Window on India
August 31, 2006

News Bullets

Industry & Finance

• Boeing readjusts itself to India's growth
  The US-based aircraft-maker, Boeing, has decided to invest $ 280 million in India just to set up an airplane maintenance facility and a pilot training centre. This is mainly because the company thought it fit to drastically change its last year's forecast of India's amazingly growing purchasing power. The Boeing company's last year's estimate was that India would buy 470 airplanes worth $35 billion by 2025, though its competitor, Airbus Industries, felt that the figure for the sale of planes in this fast-growing country could be anywhere between 800 and 1000. Now the Boeing feels, as revealed in its India 2006 Market Outlook, that India would be buying 856 planes worth $72 billion by 2026. The American companies' readjustment of vision about India is prompted by the rising disposable income of the Indian middle class that has given impetus to the air travel and the growing demand for the air freighters to support the robust growth of Indian exports. The global aircraft-makers are closely watching the enticing Indian skies to spread their wings.
• Indian Apollo takes over American Armanti
  Hyderabad and Delhi-based Indian multinational Apollo Health Street has acquired the US-based Armanti Financial Services (AFS) for $ 31 million. With this, Apollo becomes one of the top ten healthcare revenue cycle management companies of the US and has set its eyes on the slot of the top three. The US has a $ 2 trillion healthcare market and so much is the scope for the new Apollo-AFS combine that its management receivables are just $ 1 billion. They expect to take the combined revenue to $46 million in a year and are currently negotiating with two other US companies having 20 percent annual growth rate, for acquisition. Acquisition of other US companies is at the top of the agenda of the Apollo for it is keen to get the NASDAQ listing in the US by crossing the $ 200 million mark, at the earliest.

Culture

• Hrishikesh Mukherjee no more
  Veteran Bollywood film-maker, director and editor Hrishikesh Mukherjee died Sunday in Mumbai after prolonged hospitalization that arose from kidney and heart illness. He was 83. The man who joined the film industry in 1951 under legendary director Bimal Roy, reshaped the Hindi cinema with his films like Anand and Satykam. Yet Mukherjee always felt sorry that he could never do even half the good to the silver screen what the other masters of the celluloid art from his homeland Bengal - Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak - did. He admitted he lacked the element that makes radical films. His leaning was towards making a decent business without making much compromise for the box office of the mainstream cinema. His films strictly distanced vulgarity and violence. He was too humane and many times revived the fallen banners of his friends and acquaintances. Such was his clout that superstar Rajesh Khanna and would-be-mega-star Amitabh Bachchan happily charged less than half their price and eagerly entered into his films in the Seventies as they yearned to add some class and content to their glamour; and this despite his reputation of not tolerating any star tantrum. Sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar, who composed music for Mukherjkee's film Anuradha, acknowledged this master's art of extracting the best in the artists he touched. Mukherjee was hit by the death of his wife, son and younger brother at an early age and had thrust in his films on emotional family drama. The film industry had deserted him for the past eight years and he also ran out of partners to play the game of chess he loved so much.

Newspaper Quotes

• ''National song Vande Mataram (Salute to Motherland) symbolizes our Freedom Struggle. Muslims bury their dead in the same soil that gives them birth. Mother earth is the ultimate, for it sustains and nourishes us. Bowing to one's mother is no crime against humanity…''
  …says Avtar K. Kaul.
  
  ''I bow to no one except God. I am fiercely patriotic and will willingly die for my country's safety, as my forefathers did in the past, but my patriotism cannot be gauged by singing a song or not... Why not replace it with a more secular and more easily understood 'Saare Jahan se achha, Hindostaan hamara…?''
  …says Mitzy.
  
  

Government Quote

• ''Rapid expansion of the nuclear-power programme would greatly benefit from the private sector joining hands with the public-sector Nuclear Power Corporation,'' said CNR Rao, head of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India, on Tuesday.

