Khand, Guru Sant Niranjan Das, 68, was wounded in the attack.

The thousands who went on the rampage in Punjab on Monday were mainly Dalits. Authorities have imposed a curfew in parts of the state, in which three protesters died on Monday in clashes with security forces.

The Dera Sach Khand sect was inspired by the 15th century spiritual leader Ravidas, himself from a lower caste. It differs from mainstream Sikhism, for example, in that it reveres living gurus such as Sant Niranjan Das. Some pious Sikhs find this concept offensive.

Traditional Sikhism recognises 10 gurus who led the community from the founding of the faith by Guru Nanak in the late 15th century. The 10th guru named the religion's holy book, known as the Guru Granth Sahib, as his successor.

Sikhism does not recognise caste, but "the clash in a Vienna gurdwara and the mob fury are yet another manifestation of simmering discontent that Dalits in Punjab feel due to increasing social inequality and oppression in a society that was supposed to be free of it," writes the Times of India.

In the relatively prosperous state, "caste prejudices and biases remain steeped among followers of Sikhism...facing-off in a festering, endless dispute over rights, rituals and religion."

In such a context, the appeal of sects such as the Dera Sach Khand is easy to understand.

"The legitimacy given to these deras and the steady weaning away of the faithful from the gurdwaras has often rattled the Sikh clergy and its more hardline followers pitting them against the deras," writes the Indian Express.

The caste conflict may have been the cause of the Vienna attack as well.

"Caste has moved beyond India with Indian diaspora as the latter does not move as individuals but takes its cultural baggage along," Vivek Kumar, who teaches sociology in New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, told the Times of India.

According to some reports, the attackers objected to the temple allowing a living guru to speak in the presence of the holy book.

But Vienna police say they are still unclear on what motivated the kiling.

The temple which was attacked is newer than Vienna's two other Sikh temples and had been gaining popularity, but so far there had been no hostilities between the different groups in Vienna, said Bernhard Fuchs, an ethnologist at Vienna university.

And the city's two other Sikh temples have distanced themselves from the attack and condemned it as against the basic tenets of the Sikh faith.

"The foundation of Sikhism besides brotherly love and care for others, is also the principle of non-violence," they said in an open message.

"Based on these principles, the Sikh religious community in Austria therefore reject all act of fanaticism and condemned this outrageous attack in the strongest term."

Muslims are seen as a crucial vote bank in several possible swing states in India's general election and many politicians are making the right noises to court the community.

In the state of Bihar, which I recently visited, its chief minister Nitish Kumar told me his campaign focused on caste-blind development but also communal harmony:

"Now everybody is happy. There is complete communal harmony," he said as we sat at night on the veranda at his residence.

If what he says is true, then communal harmony could be a vote winner for Kumar, whose party still has far fewer seats in the national parliament than that of his main rival in the state, the federal Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

Prasad was chief minister for years, backed mainly by the Yadav caste and the Muslim vote. Could that Muslim vote now be slipping away from him?

Hussain Ansari, a Muslim rickshaw driver whom I met, ironically, outside Prasad's campaign office, told me he will vote for Kumar: "The situation is changing. Lots of development is taking place."

It remains to be seen to what extent Biharis believe Kumar has changed Bihar under his tenure as they go the polls.

But Kumar may also face a problem: he is an ally of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of whom many Muslims are still wary.

So it is no wonder the issue of Varun Gandhi, a scion of India's powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and a BJP election candidate, has reared its head in the state.

Gandhi has just been released from jail, accused of making an inflammatory "hate speech" against Muslims in March. Gandhi said video clips of his campaign rally were doctored in a political
conspiracy to tarnish his image.

The BJP has so far stuck by its candidate. Kumar, on the other hand, for a long time demanded legal action against Gandhi.

Enter Lalu Prasad, who told a rally he wanted to flatten Gandhi with a roller and said he would have done so if he were the country's home minister.

In a twist, local police in Bihar filed reports against Prasad for his speech against Gandhi.

The BJP in its manifesto also revived an old promise to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the northern town of Ayodhya, on a site revered by Hindus but disputed by Muslims.

