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.

Enterprising cab drivers and guides, who once offered “Shantaram” and “Slumdog Millionaire” tours when the book and movie were hugely popular with tourists, now hawk 26/11 tours, with commentary of the police officer who fought a gunman with just his baton, and the nanny who saved the child of a rabbi.

Starting from the fisherman’s colony where the 10 militants landed, the tour takes in the Jewish Centre, the main train station where gunmen killed the most number of victims, the Trident and Taj Mahal hotels, Cama Hospital and Leopold Cafe.

“All foreign tourists and even locals from remote towns come here. They want to pay homage,” said Eric Anthony, manager at the cafe, where holes made by bullets still dot walls and windows.

At Leo’s, as it is popularly known, visitors can buy a T-shirt or a book on the attacks. Mugs made for the anniversary were taken off the shelf after a regional Hindu fundamentalist group protested what it called commercialisation of the attacks.

The line between commercialisation and commemoration is one that Raj Comics has tried to walk carefully; it plans a series of titles featuring two of its superheroes taking on militants still holed up in Mumbai and saving the city’s residents.

The first of these, launched in May, sold more than 100,000 copies, and the second launches later on Thursday.

“The challenge is to create a piece of work that wraps some of the issues in an enjoyable, fun reading experience,” said Sanjay Gupta, Raj Comics’ studio head.

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.

Founder Jamsetji Tata had originally shopped for the hotel in London, Dusseldorf, Berlin and Paris, ordering 10 spun iron pillars that he saw at the Eiffel Tower opening exhibition for the hotel’s large ballroom, now redone in tonnes of gold.

The hotel, which combines Oriental, Florentine and Moorish architectural styles in its vaulted alabaster ceilings, graceful archways and marble floors, houses fine examples of modern and contemporary Indian art, and now, modern security systems, too.

The palace wing, built on reclaimed land overlooking the Arabian Sea, is a prime example of Indo-Sarcenic architecture, with cupolas and a dominant dome, which during the 60-hour siege was engulfed in flames and thick smoke from grenades.

The company spent some 1.8 billion rupees on repair and restoration, Bickson said, and lost more than that in the time that the hotel was shut for business.

But it has received several inquiries, including from guests who were present during the attack, he said.

The luxury Oberoi Hotel a few hundred metres away, which was also attacked, reopened earlier this year.

While the Taj has retained its priceless Belgian chandeliers, antique chests and sacred icons, it has completely refurbished its luxurious suites, including the Ravi Shankar suite, where maestro Shankar taught Beatle George Harrison to play the sitar. s:

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.

These are not just retirement funds. Besides depriving countries of valuable resources for development, experts warn “black money” is often used to fund militants, and therefore poses a major security risk, as well.

But signing a deal to gain access to this money is one thing, assembling convincing evidence of these accounts is another.

Swiss bank UBS last year agreed to hand over details of more than 4,000 American accounts to the U.S. government for investigation of tax evasion.

But Swiss banking officials, who have long resisted pressure to open up, have already indicated India cannot simply “throw a telephone book” at Switzerland and expect ready cooperation.

What India needs to do is build strong cases against people it suspects are guilty of tax fraud and graft.

It will not be easy, as they may well include politicians and other powerful figures. But with an abysmal ranking when it comes to corruption, India has much to gain from building credible evidence against tax evaders.

India has shown serious intent with the pact; now it needs to demonstrate serious and swift action.

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.

Mumbai’s local trains are its lifeline, but they are bursting at the seams. A Metro has been slow in coming and plans to develop the waterways for the island city have been mired in political and environmental concerns. Other big cities have faced similar issues.

Still, there is a ray of hope: a Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) in Ahmedabad in western Gujarat state, built and launched with minimal fanfare, has captured the imagination of even its wealthy residents, and is easing congestion gradually.

The BRTS, which transports some 60,000 people daily, aims to cover some 88 km and ferry 120,000-130,000 passengers by March 2012. Countries including Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia are studying the system, called Janmarg, or people’s way.

Indian cities are competing now to build the tallest apartments and the biggest statues; what they should be focusing on, instead, is affordable housing, public transport and sewage treatment to make them more liveable.

The McKinsey Global Institute has said India will, over the next two decades, see an urban transformation the scale and speed of which has not happened anywhere except China, with many Indian cities becoming larger than many countries today, in terms of size of population and GDP.

A cheap, efficient and scalable public transport system is essential to ensure millions are not stuck in gridlocks.

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.

Daisey’s monologue, which is part-autobiography and part-journalism, is both hilarious and heartbreaking, as he admits his own obsession with Apple gadgets such as the wildly successful iPad and the iPhone, while also criticizing a work environment he says has been forced by globalization.

“We, as Apple fans and the West are complicit in this tough work environment. We are every bit as responsible, let’s not kid ourselves,” he said.

Jobs is not an unreasonable or uncaring man, Daisey said, noting how he has transformed Apple into one of the “greenest” tech companies from being one of the “dirtiest,” and so can be persuaded to push for change at the factories in Shenzhen.