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Opinion

Ganesh festival and Indian Muslims - By Pratap Thorat

India's western state of Maharashtra, parts of its neighbouring states like Gujarat, Goa, Karnataka and many other parts of the rest of India are presently in the grip of frenzied public celebrations of a 10-day-long festival of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant God of intellect and endowment. They say enthusiasm is such a powerful asset that it beats money, power and influence. But on witnessing the current passionate celebration one irresistibly feels that it has come to beat one more thing - the looming threat of the so called Islamist terrorism. Just before a fortnight, many of these areas where the festivity is at a high pitch, particularly those in Gujarat and Marathwada, were submerged under flood waters for weeks. But even that failed to dampen the spirits.

The inadequacies of the material world have consistently been the part of these people's life. Is it the firm faith or an inveterate defiance that keeps drawing the millions of people out to the carnival? If faith it is, is it the faith in the Lord Almighty, or the faith in the all-inclusive, egalitarian, consociational and robustly democratic society that makes India a unique country in the world? goodness of the fellow Indian Muslims that makes them fearless and even careless? A close view reveals that the role of their faith in not just the principle but the centuries' old practice of a peaceful co-existence is large enough not be undermined. The intelligence apparatus alone knows the enormous growth in the size of the Islamist terrorists' threat that grew after the 7/11 Mumbai bomb blasts. The overburdened and apprehensive police tried to contain the volume of the celebrations. The police said on Wednesday that the arrested Lashkar-e-Tayiba leader Faizal Sheikh revealed that 50-odd Pakistan-trained youths were still active in and around Mumbai, were ready to strike and were waiting for orders from across the border and that the Lashkar's effort to motivate the local Muslim youth was desperate. There is no reason to dismiss the police warnings as hollow, yet the people's writ prevails and the police are left with the task of other precautionary and preventive works. But the Indian police too come from this very trusting and less panicky people. That is why their response to terrorism is relatively soft so as not to disturb the psyche of the innocent sections of the local Muslims. In comparison, the security checking is a major source of discomfort to the brown-skin south Asians, in the US and the UK and this bothering crosses many limits, when such measures come in the wake of new terrorist threats. True, Indian Muslims have always lived under the shadow of partition. But it is also true that this mistrust has readily melted away at the level of average citizen. Both history and geography of India have made Indian Muslim far different than those from the rest of the world. Cultural invasions and the resultant multi-culturalism are nothing new to India. Indians, therefore, are less panicky to such things than the people from the West. In the thinking sections of the Hindus here there is an awareness of the contradiction that a scholarly and otherwise secular Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who had no inhibitions in enjoying pork and alcoholic drinks that Islam banned, ultimately created an Islamic Pakistan; but an illiterate or semi-literate average Muslim, who was deeply devoted to Islam, also had an unshaken faith in Gandhi and Nehru's India's secular ideals and had refused to cross over to Pakistan at the time of partition, braving all the suspicion and mistrust. The less-thinking sections of the Hindus believe in what they see. They see a large number of Muslim volunteers engaged in the Ganesh festival activities from collecting funds, decorating pendals to organising processions, with an equal zeal of a devoted

Hindu. They also see some Muslim families even worshipping Ganesh idols in their homes, though as aberrations. An average Hindu by now may not remember that it was Ustad Bismillah Khan's melodious Shehnai recital that played the prelude to the famous speech of Jawaharlal Nehru - Tryst with Destiny, when the dawn of freedom heralded 59 years back. But he knows very well that the holiness of no Hindu temple, ceremony or festival is full without the melody of the Shehnai of the maestro, who died recently on August 21. He is gratefully aware that it was this devoted Shia Muslim maestro's Shehnai that had been opening the doors of the Kashi-Vishwanath temple at Banares in the early mornings for years. So much intricate is the intertwining of the cultural thread that ''the fear of small numbers'' (a recent book by New York-based Professor John Dewy) is less in India and more in the West.