Mobs tore down a 16th century mosque on the site in 1992, which led to Hindu-Muslim riots that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Analysts say the BJP's pledge will garner Hindu votes. But it won't necessarily help Kumar's attempts to woo Muslims, and he vocally opposed his ally's pledge:

"The BJP as a political party is free to hold its views on the Ram Temple and several other issues, but when we form a coalition government, no communal or contentious issue is on our agenda," he is quoted as saying.

Muslims in parts of India say they feel alienated from the rest of the country, often left behind by India's economic boom and tarnished by the same brush as Islamist militants.

In Bihar, though, communalism has not played a large role in the past, said Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute, who is based in the state.

He argues Hindus in Bihar have been split along caste lines to the extent that they do not present a united front in which communalism thrives.

"In the absence of a Hindu consolidation, communalism is not a very powerful force in Bihar."

But Varun Gandhi and the BJP have become a talking point in 2009. Prasad will try his hardest to keep Muslims on side, and what better way than to play up Kumar's ties with the BJP and the prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani?

"It's a contradiction that the chief minister has criticised Varun Gandhi but on the other hand supports the BJP and L.K. Advani," Ram Bachan Roy, a member of Prasad's party, told me. "L.K. Advani is an incarnation of communalism."

(Reuters photos of federal railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav and a Muslim voter)

"The state government is trying to establish the rule of law...however so mighty someone may be, without any discrimination, whatever their clout is, they will still be put on trial." 

This is what Neelmani, a senior police officer in Bihar, told me in a recent interview.

He said the "Jungle Raj", which gave the state a reputation for corruption, kidnappings and crime, is coming to an end.

The state's bad name made me expect the worst. But violent crime such as civilian killings has dropped sharply in the past four years.

When you ask people in the capital, Patna, what they are happiest about now, they often say they can venture out after dark without fear.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar wants to present his leadership in stark contrast to that of his predecessors, Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi, who ruled the state for 15 years until 2005.

Prasad handed over the reins to his wife when he was accused in the "Fodder Scam", a large-scale corruption case.

Her residence is just opposite Chief Minister Kumar's, and despite the bluster around Kumar, Prasad and his wife may well think they can cross the road again in the future.

Taking a short trip to a village just outside Patna, it is clear Bihar faces an uphill battle.

I wanted to check out how Congress' flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) had worked.

The villagers complained they were getting ripped off by contractors and threatened with jail.

At a small government office in the area, I could see why. A contractor we talked to was very friendly at first. He gave us plates of delicious grapes and tea.

But when we asked him about NREGA, he clammed up.

His senior came in mid-way through the conversation, took him to one side and, so says a friend of mine who overheard them, muttered something about a short jail stint if he spilled the beans.

We asked where we could meet NREGA labourers. Twice a local came in, heard what we were talking about and offered to help, and twice they were quickly ushered out past a small sign by the door warning against corruption.

We ventured out on our own to find the workers. When we did, they listed ways in which their money disappeared in NREGA. 

One trick was simply not to pay them. Another was to get them to work for weeks and then not record it. Yet another was to take their thumbprints and then go collect the money.

The job scheme has faced problems in several states and done well in others. I was left in little doubt in which category Bihar falls.

Nitish Kumar is campaigning on a platform of caste-blind development and communal harmony -- a message that may or may not resonate in a state where caste loyalties are still strong.

But no one can write off Lalu Prasad, who many credit for giving a voice to the poor, to lower castes, and to Muslims when he was chief minister.

His party argues that Kumar's much trumpeted development platform has excluded many of the state's poorest.

Prasad is now the federal railway minister. He won praise for rescuing the service from near bankruptcy and turning it into a cash cow, and has given lectures to American Ivy League students on the success story.

But some Biharis may wonder why he did not work the same miracles for them.

The black sheep of India's most powerful political dynasty or a young politician making his own way in that family's most potent political rival?

Call him what you will, Varun Gandhi is grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons in an episode that could embarrass his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party at the start of a general election campaign.

The great-grandson of India's founding father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was allegedly caught out making inflammatory comments against Muslims at a recent rally.

Local TV news channels are daily replaying clips in which he is alleged to have said the hands of those who threatened Hindus should be cut off, and going on to make crude comparisons between a rival Muslim candidate and Osama bin Laden.

India's election commission will now monitor every speech Gandhi makes in the run up to the polls. To add insult to injury, Gandhi has since been accused of dishing out money to voters in his Pilibhit constituency in Uttar Pradesh state.

