Rupee at 64: 5 Lessons from a man-made disaster

By Arjun Parthasarathy

The Indian rupee (INR) is trading at levels that can only be described as disastrous. Levels of Rs 63-64 to the US dollar mean all-time lows for the currency that has depreciated by a whopping Rs 20 – or 45 percent – over the last couple of years.

What has made the INR tank against the USD and join the ranks of countries such as Argentina and Iceland that have seen their currencies lose most of their value over the last decade? The Brazilian real is the only other currency that has depreciated more than the INR, falling by over 53 percent in the last two years.

Brazil’s problems largely stem from its sharp fall in GDP growth from levels of 7.5 percent seen in 2010 to below 1 percent seen in 2012. Weak commodity prices, with the Reuters CRB commodity index down by over 30 percent since the financial crisis erupted in 2007-08, bureaucracy, corruption and weak infrastructure are to be blamed for Brazil’s GDP growth fall.

Overconfidence was the undoing of the rupee: AFP

India’s problems stem from overconfidence on growth, economic mismanagement, bureaucracy, corruption and weak infrastructure. The INR fall is completely man-made and policymakers blaming the forthcoming withdrawal of the stimulus by the US Fed is pure nonsense.

India offers a great learning tool for policymakers across the world on how not to manufacture currency disasters. India’s fall from strength in the mid 2000’s to a position of weakness post 2010 is well documented. High fiscal and current account deficits, rising inflation, falling economic growth and weak capital markets are the cause of the INR fall. What did the policymakers do to take the INR down to record lows and, more importantly, push India out of any kind of reckoning in the world economic order?

The following five man-made factors are the cause of the INR fall.

1. The government, public and private sector were living in a fool’s paradise believing that economic growth will never slow down. The government allowed subsidies to burgeon, as rising oil prices were not passed on to consumers while public sector banks lent heavily to infrastructure projects of the private sector where revenues were more mythical. The private sector floated projects based on valuations of licences and commodities rather than on future cash flows. The end result was a huge subsidy bill taking up the fiscal deficit by 300 bps (100 basis points make 1 percent), rising non performing assets of banks, that have gone up multi-fold, and a fall in valuations of over 80 percent of many companies in the private sector.  Government finances, banking sector balance sheets and health of corporates weakened considerably, leading to fall in valuations of the whole country that is reflected in the rupee fall.
2. The illusion of high foreign exchange reserves made policymakers ignore a potential spike in Current Account Deficit (CAD). India’s foreign exchange reserves touched record highs of around  $320 billion in February 2011 (around 11 months of import cover) but have plummeted by 12.5  percent since then to levels of  $280 billion (around seven months of imports). CAD has risen from levels of below 3 percent of GDP to 5 percent over the last few years. CAD was financed by capital flows that led policymakers to believe that a high CAD would not impact the INR. Structural issues of oil and gold imports, rising inflation and high fiscal deficit was ignored until too late.

3. Growth was given priority over inflation. The focus on growth by all stakeholders concerned pushed inflation to the back seat. The RBI was castigated in public by both the government and the corporates for taking any action on inflation as it was felt that growth would suffer. The numbers are stark. In the period 2008-12, wholesale price inflation came down to below zero to over 10 percent levels and then went back to over 10 percent levels. The RBI, in the meanwhile, raised the benchmark repo rate by 100bps and then cut the rate by 425 bps and then raised the rate by 375 bps. The seesawing of policy rates along with seesawing of inflation indicates that the central bank was being reactive rather than being proactive. The economy has suffered due to the wide fluctuations in inflation and policy rates, leading to the INR being dumped later on.

4. A falling INR hurt the pride of the government. The government felt that India was too much of a growth story for the INR to fall. The noises made by the government when the INR touched Rs 57 in June 2012 suggested that the INR was being pulled down due to reasons other than macroeconomic factors. The RBI forced speculators to reduce long USD/INR positions while the government made noises on reforms and growth. The government and the RBI did not show urgency in tackling the INR fall last year and that has hurt them heavily this year.

5. The INR fall to levels of below Rs 60 has awakened the ‘animal spirits’ of the government and the RBI. The FM has been touring the world to bring in foreign investments while the RBI has strangled liquidity and reintroduced capital controls. The end result is a fall to record low levels of Rs 64. These hasty “animal spirit” decisions have caused panic in the markets as any hope of economic growth pulling the INR up has been laid low. Policymakers are not focusing on growth at the right time and markets know that policy actions cannot stem the fall in the INR. Wrong policies at the wrong time.

