Mumbai attack sites draw tourists, inspire comics
MUMBAI (Reuters) – Fancy a painting depicting the horror of last November’s attacks in Mumbai? How about a comic book with superheroes taking on the Islamist militants, or a coffee mug or music album as a tribute to the victims?
On the first anniversary of the attacks that killed 166 people, alongside the prayer meetings and candlelight vigils, are art shows, music launches, book deals and movies in the making, even tours of the sites by enterprising cab drivers and guides.
“Something changed, something was lost in those three days, and we wanted to capture that,” said Jasmine Shah Varma, who curated an art exhibition titled “Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again”.
Works at the gallery, near the Taj Mahal Hotel that was attacked, included an oil on canvas of a gun-toting silhouette in red, and photographs of sinister masks on a beach, a reference to the 10 militants who came in a dinghy.
“After November 2008, the romanticised notion of Mumbai’s seafront has changed. Now it reminds us of the terror that came via the sea,” said Varma.
There are other reminders that one can wear, carry or drink from: “Forever Bombay” necklaces, with shiny threads and beads twisted to resemble the dome of the Taj Mahal Hotel that was attacked, as well as Mumbai handbags, with tassels and prints.
Mumbai is no stranger to bomb blasts, but the emotional and commercial outpouring since last November is unprecedented.
Mumbai’s Taj hotel reopens Sunday after 2008 attacks
MUMBAI (Reuters) – Holding balloons and flowers, employees pledged on Thursday to re-dedicate themselves to Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel when it reopens at the weekend after the 2008 militant attacks in which guests and staff members died.
The hotel, which suffered extensive damage from a siege laid by four heavily armed gunmen, was one of several Mumbai landmarks attacked by Pakistan-based militants. The November strikes, which lasted over 60 hours, killed 166 people.
Standing on the grand cantilever stairway, staff members cheered and tossed rose petals in the air after chairman Ratan Tata garlanded a bust of the founder of the Tata Group, India’s oldest conglomerate, which also owns the luxury Taj hotels.
“This flagship property, this venerable Old Lady, is going to reopen in the same glory, the same splendour of more than 100 years,” Tata said, his voice cracking, ahead of the hotel’s scheduled reopening on Sunday, also India’s independence day.
Tata had vowed to “rebuild every inch” of the iconic hotel, founded in 1903, and which has played host to maharajas, heads of state, chief executives, movie stars and entertainers alike.
Architects, designers and restoration experts from India and around the world spent more than 21 months assessing the damage, then restoring the hotel, said Raymond Bickson, managing director of Taj Hotels, a unit of Indian Hotels Co Ltd. (IHTL.BO: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).
“It was a cast of thousands that undertook the extensive restoration and sensitive restoration of the hotel, staying true to the original design and spirit,” he said.
India can now follow the black money
Indians love many things about Switzerland: chocolates, watches, Bollywood movie locales and secret bank accounts.
Until now.
India and Switzerland on Monday signed a pact amending the existing double taxation avoidance agreement, that will make it easier for New Delhi to gain access to information on suspect bank accounts, possibly paving the way to recovering billions of dollars in undeclared wealth.
It is anyone’s guess just how much money is stashed away in secure vaults in the scenic Alps.
The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which made repatriating “black money” one of its election promises last year, estimates there may be some 25,000 trillion rupees, or roughly half India’s GDP of $1 trillion, in secret Swiss accounts.
Other estimates are even higher.
A report from Global Financial Integrity last year said $23-$27 billion in illicit money left India every year in the period 2002-06; some of it to offshore financial centres, and the rest to tax havens and traditional banks including big Swiss banks.
Gridlocked in the rush to grow
Newspapers have delighted in reporting a 100km traffic jam outside Beijing could last until mid-September. Road construction is the immediate cause for the gridlock, which stretches as far as Inner Mongolia, Chinese officials have said.
For Indian commuters battling a near-daily gridlock in all the big cities, this is an ominous sign of things to come.