But the man himself stood defiant and said video clips of his speech had been doctored for political gain.

"That is a conspiracy, that is not my voice, those are not my words," he said, but refused to name the likely conspirators.

The political lives of Gandhi and his cousin Rahul make for lip-smacking contrasts. Rahul's mother, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born head of the Congress party whom many see as wielding the real power in government, has long groomed her son to be a future prime minister.

Congress leaders openly say Rahul's rise to the top is a matter of when not if. Varun, who faces a criminal investigation into his alleged comments, presents his party with a fiery alternative to Rahul, but enjoys precious few benefits from his famous name.

Unlike most of the Nehru-Gandhi line, Varun joined the BJP. His mother fell out with slain former prime minister Indira Gandhi and drifted towards Congress’ main rival at the end of the nineties.

In the dynasty vs dynasty game, Congress promotes Rahul as the natural heir to his father Rajiv Gandhi, the country’s youngest ever prime minister who governed when a young India began its rise on the global stage.

In contrast, the BJP wants to position Varun as the only Gandhi who can uphold the ideals that Indira stood for, especially toughness on internal security and military prestige.

The BJP has in the past been accused of stoking tensions between Hindus and Muslims to pander to its large Hindu vote base. Comparisons between Varun Gandhi and Narendra Modi are inevitable.

Some have not forgiven the Chief Minister of Gujarat, regarded as one of the BJP's most capable politicians, for what they saw as his quiet complicity in communal riots in his state in 2002 that left more than 2000 people, mostly Muslims, dead.

"Another Modi is rising. There is no necessary to apology, he told real situation," reads one reader's comment on an article on Gandhi in the Economic Times newspaper.

"Varun is among the few bold younger politicians taking the bull by the horns. The majority (Hindus) must have at least an equal say in their own country. But we are ruled by minorities with an Italian to boot," said another.

Another thing Gandhi said this week in the midst of the row caught my eye. "I am a Gandhi, a Hindu and an Indian in equal measure," he was quoted as saying.

Where had I heard such words before? The charismatic young Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, a friend of Rahul’s, delivered a barnstorming speech in parliament last year in defence of secularism.

"I am a Muslim and I am an Indian, and I see no distinction between the two."

Whereas Abdullah's speech was widely praised and became an instant YouTube hit, the question is what the future now holds for Gandhi's fledgling political career.

"As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too...Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn," wrote London Times' columnist Alice Miles.

The phrase "poverty porn" spread across the Indian media as commentators nodded in agreement or shook their heads even before the film premiered in its native Mumbai and India could (legally) watch it.

A group of the city's slum dwellers, including children, protested against the word "dog". A social activist filed a defamation case in Patna. And this week, hundreds of slum dwellers in Bihar's capital ransacked a movie theatre demanding the title be changed.

So, is it really "poverty porn" for the Westerner's delectation? Are beatings, torture, and the maiming of street beggars a sick form of adult exotica?

Perhaps the question can be rephrased: does a morbid fascination with the suffering of others find a place in art and is "Slumdog" are a striking example of this?

Be it a film on the Nazi holocaust, or based on crime, or a painful examination of the horrors of drug abuse (Trainspotting?), viewers can gawk at the world's dirty underbelly whether or not they would describe themselves as pain perverts.

But the film has caused real offense in some parts.

"'Slumdog' is just every scrap of dirt picked up from every corner and piled up together to try and hit back at the growing might of India. And the awards almost seem like a sadistic effort to show the world -- look we knew that this was India, and these are the slumdogs we are outsourcing our jobs to," wrote management consultant and film producer Arindam Chaudhuri on his blog.

Chaudhuri and others say the film crosses the line into stereotype in a way that "stinks of racial arrogance" and is designed to undermine India's inevitable rise on the world stage.

According to Chaudhuri, the film serves up "India as the accidental millionaire, which in fact happens to be a slumdog".

But take the critically acclaimed movie "La Haine" (Hate), about life in the grim suburbs of Paris. Riots, needless bloodshed, police' brutal treatment of immigrants and monotonous poverty are its subject matter and there is no happy ending.

Should France have rushed to the city's defence and said the (French) director wallowed in the city's troubles when Paris has so much more to offer? Could he not have made a film set in the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and the world-famous catwalks?

