In Kerala, Political Humor is Embraced

India may have dented its image as a champion of press freedom after the anticorruption activist Aseem Trivedi was arrested in September for lampooning the Parliament in a cartoon, but, in fact, political satire has a long history in many parts of the country, especially in Kerala.

No-holds-barred portraits of political leaders are daily fare on every local channel, and the targets of such shows even see it as an honor of sorts.

Such tolerance for ridicule lies in the fact that mimicry has long been the staple of entertainment in Kerala. Most of the top movie stars in Malayalam-language cinema, also known as Mollywood, started their careers as mimicry artists at temple festivals and other public functions. In the old days, they imitated sounds around them, like the birds, the animals and the machines. Then they move d on to imitating popular movie stars and eventually to political leaders.

With the explosion of the 24/7 television channels, many of them news channels, the mimicry artists found their way to the small screen. To meet the competition from entertainment channels, the news channels started showing movie clips in the guise of entertainment news and introduced several programs with sharp political satire.

The longest-running of these series is “Munshi” on Asianet, a daily show poking fun at the prevalent political and social practices. A fixed cast of half a dozen men, who represent not only different political views but also different castes and communities, discuss the day's major event with sharp wit and comical action. They take sides, attack politicians by name and generally reflect the frustrations of the common man. Fin ally, the wisest of them all, Munshi, or the Pundit, a wise old man who does not participate in the conversation, sums up the whole situation in a proverb or a pithy quote.

The actors live and work together day in and day out to produce their program, which reminds viewers of the cartoonist R.K. Laxman's Common Man, who appeared every day on the front page of a national daily to offer his commentary on the faults and foibles of politicians.

Asianet has another serial called “Cinemala,” in which actors appear as politicians. Mimicry is used very effectively to bring out the most comical aspects of the political leaders, and the actors bear striking similarities to politicians like the defense minister A.K. Antony, the Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy and the Communist leader V.S. Achuthanandan.

All the channels seem to have found their own versions of Antony, Chandy and Achuthanandan, with varying degrees of similarity with the originals. Just as the real Charlie Chaplin once lost a Chaplin look-alike contest, the real politicians will have a hard time competing with their impersonators, as the latter appear to be more authentic than the former.

Slapstick comedy is not the only medium for political satire. Following the lead of a show called “Natakame Ulakam” (“All the World is a Stage”) on Amrita TV, several others have emerged as one-man talk shows, in which political events are described with various degrees of ridicule. Some, like “Varanthyam” (“Weekend”) on Indiavision and “Sakshi” (“Witness”) on the leftist Kairali channel, show actual clips of news events to prove the point that facts are often stranger than fiction.

Torn out of context in some instances, the words and deeds of politicians appear ridiculous. One favorite item features political leaders falling asleep on the dais, often when the speaker talks about the need to awake, arise and stop not until the goal is reached. Some shows literally put words in the mouths of politicians by playing the soundtrack of a film.

Asianet's serious news program, “Cover Story,” is the hardest hitting of all the political programs. The anchor, Sindhu Suryakumar, minces no words in her critical analyses of men and matters and reinforces her arguments with hard facts. She also uses songs and scenes from Mollywood to great effect, but the mood is serous and purposeful. Much to the credit of the authorities, nobody has either tried to intimidate her or to influence her, and she carries on merrily, exposing all politicians.

“In my channel, I am happy to juxtapose a serious program on international matters with a slapstick on Indian politicians,” said T.N. Gopakumar, editor in chief of Asianet News. “I professionally believe that this goes to strengthen the aspirations of the people, who exercise their right to vote to elect a better government. Of course, we ensure that satire does not cross the borders, turn into vendetta or malice.”

A major dilemma of the politicians is whether to laugh or cry when they become caricatures in popular comedy shows. The appearance of their doubles indicates that they have arrived on the scene, and they may rejoice on that account. Only those who matter politically are imitated and ridiculed. On the other hand, upcoming politicians are not likely to be pleased to see their weaknesses exposed on television.

“As a devotee of free speech, I tell myself that it is flattering to be found worthy of being satirized, so one just grins and bears it and hopes the damage is not lasting,” said Shashi Tharoor, a member of Parliament and recently-named minister of state for human resources development. He was recently portrayed in one show's sketch as doing a cinematic dance with his wife, lampooning his image as a romantic Bollywood-style hero.

For more seasoned politicians, it is just an occupational hazard they have learned to live with. Mr. Chandy, the state's chief minister, was philosophical about his many appearances on these shows. “Satire is part of the vibrant visual media in Kerala, which enjoys freedom of expression,” he said.

India and Britain Deepen Their Artistic Links

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya Museum, Mumbai

Interns at the Courtauld Institute working on the "Sword of Damocles." The London art school is active in restoration efforts across India.

MUMBAI - It has taken well over sixty years, but after a traumatic divorce that unraveled an empire, India and Britain now seem to be having some kind of cultural honeymoon.

"Akbar ordering the slaughter to cease in 1578" (c.1595), one of the works showing in the British Library's coming exhibition "Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire."

"Squirrels in a Plane Tree," another work in the exhibition. Cultural ties between Britain and India have become stronger in recent years.

The landmark exhibition “Mummy: The Inside Story,” which opens on Nov. 21 at the biggest museum in Mumbai, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, or CSMVS, is the result of a new collaboration between the British Museum, whose collection forms the display, and the CSMVS. In January, the British Council is holding an exhibition in India of 30 contemporary British artists, including David Hockney and Peter Blake. And in London, India's Minister of Culture, Chandresh Kumari Katoch, is set to inaugurate on Nov. 9 the opening of “Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire,” at the British Library. While that exhibition did not involve any explicit collaboration with Indian museums or curators, it is part of a wider cultural momentum that has increased in recent years and notably since both countries signed a memorandum of understanding in July 2010 to deepen artistic ties.

“For the British public, India has always been a starting point for Asia,” Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, said by telephone. He added that the concept of London museums working more closely with India makes sense, “as a very large part of India lives here.”

From the formation of the East India Company in 1600 to the rise of the British Raj and its fall when India declared independence in 1947, British-Indian relations have weathered ups and downs. But with India's growing economic importance, wariness of the shadow of colonization is waning and a recognition is growing that the country's art heritage should be reinvigorated. Since the cultural agreement was signed in 2010, there has been an increasing number of exchange projects, including traveling exhibitions, research, training, digitizing of archives and collections and fund-raising.

“British institutions have always seen India as a huge art resource, but now it's being seen as a place for serious high-level exchange,” said Adam Pushkin, the head of arts at the British Council in India.

Major British institutions are increasingly turning to India to expand their resources, including modern and contemporary galleries. “We are actively developing reciprocal projects and possible exhibition plans,” Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, said in an e-mail.

Lekha Poddar, an Indian art collector who heads the Tate's newly formed South Asia Acquisitions Committee and who founded the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi, pointed out that many British institutions wanted to “be part of the new economic power shift that's happening from West to East.”

Developments on the arts front between India and Britain have been numerous in recent years. Earlier this year, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London displayed paintings by Rabindranath Tagore, with many obtained from the Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan in West Bengal and shown outside India for the first time. A traveling exhibit of Kalighat paintings this spring, organized by the V&A and the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata, was seen by 400,000 visitors in Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad and New Delhi.

Other initiatives include a show of works by the Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor in Mumbai and Delhi, organized last year by the British Council, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and the Lisson Gallery in London. The British Council also reopened the Queens Gallery, an exhibition space in its New Delhi premises, last year.

Smaller galleries and provincial museums are also getting in on the cultural exchange. Spaces like Gasworks in London have residencies specifically for Indian artists financed by organizations like Creative India. Last year, the British artist Liz Ballard spent two months in Mumbai as part of a residency exchange between the CSMVS and the Norwich Castle museum, while the artist Simon Liddiment conducted printmaking workshops at the Sir J.J. School of Arts in Mumbai.

Exhibitions aside, Britain and India are also working together to share expertise. The British Museum held a leadership training program supported by India's Ministry of Culture for 20 people including museum directors, administrators and curators from across India earlier this year, while the V&A conducted a training program in London for 15 museum professionals from India. The V&A and the British Library are helping to digitize Indian archives and paintings from collections in India and Britain. Graduates from the Courtauld Institute of Art have worked at the conservation center at the CSMVS, and the Institute is active in restoration efforts across India.

