A Younger India Is Flexing Its Industrial Brawn

[shariqq]

vihuk : This is a good article that you emailed me. Why not post such ones here, for all our reading benifit 


A Younger India Is Flexing Its Industrial Brawn


Rolls of steel weighing up to 30 metric tons are loaded onto ships at Hazira, India. Steel shipped by the Essar Group to the United States is put to a variety of uses like construction projects and mountings for car engines.

By KEITH BRADSHER for NY Times

Published: September 1, 2006

PUNE, India — India’s economic advancement no longer rests on telephone call centers and computer programmers.

Among villages with thatch-roofed huts and dirt roads on the outskirts of this city in central India, John Deere and LG Electronics have recently built factories turning out tractors and color television sets for sale in India and for export to the United States.

In Hazira, in northwestern India, where some residents still rely on camels to carry traders’ goods, the Essar Group is making steel to be used for ventilation shafts in Philadelphia, high-rise structural beams in Chicago and car engine mountings in Detroit.

For decades, India followed a route to economic development strikingly different from that of countries like Japan, South Korea or China. While its Asian rivals placed their bets on manufacturing and exports, India focused on its domestic economy and grew more slowly with an emphasis on services.

But all that is starting to change.

India’s annual growth in manufacturing output, at 9 percent and accelerating, is close to catching growth in services, at 10 percent. Exports of manufactured goods to the United States are now rising faster in percentage terms than China’s, although from a much smaller base. More than two-thirds of foreign investment in the last year has gone into manufacturing in India, not services.

“Saying we are a back office and China is a factory is a backhanded compliment,” said Kamal Nath, India’s minister of commerce and industry. “It’s not really correct.”

Indeed, in interviews at 18 Indian factories and other businesses in 10 cities and villages scattered across the length and breadth of the nation, the picture that emerges is of a country being driven by advances in manufacturing to a much brisker pace of economic growth.

A prime reason India is now developing into the world’s next big industrial power is that a number of global manufacturers are already looking ahead to a serious demographic squeeze facing China. Because of China’s “one child” policy, family sizes have been shrinking there since the 1980’s, so fewer young people will be available soon for factory labor.

India is not expected to pass China in total population until 2030. But India will have more young workers aged 20 to 24 by 2013; the International Labor Organization predicts that by 2020, India will have 116 million workers in this age bracket to China’s 94 million.

India’s young population will also make it a huge and growing market for years to come, while the engineering skills and English skills of its educated elite will make it competitive across a wide range of industries. So even though India remains a difficult place to do business, several multinationals have been placing big bets on India in hopes of taking advantage of this shifting global dynamic.

General Motors and Motorola are preparing to build plants in western and southern India. Posco of South Korea and Mittal Steel of the Netherlands have each announced plans to erect giant steel mills in eastern India, where Reliance of India will soon construct one of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants.

They are finding India’s labor force well suited to their goals. When LG set out in 2005 to fill 458 assembly line jobs at its factory here at a starting wage of $90 a month, it required that each applicant have at least 15 years of education — usually high school plus technical college.

Seeking a young work force, the company decided that no more than 1 percent of the workers could have had any prior work experience. Despite the limitation, 55,000 young people met its criteria for interviews.

“In the villages there is little income,” said Siddu Matheapattu, 24, in between applying sealant to refrigerator frames. “Here I can earn more.”

By contrast, cities in the export-oriented Guangdong Province in southeastern China raised monthly minimum wages this summer by 18 percent, to $70 to $100 a month, after factories reported that they had one million more jobs than workers to fill them. Factories elsewhere in China face less severe labor shortages, but they also are being forced to raise wages.

As India has deregulated its economy, output has gradually accelerated to a growth rate of 8 percent a year, feeding a national euphoria and a few hopes of someday even beating China’s annual growth of more than 10 percent

Plenty of obstacles remain, however, notably India’s weak infrastructure. China invests $7 on roads, ports, electricity and other backbones of a modern economy for every dollar spent by India — and it shows. Ports here are struggling to handle rising exports, blackouts are frequent and dirt roads are common even in Bangalore, the center of the country’s sophisticated computer programming industry.


Graphic: An Industrial Base of Its Own




Pervasive corruption has slowed many efforts to fix these problems. India’s labor laws, little changed since they were enacted just after independence in 1947, also continue to discourage companies from hiring workers, by making it very difficult to lay off employees even if a company’s fortunes sour or the economy slows.

Still, a new optimism prevails in India, bordering at times on euphoria.

“The Chinese are very good at copying things, but Indians believe in quality work, we believe in meeting pollution norms,” said S. S. Pathania, the assistant general manager of the Hero Honda motorcycle factory in Gurgaon, 30 miles south of New Delhi. “I think India will pass China very soon.”

An Unexpected Boom In Manufacturing

Sprawling across more than a square mile next to a gray tidal estuary, the scale of the Essar Group’s complex in Hazira is already impressive. Essar has its own port to bring in iron ore and its own large gas-fired power plant for electricity. At the steel mill, giant buckets pour 150 tons of molten metal at a time to form slabs 2 yards wide and up to 10 yards long.

But the complex is just starting to grow. Essar is quintupling steel production and pushing forward a sevenfold increase in power generation, most of it for sale to a national grid desperately short of electricity.

Growth on that scale, especially in industries like steel and power but also in areas like car parts and household appliances, is what India has long lacked. Industrial production accounts for only a fifth of India’s economic output, compared with two-fifths of China’s. But this ratio is starting to rise in India as manufacturing, led by exports, grows faster than agriculture and even some service industries.

Until recently, legislation effectively barred companies with more than 100 employees from competing in many industries. The laws were intended to protect tiny businesses in villages, often employing women and minorities; high tariffs were placed on imports as well.

But a result was hundreds of thousands of businesses too small to be competitive; India lags behind even the impoverished Bangladesh next door in exports of garments, a big creator of jobs for China. The Indian government has responded by narrowing the list of protected industries to 326 categories of goods from 20,000 and has lowered tariffs.