Should "City of God" have apologised for being set in the troubled slums of Rio and because it didn't address Brazil's own emergence on the world stage?

The director of "Slumdog", Danny Boyle, is up for an Academy Award. But some panned the film on its own perceived demerits and said it does not deserve 10 Oscar nominations -- three for music director A.R. Rahman will do. The three people I went to see it with were underwhelmed.

Some saw the film as trite and inconsistent. For example, the hero's sudden knowledge of English after his stint as a guide at the Taj Mahal came under scrutiny, especially since it allowed Boyle to shoot large chunks of the film in his native tongue.

Whether or not a moviegoer wants to spend his money on a film set in slums seems a matter of taste, but with more expected protests in India, the controversy has not died down.

On June 29 of this year, hundreds of gays, lesbians and transsexuals danced and sang on the streets of three Indian cities, hoisting the rainbow flag on the country’s first nationally coordinated gay pride day.

Though they waved slogans such as “gay and loving it”, many still wore masks – afraid to openly campaign against the dreaded Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which has banned “unnatural” sex since colonial times.

So where do the protesters find themselves nearly four months later, as gay activists battle a (divided) government to scrap the law, taking the case to the Delhi High Court?

The charges leveled by the government against homosexuals appear to be stacking up. Local media has quoted additional solicitor general P P Malhotra as saying homosexuality is a “social vice”, borne of a “perverse mind”.

It has been called the worst form of indecency, while an MP from an independent party called it an “evil” that has been imported into India from the western world and would change the face of India.

Worse, the government says homosexuality is “a disease” – the spreader of killer HIV/AIDS even as it infects the morality of its victims. Malhotra on Monday painted a gloomy picture indeed of what would happen if Indian homosexuals had their way: “AIDS is already spreading in the country and if gay sex is legalized then people on the street would start indulging in such practices saying that the High Court has given approval for it.”

It would, in the words of Home Minister Shivraj Patil, “open the floodgates for delinquent behaviour" for those same people who danced on the streets of Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore four months ago.

No longer fearing prison, they would flaunt their vice openly on the streets, as police and decent families stand by, powerless to stop them. If, by the government’s own estimate, just 0.3% of Indians are homosexual, that still leaves around three million people to go on the rampage.

So far, though, the High Court has not been impressed. It has dismissed the government’s evidence when it drew on religious texts, including the bible, to attack homosexuality. On Monday the High Court challenged the Centre to prove how homosexuality was a disease, and earlier cheekily asked whether straight sex should also be banned, given it also spreads AIDS.

The cabinet itself is divided: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh found himself asking two members of his cabinet to make up their very public tiff on the issue. Health Minister Ramadoss has been a strong spokesman for the gay campaign, arguing that pushing homosexuality underground has made it harder, not easier, to stop the spread of AIDS.

The question is, if the law is repealed, will homosexuals feel truly free in India, and how much of a backlash will there be against them? Given the social stigma, those who flaunted their pride secretly in June, might still find it hard to out themselves to friends and family, even if the law says they can.

If you want a break from a global financial meltdown, the launch of Bentley's latest luxury car in India can be welcome relief - and show that the rich are still doing what they do best. Buying unnecessary things.

It means you can, in my case, leave behind an office full of tired journalists hunched over ever more depressing data, and ignore TV screens showing grimfaced politicians and weepy traders.

Out there somewhere, someone has the cash to buy the 'New Continental Flying Spur Speed' Bentley - even if that somebody isn't you.

The car - which costs a cool Rs2.5crore (over half a million USD) - was on display at one of the capital's high-end hotels on Friday.

Boasting a stylish black finish and a retro-style front grille, the car's specs are, in the current climate, almost satirical.

To get to 100kmh needs just 4.8 seconds of pedal pressing; while your top speed - if you were ever tempted to try it out - is 322kmh.

Every car is also custom-made to fit the whims of those who can still afford to be whimsical; and is built with a decadent slowness that means that the cover for the steering wheel, for example, takes 5 1/2 hours to stitch together.

It makes for entertaining reading on the same day that the carmaker's country of origin, the UK, is revving up to sue Iceland over withheld bank deposits - not an event many of us saw coming.

And as Bentley's MD for India says, 'there is always somebody making money'. While things are starting to look really bad in India, Bentley and many companies like it still see the country as a 'key market', and aren't going anywhere.