India is adding vehicles at an unprecedented pace, with July clocking the highest car sales on record.
China has already overtaken the United States as the biggest auto market, and Indians are splashing out on cars across segments, from the humble Nano to the uber luxury Jaguar sedan.
But India, despite its stated goal of spending some $500 billion in the five years to March 2012 and double that sum over the next five-year period, has failed to build roads to keep up.
Transport Minister Kamal Nath’s promise to build 20 km of road a day is as full of holes as Mumbai’s roads in the monsoon, and plans for improving public transport have been slow off the ground.
Delhi’s Metro is a success story, but needs to cover a far greater distance before it can take the load off the congested roads.
A monologue to make Apple mend its manufacturing ways
MUMBAI (Reuters Life!) – A master storyteller and self-confessed Apple fan hardly makes for a compelling advocate for social change.
But Mike Daisey, whose new monologue focuses on what he calls the dark side of Apple’s iconic gadgets, hopes he can pressure Chief Executive Steve Jobs to push for better labor conditions at factories in China, where most Apple gadgets are assembled.
The two-hour monologue entitled “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is part paean and part critique of Apple Inc, and Jobs, a pancreatic cancer survivor and founder of the iconic company that wields enormous clout in the tech world.
Dressed in black — in a nod to Jobs’ trademark black turtleneck and jeans — the stocky Daisey sat in the spotlight at a desk on an otherwise bare stage in Mumbai this week, gesticulating through his expletive-ridden monologue, barely pausing to sip water from a glass or wipe sweat off his face.
Daisey, acclaimed for his monologues including ‘Great Men of Genius’ and ’21 Dog Years’, posed as an American businessman to check out Foxconn Technology in Shenzhen that came under international scrutiny after a spate of worker suicides.
Critics have blamed the suicides on stressful working conditions at the factory that employs nearly 800,000 workers.
Filling the gap one brick, one hospital bed at a time
Two stories this week stand out as examples of how entrepreneurs in India are doing what the government and the private sector have largely failed to do.
One is on housing, the other on healthcare, hot-button topics in India, which is struggling to house and heal its 1.1 billion population even as it gallops toward double-digit growth.
Various state governments and real estate firms have made lofty promises of “affordable housing”, but few have delivered.
One man is determined to show he can. Entrepreneur Jaithirth “Jerry” Rao, who headed software firm MphasiS, this week launched a project in Bangalore to build 1,900 homes that will be priced at 450,000 – 1 million rupees (roughly $9,500 – $21,000) each.
Rao’s Value and Budget Housing Corp – floated with a former Citibank colleague – will use lightweight aluminium beams and cast-on-site technology to cut costs.
Top mortgage lender HDFC will provide housing finance for the project, which will be replicated in cities including Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, the NCR and Navi Mumbai, which are more often in the news for luxury residential projects looking to outdo Dubai.
Rao’s project comes on the heels of a similar one launched by entrepreneur Ramesh Ramanathan’s Janaadhar Constructions, which is building more than 500 homes priced at 500,000 rupees or less.
No longer all in the family: Indian businesses step out
MUMBAI (Reuters) – When it comes to Indian businesses, The Tata Group is the oldest and best-known: the conglomerate owns the luxury Jaguar car brand, it’s made the world’s cheapest car, and its chairman, 72-year-old Ratan Tata, oversees an empire that ranges from salt to software.
This month, Tata Group set another milestone: it became the first Indian family-run business to look beyond the family for a successor to Tata, who is due to retire by end-2012.
Tata has no apparent successor, leaving the business founded by his great-grandfather potentially vulnerable.
But his decision to look within the company, as well as abroad, will go some way in dispelling some of the negative notions of family firms in India, highlighted by the bitter five-year feud between the billionaire Ambani brothers.
“Change has taken a while; they’re evolving relatively slowly because business is seen as an emotional link between founders and their assets, and they tend to want to pass them on to the next generation,” said Frank Hancock, managing director of advisory at Barclays Capital and an India veteran.