In India, where many museums had, until recently, been left to languish, the fruits of collaboration might take time to be widely felt. “India is being courted by Western money and Western curators, but so far this simply hasn't affected the traditional museum sector, where the speed of change is glacial,” said the British historian William Dalrymple, who co-curated an exhibition on Mughal India at the Asia Society in New York this year. Mr. Dalrymple said that for that exhibition, no paintings or works were obtained from within India because the process was too cumbersome. But things are starting to change, led by institutions like the CSMVS and the Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum.

“Before, very few Indians traveled abroad,” said Sabyasachi Mukherjee, director of the CSMVS. “Now thousands go and the first thing they do is visit museums. The government realized it's important to develop relationships with foreign institutions.”

The learning and sharing is not just one-sided. “We would like to see scholar participation from India and new scholarship on Mughal art and culture,” said Malini Roy, a curator at the British Library, who put together the Mughal India exhibition.

Mr. MacGregor of the British Museum agrees. “The CSMVS is way ahead in how it presents material to children,” he said. “We've sent colleagues to study the coins display and we're thinking of using the CSMVS model of stamping and making your own coins.”

A version of this special report appeared in print on November 1, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

Anti-Corruption Activist Targets Indian Company

India's biggest business group became the latest target of the anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday, when he accused Reliance Industries of colluding with the federal government to profit from a contract to drill for natural gas.

In recent weeks, the activist and his group, India Against Corruption, have made headline news as they leveled allegations of corruption against several high-profile Indian government officials, including former law minister Salman Khursheed, who is now the foreign minister; Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of the Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and Nitin Gadkari, the president of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kejriwal alleged that in 2000 the B.J.P.-led coalition government Reliance Industries, which is led by Mukesh Ambani, favorable terms to extract gas from the Krishna-Godavari Basin off India's east coast. He also accused the current Congress-led government of r emoving a minister who questioned the contract's term.

Mr. Kejriwal distributed copies of document that he said showed Reliance Industries had initially agreed to produce the gas at the price of $2.34 per million British thermal units (B.T.U.), with a total investment of $2.39 billion. The memo said that under the profit-sharing terms, if Reliance's investment increased, the company's share of gas profits could also increase even if the overall profits fell.

Reliance Industries denied all of Mr. Kejriwal's accusations. “The statements made by I.A.C. in the press conference today are devoid of any truth or substance whatsoever,” the company said in a statement Wednesday evening. “Irresponsible allegations made by I.A.C. at the behest of vested interests without basic understanding of the complexities of a project of this nature do not merit a response,” the statement said.

B. K. Hariprasad, the Congress Party's general secretary, also said the charge s were baseless in an interview with NDTV,. “It has become a fashion for India Against Corruption to level some charges on the government and to remain in media limelight,” he said. “This country is run by 1,200 million people and not by Mukesh Ambani.”

Reliance Industries' operations in the Krishna-Godavai Basin have been complicated. In 2006, Reliance Industries raised its investment in the basin to $ 8.8 billion, which the government approved. In 2007, the natural gas price was increased to $ 4.2 per million B.T.U. Mr. Kejriwal alleges this was done to further benefit the company.

Earlier this year, Reliance Industries asked to raise the gas price again, to $14.20 per million B.T.U, but that request was rejected by Jaipal Reddy, the petroleum minister. Mr. Reddy was one of several officials who were reshuffled by the central government over the weekend. Mr. Kejriwal attributed that move to Mr. Reddy's refusal to give in to Reliance Industries.

†œThis episode explains the real reasons for the price rise in the country,” said Mr. Kejriwal. “The government seems to be succumbing to illegitimate demands of some powerful corporate in the country.”
He demanded that Reliance Industries' “blackmailing” should be immediately stopped and that its contract to drill the basin should be canceled.

Image of the Day: Oct. 31

Altaf Qadri/Associated PressA group of Sikhs at a protest in New Delhi, demanding the arrest of those who carried out the anti-Sikh riots in 1984. The riots were sparked by the assassination of former prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.

A Conversation With: Actor-Director Naseeruddin Shah

Courtesy of Motley ProductionsNaseeruddin Shah.

The third edition of the Tata Literature Live's Mumbai LitFest opened Wednesday at the National Center for the Performing Arts. Over five days, the festival offers a mix of panel discussions, book launches, workshops, poetry readings and performances. Participants include the Nobel Prize laureate V. S. Naipaul, the historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala, the psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell and the journalist Scott Carney.

On Friday evening, the director Naseeruddin Shah will perform a reading of short stories and poems of James Thurber and Vikram Seth. Mr. Shah is widely recognized as one of the finest Indian film and stage actors and directors. He has won numerous film awards during the course of his career, and he has also received the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan civilian awards from the Indian government for his contribution to Indian cinema.

Mr. Shah recently spoke to India Ink about the state of cinema in India, his theater group and his connection with Indian youths.

Q.

In recent years, Mumbai has become host to various festivals in the realm of theater, film, music and the arts. What are your thoughts on the cultural scene in Mumbai today? Do you think the city's reputation for not being as culturally exciting as Delhi is changing?

A.

I think it's a complete myth because Mumbai is far more culturally alive than Delhi. On any given evening in Mumbai there will be about 20 different plays in different neighborhoods and different languages. Whereas whenever I visit Delhi I scan the papers and I'm hard pressed to find a single play to watch. There is such a lot happening here in terms of art galleries, music programs, theater festivals â€" I think Mumbai deserves the title of the cultural capital of India.

The festivals that occur each year are like a gathering of the fraternity of that field, and I think that it is wonderful that literature is being celebrated. I do hope it makes some difference to the younger generation and encourages them to read. Communicating great writing has been part of my aim over the course of my career, and I have often done enactments and readings of writing from the subcontinent. At Literature Live, I'll be doing a reading of James Thurber and Vikram Seth with a group of three others, including my son and my daughter, which I'm excited about.

Q.

What do you think is the one thing you would like to see change in the Indian cultural scene?

A.

I think if somehow reading could become a part of our culture and upbringing, it would be fantastic. Maybe it will happen in this generation. I feel like the previous generation did not, by and large, read much great writing. I think exposure to great literature makes a huge difference.

Q.

What is your opinion of the state of cinema in India today? Is there a vibrant parallel cinema or art cinema scene?

A.

There is a healthy parallel cinema culture in India, with youngsters attempting to make movies in the language they know and about problems that concern them and issues they understand. I think these films are far superior to the films that were made in the '70s. We no longer have people sitting in air-conditioned rooms in Mumbai making movies about landless laborers in Bihar. Now people from Bihar are making movies themselves.

I'm very excited by a couple of young filmmakers. There is this young fellow called Qaushik Mukherjee in Kolkata who goes by just Q, who I find really interesting. Also of course Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee are doing some fantastic work.

Q.

Is there audience interest in viewing offbeat and art cinema?

A.

I don't think the audience has changed much â€" they still want their daily dose of mindless masala. I think that now mainstream cinema has become part of the daily diet, it is accepted and digested, and cannot be done away with. But there is a niche audience for parallel cinema, and for that I am thankful.

Q.

Across all the different avatars you have had as an actor and director on stage, in Bollywood and Hollywood â€" what would you say has been your favorite? What have you enjoyed the most?

A.

It's difficult to say, and I've enjoyed most of my career. The ones I've enjoyed I was good in, and the ones I didn't enjoy doing, I did not fare very well in. But I would say the t elevision series “Mirza Ghalib” is at the top of the list.

Q.

What has been the most challenging aspect of your work?

A.

I think now the challenge is to try and stay fit and healthy, and somehow find a connect with the youth of today, which is very stimulating. I am very impressed with young people today. I do a lot of teaching at various institutes, and I love interacting with the students there.

Q.

Motley Productions, the Mumbai-based theater company you co-founded with Benjamin Gilani in 1979, has received several accolades and performed in India and abroad over the years. What are your plans for Motley?

A.

My plans as long as I live are to keep it running and keep doing interesting work. I also want to ensure that Motley does not become synonymous with my name, as I want the company to outlive me, so we purposely do a number of productions in wh ich I do not act. There are still a couple of plays in my wish list, and among them is “Saint Joan,” a play by George Bernard Shaw. Outside of that, I am grateful for the support we have received and hope that we are able to do the work we love for a long time.