Is there hope for the INR going forward? Yes, if the stakeholders learn from their earlier mistakes and take the right decisions.

The mistakes India has made on the INR will help other countries to tackle currency issues. 

Something good can after all come out of the INR fall. But it won’t help us right now.

Arjun Parthasarathy is the Editor of  www.investorsareidiots.com a web site for investors. 

No-Frill Thrills: The Rise of Minimalist Sex Apps

By Kevin Roose

In January of last year, Roman Sidorenko and Alexander Kukhtenko had an idea to break their sexual dry spells the way they solved many of their other problems: with an app.


"We wanted an easy way to find sex, basically," says Sidorenko. But the two friends (who describe themselves as "pomosexuals") were too impatient to use the available dating apps on the market, all of which required them to spend hours flirting with potential flings via chat or text message before getting a date and, possibly, sealing the deal. They knew there were horny people around them looking for sex — and nothing more — but had no way of figuring out where, and who, they were.

"We thought it would be cool to use an approach like Uber," Sidorenko says. "Where you basically create the request, and you get a car pretty soon. We thought it would be cool to have something like that to find a sex buddy."

From that brainstorm came Pure, a new app that brings the on-demand convenience of Uber or Seamless to the bedroom. On Pure, users designate their gender and the gender(s) of the people they'd like to sleep with, specify whether they are able to host or not, and are shown any other willing users in the surrounding area, each with an "Okay" or "No Way" prompt. When two users are mutually attracted, they're given each others' coordinates to meet up. There are no profiles, no lengthy chat sessions, and all unfulfilled requests vanish after an hour. Confidential user feedback keeps creeps at bay, and people who repeatedly no-show are banned.

Pure, which will launch next week pending approval by Apple's App Store ("we have a plan B," says Sidorenko), is the newest entry into one of the hottest subgenres of consumer tech: the minimalist hookup app. In olden days, people hoping to get their rocks off using the Internet had no choice but to try their luck on services like Match.com or OkCupid — which require them to fill out profiles, choose flattering photos, and spend hours crafting messages that likely went unread — or wade into the sketchy backwaters of Adult FriendFinder or Craigslist postings. Now apps like Tinder and Bang With Friends are offering itchy-fingered users the chance to cut out the chitchat and get down to getting down.

"People are becoming comfortable with a format of online dating that once sounded scary," says Dan Slater, author of Love in the Time of Algorithms. "If these new location-based, on-the-fly apps are largely for hooking up ... perhaps more people out there are looking for quick sex than had been originally thought."

Easy hookup apps aren't new — Grindr has been a staple of the gay community since 2009, and there has been a parade of copycats in the years since — but the success of Tinder and Bang With Friends seems to have pushed the idea into the hetero mainstream and attracted the interest of high-profile investors. Bang With Friends reportedly raised a $1 million funding round and was seen as dangerous enough for Zynga to sue it for trademark infringement. Tinder is backed by IAC and is a perennial target of acquisition rumors in Silicon Valley. Pure, which is hoping to ride the wave, raised a seed round of $200,000, according to Sidorenko, and is currently soliciting additional investments.

"It’s very interesting to see what Fifty Shades of Gray did for the pleasure-products industry," Sidorenko says. When that book became a monster hit, "it became okay to talk about BDSM stuff. It became okay to buy sex toys. This is the way the dating industry will be changed."

Pure co-founders Roman Sidorenko and Alexander Kukhtenko

So far, minimalist sex apps have yet to find Fifty Shades–like appeal. Grindr's hetero-focused spinoff, Blendr, flopped upon introduction two years ago, and while gay-oriented apps like Scruff have sprung up with even simpler interfaces, none has eclipsed the original. But Tinder and Bang With Friends have gotten all genders and orientations interested, in part by appearing less sketchy than silly and spontaneous.

Part of the theoretical appeal of Pure and Bang With Friends is that, like Grindr, they cut the mating process down to its essential, primal elements — gender, age, appearance, location, availability — and remove the sting of rejection by showing users only the matches that have expressed interest in them, too. Unlike on Grindr, users aren't required to have or maintain separate profiles (Bang With Friends simply pulls information from Facebook), and on Pure, there is no "idle" or "away" setting, meaning that everyone using the app is presumably DTF at the moment of contact.

