India at 60

India celebrated 60 years of independence on August 15.

Many were the nay-sayers around the world who scoffed at India's experiment with democracy. They have all been proven wrong. Democracy -- the fact that India belongs to her people -- is India's primary achievement, and may yet provide its salvation.

Will India fulfill the promise of this moment and make good on the pledge Jawaharlal Nehru made to the people of India in his famous midnight speech to free all Indians from 'poverty and disease and inequality of opportunity'?



Will India have the political courage and the intellectual daring to imagine a post-industrial, 21st-century national destiny grounded in its own ancient traditions and the truly revolutionary message of non-violence that secured its freedom, or will it fall prey to the seductions of a 20th-century industrial consumer society in the American mode?




I fear all signs are that India is choosing the latter path, betraying both the wisdom of one of its greatest progenitors, Mahatma Gandhi, and the life chances of most of its people.




Here is the link to an article I published for a special report on India's independence for Forbes.com (in the privileged company of lead author Amartya Sen). http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/05/india-us-relations-oped-cx_mka_0813us.html

And here are links to two review essays that mention my recent book Planet India. The latter, by New America Media editor Sandip Roy is an interesting piece. I'm putting New America Media on my links if you care to read more there.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070818.BKREAD18/TPStory/Business/columnists

and

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=7bc7807bf4fae0386f178deb89e53922

The World is Wet: The Globalization of Monsoon

It's raining, again, in Manhattan. Two days ago, torrential rains virtually shut down New York City. Thousands of commuters were stranded when the downpour flooded the city's subways and brought mass transportation to a grinding halt. Given no information by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, commuters desperately made calls on their mobile phones. Hundreds massed at street corners hoping against hope for a cab. Thousands crammed into overloaded buses.


Shot at 2007-08-10

Now where have I seen this before? Oh right, July 2005, Bombay! Rains fell so hard and fast the city was paralyzed. Over 2,000 people died.

It was raining in Paris when I left last week. Unusually heavy rains paralyzed Britain last month, stranding residents and tourists alike, drowning motorways, campgrounds, and city streets. My Parisian and Londoner friends complain that this has been the dreariest summer they can remember. You'd be better off taking a rain umbrella than a beach umbrella to Paris Plages this year.

But none of the inconvenience the rains have inflicted on Britons, Parisians and New Yorkers this summer can remotely compare to what they have done to the long-suffering rural poor of India and Bangladesh. There, the monsoon is an annual event, essential to the survival of billions of people in South Asia. Every year, there is flooding. Some damage and deaths are expected. 2005 was really bad. Last year was also bad.

But this year has been unusually bad. Fields waiting for a good soak were entirely submerged for days longer than anyone could remember, ruining crops that in many cases were farming families' only hope for survival. Entire villages were drowned. Refugees from the floods have not received enough food aid. Now, as the waters recede, fears of massive epidemic disease are growing.


Shot at 2007-08-10

For this, and other reasons, India will again have to import grain this year to meet its basic needs. The price is likely to be high.

In France and in the United States, a dry spring followed by the freakishly wet summer have hurt the grain harvest badly. Yields are expected to be as much as 30 percent lower this year over last in some areas.

And as if this weren't bad enough news for global food security, an increasing proportion of productive farmland is being used to produce biofuels. The current rush to get into the potentially lucrative biofuel business is great news for the big agricultural industrialists and terrible news for small farmers in the United States and hungry people in Asia and Africa.

Meanwhile, Greece, Romania and Croatia were treated to searing temperatures as high as 45 C that sparked massive wildfires, turned normally fertile fields into hard-baked wastelands, and killed a certain number of people who simply couldn't cope with the heat. We learn that the amount of ice that has melted at the polar ice cap this year puts previous years to shame.

In New York this past year, the daffodils bloomed in December. It snowed in April. Torrential rain in August? Why not?

In addition to the rain on Wednesday, a rare tornado touched down briefly in Brooklyn, sending trees crashing down onto parked cars and ripping roofs off row houses. Meanwhile, understandably insular New Yorkers learned our fair city was ripe for getting slammed by a hurricane of potentially record-breaking proportions that would make last Wednesday's flooding look like a bare sprinkle. I live on the 2nd floor (1st floor in the rest of the world) of a small building in the East Village, a neighborhood almost entirely built on reclaimed marshland. Time to move?

But where to go when the monsoon has gone global? If this summer isn't a wake-up call for citizens around the world that it's time to do more than talk about dealing with global warming, then I don't know what is.

One More Reason to Love Paris: Free Bicycles

There are many reasons to fall in love with the City of Light but Paris' progressive mayor Bertrand Delanoë has just added one more: free bicycles. The new program is called "Vélib'" - a neologism from "vélo," bicycle and "libre," free. This from the same man who launched Paris Plage, seasonal sandy "beaches" on the banks of the Seine for Parisians unable to get away to the seashore in summer.

There are bicycle stands all over the city now, even one on my street.



You can sign up for a year membership or just a day or a week, swipe your credit card for security deposit, and then check out a bicycle. The first half hour is free, but it goes up quickly from there. Two hours costs 7 Euros (a little more than $10). But the idea is to ride to where you need to go, park the bike at a stand near there (ending your borrowing time) and then check out another one when you need to move on. My neighborhood has a lovely system of bicycle lanes and there a tons of people bicycling around the city.



Even though the program just started, I would say about half the people I saw were using the new free bikes; the other half their own bikes.

I'm used to using ZipCar in New York, a private system of checking out cars by the hour which is not too different from the idea behind Velib' -- except that it is private and it is for cars. In principle, any Parisian willing to do some pedalwork and in possession of a credit or debit card to assure the security deposit can get around the city now absolutely free. And this in a city that boasts what may be the finest subway system in the world, the famous Métro.

The Vélib bicycles are stylishly retro, with little baskets at the handle bars so you can put the fruits and vegetables you picked up at the market and your baguette there as you ride home.

While I delighted in yet another public amenity in a city and a country that doesn't skimp on investing in the res publica, breaking news from America spoiled my carefree mood. First there was the horrible news of the steam pipe explosion near Grand Central. Then, not too long after, the even more horrible news of the Twin Cities' bridge collapse in Minnesota. The contrast was pretty stark: A country investing in public infrastructure specifically designed to relieve urban congestion, get cars off city streets and improve air quality (not to mention people's health - no need to pay for a health club if your biking to work every day!) versus a country whose 20th- or even 19th-century infrastructure is crumbling away because it doesn't directly pay anyone to keep it up.

Here is a bicycle lane near my Paris apartment, separated from the street by a line of parked cars, one-way. The other way is on the other side of a park built over a section of the Canal St. Martin.



Of course, plenty of people bicycle around my neighborhood in New York, but they do so at some risk to life and limb. There are special lanes for fire trucks in New York City that are used by regular traffic when no fire truck is present but few lanes for bicycles, aside from the parks along the Hudson and the East rivers. The lanes that do exist on city streets are on the traffic side of parked cars with no curb or other protective measure. The result is that taxis, delivery trucks, people making turns and other motor vehicles constantly use the bicycle lanes, especially to double park. This creates a real hazard for cyclists who must then swerve out into oncoming vehicular traffic to avoid the cars and trucks parked in their lane.

As far as I know, Michael Bloomberg's visionary clean air plan for New York City does not include a system of free bicycles for use by city residents and visitors, nor major investment in a network of safe bicycle lanes separated from vehicular traffic.

But hey, we'll always have Paris.