Q.

What other projects are you working on?

A.

At the moment there are no movies on my plate. I've done one movie, “John Day,” which is a vendetta story of an ordinary man driven to murderous acts because of the trauma he experiences. The film has been directed by Ahishor Solomon and produced by K. Asif and Anjum Rizvi, the person who brought out “A Wednesday.” That should be coming out next year.

Tamil Nadu Prepared for Cyclone Nilam, Officials Say

Nathan G/European Pressphoto AgencyFishermen at the Kasimedu fishing harbor, prepare for Cyclone Nilam in Chennai, Tamil Nadu on Oct. 31.

CHENNAI-Tamil Nadu officials, hoping to avoid a repeat of the destruction caused by Cyclone Thane last year and other recent storms, have prepared extensively for Cyclone Nilam, which is expected to make landfall near the state capital of Chennai early Wednesday evening.

Cyclone Nilam, with winds traveling at 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour, is off the coast of southern India and expected to make landfall at about 6 p.m. Hundreds of people from the region have alrea dy been evacuated.

The cyclone is heading “northwest to cross anywhere between Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu and Nellore in Andhra Pradesh,” said Y.E.A. Raj, deputy director general of meteorology in Tamil Nadu. He warned that destructive winds and rains unleashed by the cyclone are likely to disrupt daily lives in Tamil Nadu and adjoining south Andhra Pradesh.

After dozens of people were killed by Cyclone Thane in December 2011, and thousands were forced into emergency shelters, the state decided to bulk up its disaster response, using India's National Disaster Response Force as a model. In March, the Tamil Nadu government set up a State Disaster Rescue Force, or S.D.R.F., which pledges to handle natural disasters “on a war footing.”

“Tamil Nadu has a long coastline and the state has witnessed many storms over the years,” said M. Jayaraman, joint commissioner for revenue administration for Tamil Nadu. “We have standa rd operating procedures already in force to tackle natural calamities and have also taken extra efforts this time,” he said.

Courtesy of Sangeetha RajeeshCyclone Nilam approaches Chennai, Tamil Nadu on Oct. 31.

Two teams of S.D.R.F. forces, of 35 trained personnel each, have been sent to Mahabalipuram and Cheyyur Taluks in Kancheepuram district, Mr. Jayaraman said. “They are officers trained by the state in disaster risk management and experts in handling situations arising as a result of natural calamities,” he said. Four more teams are on standby for flood-prone coastal districts, he said.

“All district collectors have been alerted, an d flood-prone districts have fire and rescue personnel ready in case the need arises,” he said.

Heavy rains are expected during the next 24 hours in many coastal districts in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. In Tamil Nadu, the most affected districts will be: Nagapattinam, Thiruvarur, Thanjavur, Tiruchirappalli, Cuddalore, Pondicherry, Villupuram, Kanchipuram, Chennai, Tiruvannamalai, Vellore and Tiruvallur. In Andhra Pradesh, they are Nellore, Chittoor, Anantapur, Cuddapah and Kurnool.

The ocean is expected to surge about 1 to 1.5 meters (5 feet) over the normal astronomical tide, which is likely to inundate the low-lying areas of the Chennai, Kanchipuram and Tiruvallur districts in Tamil Nadu and Nellore district in Andhra Pradesh.

Crops, including paddy, groundnut and maize, in the coastal districts of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are likely to be damaged. Fishermen have been warned not to venture into the sea until the storm subsides.

In Kancheep uram district, seven teams formed by the district authority are stationed on land and two are patrolling the coastline, said the district collector, L. Sitherasenan. “We have already evacuated 500 people from flood-prone villages, and they are now housed in some of the 19 rescue shelters,” he said. The district has taken cues from past experiences of storms like Thane, he said, and has automatic tree-felling machines and seven ambulances waiting.

The low and vulnerable Cuddalore district has often suffered from natural calamities in Tamil Nadu, recording 486 human fatalities out of 3,925 in the state after the 2004 tsunami. The district collector, Rajendra Ratnoo, said that because of that past experience, the district is now well-equipped to handle Cyclone Nilam. “We have ensured that manpower and material are on alert and special teams are stationed in vulnerable blocks,” he said.

Cuddalore has mobile tree-cutting machinery, sandbags and casuarinas tree s waiting, to prevent flood waters from entering villages. Rescue shelters, food and water are also ready in case of evacuations. “Our priority is to prevent loss of life, and so we have readied a multilayer approach, with all departments working as a team alongside the people,” Mr. Ratnoo said. “We have not evacuated people as yet since the wind is still toward the sea.”

Doing the U.P.A. Shuffle

European Pressphoto AgencyPrime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a blue turban, with Vice President Hamid Ansari, sixth from left and President Pranab Mukherjee, fifth from left, with the newly sworn-in ministers in New Delhi on Oct. 28.

India's most recent cabinet reshuffle, the third since the United Progressive Alliance was re-elected in 2009, had a familiar, head-spinning feel to it.

Once again, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has moved ministers from one massive and fundamental issue that needs serious attention and reform in India, like commerce or roads or petroleum, to another, often completely unrelated, issue.

In the current reshuffle, among other changes, the law minister became the minister of external affairs, and the petroleum minister became the minister for science and technology. In January of 2011, Mr. Singh made the minster for rural development the minister for science and technology and nominated a new law minister and petroleum minister, among other changes.

Political experts say this strategy, of swapping out top lieutenants in rapid succession, is preventing badly needed development from happening in the country.

These “changes appear arbitrary, and don't have any apparent logic for the efficient functioning of the ministries,” said Neelam Deo, the director of Gateway House, a research institution in Mumbai, who has been the Indian ambassador to Denmark and the Ivory Coast. Ministers are changed for state politics an d political preferences, not their expertise, she said.

As the leadership of the ministry passes from hand to hand, decisions that are made are often myopic, and sometimes even harmful in the long term, critics say. Very often, projects that open with pomp and planning by one minister, who has spent some time understanding a particular sector, are abandoned or reversed by his successor in an attempt to stand out or second-guess why the predecessor was removed.

For many ministers, this reshuffling has been almost constant since the U.P.A. won the last national election.

Take, for instance, Kamal Nath. Since 2009 alone, he has been minister for commerce and industry, minister of road transport and highways, minister for urban development and, as of this past weekend, minister of parliamentary affairs, a politically crucial position given the deadlocked Parliament.

In several of these positions, he started with gusto, only to leave the ministry with goal s unmet. As commerce minister, for example, a role he first took in 2004, Mr. Nath spoke against subsidies for American farmers, pledging to end them in world trade talks, and arguing the point so vigorously that a World Trade Organization meeting was suspended. (Now, Brazil is considered the leading developing nation in that push). As roads minister, he pledged to build 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, of highway a day. (There's no way that number can be met, his successor said recently.)

Urban development, a key post for a rapidly urbanizing India whose cities lack basic necessities like enough water and proper garbage disposal, is sure to take a back seat to Mr. Nath's new, additional, post when India's embittered Parliament gets back in session.

Constant cabinet changes are an inevitable consequence of the instability of coalition politics in a parliamentary democracy like India's, analysts said. “Where the people's mandate is fractured and you have a fractured polity, frequent cabinet reshuffle is likely,” says Satish Misra, a senior fellow in politics and governance at the Observer Research Foundation in Mumbai.

You have to take into account the political survivability of the government, he said. Otherwise, “we have to ask â€" would frequent elections be any better for governance?”

Calls and e-mails to Mr. Singh's spokesman on the topic were not immediately returned.

Another reason for the merry-go-round of ministers is the U.P.A.'s multi-headed decision-making process, say government officials and analysts. While Mr. Singh announces these new appointments, he doesn't call all the shots. Instead, the Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi and sometimes her son, Rahul, are also involved in the process, which can undercut any strategic plan the prime minister may have, they say.

Knowing the reasons behind these reshuffles doesn't make them any less perplexing.

Jairam Ramesh, the head of the govern ment's sanitation and water ministry, as well as the rural development ministry, started a nationally recognized campaign against open defecation, a widespread problem in India which is responsible for millions of illnesses and deaths every year. He was unceremoniously yanked out of the position last weekend and replaced by Bharatsinh Solanki, a Congress Party stalwart from the Anand district of Gujarat. (Toilet construction there, incidentally, has seriously lagged stated goals, although Mr. Solanki is not directly involved with the program.)