Comparing factories in India to their competitors in China, many of the Indian factories are smaller but some appear more efficient.

India’s stronger financial system demands higher interest rates than China’s state-owned banks, making it costlier to hold the small mountains of components awaiting assembly that are often seen in Chinese factories. The Confederation of Indian Industry, a national trade group, has also been highly successful in pushing companies to adopt the latest Japanese lean manufacturing techniques.

The drawback is that the nation’s manufacturing boom, built on higher-quality goods made under more modern conditions than in China, is not likely to create as many factory jobs as India needs.

The Essar steel mill, for example, has been replacing old, labor-intensive equipment with more modern gear. “We were having it all done manually, but because the customers demand very high quality, we have to do it automatically,” yelled Rajesh Pandita, an Essar manager, over the roar of a house-size machine that was stretching a minivan-size coil of steel back and forth through large rollers until it was little thicker than plastic kitchen wrap.

The Whirlpool factory in Pune uses machines, not people, to fold the steel exteriors of refrigerators. It has some of the highest productivity per worker of any Whirlpool factory in the world, with just 208 line workers producing up to 33,000 refrigerators a month.

Labor laws, however, discourage flexibility. They still ban companies from allowing manufacturing workers to put in more than 54 hours of overtime in a three-month period even if the workers want to earn extra money. Firing workers is extremely difficult.

“Companies think twice, 10 times before they hire new people,” said Sunil Kant Munjal, the chairman of the Hero Group, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of inexpensive motorcycles.

Hero in Gurgaon, on the southern outskirts of New Delhi, and its archrival, the Lifan Group in Chongqing, a city in western China, produce comparable motorcycles but the similarity ends there. Hero markets heavily to its domestic market, protected from foreign competition by high import tariffs, while Lifan emphasizes exports.

With scant ventilation, Lifan’s factories are filled with diesel exhaust as workers test engines and ride finished bikes at breakneck speed out the doors, zigzagging past co-workers. Hero’s factory in Gurgaon, where Honda holds a minority stake, has far better safety standards and excellent ventilation.

The Lifan factory pays less than $100 a month. The heavily unionized Hero factory pays $150 a month plus bonuses of up to $370 a month; nearly half the workers earn the top bonus, Mr. Pathania said.

Lifan’s labor force is quiescent — would-be organizers of independent labor unions face long jail terms or worse in China. Hero’s workers staged a successful nonviolent protest in 2005 to call for more contract workers to be eligible for the bonuses as well.

Bad Roads and Blackouts Take a Toll on Efficiency

But the biggest question mark hanging over the rise of manufacturing in India lies in whether the country has enough roads, ports and electricity-generating plants to move huge quantities of goods and power the factories that make them.

Captain Abhay Srivastava, an operations manager at India’s busiest port, was on duty on a recent afternoon when a phone call suddenly came in from the docks below. An enormous container ship from Qatar needed to slide 35 feet backward along the privately managed dock at the Nhava Sheva port near Mumbai to allow another large vessel to squeeze into the dock in front of it.

Captain Srivastava grabbed his white hard hat and dashed for the elevator. As soon as he reached the water’s edge, a dozen laborers in orange jumpsuits began straining to arrange a cat’s cradle of heavy, five-inch-thick ropes that would allow the ship to use its powerful winches to pull itself out of the way.

“They are efficient people; they don’t speak a lot,” said Captain Srivastava, who has visited most of the world’s major ports either as a ship captain or for port training exercises. “You go to some places and they just stand around.”

The efficiency of the Nhava Sheva port — it approaches West Coast ports in the United States in the number of containers moved per hour — shows that India is capable of producing world-class facilities.

But big as it is, Nhava Sheva is too small to handle the crush of traffic. John Deere tractors wait in a container at the dock for one to four days before being loaded on a ship.

“If this pace of growth continues, we will see more congestion at the port,” said Raj Kalathur, the managing director and chief executive of Deere’s operations in India.

Similar worries prevail in Chennai, formerly Madras. “Another four or five years, we’ll be choked,” said M. Rafeeque Ahmed, the chairman of the Farida Group, a 9,000-employee shoe manufacturer in Chennai that needs the port for exports.

Infrastructure improvements are particularly important because manufacturing companies are buying more and more components from far-flung suppliers. Making sure all those parts arrive on time requires a reliable transportation system.

“Manufacturing is no longer done all under one roof,” said Victor Fung, the chairman of the Li & Fung Group, a large Hong Kong-based company that buys goods from factories across Asia for sale to retailers and wholesalers in the United States and Europe.

Indian officials are talking about expansion. Planning is under way for new wharves at Nhava Sheva, but the years-long task of construction has not yet started.

China has faced capacity problems, too. A surge in steel production in early 2004 overwhelmed bulk cargo ports. Inflation quintupled in a year, to 5.3 percent, as bottlenecks at ports, highways, railroads and elsewhere in China drove up companies’ costs.

The Chinese response was swift and decisive. The pace of port investment nearly tripled in six months. Work crews labored around the clock to erect more cranes and expand wharves.

The Chinese economy grew at a breathtaking pace of 11.3 percent in the second quarter of 2006, but consumer prices were just 1 percent higher in July than a year earlier.

By contrast, India is struggling with 8 percent inflation this summer as bottlenecks have appeared after three years of 8 percent growth.

Belatedly, India’s roads and ports are improving. Just four years ago, Sona Koyo Steering Systems, an auto parts manufacturer, incurred hefty financing costs to keep a month’s inventory on hand in case deliveries were delayed. Now its factory in Gurgaon makes six deliveries a day to a nearby Maruti car assembly plant; the eight-mile drive takes an hour or more because of traffic jams, but the deliveries get through.

“I’m not going to deny infrastructure is bad,” said Surinder Kapur, Sona’s chairman and managing director. “But a lot of our vendors are around us, a lot of our customers are close to us.”

