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.