The railway ministry, on the other hand, which oversees India's underfunded and dangerously decrepit 40,000-mile railway network, has had six ministers in just over three years, counting Sunday's newest appointee, Pawan Kumar Bansal.

This revolving door is due, in part, to the ministry's early assignation to West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who has left the U.P.A. But Ms. Banerjee can't be blamed for all the chan ges. The minister before Mr. Bansal, C.P. Joshi, was in charge of the railways ministry for just two months before the most recent reshuffle, and had started to take some steps toward modernization in that time, including the creation of this real-time map of the trains operating in India. (An aside: Mr. Bansal has no experience with railways, while Mr. Solanki, the new water and toilets minister, came from the railway minister.)

In the worst-case scenario, ministers stop trying, analysts say. Sometimes because ministers “don't know how long they will remain at one position, they try to be careful not to offend at the party level and allies, so they try not to be too proactive,” Ms. Deo said.

Years of expertise on a subject are suddenly made worthless by these reshuffles, Ms. Deo of Gateway House said. Pallam Raju, for example, was minister of state for seven years in the defense ministry, but he has been moved into the human resources development. “Why is he moved there? What expertise does he have there?” she asked.

Very occasionally, the frequent shuffling can actually work to a minister's advantage.

Take, for instance, P. Chidambaram, who was named finance minister this summer. His appointment is widely credited with helping to restart the financial reform process, which included an announcement that foreign investment will be allowed in India's multibrand retail sector.

Mr. Chidambaram should be able to get things done in the finance ministry. After all, it's the third time in his political career he's held the position.

On This Day: The Assassination of Indira Gandhi

A screenshot of The New York Times from Nov. 1, 1984.

“Strong-willed, autocratic and determined to govern an almost ungovernable nation that seemed always in strife, Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister four times and the dominant figure in India for almost two decades,” Linda Charlton wrote in The New York Times obituary of Ms. Gandhi, who was assassinated on October 31, 1984.

“During her tenure the Government made limited headway against such age-old Indian problems as overpopulation, hunger, caste, inadequate sanitation and chronic religious strife among the majority Hindus, Moslems and other sects,” she wrote. “Her critics charged that her promises to eras e poverty were quixotic and that India's chronic and severe social problems actually burgeoned during her years of power.” (Read the full obituary here.)

Of her death, New Delhi correspondent William K. Stevens wrote “Her sudden disappearance from the public scene represents a considerable challenge to the future of the Indian experiment in democracy.”

Hours after her death, he wrote, “her 40-year- old son, Rajiv Gandhi, was sworn in as her successor. It is his abilities and performance that are, perhaps, the biggest uncertainty for many people as the nation tries to adjust to the events of today.” (Read the full article about her death here.)

Catalonia\'s Immigrants Add to Separatist Debate

Immigrants Have Helped Set Catalonia Apart in Spain

Edu Bayer for the International Herald Tribune

Watching a Sikh band performing at a temple in Badalona, a city in Catalonia, which is considering separating from Spain.

BADALONA, Spain - Catalonia's gathering drive to separate from Spain has been a mixed blessing for Enrique Shen.

It has been good for business. Last month, before a giant rally in neighboring Barcelona to support independence, Mr. Shen ran out of the Catalan flags he sells as a wholesaler because customers had snapped up about 10,000 of them in just a week.

But as an immigrant who moved here from Shanghai 20 years ago, he is worried by the way separatists advance their case for nationhood with claims to a distinct Catalan national culture, language and identity that set it apart from Spain. “It's always best to be part of a larger country, just like having a bigger family to help you,” Mr. Shen said.

Immigrants like Mr. Shen illustrate the complexities of identity in Catalonia, where they have helped make the economy both the largest among Spain's regions and the most diverse, alongside Madrid, with sizable populations of Muslims, Sikhs, Chinese and others.

As Catalonia prepares for a regional election on Nov. 25 that could become an unofficial referendum on independence, as many as 1.5 million residents of the region, out of a total population of 7.5 million, will not be eligible to vote because they are not Spanish citizens.

While these newcomers have played little part in the separatist debate so far, their sheer numbers and their contributions to Catalonia's economy have indirectly reinforced the claims by some politicians that the region should occupy a place in the European Union separate from Spain. With annual output of about $260 billion in goods and services, an independent Catalonia's economy would be larger than a dozen of the union's 27 members.

Cities like Badalona, just northeast of Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast, illustrate the social and economic challenges that Catalonia faces, whatever the outcome of the separatist drive.

Last year, Badalona, with a population of 220,000, elected a hard-line conservative mayor, Xavier García Albiol, “in part due to his polemical views linking immigrants from Romania and other countries to crime and promising a tougher stance on illegal immigration,” the United States Department of State said in its most recent human rights report on Spain.

Mr. García Albiol is one of only a few politicians from the governing Popular Party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to win office in Catalonia. In step with his conservative colleagues, Mr. García Albiol opposes separation, and he has cast a large shadow over Badalona's immigrants, to the point that he has been sued based on accusations of inciting hatred against the local Roma population.

“One reason I got elected is because people could see that I was ready to identify a problem and take action to resolve it,” Mr. García Albiol said in an interview.

Asked to explain the problem, Mr. García Albiol said, “A large part of the migrants came here to work, but a small part also arrived with the sole intention of becoming delinquents, stealing and making life generally impossible for all their neighbors.” For this minority, he concluded, “the only solution is police pressure, efficient judicial action, and if possible, send them back to their countries.”

This year, Mr. García Albiol tried unsuccessfully to block the opening of a new mosque in Badalona. The mayor's immigration policies are “a bad joke,” said Abdelkrim Latifi I Boussalem, who helps run Amics, an association that offers Islamic teaching and Arabic language classes in Badalona.

Still, Mr. Latifi I Boussalem, who left his native Casablanca, Morocco, 22 years ago, said the municipality struggled to accept the Moroccans and Pakistanis who form the bulk of the city's Muslim population even before the city elected Mr. García Albiol.

“All the major political parties display some fear of Islam,” he said. “It's never been easy, but at least other politicians used to talk to us and didn't just call us a problem.”

Mr. Latifi I Boussalem contended that recent immigrants should have a say in any independence referendum. “We're not here to dilute Catalan identity, and are ready to work hard to understand the place in which we live, especially since Catalonia has always been a land of welcome and refuge.”

Before World War II, Catalonia's population was about 2.9 million, but it doubled in the decades afterward as Spaniards flocked to the region's industries from poorer, more rural parts of Spain. Mr. García Albiol's father, for instance, came from Andalusia in the 1960s, at the peak of that migration movement.

More recently, Catalonia has been at the forefront of a wave of immigration that started in the late 1990s, when Spain opened its doors to millions of overseas workers to fuel a construction-led boom. That boom ended in 2008 with the world financial crisis and the collapse of the real estate bubble here, and many of the immigrants have either started to leave or been forced into the ranks of Spain's unemployed, who now make up 25 percent of the labor force.

“For most of the immigrants we help, their only preoccupations now are finding a job, making sure their papers are in order and meeting their basic needs,” said Fátima Ahmed, the spokeswoman for Ibn Batuta, an association based in Barcelona that offers legal and social services to immigrants. These issues, she said, “are very far from a political debate that they don't even have the right to vote in.”

In fact, Artur Mas, the president of Catalonia, said in a recent interview that it was unclear whether a formal referendum on separation would be open to legal immigrants.

Sikhs are among the immigrants here who express some empathy for the separatist movement, drawing a parallel with their own struggles at home. An estimated 13,000 of the 21,000 Sikhs who have moved to Spain since 2000, mostly from India's Punjab region, have settled in Catalonia.

Gagandeep Singh Khalsa, who is fluent in Spanish but prefers to speak Catalan, acts as a local spokesman and interpreter for his fellow Sikhs. “I feel in harmony with the people here,” he said, “because we have been facing the same problems with India over the Punjab as they have with Spain.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 31, 2012, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Immigrants Have Helped Set Catalonia Apart in Spain.

Image of the Day: Oct. 30

Sajjad Hussain/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesA potter prepares a diya, or earthen lamp, ahead of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, in New Delhi.

