Well.... i think i shared with most that I had the great chance to go the Areosmith concert last weekend, but I was unable to tell most (for fear that most would freak out) was that I was hit by a cop..... the story is as follows....
The concert had begun. I had heard from past concert goers that usually the barrier between the two main section was broken down about 30 mins into the concert. So, 20 mins and counting I noticed that the right portion of the crowd had began to hassle the cops to break down the barrier. Being the Women Warrior that I am (this is the meaning of the name "Kelly") I walked over to the rallying crowd and decided to position myself dead in the front, with the adhoc sheet metal wall touching my right shoulder. Suddenly the situation turned for the worse……(After about 30 mins of haggling).
Suddenly the bottom portion of the wall was torn off. In its place were inserted two cops with the sticks in hand blindly hitting at the crowd. I wearing jeans was indecisive from the rest of the crowd (all male) and so with one clean blow my shine exploded with pain. I which point I jumped back scream the first obscenity that came to mind. Everyone in the crowd realized what had happened and began to scream as well. I took this opportunity to exist and literally run for the open area behind the crowd.
Waking up the next morning was the reality check that I had been literally hit by a cop and had the proof to show for it!
Returning to office brought the inevitable sharing of the story. By end of day the story had gained a new form: American Intern was assaulted by the cops at crazy and out of control rock concert. American Embassy has decided to take action and press conference will be held this afternoon..... Just kidding only got as far as Kelly got beat up by the cops.... poor thing... let me see that burse again!
Please see my lovely proof below.....
Me
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Thursday, June 7, 2007
No Thanks India
Through my friendships here in Chennai I have learned the well known tradition of never saying thank you.
Thank you is saved for the highly respected person in ones life.
It is to them that you give the courteousy of thank you to.
No Thank you. No Thanks. No Thanx. No you are so kind. No many thanks.
That’s it folks and you know what this brings? An idea that you are giving just to give and no thank you or exchange is expected. What a concept that really needs to be implemented all over the globe. This is just one of many concepts that India has to offer the world.
Please see below some IM chats I have had on the subject:
sureshsperumal@gmail.com: thanks.. should be used only wit formaly related people..]
me: okay no thank EVER
me: thanks!
so sweet....:)
sureshsperumal@gmail.com: huh
save ur thanks
me: oh that right... its just habbit
you indian are crazy...
me: hi vinu
kavitha had mentioned that the cd with the images on it were to reach our office by end of day
is there any way to find out how long until it will reach
?
Sent at 5:05 PM on Thursday
Vinu: We have sent it through our office boy
me: okay
Vinu: he shd be reaching there anytime
me: okay kool
thank you
Vinu: he has left ramco already
okay
Pl do not mention
me: mention what?
Vinu: Thank you
me: oh okay... that is a thing here isn't it?
not saying thank you... i mean
Vinu: generally plp dont be so formal if they know eachother very well
me: oh okay i see
Vinu: yea so i think i know you pretty well and can avoid all these formal words
me: kool kool i agree
Thank you is saved for the highly respected person in ones life.
It is to them that you give the courteousy of thank you to.
No Thank you. No Thanks. No Thanx. No you are so kind. No many thanks.
That’s it folks and you know what this brings? An idea that you are giving just to give and no thank you or exchange is expected. What a concept that really needs to be implemented all over the globe. This is just one of many concepts that India has to offer the world.
Please see below some IM chats I have had on the subject:
sureshsperumal@gmail.com: thanks.. should be used only wit formaly related people..]
me: okay no thank EVER
me: thanks!
so sweet....:)
sureshsperumal@gmail.com: huh
save ur thanks
me: oh that right... its just habbit
you indian are crazy...
me: hi vinu
kavitha had mentioned that the cd with the images on it were to reach our office by end of day
is there any way to find out how long until it will reach
?
Sent at 5:05 PM on Thursday
Vinu: We have sent it through our office boy
me: okay
Vinu: he shd be reaching there anytime
me: okay kool
thank you
Vinu: he has left ramco already
okay
Pl do not mention
me: mention what?
Vinu: Thank you
me: oh okay... that is a thing here isn't it?
not saying thank you... i mean
Vinu: generally plp dont be so formal if they know eachother very well
me: oh okay i see
Vinu: yea so i think i know you pretty well and can avoid all these formal words
me: kool kool i agree
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
PICTURES!!!