India is also starting to address chronic power shortages. But it is still a serious problem in northern India, where Mr. Kapur has his steering systems factory. He receives electricity from the national grid just seven or eight hours a day. So the factory has three enormous diesel generators, one bigger than a typical Manhattan living room, operating at four times what an industrial user in the United States usually pays.

Despite such obstacles, India’s manufacturing sector appears poised for further growth. In a country where the national symbol has shifted from government bureaucrats at aging desks to call center operators in cubicles, it looks as if the next icon will be the laptop-toting engineer on a factory floor.

“The old philosophy was, ‘I should work in an office, come in at 10 and leave at 4,’ ” said Nitin Kulkarni, 35, an engineer at the Hazira steel mill. But in recent years, he added, “there has been a revolution.”

[vibhuk]

Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
I.
As Thomas Jefferson lay dying at his hilltop estate, Monticello, in late June 1826, he wrote a letter telling the citizens of the city of Washington that he was too ill to join them for the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence. Wanting his letter to inspire the gathering, he told them that one day the experiment he and the founders started would spread to the whole world. ''To some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,'' he wrote, the American form of republican self-government would become every nation's birthright. Democracy's worldwide triumph was assured, he went on to say, because ''the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion'' would soon convince all men that they were born not to be ruled but to rule themselves in freedom.

It was the last letter he ever wrote. The slave-owning apostle of liberty, that incomparable genius and moral scandal, died 10 days later on July 4, 1826, on the same day as his old friend and fellow founder, John Adams.

It's impossible to untangle the contradictions of American freedom without thinking about Jefferson and the spiritual abyss that separates his pronouncement that ''all men are created equal'' from the reality of the human beings he owned, slept with and never imagined as fellow citizens. American freedom aspires to be universal, but it has always been exceptional because America is the only modern democratic experiment that began in slavery. From the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it took a century for the promise of American freedom to even begin to be kept.

Despite the exceptional character of American liberty, every American president has proclaimed America's duty to defend it abroad as the universal birthright of mankind. John F. Kennedy echoed Jefferson when, in a speech in 1961, he said that the spread of freedom abroad was powered by ''the force of right and reason''; but, he went on, in a sober and pragmatic vein, ''reason does not always appeal to unreasonable men.'' The contrast between Kennedy and the current incumbent of the White House is striking. Until George W. Bush, no American president -- not even Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right. But this gambler from Texas has bet his place in history on the proposition, as he stated in a speech in March, that decades of American presidents' ''excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability'' in the Middle East inflamed the hatred of the fanatics who piloted the planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11.

If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary. If Iraq fails, it will be his Vietnam, and nothing else will matter much about his time in office. For any president, it must be daunting to know already that his reputation depends on what Jefferson once called ''so inscrutable [an] arrangement of causes and consequences in this world.''

The consequences are more likely to be positive if the president begins to show some concern about the gap between his words and his administration's performance. For he runs an administration with the least care for consistency between what it says and does of any administration in modern times. The real money committed to the promotion of democracy in the Middle East is trifling. The president may have doubled the National Endowment for Democracy's budget, but it is still only $80 million a year. But even if there were more money, there is such doubt in the Middle East that the president actually means what he says -- in the wake of 60 years of American presidents cozying up to tyrants in the region -- that every dollar spent on democracy in the Middle East runs the risk of undermining the cause it supports. Actual Arab democrats recoil from the embrace of American good intentions. Just ask a community-affairs officer trying to give American dollars away for the promotion of democracy in Mosul, in northern Iraq, how easy it is to get anyone to even take the money, let alone spend it honestly.

And then there are the prisoners, the hooded man with the wires hanging from his body, the universal icon of the gap between the ideals of American freedom and the sordid -- and criminal -- realities of American detention and interrogation practice. The fetid example of these abuses makes American talk of democracy sound hollow. It will not be possible to encourage the rule of law in Egypt if America is sending Hosni Mubarak shackled prisoners to torture. It will be impossible to secure democratic change in Morocco or Afghanistan or anywhere else if Muslims believe that American guards desecrated the Koran. The failure to convict anybody higher than a sergeant for these crimes leaves many Americans and a lot of the world wondering whether Jefferson's vision of America hasn't degenerated into an ideology of self-congratulation, whose function is no longer to inspire but to lie.

II.
And yet . . . and yet. . . .

If Jefferson's vision were only an ideology of self-congratulation, it would never have inspired Americans to do the hard work of reducing the gap between dream and reality. Think about the explosive force of Jefferson's self-evident truth. First white working men, then women, then blacks, then the disabled, then gay Americans -- all have used his words to demand that the withheld promise be delivered to them. Without Jefferson, no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation. Without the slave-owning Jefferson, no Martin Luther King Jr. and the dream of white and black citizens together reaching the Promised Land.

Jefferson's words have had the same explosive force abroad. American men and women in two world wars died believing that they had fought to save the freedom of strangers. And they were not deceived. Bill Clinton saluted the men who died at Omaha Beach with the words, ''They gave us our world.'' That seems literally true: a democratic Germany, an unimaginably prosperous Europe at peace with itself. The men who died at Iwo Jima bequeathed their children a democratic Japan and 60 years of stability throughout Asia.

These achievements have left Americans claiming credit for everything good that has happened since, especially the fact that there are more democracies in the world than at any time in history. Jefferson's vaunting language makes appropriate historical modesty particularly hard, yet modesty is called for. Freedom's global dispersion owes less to America and more to a contagion of local civic courage, beginning with the people of Portugal and Spain who threw off dictatorship in the 1970's, the Eastern Europeans who threw off Communism in the 90's and the Georgians, Serbs, Kyrgyz and Ukrainians who have thrown off post-Soviet autocratic governments since. The direct American role in these revolutions was often slight, but American officials, spies and activists were there, too, giving a benign green light to regime change from the streets.