Cyclone Nilam Lurks off South Indian Coast

Courtesy of India Meteorological DepartmentA satellite image of cyclone Nilam taken on Oct. 30.

As the east coast of the United States grapples with Hurricane Sandy, Cyclone Nilam is swirling about 500 kilometers, or 310 miles, off the east coast of southern India.

The cyclone, which is expected to make landfall Wednesday afternoon or evening between the district of Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu and Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh, could carry winds of up to 100 kilometers per hour, meteorologists said. Schools and colleges are closed in Chennai, and officials warned local fisherman to stay on the land.

“No one should venture out in the sea,† said S.R. Ramanan, director of the Area Cyclone Warning Center in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The meteorological department said the seas off of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Pondicherry will be rough.

Over the last 24 hours, the northern coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, including Chennai, Kancheepuram and Cuddalore, received up to 15 centimeters (5.9 inches) of rain in some areas.

While the storm is nowhere near the size of Hurricane Sandy, winds are expected to barrel up to 100 kilometers per hour while the cyclone travels toward the northwest, but their speed will decelerate when the cyclone hits land, experts said. Weather conditions are expected be calmer by Thursday.

According to the Indian meteorological department, a deep depression, a condition that precedes cyclonic winds, was noticed around the Bay of Bengal on Tuesday at 5:30 a.m. Indian Standard Time. In about three hours, the speed of wind exceeded 34 knots, about 63 k ilometers per hour, the benchmark at which the storm can be classified as a cyclone.

Mr. Ramanan said that huts in low-lying areas could be damaged, and temporary outages of power and communication services could occur.

Is India\'s Rising Billionaire Wealth Bad for the Country?

Amit Dave/ReutersMukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries is the richest Indian according to the Forbes Billionaires list 2012.

The strength and direction of the Indian economy may be up for debate, but one remarkable fact is not: There has been massive growth in the number and wealth of billionaires in India since the economic liberalization measures in 1991.

The phenomenon has often been compared to the United States' experience in the latter part of the 19th century. This was a period evocatively described by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner as America's “Gilded Age,” a time characterize d by industrialists so wealthy and powerful that they came to be pejoratively called “robber barons.”

According to the 2012 list of the world's billionaires, compiled annually by Forbes, 48 of the 1,153 billionaires are from India, accounting for a little over 4 percent of the total. This compares to India's share of global output at 2.6 percent when compared using nominal exchange rates, or 5.7 percent when compared using “purchasing power parity” exchange rates.

By this metric, India's share of billionaires in the global total seems comparable to its overall share of the global economy. But look more closely, and a different picture emerges.

A recent study by the economists Aditi Gandhi, formerly of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, and Michael Walton of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard attempts to parse the sources of the wealth of India's billionaires as well as placing the Indian experience in comparative perspective. The data reveals a staggering increase in billionaires' wealth as a percentage of national income in India, from a low point of less than 1 percent in 1996 to a whopping 22 percent in 2008.

That number has dropped off as a result of the global financial crisis and plummeting stock markets in India and elsewhere, but as of 2012 it stands at just under 10 percent.

How does this compare to other countries? India is now on par with the United States and Mexico, where billionaires' wealth in both countries is about 10 percent of national income. Among the large emerging economies known as the BRICs, (referring to Brazil, Russia, India and China) India is more unequal than China (where the comparable statistic is below 5 percent) and amazingly even with Brazil (a little above 5 percent), historically a country noted for wide disparities in wealth and income.

Among the BRIC countries, only Russia has a higher share of billionaires to natio nal income (pushing 20 percent) â€" and that in a country famous for its oligarchs, latter-day robber barons who emerged during the heady days of former President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, when Russia held the dubious moniker of being the “Wild East.”

The other important finding emerging from Ms. Gandhi and Mr. Walton's research is that 43 percent of India's billionaires came from sectors that the researchers classify as “rent-thick,” that is, those enjoying what economists would consider above-normal profits because the companies possess certain privileges. What is more, these billionaires account for a majority (about 60 percent) of the total wealth of India's billionaires.

The Forbes list of richest Indians, released last week, is full of businessmen and women from “rent-thick” sectors: real estate, construction, infrastructure, media, cement and mining. These are sectors in which the government continues to play a large role, in the form of lice nses and other forms of control, and in which there's a presumption of a government-business nexus â€" or collusion, to use a less flattering term, according to Ms. Gandhi and Mr. Walton.

For example, they contend that “the real estate sector is well known for the large number of ‘black' transactions, and the nexus between politicians and realtors has been documented in recent scams.”

An obvious inference, although one difficult to prove rigorously, is that the above-normal profits earned in industries like real estate or cement accrue because of the cozy relationship between business and government.

There is some heartening news, though, in the study by Ms. Gandhi and Mr. Walton. According to their analysis, the majority of Indian billionaires are “self-made,” and around 40 percent represent wealth that is “inherited and growing,” like the Ambani brothers, Mukesh and Anil, sons of the late Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of the family business empi re.

Not surprisingly, the self-made billionaires are in fields like information technology, which are offspring of the 1991 economic reform measures, and not holdovers from the era of the “license raj.”

Why might this be important? According to research, there is a positive correlation between economic growth and the wealth of self-made billionaires, while there is a negative correlation between growth and inherited wealth. It's impossible to establish a conclusive cause-and-effect relationship, but the finding is at least suggestive of the fact that economies populated by those whose wealth is self-made are more dynamic than those that rely on the perpetuation of existing economic elites and their descendants.

As Jayant Sinha, an investment adviser, and Ashutosh Varshney, a political science professor at Brown University, have argued in a column in The Financial Times, the current state of the Indian private sector, which they dub “curry capitalism,â € requires sweeping reforms, intended to ensure that cronyism and corruption are curbed while India's entrepreneurial ethos is given a much-needed boost.

What is more, even in the United States, there is an increasingly urgent debate on whether worsening income and wealth inequality, as captured by the importance of billionaires to the economy and other factors, is helpful or harmful for economic growth, the subject of a recent Times “Room for Debate” feature.

In an era of flagging growth rates and a renewed reform impetus from the incumbent government, the possibility that excessive inequality could be bad for the economy may be the most important lesson to come out of the Forbes billionaire list.

Vivek Dehejia is an economics professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and a writer and commentator on India. You can follow him on Twitter @vdehejia.

Image of the Day: Oct. 29

Kevin Frayer/Associated PressA woman performs a ritual on the banks of Yamuna River in New Delhi, on the occasion of Sharad Purnima. It is traditionally celebrated by Hindus during the first full moon in the Hindu month of “Ashwin.”

India Goes to the Races: A Weekend of Formula One

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• Article: No Surprise: Vettel Captures the Indian Grand Prix Again

A Conversation With: Asha Bhat, Kashmir\'s Only Female Panchayat Leader

Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesAsha Bhat, center, a member of the village panchayat, at a meeting in Kashmir in this July 8, 2011 file photo.

WUSSAN VILLAGE

Asha Bhat is the only female Kashmiri Pandit in Kashmir valley to serve on the village council known as a panchayat. She won a seat on the Wussan village panchayat in April 2011, when the state held council elections for the first time in more than three decades.

The village, which sits on the edge of the Himalayas amid tall chinar trees and flowing streams, is home to over 100 Muslim families but has only five families o f Kashmiri Pandits, a Hindu community that for the most part fled the region in the 1990s under increasing threats of violence. Only some Pandit families, including Mrs. Bhat's, chose to stay behind.

Mrs. Bhat's election was celebrated as a sign of growing tolerance in the region, although some of the initial euphoria has died down since then. Both voters and Mrs. Bhat have expressed disappointment at what she has been able to achieve on the council for the village. She also works as a low-level secretary at the village school for a monthly honorarium of $1.20. Mrs. Bhat, 52, has two married sons and recently became a grandmother.

Q.

Why did you decide to contest the village panchayat election?

A.

I wanted to help my fellow villagers, particularly women. I wanted to bring some job opportunities for women in the village, like a shawl knitting center or an anganwadi [day care] cen ter.

Q.

You chose to stay in the Kashmir valley while most of the Kashmiri Pandit families migrated to Jammu and other safer places. Why?

A.