I took a trip to Bagalore for the Areosmith concert.... here are some pics of the lands in between Chennai and Bangalore (who name is now changing to Bangalooru)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/sets/72157600307628273/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/sets/72157600307628273/
DID YOU KNOW? (Cami... hehe)
DID YOU KNOW?
• India is the world's fourth-largest economy.
• By 2034, India will be the most populous country on Earth, with 1.6 billion people.
• India's middle class is already larger than the entire population of the United States.
• One out of three of the world's malnourished children live in India.
• India is home to the biggest youth population on earth: 600 million people are under the age of 25.
• 72,000,000 cell phones will be sold in India in 2007.
• India just edged past the United States to become the second-most-preferred destination for foreign direct investment after China.
• In 1991, Indians purchased 150,000 automobiles; in 2007, they are expected to purchase 10 million.
• By 2008, India's total pool of qualified graduates will be more than twice as large as China's.
• By 2015, an estimated 3.5 million white-collar U.S. jobs will be offshored.
• India is the largest arms importer in the developing world.
• American corporations expect to earn $20 to $40 billion from the civilian nuclear agreement with India.
• In 2007, there are 2.2 million Indian Americans, a number expected to double every decade.
• Twenty-nine percent of India's population speaks English -- that's 350 million people.
Two Great Books on India
There are two amazing booking out there that anyone who wants to really know what is going on in India should read!
The first is one that I am presently reading and am lovin it:
In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India
By Edward Luce
Description:
Edward Luce tackles the challenges and reality of the world's largest democracy with insight and balance in this stimulating portrait of a nation in transition. Luce, Delhi-based Financial Times's South Asia bureau chief from 2001-2005, married to his college sweetheart who is Indian, considers India his second home. He knows from which he writes.
Planet India : How the Fastest Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World
By Mira Kamdar
Description
India is everywhere: on magazine covers and cinema marquees, at the gym and in the kitchen, in corporate boardrooms and on Capitol Hill. Through incisive reportage and illuminating analysis, Mira Kamdar explores India's astonishing transformation from a developing country into a global powerhouse. She takes us inside India, reporting on the people, companies, and policies defining the new India and revealing how it will profoundly affect our future -- financially, culturally, politically.
The world's fastest-growing democracy, India has the youngest population on the planet, and a middle class as big as the population of the entire United States. Its market has the potential to become the world's largest. As one film producer told Kamdar when they met in New York, "Who needs the American audience? There are only 300 million people here." Not only is India the ideal market for the next new thing, but with a highly skilled English-speaking workforce, elite educational institutions, and growing foreign investment, India is emerging as an innovator of the technology that is driving the next phase of the global economy.
While India is celebrating its meteoric rise, it is also racing against time to bring the benefits of the twenty-first century to the 800 million Indians who live on less than two dollars per day, to find the sustainable energy to fuel its explosive economic growth, and to navigate international and domestic politics to ensure India's security and its status as a global power. India is the world in microcosm: the challenges it faces are universal -- from combating terrorism, poverty, and disease to protecting the environment and creating jobs. The urgency of these challenges for India is spurring innovative solutions, which will catapult it to the top of the new world order. If India succeeds, it will not only save itself, it will save us all. If it fails, we will all suffer. As goes India, so goes the world.
Mira Kamdar tells the dramatic story of a nation in the midst of redefining itself and our world. Provocative, timely, and essential, Planet India is the groundbreaking book that will convince Americans just how high the stakes are -- what there is to lose, and what there is to gain from India's meteoric rise.
The first is one that I am presently reading and am lovin it:
In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India
By Edward Luce
Description:
Edward Luce tackles the challenges and reality of the world's largest democracy with insight and balance in this stimulating portrait of a nation in transition. Luce, Delhi-based Financial Times's South Asia bureau chief from 2001-2005, married to his college sweetheart who is Indian, considers India his second home. He knows from which he writes.
Planet India : How the Fastest Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World
By Mira Kamdar
Description
India is everywhere: on magazine covers and cinema marquees, at the gym and in the kitchen, in corporate boardrooms and on Capitol Hill. Through incisive reportage and illuminating analysis, Mira Kamdar explores India's astonishing transformation from a developing country into a global powerhouse. She takes us inside India, reporting on the people, companies, and policies defining the new India and revealing how it will profoundly affect our future -- financially, culturally, politically.