This democratic turn in American foreign policy has been recent. Latin Americans remember when the American presence meant backing death squads and military juntas. Now in the Middle East and elsewhere, when the crowds wave Lebanese flags in Beirut and clamor for the Syrians to go, when Iraqi housewives proudly hold up their purple fingers on exiting the polling stations, when Afghans quietly line up to vote in their villages, when Egyptians chant ''Enough!'' and demand that Mubarak leave power, few Islamic democrats believe they owe their free voice to America. But many know that they have not been silenced, at least not yet, because the United States actually seems, for the first time, to be betting on them and not on the autocrats.

In the cold war, most presidents opted for stability at the price of liberty when they had to choose. This president, as his second Inaugural Address made clear, has soldered stability and liberty together: ''America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.'' As he has said, ''Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.''

It is terrorism that has joined together the freedom of strangers and the national interest of the United States. But not everyone believes that democracy in the Middle East will actually make America safer, even in the medium term. Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for one, has questioned the ''facile assumption that a straight line exists between progress on democratization and the elimination of the roots of Islamic terrorism.'' In the short term, democratization in Egypt, for example, might only bring the radical Muslim Brotherhood to power. Even in the medium term, becoming a democracy does not immunize a society from terrorism. Just look at democratic Spain, menaced by Basque terrorism.

Moreover, proclaiming freedom to be God's plan for mankind, as the president has done, does not make it so. There is, as yet, no evidence of a sweeping tide of freedom and democracy through the Middle East. Lebanon could pitch from Syrian occupation into civil strife; Egypt might well re-elect Mubarak after a fraudulent exercise in pseudodemocracy; little Jordan hopes nobody will notice that government remains the family monopoly of the Hashemite dynasty; Tunisia remains a good place for tourists but a lousy place for democrats; democratic hopes are most alive in Palestine, but here the bullet is still competing with the ballot box. Over it all hangs Iraq, poised between democratic transition and anarchy.

And yet . . . and yet. . . . More than one world leader has been heard to ask his advisers recently, ''What if Bush is right?''

III.
Other democratic leaders may suspect Bush is right, but that doesn't mean they are joining his crusade. Never have there been more democracies. Never has America been more alone in spreading democracy's promise.

The reticence extends even to those nations that owe their democracy to American force of arms. Freedom in Germany was an American imperial imposition, from the cashiering of ex-Nazi officials and the expunging of anti-Semitic nonsense from school textbooks to the drafting of a new federal constitution. Yet Chancellor Gerhard Schroder can still intone that democracy cannot be ''forced upon these societies from the outside.'' This is not the only oddity. As Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of the German weekly Die Zeit points out, the '68-ers now in power in Germany all spent their radical youth denouncing American support for tyrannies around the world: ''Across the Atlantic they shouted: Pinochet! Somoza! Mubarak! Shah Pahlevi! King Faisal! Now it seems as though an American president has finally heard their complaints. . . . But what is coming out of Germany? . . . Nothing but deafening silence!''

The deafening silence extends beyond Germany. Like Germany, Canada sat out the war in Iraq. Ask the Canadians why they aren't joining the American crusade to spread democracy, and you get this from their government's recent foreign-policy review: ''Canadians hold their values dear, but are not keen to see them imposed on others. This is not the Canadian way.'' One reason it is not the Canadian way is that when American presidents speak of liberty as God's plan for mankind, even God-fearing Canadians wonder when God began disclosing his plan to presidents.

The same discomfort with the American project extends to the nation that, in the splendid form of the Marquis de Lafayette, once joined the American fight for freedom. The French used to talk about exporting Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité, but nowadays they don't seem to mind standing by and watching Iraqi democrats struggling to keep chaos and anarchy at bay. Even America's best friend, Tony Blair, is circumspect about defining the Iraq project as anything more than managing the chaos. The strategy unit at 10 Downing Street recently conducted a study on how to prevent future international crises: debt relief, overseas aid and humanitarian intervention were all featured, but the promotion of democracy and freedom barely got a mention. European political foundations and overseas development organizations do promote free elections and rule of law, but they bundle up these good works in the parlance of ''governance'' rather than in the language of spreading freedom and democracy. So America presides over a loose alliance of democracies, most of whose leaders think that promoting freedom and democracy is better left to the zealous imperialists in Washington.

The charge that promoting democracy is imperialism by another name is baffling to many Americans. How can it be imperialist to help people throw off the shackles of tyranny?

It may be that other nations just have longer memories of their own failed imperial projects. From Napoleon onward, France sought to export French political virtues, though not freedom itself, to its colonies. The British Empire was sustained by the conceit that the British had a special talent for government that entitled them to spread the rule of law to Kipling's ''lesser breeds.'' In the 20th century, the Soviet Union advanced missionary claims about the superiority of Soviet rule, backed by Marxist pseudoscience.

What is exceptional about the Jefferson dream is that it is the last imperial ideology left standing in the world, the sole survivor of national claims to universal significance. All the others -- the Soviet, the French and the British -- have been consigned to the ash heap of history. This may explain why what so many Americans regard as simply an exercise in good intentions strikes even their allies as a delusive piece of hubris.

The problem here is that while no one wants imperialism to win, no one in his right mind can want liberty to fail either. If the American project of encouraging freedom fails, there may be no one else available with the resourcefulness and energy, even the self-deception, necessary for the task. Very few countries can achieve and maintain freedom without outside help. Big imperial allies are often necessary to the establishment of liberty. As the Harvard ethicist Arthur Applbaum likes to put it, ''All foundings are forced.'' Just remember how much America itself needed the assistance of France to free itself of the British. Who else is available to sponsor liberty in the Middle East but America? Certainly the Europeans themselves have not done a very distinguished job defending freedom close to home.

During the cold war, while most Western Europeans tacitly accepted the division of their continent, American presidents stood up and called for the walls to come tumbling down. When an anonymous graffiti artist in Berlin sprayed the wall with a message -- ''This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality'' -- it was President Reagan, not a European politician, who seized on those words and declared that the wall ''cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.''