We chose to stay here because we never felt threatened, even at the peak of militancy. No harm and no threat were ever given to us. We never felt that we are Hindus and living among Muslims. We always thought that we are living among our brothers and sisters.

Q.

Were you concerned that Muslims would not vote for you because you are a Hindu Pandit woman?

A.

No. In fact, my Muslim neighbors approached me and persuaded me to contest the election. There are only five Pandit families in the village. It is the Muslim families who got me elected.

Even before elections I used to help people in village matters. On many occasions I used to talk to army people to get our village boys released. The army used to hold up t hose boys on suspicion during the militancy days. That created my image in the village as a social worker, and the people got me elected to the village body.

Q.

Are you satisfied after working for more than one year as a panchayat member?

A.

No, I am not satisfied. I am not able to help poor people. I am not able to help poor women. We do not have enough powers and resources to help people. For everything we need to go to government officials. Their pace of work is very slow. We need to go to them for small issues several times.

We are not able to fulfill the aspirations of poor people. We feel that we are not able to do much work. I could not establish any center in the village that could have given some jobs to women.

Q.

What do the villagers say now to you?

A.

They say, “We voted for you, we elected you, now help us.” The expectations are v ery high. They think that we can get anything done. That is not the reality.

We could get some of the things done in the village like some hand pumps for drinking water, laying down of some village alleys, construction of some small drains, etc. That is not enough. We need to do much more.

Q.

What do you think is needed the most in the village?

A.

The villagers need to improve their income, particularly women. If I can help to bring in some center that can provide some employment opportunities to women, that will be a big achievement. Poor villagers desperately need to improve their income.

Q.

You became famous throughout India. Did that help you at all?

A.

Yes, I became famous, and I liked that initially. I gave interviews to media people. I gave TV interviews. I was invited to Delhi, Nagpur, Pune and Mumbai for awards and to speak about my work.

But all that publicity did not help me in my work in the village. In fact, it has become a problem for me. The people saw me on TV. They think that I am the key to everything. My villagers say that I am not able to get things done even after becoming so famous.

Q.

What are the major hurdles you face in performing your duties?

A.

We do not have enough resources to spend in the village. We do not have any funds to help poor people. Whatever money that comes is routed through officials. The officials do not transfer the money without taking a bribe. If we get some work done, the officials will not clear the wage bill without a bribe. Corruption has become the biggest hurdle.

We are not paid any salary or any transport charges to be panchayats. We are supposed to spend from our own pocket. How long we can spend from our own pocket?

Also, the panchayat system is not fully in place. The elections only took place at village level, not at a block and district level. Maybe it will become more functional with block- and district-level elections.

Q.

Do you think that the panchayat system can help in eradicating poverty from villages?

A.

Corruption is the biggest hurdle. Corruption is defeating the whole purpose of panchayats. Until we eradicate corruption, we cannot eradicate poverty.

Q.

Many panchs and sarpanchs have resigned because they fear for their lives. Two were killed recently by militants. Do you feel threatened?

A.

No, I do not feel threatened. Nobody in our area has resigned. We do have some concern, but no threat as such. We will not resign.

Q.

What inspires you?

A.

I am a follower of Anna Hazare. I am against corruption, and I want to fight against corruption.

Q.

Are you hopeful that the panchayat system will improve?

A.

I never lose hope. You live with hope till you die.

(This interview was conducted in Hindi and translated into English. It has been lightly edited.)

No Surprise: Vettel Captures the Indian Grand Prix Again

NEW DELHI - Great news for Formula One in India: In the second year of its running, the Indian Grand Prix outside Delhi looked like any other Formula One race. But this time on the track it was a far better spectacle than the one last year, with more wheel-to-wheel racing, more overtaking and nearly as many spectators.

What did not change was that for the second year in a row Sebastian Vettel of the Red Bull team started from pole position and won the race, leading from start to finish. It was Vettel's fourth victory in a row this season and his fifth of the year, and it increased his lead in the series to 13 points over Fernando Alonso, of Ferrari, who finished in second position. Mark Webber, the other Red Bull driver, finished third.

“I have had an incredible two years to come here and win the race on Sunday,” Vettel said. “A very special Grand Prix, and I don't know what it is about this circuit but I really like the flow of it.”

It was the 26th victory of Vettel's career. The race effectively turned the championship title race into a duel between Alonso and Vettel, although Kimi Raikkonen, Webber and Lewis Hamilton still have a mathematical chance to win the title, with 75 points available to the winner of all of the final three races.

Vettel leads the series with 240 points, Alonso is second with 227 points, Raikkonen of Lotus is third with 173, Webber is fourth with 167, and Hamilton is fifth with 165. Only Jenson Button, Hamilton's teammate at McLaren Mercedes, was eliminated from the title race on Sunday, although he finished the race in fifth.

For Hamilton to win the title, he would have to win the remaining races, and Vettel would have to gain no more points. Alonso would also have to race poorly the rest of the season.

“Obviously it is not easy at the moment to fight with Red Bull, but we never give up,” Alonso said. “We have to congratulate them. They were fantastic this weekend. But we want to be happy in Brazil.”

The racing in India on Sunday was far from the tame affair of the first edition of the race, with plenty of overtaking. With 12 laps left, Alonso made a spectacular and important move, passing Webber to take second position and gain a few more points.

In the final laps, even Vettel had a tense time, as his floorboard had come loose and sparks were flying from under his car as the floorboard scraped along the track. In the meantime, Alonso began catching up to him.

“The plank is on the ground,” a Ferrari engineer said to Alonso over the radio, telling him of Vettel's plight. “Let's keep pushing, let's put him under pressure.”

With three laps left after catching up a little, however, Alonso slid slightly off the track, before getting the car back under control. But he could never get close, and finished 9.4 seconds behind.

“Nice work, you weathered the storm brilliantly,” his engineer said to Vettel.

Right from the start, it was tense action as the two Red Bull drivers pulled up alongside each other. Vettel defended his position against his teammate, Webber. Behind them the two McLaren drivers, Hamilton and Button, fought for position, and Alonso, who started fifth, profited by that battle to slot in between the two of them, moving immediately to fourth.

He then passed Button on Lap 4 to move into third.

“There are 75 points available and we are 13 behind, and hopefully we can improve; the races are long and there can be problems,” Alonso said. “So there are still many points on the table and I am still very optimistic.”

In the final laps of the race, Hamilton gained on Webber, who had a problem with his power-boost system, but the British driver never managed to pass the Australian and finished 0.6 seconds behind him.

“Another two laps and he would have got me,” Webber said.

By the end of the race, Raikkonen was also only half a second behind Felipe Massa in the other Ferrari, and the two finished sixth and seventh.

The action also got stormy at the back of the pack. Up and down the pack cars were overtaking and slipping off the track, exchanging positions.

It was a vast improvement on the calm procession of last year's race, which was nevertheless hailed as a victory for India in its effort to host an international sporting event after the fiasco of the Commonwealth Games in 2010.

The race Sunday was attended by an estimated 80,000 spectators, compared with 95,000 last year.

“I think it is an impressive country,” Vettel said. “In here in the paddock is something we know, but looking at Delhi or outside the circuit it is quite a different life. To see how people live here and see the culture, it's very different.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 29, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

At Bangalore\'s Gated Enclaves, the Chaos Outside Comes Knocking at the Door

Pushkar VYash Enclave, an upscale gated residential complex in Bangalore, Karnataka.

In Bangalore, sentry-guarded, walled high rises and gated villa communities with grandiloquent names like Golden Enclave, Pebble Bay and Palm Meadows are all the rage. For many middle-class and upper middle-class families in the city - and in big cities elsewhere in India - they offer protection and privacy, an escape from the dysfunctional urban disarray outside.

But if events of the past few months are any indication, the problems of the outside world are insistently knocking at the gates.

David Arthur, a corporate dealer who offers cell-phone ser vices to companies, has lived with his wife and two children in one such idyll, called Yash Enclave, for the past eight years. Recent events have taken some of the sheen off this perfect setting for him.

Yash Enclave is a walled community in a new north Bangalore neighborhood called Hennur Road . Inside, the streets are squeaky clean, homes have lush gardens, and there is seldom a honk heard from the cars as they cruise through, stopping to make way for kids riding bicycles, gliding by on rollerblades or chasing after cricket balls.

It is a place where children also leave bicycles and skateboards outdoors without fear of theft â€" a situation unthinkable in any Indian city.