The world's fastest-growing democracy, India has the youngest population on the planet, and a middle class as big as the population of the entire United States. Its market has the potential to become the world's largest. As one film producer told Kamdar when they met in New York, "Who needs the American audience? There are only 300 million people here." Not only is India the ideal market for the next new thing, but with a highly skilled English-speaking workforce, elite educational institutions, and growing foreign investment, India is emerging as an innovator of the technology that is driving the next phase of the global economy.
While India is celebrating its meteoric rise, it is also racing against time to bring the benefits of the twenty-first century to the 800 million Indians who live on less than two dollars per day, to find the sustainable energy to fuel its explosive economic growth, and to navigate international and domestic politics to ensure India's security and its status as a global power. India is the world in microcosm: the challenges it faces are universal -- from combating terrorism, poverty, and disease to protecting the environment and creating jobs. The urgency of these challenges for India is spurring innovative solutions, which will catapult it to the top of the new world order. If India succeeds, it will not only save itself, it will save us all. If it fails, we will all suffer. As goes India, so goes the world.
Mira Kamdar tells the dramatic story of a nation in the midst of redefining itself and our world. Provocative, timely, and essential, Planet India is the groundbreaking book that will convince Americans just how high the stakes are -- what there is to lose, and what there is to gain from India's meteoric rise.
Monday, June 4, 2007
NY Time Looks at the Indian Construction Boom
In a New India, an Old Industry Buoys Peasants
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: June 3, 2007
MORBI, India — Meet the men and women building the new India.
Chakubhai Khabhu, old and lean, smoking a thin, hand-rolled cigarette, stands on top of a pile of bricks his children have made with their hands. His daughter, Vanita, 20, tosses bricks to her brothers, two by two, in a seamless human chain. One of his sons’ wives takes a break to breastfeed her 2-year-old near a pile of black clay.
For every thousand bricks, they earn a bit less than $5.50. The family, with five adult laborers, pockets on average a little more than $2 a day.
This is the life behind the great Indian construction boom, propelled by an economy still growing at 9 percent a year.
The lure of steady work is drawing more and more migrants like the Khabhus, who come to brickyards like this one around the country because they can no longer sustain themselves by farming.
The success of the brick business, in other words, is as much a portrait of a growing industry as it is a testament to the dismal state of the Indian peasantry.
Construction and its ancillary trades, most of them involving unorganized and unregulated jobs, employ 30 million people, according to the Planning Commission of India. That compares with roughly two million in, say, the software business.
With construction expanding, so, too, apparently is the demand for bricks. Chandu Bhalsod, president of an association of brick makers in Morbi, said his production had doubled in the last year alone, and would probably double again next year. The demand has grown so fast, Mr. Bhalsod said, that he is now facing a labor shortage. He said he planned to scout for workers this year in a hungry forest belt hundreds of miles away.
Much of that work is done by migrant labor families like the Khabhus, who trek from their home villages near and far to brickyards for eight months of the year, except during the monsoon season, when rains halt production.
The Khabhus said they gave up when seawater from the nearby Gulf of Kutch crept in and killed their fields. Since Vanita was a child, the family has roamed the country in search of work — in construction and road-building, and finally, here to this brickyard.
The Khabhus’ home, in a village about 30 miles west of here called Manomara, is locked up for the season. A thorny bundle of dead brush blocks their front door. It is a billboard announcing that they will be back only when the rains come and the brickyards close. Nearly half of the homes in Manomara’s low-caste Dalit quarter are locked.
Of all the backbreaking work available to the poorest Indian peasant, making bricks offers some of the best earnings. It pays better than making salt, or working in the roof-tile factories. It can allow families to build a proper house, pay for a wedding or buy a goat or a television.
But the work is hazardous, especially at kilns like this one. Smoke spills out everywhere. Within minutes it chokes a novice hovering nearby. It is so laden with heavy soot that it blackens nearby mango blossoms, to say nothing of the lungs of the people like the Khabhus, who live and breathe bricks. Home is a small room made of bricks, on the edge of the kiln. They sleep on cots outside.