This is why much of the European support for Bush in Iraq came from the people who had grown up behind that wall. It wasn't just the promise of bases and money and strategic partnerships that tipped Poles, Romanians, Czechs and Hungarians into sending troops; it was the memory that when the chips were down, in the dying years of Soviet tyranny, American presidents were there, and Western European politicians looked the other way.

It is true that Western Europe has had a democracy-promotion project of its own since the wall came down: bringing the fledgling regimes of Eastern Europe into the brave new world of the European Union. This very real achievement has now been delayed by the ''no'' votes in France and the Netherlands. Sponsoring the promotion of democracy in the East and preparing an Islamic giant, Turkey, for a later entry is precisely what the referendum votes want to stop. So who will be there to prevent Islamic fundamentalism or military authoritarianism breaking through in Turkey now that the Europeans have told the Turks to remain in the waiting room forever? If democracy within requires patrons without, the only patron left is the United States.

.......to be continued.

[vibhuk]

PART II

IV.
While Americans characteristically oversell and exaggerate the world's desire to live as they do, it is actually reasonable to suppose, as Americans believe, that most human beings, if given the chance, would like to rule themselves. It is not imperialistic to believe this. It might even be condescending to believe anything else.

If Europeans are embarrassed to admit this universal yearning or to assist it, Americans have difficulty understanding that there are many different forms that this yearning can take, Islamic democracy among them. Democracy may be a universal value, but democracies differ -- mightily -- on ultimate questions. One reason the American promotion of democracy conjures up so little support from other democrats is that American democracy, once a model to emulate, has become an exception to avoid.

Consider America's neighbor to the north. Canadians look south and ask themselves why access to health care remains a privilege of income in the United States and not a right of citizenship. They like hunting and shooting, but can't understand why anyone would regard a right to bear arms as a constitutional right. They can't understand why the American love of limited government does not extend to a ban on the government's ultimate power -- capital punishment. The Canadian government seems poised to extend full marriage rights to gays.

Some American liberals wistfully wish their own country were more like Canada, while for American conservatives, ''Soviet Canuckistan'' -- as Pat Buchanan calls it -- is the liberal hell they are seeking to avoid. But if American liberals can't persuade their own society to be more like other democracies and American conservatives don't want to, both of them are acknowledging, the first with sorrow, the other with joy, that America is an exception.

This is not how it used to be. From the era of F.D.R. to the era of John Kennedy, liberal and progressive foreigners used to look to America for inspiration. For conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan was a lodestar. The grand boulevards in foreign capitals were once named after these large figures of American legend. For a complex set of reasons, American democracy has ceased to be the inspiration it was. This is partly because of the religious turn in American conservatism, which awakens incomprehension in the largely secular politics of America's democratic allies. It is partly because of the chaos of the contested presidential election in 2000, which left the impression, worldwide, that closure had been achieved at the expense of justice. And partly because of the phenomenal influence of money on American elections.

But the differences between America and its democratic allies run deeper than that. When American policy makers occasionally muse out loud about creating a ''community of democracies'' to become a kind of alternative to the United Nations, they forget that America and its democratic friends continue to disagree about what fundamental rights a democracy should protect and the limits to power government should observe. As Europeans and Canadians head leftward on issues like gay marriage, capital punishment and abortion, and as American politics head rightward, the possibility of America leading in the promotion of a common core of beliefs recedes ever further. Hence the paradox of Jefferson's dream: American liberty as a moral universal seems less and less recognizable to the very democracies once inspired by that dream. In the cold war, America was accepted as the leader of ''the free world.'' The free world -- the West -- has fractured, leaving a fierce and growing argument about democracy in its place.

V.
The fact that many foreigners do not happen to buy into the American version of promoting democracy may not be much of a surprise. What is significant is how many American liberals don't share the vision, either.

On this issue, there has been a huge reversal of roles in American politics. Once upon a time, liberal Democrats were the custodians of the Jeffersonian message that American democracy should be exported to the world, and conservative Republicans were its realist opponents. Beginning in the late 1940's, as the political commentator Peter Beinart has rediscovered, liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Adlai Stevenson realized that liberals would have to reinvent themselves. This was partly a matter of principle -- they detested Soviet tyranny -- and partly a matter of pragmatism. They wanted to avoid being tarred as fellow travelers, the fate that had met Franklin Roosevelt's former running mate, the radical reformer Henry Wallace. The liberals who founded Americans for Democratic Action refounded liberalism as an anti-Communist internationalism, dedicated to defending freedom and democracy abroad from Communist threat. The missionary Jeffersonianism in this reinvention worried many people -- for example, George Kennan, the diplomat and foreign-policy analyst who argued that containment of the Communist menace was all that prudent politics could accomplish.

The leading Republicans of the 1950's -- Robert Taft, for example -- were isolationist realists, doubtful that America should impose its way on the world. Eisenhower, that wise old veteran of European carnage, was in that vein, too: prudent, risk-avoiding, letting the Soviets walk into Hungary because he thought war was simply out of the question, too horrible to contemplate. In the 1960's and 70's, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger remained in the realist mode. Since stability mattered more to them than freedom, they propped up the shah of Iran, despite his odious secret police, and helped to depose Salvador Allende in Chile. Kissinger's guiding star was not Jefferson but Bismarck. Kissinger contended that people who wanted freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe were lamentable sentimentalists, unable to look at the map and accommodate themselves to the eternal reality of Soviet power.

It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy. At the time, many conservative realists argued for detente, risk avoidance and placation of the Soviet bear. Faced with the Republican embrace of Jeffersonian ambitions for America abroad, liberals chose retreat or scorn. Bill Clinton -- who took reluctant risks to defend freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo -- partly arrested this retreat, yet since his administration, the withdrawal of American liberalism from the defense and promotion of freedom overseas has been startling. The Michael Moore-style left conquered the Democratic Party's heart; now the view was that America's only guiding interest overseas was furthering the interests of Halliburton and Exxon. The relentless emphasis on the hidden role of oil makes the promotion of democracy seem like a devious cover or lame excuse. The unseen cost of this pseudo-Marxist realism is that it disconnected the Democratic Party from the patriotic idealism of the very electorate it sought to persuade.