"Grindr is nothing but a traditional dating site," Sidorenko says. "To find someone for a hookup, you have to start a standard chat like, 'Hi, how are you, are you looking, can you host?' A lot of gay people we interviewed said, 'I wish I had a way to see who’s looking to meet right now.'"

Of course, even the most bare-bones matchmaker will require some precoital communication. And the tremendous success of more traditional online dating services (IAC's Match.com, for one, made $205 million last year) proves that many people don't want to skip the foreplay.

"These apps are tapping into this perception that people are looking for casual sex, but most people are using these apps as a gateway to something longer term," says Lauren Kay, the founder of the Dating Ring, a start-up that pairs algorithmic date-finding with old-fashioned in-person matchmaking.

In addition to proving they're not just racy novelties, minimalist sex apps will have to figure out how to make money. Bang With Friends has no apparent revenue model at present, though it's easy to imagine a premium version that charged users for better matches. The founders of Pure, whose website and investor deck are filled with feminine imagery and sex-positive language, say they're starting out by marketing to "men who have sex with men," but hope to break into the straight, bi-, and polyamorous markets soon after launch. Their money-making concept centers on charging users $9.99 for a day pass, which allows them to submit unlimited requests for 24 hours.

Eventually, Pure's co-founders say they hope to be part of a cultural change surrounding online sex-discovery. They've enlisted female sexologist Carol Queen to help them reach women, and they're planning a series of marketing events at New York bars in the coming weeks. The goal is to get casual sex-seekers comfortable with the idea of skipping the small talk, avoiding the awkward bar drinks, and going right for the sack.

That will be easier said than done. "Everyone's trying to get on the online-dating gravy train," says Harry Reis, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Rochester. Reis, who has written extensively about online-dating habits, is wary of the rise of minimalist apps, especially the ones that promise to arrange casual, spur-of-the-moment flings. Reis also points out that while society's attitudes about monogamy may be changing, that change doesn't necessarily mean that people will flock to spur-of-the-moment hookup apps for a quick fix.

"Just because a person isn't interested in monogamy doesn't mean they're interested in having sex with anyone and anything," he says.

Auto Makers Maruti, Honda, GM Turn Towards Northeast, Eye 50% Jump in Sales

Guwahati, Aug 21 : With country's auto sector going through tough phase, the industry is looking towards the North Eastern market that promises good opportunity with major manufacturers expecting growth of up to 50 per cent in sales.

Major auto makers Maruti Suzuki, Honda Cars, General Motors India and Toyota Kirloskar Motor are planning to expand their reach in the region that has largely been untapped. "The North Eastern market is very fertile. I think, the future of this region is very bright.

Opportunities are there for auto makers," Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) Deputy Director General Sugato Sen told PTI.

The rate of owning a car in India is 18 units per 1,000 people and it is even lower in North East (NE), he added.

Expecting a huge growth in the market, the wholly-owned Indian subsidiary of Japanese car major Honda is increasing its focus in the eight states of the region and plans to expand its base aggressively in the coming months.

"The North East market is increasingly gaining significance for Honda as this market has a lot of sales potential for hatchbacks and compact sedans. We are hoping more than 50 per cent jump in our sales in the region," Honda Cars India Ltd (HCIL) Senior Vice President (Marketing and Sales) Jnaneswar Sen said.

Considering the current industry growth, which is negative since last several months, the NE region is still expected to post a double digit growth, he added.

Sen further said the growth in the NE will be huge due to the fact that the automobile players are increasingly focusing on this market and it currently has a smaller base.

Talking about the company's dealership expansion plans in the region, he said: "In next 18 months, we will be expanding our presence in the entire North East and will have new facilities coming up in Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland.

"The company, which opened its first dealership in this region at Guwahati in 2008, is currently present in Guwahati and Dibrugarh in Assam, and Gangtok in Sikkim.

The country's largest car maker Maruti Suzuki India is also expanding its presence in rural and remote parts of NE as it expects "rapid growth" in the region in the next 3-4 years.

"North East market has always been very important for Maruti Suzuki. We believe that there is a huge opportunity in rural areas of North East, besides the major cities," Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) Chief Operating Officer (Marketing and Sales) Mayank Pareek said.

Currently, this region contributes around 4 per cent to the total domestic sales of MSI and it is "significant considering the socio-geographical nature of the region", he added.