Beyond Yash Enclave's manned gates is India's urban reality: slums, potholed and traffic-choked roads, piles of garbage on street corners, traffic fumes, and a cacophonous din from the revving motors and incessant honking of the cars, buses and motorcycles.

The two worlds are separated by a bare hundred meters, but the contrast could not be starker. “Once inside, we live a sheltered life,” said Mr. Arthur, a lifelong Bangalore resident. But, he lamented, “that is going to get increasingly difficult in the coming days.”

Problems started in Yash Enclave a few months ago.

First, the borewells ran dry, leaving residents without water until they found an outside contractor. In Bangalore, the city supplies, or rather, rations water to individual homes. But large apartment blocks or villa complexes often have to make their own arrangements.

Venkata Raju of the Bangalore Water Supply Board said that the 900 million liters of water available per day, an amount that has remained the same since 2002, is rationed to 250 square kilometres of the city's core. Since then, the city has boomed, its boundaries have stretched and a lot more apartment complexes and gated communities have come up. “The quantity is i nadequate,” he said.

But private water suppliers come with their own set of problems. The quality of their  water is sometimes so bad that many communities are forced to install expensive water treatment plants or filters in individual homes.

The residents of Yash Enclave have hired private water tanker contractors who now fill the community tanks several times daily. Every home in Yash Enclave has a filter. Some buy bottled drinking water as well.

Water is an issue in nearly every walled community in Bangalore, but additionally for some, security guards started disappearing. Thousands of people from India's northeast fled Bangalore in August, after they heard rumors of possible attacks. Many private security companies rely heavily on northeastern immigrants, who tend to be fluent in Hindi or English and literate, and communities had to downsize their security staff or rework contracts to pay more for guards, whose salaries went up once the labor pool sh rank.

The latest crisis to hit Bangalore's planned communities involves their garbage.

In recent weeks, city authorities have thrown up their hands after a futile search for new dumping grounds for the thousands of tons of garbage produced daily in Bangalore. (Read more about Bangalore's garbage problem and the thousands of women responsible for sorting and collecting the city's trash.)

In September, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, the city's governing authority, categorized any building or housing society with more than 10 units as a ‘bulk generator' of waste, citing an old rule, and mandated that such bulk generators should have their own garbage composting units or else make their own arrangements to have waste removed by garbage contractors.

Residents at Yash Enclave, whose homes are worth 10 million rupees ($250,000) or more, currently pay a private contractor a few thousand rupees to clear the garbage from their complex once a day. Mr. Arthur anticipated that the contractor would soon ask for higher fees, or, worse, refuse to do the daily collection.

Hundreds of similar walled communes dot Bangalore, where the population of 9.6 million has increased nearly 50 percent in a decade.

The Bangalore residents who choose to live in the city's gated enclaves call them “Little Republics.” Urban experts criticize their resident of of withdrawing from civic engagement and accelerating India's already wide socioeconomic schisms.

“It is an unhealthy divide,” said V. Ravichandar, a management consultant and an urban analyst. “A certain segment of the population has concluded that the public system is a failure and has opted out by creating their own private cocoons,” he said.

Gated communities are a flawed urban development model, he said, adding that the government should instead encourage collaborative, sustainable development zones with built-in working, living and social spaces.< /p>

Bangalore's private communities, though, have been designed for the opposite of “collaborative living” with the rest of India â€" and residents say that's why they live there. Many of Bangalore's private communities are next door to real India, yet have no semblance of being connected to it. Some residents seem to prefer this, saying that the exclusivity really appeals to them.

Mili Jalan, who runs an early learning center, said she chose a gated complex on Sarjapura Road to get away from the mayhem outside, and to avoid some of the normal hassles of living in India.

“I did not want to get into the nitty-gritty of negotiating daily life, whether ensuring water in my taps or power to run my refrigerator or finding a reliable carpenter or electrician if I needed one,” said Ms. Jalan. In most gated communities, these duties are handled by either the complex manager or a committee of residents, who negotiate on the residents' collective behalf and levy maintenance fees or a one-time charge.

Yet, Ms. Jalan is realizing that she can't be completely shielded from the dysfunction outside. As Bangalore's water scarcity worsened recently, Ms. Jalan has found herself shocked by the price she has to pay for a necessity like water.

Her 100-apartment building complex, ironically called Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head, never had a city water supply. Located in a dry part of the city, there is no groundwater to mine either so residents are dependent on private water suppliers, who take advantage of their position to raise priceas at will. Mr. Jalan's monthly water bill recently went up another 2,000 rupees ($37) per months.

The extra cost hasn't soured her on gated community life â€" if anything, it has made her more sensitive to the city's challenges. “I am even more aware what it's like outside,” she said. “I appreciate that I live in an ivory tower.”

Saritha Rai sometimes feels she is the only person living in Bangalore who was actually raised here. There's never a dull moment in her mercurial metropolis. Reach her on Twitter @SarithaRai.

A Village Rape Shatters a Family, and India's Traditional Silence

Enrico Fabian for The New York Times

A 16-year-old girl, right, who was gang-raped, sitting with her mother. The girl's father killed himself.

DABRA, India - One after the other, the men raped her. They had dragged the girl into a darkened stone shelter at the edge of the fields, eight men, maybe more, reeking of pesticide and cheap whiskey. They assaulted her for nearly three hours. She was 16 years old.

When it was over, the men threatened to kill her if she told anyone, and for days the girl said nothing. Speaking out would have been difficult, anyway, given the hierarchy of caste. She was poor and a Dalit, the low-caste group once known as untouchables, while most of the attackers were from a higher caste that dominated land and power in the village.

It might have ended there, if not for the videos: her assailants had taken cellphone videos as trophies, and the images began circulating among village men until one was shown to the victim's father, his family said. Distraught, the father committed suicide on Sept. 18 by drinking pesticide. Infuriated, Dalits demanded justice in the rape case.

“We thought, We lost my husband, we lost our honor,” the mother of the rape victim said. “What is the point of remaining silent now?”

As in many countries, silence often follows rape in India, especially in villages, where a rape victim is usually regarded as a shamed woman, unfit for marriage. But an outcry over a string of recent rapes, including this one, in the northern state of Haryana, has shattered that silence, focusing national attention on India's rising number of sexual assaults while also exposing the conservative, male-dominated power structure in Haryana, where rape victims are often treated with callous disregard.

In a rapidly changing country, rape cases have increased at an alarming rate, roughly 25 percent in six years. To some degree, this reflects a rise in reporting by victims. But India's changing gender dynamic is also a significant factor, as more females are attending school, entering the work force or choosing their own spouses - trends that some men regard as a threat.

India's news media regularly carry horrific accounts of gang rapes, attacks once rarely seen. Sometimes, gangs of young men stumble upon a young couple - in some cases the couple is meeting furtively in a conservative society - and then rape the woman. Analysts also point to demographic trends: India has a glut of young males, some unemployed, abusing alcohol or drugs and unnerved by the new visibility of women in society.

“This visibility is seen as a threat and a challenge,” said Ranjana Kumari, who runs the Center for Social Research in New Delhi.

In Haryana, the initial response to the rape after it was disclosed ranged from denial to denouncing the media to blaming the victim. A spokesman for the governing Congress Party was quoted as saying that 90 percent of rape cases begin as consensual sex. Women's groups were outraged after a village leader pointed to teenage girls' sexual desire as the reason for the rapes.

“I think that girls should be married at the age of 16, so that they have their husbands for their sexual needs, and they don't need to go elsewhere,” the village leader, Sube Singh, told IBN Live, a news channel. “This way rapes will not occur.”

The most vulnerable women are poor Dalits, the lowest tier of the social structure. Of 19 recent rape cases in Haryana, at least six victims were Dalits. One Dalit teenager in Haryana committed suicide, setting herself afire, after being gang-raped. Another Dalit girl, 15, who was mentally handicapped, was raped in Rohtak, according to Indian news media accounts, the same district where a 13-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a neighbor.

“If you are a poor woman who is raped, you cannot even imagine a life where there will be justice,” Kalpana Sharma, a columnist, wrote recently in The Hindu, a national English-language newspaper. “If you are a poor woman and a Dalit, then the chances of justice are even slimmer.”