John Kerry's presidential campaign could not overcome liberal America's fatal incapacity to connect to the common faith of the American electorate in the Jeffersonian ideal. Instead he ran as the prudent, risk-avoiding realist in 2004 -- despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he had fought in Vietnam. Kerry's caution was bred in the Mekong. The danger and death he encountered gave him some good reasons to prefer realism to idealism, and risk avoidance to hubris. Faced with a rival who proclaimed that freedom was not just America's gift to mankind but God's gift to the world, it was understandable that Kerry would seek to emphasize how complex reality was, how resistant to American purposes it might be and how high the price of American dreams could prove. As it turned out, the American electorate seemed to know only too well how high the price was in Iraq, and it still chose the gambler over the realist. In 2004, the Jefferson dream won decisively over American prudence.

But this is more than just a difference between risk taking and prudence. It is also a disagreement about whether American values properly deserve to be called universal at all. The contemporary liberal attitude toward the promotion of democratic freedom -- we like what we have, but we have no right to promote it to others -- sounds to many conservative Americans like complacent and timorous relativism, timorous because it won't lift a finger to help those who want an escape from tyranny, relativist because it seems to have abandoned the idea that all people do want to be free. Judging from the results of the election in 2004, a majority of Americans do not want to be told that Jefferson was wrong.

VI.
A relativist America is properly inconceivable. Leave relativism, complexity and realism to other nations. America is the last nation left whose citizens don't laugh out loud when their leader asks God to bless the country and further its mighty work of freedom. It is the last country with a mission, a mandate and a dream, as old as its founders.

All of this may be dangerous, even delusional, but it is also unavoidable. It is impossible to think of America without these properties of self-belief.

Of course, American self-belief is not an eternal quantity. Jefferson airily assumed that democracy would be carried on the wings of enlightenment, reason and science. No one argues that now. Not even Bush. He does speak of liberty as ''the plan of heaven for humanity and the best hope for progress here on Earth,'' but in more sober moments, he will concede that the promotion of freedom is hard work, stretching out for generations and with no certain end in sight.

The activists, experts and bureaucrats who do the work of promoting democracy talk sometimes as if democracy were just a piece of technology, like a water pump, that needs only the right installation to work in foreign climes. Others suggest that the promotion of democracy requires anthropological sensitivity, a deep understanding of the infinitely complex board game of foreign (in this case Iraqi) politics.

But Iraqi freedom also depends on something whose measurement is equally complex: what price, in soldiers' bodies and lives, the American people are prepared to pay. The members of the American public are ceaselessly told that stabilizing Iraq will make them more secure. They are told that fighting the terrorists there is better than fighting them at home. They are told that victory in Iraq will spread democracy and stability in the arc from Algeria to Afghanistan. They are told that when this happens, ''they'' won't hate Americans, or hate them as much as they do now. It's hard to know what the American people believe about these claims, but one vital test of whether the claims are believed is the number of adolescent men and women prepared to show up at the recruiting posts in the suburban shopping malls and how many already in the service or Guard choose to re-enlist and sign up for another tour in Ramadi or Falluja. The current word is that recruitment is down, and this is a serious sign that someone at least thinks America is paying too high a price for its ideals.

Of all human activities, fighting for your country is the one that requires most elaborate justification. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that ''to fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might.'' He had survived Antietam and the annihilating horror of the Battle of the Wilderness, so he knew of what he spoke. The test that Jefferson's dream has to pass is whether it gives members of a new generation something they want to fight for with all their might.

Two years from now is the earliest any senior United States commander says that Americans can begin to come home from Iraq in any significant numbers. Already the steady drip of casualties is the faintly heard, offstage noise of contemporary American politics. As this noise grows louder, it may soon drown out everything else. Flag-draped caskets are slid down the ramps of cargo planes at Dover Air Force Base and readied for their last ride home to the graveyards of America. In some region of every American's mind, those caskets raise a simple question: Is Iraqi freedom worth this?

It would be a noble thing if one day 26 million Iraqis could live their lives without fear in a country of their own. But it would also have been a noble dream if the South Vietnamese had been able to resist the armored divisions of North Vietnam and to maintain such freedom as they had. Lyndon Johnson said the reason Americans were there was the ''principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania,'' the right of people to choose their own path to change. Noble dream or not, the price turned out to be just too high.

There is nothing worse than believing your son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother died in vain. Even those who have opposed the Iraq war all along, who believe that the hope of planting democracy has lured America into a criminal folly, do not want to tell those who have died that they have given their lives for nothing. This is where Jefferson's dream must work. Its ultimate task in American life is to redeem loss, to rescue sacrifice from oblivion and futility and to give it shining purpose. The real truth about Iraq is that we just don't know -- yet -- whether the dream will do its work this time. This is the somber question that hangs unanswered as Americans approach this Fourth of July.

Michael Ignatieff, a contributing writer, is the Carr professor of human rights at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is the editor of the forthcoming book ''American Exceptionalism and Human Rights.''

[kaytee]

Thats one long article mate...

[vibhuk]

I will post a shorter one for you...but will seem like a life time 

[vibhuk]

Here's something I thought you'll like—from a blogger's site—Neptunus lex:


"I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, start out dead and get it out of the way.

Then, you wake up in an old age home feeling better every day.

You get kicked out for being too healthy; go collect your pension, then, when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day.

You work 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement.

You drink alcohol, you party, you're generally promiscuous and you get ready for High School.

You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a baby, and then,

You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in luxury, in spa-like conditions, central heating, room service on tap, larger quarters every day and finally… you finish off as an orgasm.

I rest my case."

So the question is "What date do you celebrate your birthday?"