Jobs has said he found the worker deaths “troubling,” but insisted the Foxconn factory is not a sweatshop.

“The sweep of globalization means that these factories will be soon set up in India — some of them are already here — and you need to be aware that there is this other side to the fantastic, shiny gadgets we all so love,” Daisey said.

(Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Miral Fahmy)

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.

A similar model of professionals coming together to start a venture — this time for affordable healthcare — was also in the news this week.

A team that includes the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board, a former CEO of IL&FS and a former civil servant plans to set up a rural hospital network of about 2,000 hospitals to provide primary and secondary care at less than what rural Indians pay today, just over 1,000 rupees a year.

These initiatives are impressive not just in that they are largely born of the dreams and ambitions of one person or a group of not-so wealthy individuals determined to make a change.

They also address obvious, pressing needs.

A lack of affordable housing means India has the largest urban slum population in Asia; Mumbai for instance, boasts some of the priciest real estate in the world but 60 percent of its residents are homeless or live in slums.

Similarly, while India is a desired destination for medical tourism for expensive cosmetic surgeries, it has just 0.7 hospital beds and 0.6 doctors per 1,000 people, well below the world average.

With an estimated shortfall of some 20 million urban housing units and a healthcare system that falls short of meeting even basic demand, initiatives like these are perhaps just a drop in the ocean.

But they are a start, nevertheless.

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.

Business leaders and politicians tend to retire late in India. The chairman of family-owned conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra is 86 and has been at the helm since 1963. Prime Minister Manhoman Singh is 77, and his finance minister 74.

Analysts say the new crop of leaders, who grew up in post-reform India, are compelling proof of its growing confidence and ability as an emerging economic powerhouse.

Others say they are an unhappy reminder that family firms, which make up 13 of the 30 firms on Mumbai’s blue-chip stock exchange index, are still plagued by weak management and a lack of transparency that hamstring growth and dissuade investors.

In a Bain & Co survey on corporate governance in Indian firms, more than 75 percent of respondents said their board did not discuss CEO succession planning at all; fewer than a fifth had any formal or informal role in planning CEO succession.

“Succession is an issue. Obviously, you worry if someone is being put in place because of family ties rather than competence,” said Michiel van Voorst, senior portfolio manager at Robeco in Hong Kong, which has 30 million euros ($38.7 million) of a 700-million-euro fund invested in Indian firms.

“There is a risk factor. We’ve looked at some family-run companies in India and decided not to invest in them because of the additional layer of uncertainty,” he said.

NO CAKEWALK

India has a long history of entrepreneurial ambition driving sectors from steel to software, with Reliance Industries founder Dhirubhai Ambani and mobile tycoon Sunil Mittal representing hope to millions that even a school teacher’s son or a small business owner can achieve fame and fortune.

Until 1991, family-run businesses were protected by a “license raj” that kept foreign firms out. Patriarchs ran their companies like private fiefdoms with little regulatory oversight, much like the politically connected tycoons of Southeast Asia.

In the old days, sons started at the family firm early, working their way through the ranks and waiting in the wings till the patriarch died, with the oldest son usually taking control.

Now, sons and daughters, armed with degrees from top business schools in the West and stints at multinationals, are striding into the boardroom early, confidently drawing up new strategies.

“The context today is very different, and kids also realize they have to earn the right to a seat on the board, that families can hire professional managers if they’re not interested,” said K. Ramachandran, a professor at the Indian School of Business.

Every heir has it different: 30-something Aditya Mittal, a Wharton school business graduate, worked at Credit Suisse before becoming head of mergers and acquisitions at Mittal Steel, where he was key to the 26-billion-euro takeover in 2006 of Arcelor.

He is now chief financial officer at ArcelorMittal, headed by his father, billionaire Lakshmi Mittal.

SKIN IN THE GAME

It is not all a cakewalk: India has a fair share of failed family businesses and heirs who ran firms into the ground. An admission of fraud last year by the chairman of Satyam Computer Services shook the deep-rooted faith in family-owned businesses.

As did the Ambani feud, which was peppered with lobbying, public outbursts and court fights that prompted a top judge to tell them to go back to their mother to settle their differences.

Others, including the Godrej Group and the Munjals of Hero Group, a joint venture partner of Honda Motor, have drawn up succession plans to avoid such a spectacle.

Infrastructure-focused GMR Group even has a forum for spouses to air grievances and spells out a clear role for professionals.

Others, like the Bajaj Group, still do it the old-fashioned way, hashing out differences over dinner at home, as they did recently when the third generation of owners fell out over succession and ownership of the group, one of India’s largest, with interests in autos, financial services and appliances.

“We were able to reach an amicable settlement. It took time, but we did it without involving merchant bankers or middlemen. It was just us,” said patriarch and chairman Rahul Bajaj.

Slowly, Indian firms are following the path of European and American firms of yore such as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, who relinquished management.

There are also a few rare instances of families selling out: apparel exporter Gokaldas sold to the Blackstone Group, and brothers Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, after years of running drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories, founded by their grandfather, sold out to Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo.