Haryana is one of India's most entrenched bastions of feudal patriarchy. The social preference for sons has contributed to a problem of some couples aborting female fetuses, leaving Haryana with the most skewed gender ratio in India, 861 females for every 1,000 males. Politically, the Jat caste largely controls a statewide network of unelected, all-male councils known as khap panchayats, which dominate many rural regions of the state.

Elected leaders are reluctant to confront the khaps, given their ability to turn out voters, and often endorse their conservative social agenda, in which women are subservient to men. Khaps have sought to ban women from wearing bluejeans or using cellphones. One khap member, Jitender Chhatar, blamed fast food for the rise in rape cases, arguing that it caused hormonal imbalances and sexual urges in young women. Mr. Singh, who suggested lowering the legal marriage age, is also a khap leader.

“They are working the blame-the-victim theory,” said Jagmati Sangwan, president of the Haryana chapter of the All-India Democratic Women's Association. “They are diverting attention from the crime and the criminals, and the root causes.”

Yet public anger is clearly bubbling up. Small protests have been staged across the state, including one this month in the town of Meham, where about 100 men and women picketed the district police headquarters over the rape of a 17-year-old girl. They waved signs demanding “Arrest Rapists!” and “Justice for Women” and chanted “Down with Haryana Police!”

Here in Dabra, about 100 miles from the Pakistan border, villagers say there is no khap panchayat but rather an elected village council where the leadership position, known as sarpanch, is reserved for a woman under nationwide affirmative action policies. Yet the male-dominated ethos prevails. The current sarpanch is the wife of a local Jat leader, who put her forward to circumvent the restriction. During an interview with the husband, the official sarpanch sat silently in the doorway, her face covered by a gauzy scarf.

“No, no,” she answered when asked to comment, as she pointed to her husband. “He's the sarpanch. What's the point in talking to me?”

The gang-rape of the 16-year-old girl occurred on Sept. 9 but remained a secret in the village until her father's suicide. Dalits formed a committee to demand justice, and roughly 400 people demonstrated outside the district police headquarters, as well as at the hospital where the father's body was being kept.

“We told them that unless you catch the suspects, we would not take the body,” said a woman named Maya Devi. “We do not have land. We do not have money. What we have is honor. If your honor is gone, you have nothing.”

Since then, the police have arrested eight men - seven of them Jats - who have confessed to the attack. There are discrepancies; the victim says she was abducted outside the village, while the suspects say they attacked her after catching her having a tryst with a married man.

“She was raped against her will,” said B. Satheesh Balan, the district superintendent of police. “There is no doubt.”

Officer Balan said villagers told the police that other local girls had also been gang-raped at the same stone shelter, though no evidence was available. Often, a girl's family will hide a rape rather than be stigmatized in the village. Even sympathizers of the teenage victim doubt she can assimilate back into Dabra.

“It will be difficult on her,” Ms. Devi said. “Now she is branded.”

In an interview at her grandparents' home outside the village, the victim said she believed other suspects remained at large, leaving her at risk. (Female police officers have been posted at the house round-the-clock.) Yet she has actively pushed the police and joined in the protests, despite the warnings by her attackers.

“They threatened me and said they would kill my family if I told anyone,” she said.

Many Dalit girls drop out of school, but the victim was finishing high school. Even in the aftermath of the rape, she took her first-term exams in economics, history and Sanskrit. But she no longer wants to return to the village school and is uncertain about her future.

“Earlier, I had lots of dreams,” she said. “Now I'm not sure I'll be able to fulfill them. My father wanted me to become a doctor. Now I don't think I'll be able to do it.”

Hari Kumar contributed from Dabra.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 28, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Village Rape Shatters a Family, and India's Traditional Silence.

India's Unassuming Formula One Pioneer

Talking to the soft-spoken, matter-of-fact, unassuming Narain Karthikeyan, it is easy to forget that he is currently India's fastest man.

Narain Karthikeyan is the only Indian in Formula One this season.

It is also easy to forget that Karthikeyan, 35, is a trailblazer for world motorsport, as the first Indian to race in Formula One, the highest level of racing, when he began driving for the Jordan team in 2005.

“I was the first guy from India to be in Formula One, nobody had been to this territory before,” he said in a recent interview. “So it was all inventing it myself. Being a pioneer is always difficult, and I'm glad to have got another chance to race in Formula One.”

After that 2005 season, he spent several seasons in various other series before returning to Formula One last year to race with the HRT team, where he continues this season.

Looking at his results in Formula One, where he has scored points only once - at the U.S. Grand Prix in 2005, when most of the teams did not race because they had dangerous tires - it is also easy to forget that when he raced in the lower series in Europe, he had results to compare with those of such accomplished drivers as the former world champion Jenson Button, with whom he raced in Formula 3 in 1999, when Button scored three victories and Karthikeyan scored two.

He was, in fact, the first Indian to win any racing series in Europe when he won the Formula Ford Festival winter series in 1994.

Formula One is another matter. But Karthikeyan still has the same simple and direct way about him. He said competing in his home race near New Delhi this weekend was for him no different than for Button or Lewis Hamilton, both British drivers at the McLaren Mercedes team, when they go to race at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

“Except that we might not even finish on the points,” he said, alluding to a comparison between his team and the Britons, who could expect to win. “You have to keep yourself motivated, you know the country is supporting you, there are a lot of loyal fans out there. And I hope I can do something special. Last year I was 17th, and hopefully I can do better. That is all I can expect.”

The HRT team is one of the weakest - and newest - in the series. After almost three full racing seasons, it has yet to score a single point. But Karthikeyan says he knows his value as a driver.

“When I put everything together, I am as fast as anyone else,” he said, before adding about India again, “But obviously there are a lot of people watching, and that gets to you a little bit. But as you get older and more experienced, you try to calm that down a little bit.”

Karthikeyan's father raced in rallies, winning the South India Rally seven times, and the boy grew up in Coimbatore, which is the motorsport hub of India, where rally cars and other racing cars are built and prepared. Unlike his peers in Formula One, he did not start in go-karts, which were not available in India. He began in a car series, the Formula Maruti series, where he finished on the podium in his first race.

“I was 16 years old, in this formula of cars created out of 40 horsepower Suzuki engine, very basic and very small,” he said. “I think the top speed was 140k or something. Just basics.”

Since he clearly had talent, he next had to go to Europe to fulfill his ambition to become the first Indian in Formula One. He started in 1992 at Winfield, a top racing school in France that had spawned many French Formula One drivers, including its most successful, the four-time world champion Alain Prost. The competition was fierce, and among those who attended with him that year, Karthikeyan was the only driver who eventually made it to Formula One.

After the Vauxhall Junior series and the Ford series in England, he raced in the Formula Asia series in 1995 and 1996, when he won the series. In 1997, he again raced in England, in Formula Vauxhall, and the following two years in British Formula 3. Spotted by Paul Stewart Racing, the team of the son of the triple world champion Jackie Stewart, he was hired to race for that Formula 3 team in 2000, and he finished fourth in the series.

He then raced in Formula Nippon, in Japan, in 2001 before racing three seasons in the Formula Nissan World Series, in Europe, finishing fourth in 2003.

But racing at all levels requires money from its drivers, and Karthikeyan said it was not easy to persuade Indian companies to pay for a sport so little known in his country. Still, early on he gained the support of the Tata group of companies, and Tata eventually supported his entry into Formula One.

“My first Formula One test was with Jaguar,” he said. “I didn't get the break, and then I tested with Jordan the same year, in 2001, but we needed backing. But in India when you convert that kind of money 60 odd times from the dollar to the rupee, it's a lot of money for India. So people were not used to spending that kind of money, but Tata stood by me and supported my entry into Formula One.”

Tata, based in Mumbai, grew as a global conglomerate at the same time as Karthikeyan's career grew, and it helped him fund his second stint in Formula One as well. The HRT team's other driver is Pedro de la Rosa, a Spaniard who was a similar racing pioneer for his country, beginning in 1999. Then his compatriot Fernando Alonso came along and won the world title twice, in 2005 and 2006.

When asked if he saw himself that way and whether he could see an Indian world champion on the horizon, Karthikeyan was skeptical.

“There is a lot of interest, but I don't know about future world champions,” he said. “But everyone is pushing. It is a very difficult sport.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 27, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.