The Ambani feud has been held up as an example of how blood ties can affect business: lack of succession planning, opacity, and erosion of shareholder value.
These are perceptions India’s top family firms, which have dominated the country’s corporate landscape for over a century, are trying to shake off as they face more competition, tighter regulations, and a new generation of leaders takes the reins.
Mumbai’s Taj hotel reopens Sunday after 2008 attacks
MUMBAI (Reuters Life!) – Holding balloons and flowers, employees pledged on Thursday to re-dedicate themselves to Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel when it reopens at the weekend after the 2008 militant attacks in which guests and staff members died.
The hotel, which suffered extensive damage from a siege laid by four heavily armed gunmen, was one of several Mumbai landmarks attacked by Pakistan-based militants. The November strikes, which lasted over 60 hours, killed 166 people.
Standing on the grand cantilever stairway, staff members cheered and tossed rose petals in the air after chairman Ratan Tata garlanded a bust of the founder of the Tata Group, India’s oldest conglomerate, which also owns the luxury Taj hotels.
“This flagship property, this venerable Old Lady, is going to reopen in the same glory, the same splendor of more than 100 years,” Tata said, his voice cracking, ahead of the hotel’s scheduled reopening on Sunday, also India’s independence day.
Tata had vowed to “rebuild every inch” of the iconic hotel, founded in 1903, and which has played host to maharajas, heads of state, chief executives, movie stars and entertainers alike.
Architects, designers and restoration experts from India and around the world spent more than 21 months assessing the damage, then restoring the hotel, said Raymond Bickson, managing director of Taj Hotels, a unit of Indian Hotels Co Ltd..
No criticism please, we’re Indian
Suddenly, it is not cool to be against the scandal-plagued Commonwealth Games.
The CWG was meant to be Delhi’s big coming-out party, India’s assertion that it is a global powerhouse capable of doing what China did with the Beijing Summer Olympics two years ago.
Instead, the Games, scheduled for October, are turning out to be a costly embarrassment, with daily revelations of corruption, fraud and political wrongdoing that has triggered big headlines and much hand wringing by outraged citizens, sportsmen and even politicians.
But suddenly, being against the CWG is almost unpatriotic.
In an “emotional appeal” with a visual of the Indian tricolour published in all leading newspapers on the weekend, industrialist Subrata Roy flayed the “recent continuous and negative media coverage” that has left organisers and volunteers feeling “totally demoralised and dejected”.
The media, Roy said, has overdone it, “causing very big damage in maligning the image of our country”.
The media should now postpone its campaign until after the Games, Roy exhorted, and an audit of the culprits and their punishment must be done “after our country’s greatest ever sporting event is over”.
Tata to retire, successor has big shoes to fill
MUMBAI (Reuters) – The announcement that a search for a successor to Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata group, has begun was every bit as understated as the man who has steered India’s second-biggest conglomerate for nearly two decades.
A statement, emailed after the market close on Wednesday, simply said the group’s holding firm has set up a panel to find a successor to Ratan, who is due to retire by the end of 2012, and will look within the group as well as externally, including abroad.
Ratan Tata is a symbol of corporate India’s bold overseas push. The Tata group, ubiquitous in India but little-known abroad, purchased luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover in 2008.
Tata, who is single and has no children, has said before his successor need not come from the family — a break from tradition in a country where family ties run deep.
The 72-year-old, who lives quietly in south Mumbai, has said he lacked fire in the belly for another five years at the helm after the launch of the world’s cheapest car, the Nano in 2008.
His successor has big shoes to fill: Tata is credited with transforming the sprawling conglomerate of more than 300 firms into a corporate powerhouse after he took over as chairman in 1991 from his uncle J.R.D. Tata.
Now Tata Sons, the holding company owned largely by charitable trusts, oversees less than a third that many firms.
-
About Rina
-
Follow Rina