There will be more such instances, Barclays’ Hancock said.

“Cultural changes will lead to exits. The new generation is much less focused on the family business. They’re not necessarily beholden to daddy. They’re eager to strike out on their own.”

Still, there is some merit to having the family involved.

“They have more skin in the game because it’s their capital, their name and their children’s future at stake,” said Anjali Bansal, managing partner at consultancy Spencer Stuart India.

“There is value to having family in the business if they are the right people with the right skills for the right job.”

(Additional reporting by Tony Munroe and Gautam Srinivasan; Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Miral Fahmy)

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..

“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.

Founder Jamsetji Tata had originally shopped for the hotel in London, Dusseldorf, Berlin and Paris, ordering 10 spun iron pillars that he saw at the Eiffel Tower opening exhibition for the hotel’s large ballroom, now redone in tonnes of gold.

The hotel, which combines Oriental, Florentine and Moorish architectural styles in its vaulted alabaster ceilings, graceful archways and marble floors, houses fine examples of modern and contemporary Indian art, and now, modern security systems, too.

The palace wing, built on reclaimed land overlooking the Arabian Sea, is a prime example of Indo-Sarcenic architecture, with cupolas and a dominant dome, which during the 60-hour siege was engulfed in flames and thick smoke from grenades.

The company spent some 1.8 billion rupees ($38 million) on repair and restoration, Bickson said, and lost more than that in the time that the hotel was shut for business.

But it has received several inquiries, including from guests who were present during the attack, he said.

The luxury Oberoi Hotel a few hundred meters away, which was also attacked, reopened earlier this year.

While the Taj has retained its priceless Belgian chandeliers, antique chests and sacred icons, it has completely refurbished its luxurious suites, including the Ravi Shankar suite, where maestro Shankar taught Beatle George Harrison to play the sitar.

(Editing by Krittivas Mukherjee)

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”.

Another well known voice, editor Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express paper, eerily echoing George Bush’s infamous line, asked: Are you for the Commonwealth Games, or against?

Demonising the Games just because some people made some money is “colossal stupidity” and highlights the “worrying twitterisation of journalism”, Gupta wrote on the weekend.

Really?

Despite its many faults, one of the things that India has going for it is its vibrant media, which citizens and investors alike look on as a watchdog.

Yes, it’s shrill, amateurish and given to exaggeration at times. But it does its job and has triggered action from citizens and the government many times.

So why is the CWG being seen as a nationalistic holy cow beyond reproach?

Admittedly, the media has already moved on to other things, but this is a good time as any to sort out our feelings of nationalism and media responsibility.

What would you rather have, a mouthpiece for the state that toes the line tamely or a vigilant enterprise that does not hesitate to probe, expose or criticise?

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.

Tata, who studied architecture at Cornell University and management at Harvard, is ranked among the world’s 25 most powerful businessmen by Fortune magazine.

But his acumen has been questioned in the past, such as when he spearheaded Tata Motors’ foray into cars.

The launch of the Indica hatchback more than a decade ago was far from successful, and Tata later joked that he was afraid even to walk his dogs because irate customers would accost him to complain about parts that rattled and doors that did not shut.

Since then more than a million Indica cars have sold, and Tata Motors, which had been known for its buses and trucks, launched the Indigo sedan in 2002, a car Tata sometimes drives to work.

Tata Motors, which was set up to make locomotives at the end of World War Two, successfully launched the Nano despite enormous challenges and is planning to sell it abroad.

Analysts also questioned Tata’s plan to buy luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor in a $2.3 billion deal.

But Tata not only won over a tough-talking union representing workers at Land Rover and Jaguar, he has also beaten his own estimates for sales of Jaguar and Land Rover, even at home in India.

BIG APPETITE

The Tata group, with interests spanning energy, luxury hotels, including Mumbai’s Taj Mahal, retail, broadcast, software and telecoms, is India’s second biggest group by market value, behind energy giant Reliance Industries Ltd.

Under Ratan Tata the group is not afraid to make big buys: Tata Tea bought UK’s Tetley Tea for $432 million and Tata Power paid $1.3 billion for stakes in Indonesia’s PT Bumi Resources Tbk’s two coal mines.

But the biggest deal was India’s biggest ever takeover, the $13 billion purchase of UK’s Corus Group by Tata Steel.

Tata, a licensed pilot who occasionally flies the company plane, and who recently took a spin in an F-16 fighter jet, has described the launch of the Nano as a “high point” in his career, one that gave him a rush of adrenaline.

A low point was the November 2008 attack on Mumbai, which killed 166 people and was centered on the Taj Mahal hotel. Unlike some of his business rivals, Ratan Tata does not court media attention and steers clear of Mumbai’s party circuit.

Tata has lived alone in the same upmarket apartment building for years and goes to work in a black Mercedes or Indigo, sitting beside his driver.

Tata is a member of the small but prosperous Parsi community, known for its love of music and arts, and upholds the family reputation for treating employees fairly and not paying bribes.

(Editing by Paul de Bendern and Louise Heavens)