[vibhuk]

In India, the Golden Age of Television Is Now
By VIKAS BAJAJ
NY Times
Published: February 11, 2007
MUMBAI, India
 
Ghanshyam Shah, 82, watches TV for hours a day. TV ownership and programming are exploding in India.
 
The Rise of Indian Television
 
Santosh Verma for The New York Times
“Dhoom Machaoo Dhoom,” a Disney show in India, is about four teenage girls who want to start a band.
GHANSHYAM P. SHAH, an 82-year-old widower, spends up to eight hours a day in front of his television watching prayer services, soap operas and financial news. But one afternoon last December, he was completely disconnected from his favorite pastime — and visibly unsettled — because his new digital set-top box was not working.
“I’ll become really agitated if I can’t watch,” Mr. Shah said as Rumy M. Bhagat, the owner of a small cable company, gave up and plugged the wire directly into the television until he could return with another box. The image was no longer digital, but that did not matter to Mr. Shah, a retired gold and silver dealer, whose face lit up as CNBC India reported that the price of gold was up in afternoon trading.
Mr. Bhagat explained that some set-top boxes, which had been sitting in warehouses for months in advance of a government-mandated change to digital television, had proved a weak match for the heat and humidity of Mumbai. “Sometimes we have teething problems,” he said.
Growing pains like these are common throughout India’s booming television industry. Deregulation and new technology have combined to produce an explosion of new offerings. Before the early 1990s, a single government broadcaster provided a handful of channels. Now a crowded field of domestic and global media companies, including the News Corporation, Sony Entertainment and Walt Disney, offer hundreds of channels.
Indian films, especially the flashy musicals and dramas of Bollywood, have grabbed plenty of attention in the West. But the country’s lesser-known television business is more than twice as big, with an estimated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2005, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is also starting to exert greater cultural influence.
Television ownership is growing fast here, and it has plenty more room to expand. There are roughly 105 million homes with televisions in India, up from 88 million in 2000. The current number of television households is about the same as in the United States, though for India that amounts to only about half of the country’s households, compared with 98 percent in the United States.
Advertising spending on Indian television increased by 21 percent a year, on average, from 1995 to 2005, when it reached $1.6 billion, according to ZenithOptimedia, which tracks advertising globally. Double-digit growth rates are expected to continue for years.
Such numbers are very tempting to companies like the News Corporation, Disney, Time Warner and Viacom, which are losing viewers and advertisers in their core Western markets. (In addition to the domestic market, Indian television is also delivered via satellite and cable to the global South Asian diaspora.)
The pace of change in India is supercharged because the country is catching up to, and in some cases leapfrogging, developments that took decades to play out elsewhere.
“Everything that happened in the rest of the world in 10 years, is happening here in two years,” said Vikram Kaushik, the chief executive of Tata Sky, a satellite-TV company that is jointly owned by the News Corporation and the Tata Group, the Indian industrial conglomerate.
In the 1990s, media companies seized on new opportunities in India after the government, which had controlled broadcasting for nearly 50 years, began releasing its grip. The first big changes in Indian television came in the early part of that decade, when cable operators used satellite dishes, illegal but tolerated at the time, to give subscribers access to news on CNN, as well as American soap operas and movies. Viewers could also watch Indian movies and music on Zee TV, then a fledgling joint venture between the News Corporation and an Indian entrepreneur.
Previously, India’s ruling elite had a dual and somewhat contradictory view of broadcasting. On the one hand, politicians considered it too powerful a force to be left to the private sector, especially in the years after independence in 1947, when the nation’s unity and secularism were considered vulnerable. On the other hand, television was seen as too frivolous to merit much investment at a time when politicians were focused on turning India into an industrial power.
Those attitudes began to change after a financial crisis in the early ’90s forced the Indian government to devalue its currency, the rupee, and to start relinquishing its tight control over the economy. Then, in 1995, the country’s highest court declared the government’s monopoly over broadcasting unconstitutional.
When it did yield, India went further in deregulating television than it did in other sectors of the economy. It also gave up far more control when compared with China, the country against which it is most often measured. Foreign media companies can fully own entertainment networks here; they cannot in China. (India does, however, limit foreign ownership to 26 percent of television news channels and newspapers.)
THE open environment attracted the News Corporation, which entered the market in 1993 by acquiring Star TV. Star has the highest-rated shows among the private networks in Hindi-speaking parts of the country. Sony started its flagship channel here in 1995 and now has seven channels; the company owns about 61 percent of the business, with Indian investors owning the rest. The biggest Indian broadcasters are Zee and Sun TV, which dominates ratings in non-Hindi-speaking southern India.
 