On most days, they work 14 hours, breaking for meals and sleep during the hottest part of the afternoon, when temperatures climb to more than 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and that is not counting the heat that rises from the kilns day and night.
At night, when the air is cool, work goes on under the glow of thin, white tube lights. Music screeches from cheap home stereos to keep the workers awake. They mix clay and water by hand, mold the bricks by hand, stack them high between layers of coal, and when they are cooked, after a couple of weeks, load them onto trucks that ferry them to construction sites.
Brick-making work not much different from this has dominated construction in India since antiquity. Today it dominates the countryside. It is impossible to drive through any stretch of rural highway here without seeing — and smelling — brick kilns burning.
To read more go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/world/asia/03brick.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5087%0A&em&en=36f1eedccb6a388f&ex=1181102400
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: June 3, 2007
MORBI, India — Meet the men and women building the new India.
Chakubhai Khabhu, old and lean, smoking a thin, hand-rolled cigarette, stands on top of a pile of bricks his children have made with their hands. His daughter, Vanita, 20, tosses bricks to her brothers, two by two, in a seamless human chain. One of his sons’ wives takes a break to breastfeed her 2-year-old near a pile of black clay.
For every thousand bricks, they earn a bit less than $5.50. The family, with five adult laborers, pockets on average a little more than $2 a day.
This is the life behind the great Indian construction boom, propelled by an economy still growing at 9 percent a year.
The lure of steady work is drawing more and more migrants like the Khabhus, who come to brickyards like this one around the country because they can no longer sustain themselves by farming.
The success of the brick business, in other words, is as much a portrait of a growing industry as it is a testament to the dismal state of the Indian peasantry.
Construction and its ancillary trades, most of them involving unorganized and unregulated jobs, employ 30 million people, according to the Planning Commission of India. That compares with roughly two million in, say, the software business.
With construction expanding, so, too, apparently is the demand for bricks. Chandu Bhalsod, president of an association of brick makers in Morbi, said his production had doubled in the last year alone, and would probably double again next year. The demand has grown so fast, Mr. Bhalsod said, that he is now facing a labor shortage. He said he planned to scout for workers this year in a hungry forest belt hundreds of miles away.
Much of that work is done by migrant labor families like the Khabhus, who trek from their home villages near and far to brickyards for eight months of the year, except during the monsoon season, when rains halt production.
The Khabhus said they gave up when seawater from the nearby Gulf of Kutch crept in and killed their fields. Since Vanita was a child, the family has roamed the country in search of work — in construction and road-building, and finally, here to this brickyard.
The Khabhus’ home, in a village about 30 miles west of here called Manomara, is locked up for the season. A thorny bundle of dead brush blocks their front door. It is a billboard announcing that they will be back only when the rains come and the brickyards close. Nearly half of the homes in Manomara’s low-caste Dalit quarter are locked.
Of all the backbreaking work available to the poorest Indian peasant, making bricks offers some of the best earnings. It pays better than making salt, or working in the roof-tile factories. It can allow families to build a proper house, pay for a wedding or buy a goat or a television.
But the work is hazardous, especially at kilns like this one. Smoke spills out everywhere. Within minutes it chokes a novice hovering nearby. It is so laden with heavy soot that it blackens nearby mango blossoms, to say nothing of the lungs of the people like the Khabhus, who live and breathe bricks. Home is a small room made of bricks, on the edge of the kiln. They sleep on cots outside.
On most days, they work 14 hours, breaking for meals and sleep during the hottest part of the afternoon, when temperatures climb to more than 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and that is not counting the heat that rises from the kilns day and night.
At night, when the air is cool, work goes on under the glow of thin, white tube lights. Music screeches from cheap home stereos to keep the workers awake. They mix clay and water by hand, mold the bricks by hand, stack them high between layers of coal, and when they are cooked, after a couple of weeks, load them onto trucks that ferry them to construction sites.
Brick-making work not much different from this has dominated construction in India since antiquity. Today it dominates the countryside. It is impossible to drive through any stretch of rural highway here without seeing — and smelling — brick kilns burning.
To read more go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/world/asia/03brick.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5087%0A&em&en=36f1eedccb6a388f&ex=1181102400
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