Another search for authenticity ends in disappointment

A travel piece in the New York Times last week goes to a remote Indian town founded by Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabinidrath Tagore. After visiting the school founded by the sage, a museum devoted to his work (from which his Nobel Prize medal was stolen in 2004), and other local sites, the visitor encounters local color:

Toward the end of my stay, I encountered a baul singer alongside the road, strumming an ektara, a guitarlike instrument with a single string. He waved and I steered my bike toward him. With their unruly hair, matted beards and saffron kurtas, the singers (baul means "crazy") are difficult to miss. Neither Hindu nor Muslim, they are said to be insane with the love of God and wander the countryside, as they have for centuries, singing enigmatic songs about the blessings of madness and the life of a seeker. Tagore adored the bauls, and even declared himself one of them.

I sat on the ground and listened to the hypnotic music. Bauls have grown popular in recent years and, inevitably, poseurs have tried to cash in. So when another traveler, a well-off Kolkatan with an expensive camera, joined us, I asked, "Do you think he is a real baul singer?"

Clearly displeased with my question, he said after a long pause, "He's as real as you want him to be."

 

Today's fake: Indians imitate San Francisco 'school' real estate scam

In San Francisco, an institution known as the Academy of Art University is highly visible around town. Its advertisements are plastered on Muni buses, its own shuttle buses ferry students around the central city, and its logo appears on numerous buildings devoted to classes, workshops, dorms, or other, more vague purposes.

A tourist or newcomer might be excused for thinking the Academy of Art University is a thriving art institution in a town full of artists. But if you've been in town for a while, you start noticing that the AAU's presence constantly increases. More buildings, more shuttle buses -- impressive! You might wonder how they achieve such success.

In fact, the AAU is well known to San Franciscans as little more than a real estate scam. Yes, there are classes and workshops and dorms, and the shuttle buses ferry registered "students." But the quality of the art education offered by the institution is well known to be mediocre. How, then, is the organization apparently growing by leaps and bounds? Basically it works like this:

1. Government grants you status as non-profit educational institution. Under this status, you pay no real estate taxes.
2. Sign up students and help them get gobs of student loan money. The money goes straight to the institution for "tuition."
3. Hire mediocre instructors at low pay.
4. Use the extra money to buy San Francsico real estate. Pay no taxes on it.
5. Real estate appreciates, now worth 2x, 3x or more what you paid for it. Your "educational institution" now owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of prime real estate in a world city. Happy!
6. Award "graduating" students worthless degrees, which they don't care much about, because many of them are foreign students here on a lark. They go home, resume their lives, having had a year or two jaunt as "art students" in San Francisco. Happy!
7. Many students default on student loans -- government and lenders unhappy.
8. City of SF loses ability to collect tax on dozens of buildings. Recipients of city services unhappy.

It works like a charm, and now they're imitating it in India:

... Several new private "universities" have also opened up recently in Himachal. According to a local daily, the Tribune, one of these institutions enrolled students and started offering courses even before it came into legal existence. You might put down this haste to the high demand for quality education among India's overwhelmingly youthful population. But as the Tribune described in a series of reports, the universities not only lack faculties, laboratories and libraries; a few do not meet the criteria for acquiring property in the state.

In other words, private universities have become a pretext for real estate speculators to acquire expensive land from the government: another example of the collusion between state and private business manifested recently in some of India's biggest corruption scandals. These sweetheart deals would be somewhat excusable if, unlike most Indian institutions of learning, the private universities offered an education rather than degrees. But they are only interested in extracting steep tuition fees from parents anxious for their children to join India's new economy. Not surprisingly, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates in India are unemployable.

Indian tech employee dies in fun team-building event

In one of the idiotic team-building exercises run by Western companies to foster fun and solidarity among their workers, Nokia-Siemens ran a pie-eating contest in their office in Guragon, India, leading to the choking death of a 22-year-old employee.

Such antics, and their unintended consequences, are the subject of the novel I'm just finishing up, Bangalored.

technorati: Bangalore, India, outsourcing

Novel idea

Yesterday I wrote about the queue of ideas for novels that I and other writers have, some of which we can never hope to have the time or knowledge to actually write. Here's a news story that provides a perfect inspiration for a novel. I'll even give you a title: "The Extra Man."

The calamity of Asia's lost women

The killing of baby girls has led to a surplus of disaffected men who are a threat to stability

Will Hutton
Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer

In the middle of the 19th century, an area the size of Germany located between Beijing and Shanghai in central China was run for more than 15 years by the Nian rebels, a 50,000-strong network of bandit groups who lived by pillage and rape. The inability of the Imperial armies to quell the rebellion for so long was a sign of the system's vulnerability that would eventually lead to its collapse.

Importantly, the Nian bandits were men without women, long understood in China as the principal stimulus to their rebellion and cause of their violence. They originated in a district in northern China -- Huai-pei -- where the killing of infant girls to conserve food for more economically valuable boys in response to famine had been particularly terrible.

By 1850, the official records show that there were 129 men to every 100 women, an astonishing imbalance in the ratio between the sexes. Lower-class Huai-pei peasants could not find wives; hungry, economically displaced and, in Chinese terms, 'bare branches' -- not proper men because they could not marry and father children -- they turned to banditry as providing meaning and sustenance alike.

Those womanless bandits cast a long shadow over not just today's China, but the whole of Asia. Asia is estimated to suffer from up to 100 million missing women -- aborted as fetuses or murdered in infancy because of their sex. Pakistan, erupting in protests last week against President Musharraf's anti-democratic high-handedness in suspending a senior judge, is a volatile tinderbox where the capacity for such insurrection to spread is everpresent.

Fanning the flames of injustice and Islamic fundamentalism is the country's sex imbalance. Dispossessed, displaced men with no prospect of ever finding a partner more readily take to the streets like Nian rebels; violence demonstrates masculine meaning.

In today's China, there are now 119 men for every 100 women. In some areas, the imbalance is greater than it was in Huai-pei in 1850. Earlier this year, an official Chinese report projected that by 2020, one in 10 men between 20 and 45 would be unable to find a wife. Professor Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University in the US estimates that by 2020, there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men.

More here. So, if I were going to write that novel, it would be about one guy, and his friends, in such a society. I might even put a gloss on whether it was China, India or some fictional place that mixed aspects of each. The novel would have certain comic aspects in the first half and become more and more bleak as it went along, ending with the protagonist deciding to join a terrorist group out of sheer desperation; he is quickly killed.

Free idea. Take it and run.

technorati: China, surplus men, unintended consequences, India