Still, Doordarshan, the public broadcaster, remains the most widely available network, especially in rural areas, where a majority of the population lives.
To keep up with changing times, Doordarshan has retooled its programming, adding genres like soap operas and musical contests to a lineup that is still dominated by more high-minded — and what some critics would call staid — cultural programming. It has also started a satellite-TV service that has no subscription fees but also does not include the most popular private channels.
Star has been one of the few consistently profitable businesses in Indian television. Although the News Corporation does not disclose financial details of its operations here, Merrill Lynch estimates that Star accounts for 3 percent of the company’s total operating income, or about $116 million in the 2006 fiscal year.
Zee, which started by offering a few hours of programming a day, now has more than two dozen channels; it started a satellite-TV service, DishTV, in 2004. “We offered an alternative to a broadcaster, Doordarshan, from which urban audiences felt disconnected,” said Ashish Kaul, a senior vice president at Zee. “You cannot blame Doordarshan; it had a national obligation.”
About 60 percent of the nation’s television households subscribe to the cable or satellite services that carry private channels. Though Indians theoretically have dozens of channels to choose from, a handful dominate the ratings and earn most of the profits. A fragmented cable business is straining to reshape itself in response to new regulations and competition from satellite television services.
The transition to digital cable, meanwhile, has so far occurred only in parts of India’s four most populous cities. The changeover has been troubled by technical problems, weak enforcement of a Jan. 1 deadline and a shortage of set-top boxes.
At the same time, the newest technology operates alongside the often stark economic and social realities of India. Black-and-white televisions still account for an estimated 40 percent of all TV’s in use, and about 56 percent of rural households do not have electricity, according to India’s 2001 census. And because most homes in India that have a television have just one set, watching TV can be a communal activity that brings together the entire family, and often the neighbors, too.
Perhaps the most striking of the changes in Indian television is what is starting to show up on the screen.
“Dhoom Machaoo Dhoom” (Hindi for “Let’s have a blast”) is a Disney show aimed at teenagers, and it might look at home on the Disney Channel in the United States. It is about four teenage girls, one of them from New York, who want to start a band so they can represent their school in a talent contest. They face a number of challenges, including an arrogant classmate who is determined to derail their plans.
But the show, which went on the air last month, has an Indian twist. Priyanka, the New Yorker who has returned to her family’s native land, wants the girls to perform a song they have created, rather than using a tune from a popular Bollywood movie, as the local norms dictate. In one episode, Kajal, played by Sriti Jha, complains that Priyanka doesn’t understand India. “Only Bollywood works here,” she insists.
The girls do not dwell on the issue, but it is an important consideration for television executives and media companies here. Indian television has a strong partnership with the film industry, whose stars appear on its shows as guests, contestants and hosts. Movies and music videos from Bollywood remain staples on television here.
Yet in the last decade television has attained influence over the popular culture that is starting to rival that of the film business. And whereas filmmakers have traditionally worked in close-knit networks that operate in a single language, media companies have been exploiting the large and growing capacity of cable and satellite networks to cheaply develop customized channels and shows for different parts of the country. Zee, for instance, operates several regional-language entertainment and news channels.
We have a vibrant TV industry,” said Rama Bijapurkar, a business consultant whose clients include Disney and who also writes a column for The Economic Times. “When talking about the hinterland, TV is what Bollywood would like to be.”
Nachiket Pantvaidya, an executive director at Disney’s Indian operations, predicted that “Dhoom” would be a breakthrough for Indian television because it was one of the few shows produced for teenagers, and specifically for girls. He said that more than 90 percent of what Indian youths watch on TV are family dramas and other shows created for their parents.
“This is a story of kids who are trying to do something out of the ordinary,” Mr. Pantvaidya said. “Nobody makes TV for the real world. This kind of TV is rare.”
Ms. Jha, the 20-year-old who plays one of the girls on “Dhoom,” added: “This can’t be compared to the whole lot of family serials. This is much more real and close to the lives of kids.”
“Dhoom” is Disney’s sophomore effort at producing TV shows in India — its first, “Vicky Aur Vetaal,” was based on an Indian myth about a prince and a genie-like figure. The company sees television as the first step in a broader India strategy that includes films, merchandising and possibly a theme park. Last year, Disney spent $44.5 million to acquire a 15 percent stake in UTV, a production company based in Mumbai, and to buy Hungama, a television channel of children’s programming created by UTV.
“We decided early on that this had to be driven locally,” said Gary Marsh, president of entertainment for Disney Channel Worldwide in Burbank, Calif. “If we were to truly become a global company, we had to let our regional organizations create their own programming.” India was the first country where the company developed local Disney Channel shows, something it is now doing in Britain and Japan, too.
Many of Disney’s competitors have built their businesses on a similar strategy. Time Warner, which operates the Pogo and Cartoon Network channels here, is offering an Indian version of “Sesame Street” called “Galli Galli Sim Sim.” The show uses some material from the popular American show, but it is set on an Indian streetscape and is anchored by four local Muppets. A large orange-and-red lion named Boombah replaces Big Bird.
Television executives say the ventures by Disney and others aimed at youths and various niche markets are a welcome break from the way business has been done in India. A handful of channels — which carry soap operas, reality shows, music shows and important cricket tournaments — receive the bulk of the advertising. Yet entrepreneurs continue spending millions of dollars starting copycat networks. India has more than 40 cable news channels, for example.
“Here it is, we have 200 channels of the same stuff, and people are saying let’s do more of it,” said Sameer Nair, chief executive of Star Entertainment, a News Corporation subsidiary. “That will churn and change.” (In an indication that competition is intensifying, Mr. Nair announced last month that he would be leaving Star in March. According to news reports, he will be helping a rival Indian-owned TV company start a new entertainment channel.)
AS media executives try to introduce innovative programming, exactly what can go on the air in India remains fluid. There is no overt censorship of television content, but most media companies say they aggressively police themselves to avoid running afoul of political and cultural mores.
Several movie channels were forced to go off the air for more than a week last summer when a court in Mumbai ruled in favor of a schoolteacher who had argued that films that had been rated for adult viewing only in their cinematic release could not be shown on television without being edited and recertified for a wider audience.
In some ways, television fare in India today is far more adventurous than it was even five years ago. A recent adaptation of “Big Brother,” known here as “Bigg Boss,” for instance, has stirred the pot by showing minor celebrities behaving badly. Though it may seem insignificant, the show has let viewers see famous people as human beings, said Kunal Dasgupta, who heads Sony’s Indian television operations, which broadcasts the show.
Still, Mr. Dasgupta knows that social customs evolve slowly here. He said he was considering “with kid gloves” a proposal from an Italian company to help produce a miniseries that would be based loosely on the life of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of India’s ruling Congress Party who is the widow of the former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.
The proposal calls for an Indian cast, but the series would take an “Italian perspective,” Mr. Dasgupta said. “I find it very exciting and challenging,” he said. “At the same time, knowing our own media, we could be ripped apart.” He said he was “trying to see if we can get people who are really in power to accept that if we do such a thing it will be O.K.”
The fact that he is even considering such a proposal is a sign of how far television has come in India. And as the country continues to experience major economic and social changes, the shape of Indian television is likely to keep evolving.