Liquor Ban Has Done More Harm Than Good: Mizo governor

Aizawl, Aug 19 : Mizoram governor Vakkom Purushothaman has said the prohibition on liquor imposed in the state for the last 16 years had done more harm than good for society.

Talking to the media at Raj Bhavan in Aizawl, Purushothaman said, "In my personal opinion, and not in my capacity as the head of the state, the Mizoram Liquor Total Prohibition Act, 1995, has done more harm than good and people who wanted to drink were forced to consume spurious liquor."

He added that in his native state of Kerala, the government's PSU manufactured good liquor and earned Rs 10,000 crore a year from revenue. He said the Kerala experiment would be successful in Mizoram which would help in earning at least Rs 500 crore for the fund-starved state.

"I have expressed my opinion on the liquor policy to the church leaders when I met them earlier," the governor said.

He added that the imposition of the dry law not only increases drug addicts among youths, it also compels people to drink unhealthy alcoholic beverages. The prohibition was imposed in the state since February 20, 1997 by the then Congress government led by chief minister Lal Thanhawla, a year before the state assembly polls.

Social workers, who were against the dry law alleged that the government imposed the prohibition at the behest of the powerful church and successive governments also continued to enforce the law for fear of retribution from the church.

The 20 Cities Most Vulnerable to Flooding

By Tia Ghose

Researchers have just figured out which cities across the globe face the highest risk from coastal flooding.

To do so, they compiled data on 136 coastal cities with more than 1 million residents, looking at the elevation of the cities, the population distribution and the types of flood protection they had, such as levees or storm-surge barriers.

They then combined that data with forecasts of sea level rise, ground sinking due to groundwater depletion, as well as population growth projections and economic forecasts of gross domestic product (GDP). From there, they used the depth of water flooding a city to estimate the cost of the damage.

In both their best- and worst-case projections of sea level rise, the yearly global cost reached higher than $1 trillion. The most vulnerable city was Guangzhou, China, followed by Mumbai and Kolkata in India, Guayaquil, Ecuador and Shenzen, China. Almost all cities at the highest risk of flooding damage were in North America or Asia.

Here are the top 20 most vulnerable cities:

1. Guangzhou, China
2. Mumbai, India
3. Kolkata, India
4. Guayaquil, Ecuador
5. Shenzen, China
6. Miami, Fla.
7. Tianjin, China
8. New York, N.Y.—Newark, N.J.
9. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
10. New Orleans, La.
11. Jakarta, Indonesia
12. Abidjan, Ivory Coast
13. Chennai, India
14. Surat, India
15. Zhanjiang, China
16. Tampa—St. Petersburg, Fla.
17. Boston, Mass.
18. Bangkok, Thailand
19. Xiamen, China
20. Nagoya, Japan

Source: livescience

Six Chinese Frauds That Are Even Crazier Than Passing Off A Dog As A Lion

By Gwynn Guilford

African lyin’.http://www.weibo.com/2955015385/A4UuIyaTa

A zoo in Henan province has become a laughing stock around the world after it tried to pass off a wooly orange Tibetan mastiff as an “African lion.” And the hoax thickens: The zoo also featured a dog in the wolf pen, huge rats in the snake enclosure, and indeterminate “fox-like creatures” in the leopard cage (paywall).

But though that might sound crazy, dog-lion and friends are only the latest example of China’s unique knack for fakery, an entrepreneurial gambit sometimes slangily known as “shanzhai.” Here are some more classics:

“Longevity mushrooms”

In June 2012, a resourceful street cleaner was caught passing off masturbation aids as taisui lingzhi mushrooms, the fungal source to the Qin Emperor’s longevity, for about $2,870 a piece.

Don’t tell Christine O’Donnell, but it’s the secret to long life.via The Shanghaiist

To give credit where it’s due, this taisui lingzhi mushroom thing didn’t come completely out of the blue. The street vendor set up shop only after a Xi’an CCTV newscaster’s breathless exclusive on a villager’s discovery of a similar “ancient mushroom.” When the street cleaner was asked about his mushrooms’ authenticity, he replied, “It’s on the news. How can it be fake?” 

An incredibly realistic Apple store

In 2011, bloggers discovered an Apple store that was so painstakingly realistic that its staff apparently thought it was working for Apple. They weren’t. Here’s one such worker, via BirdAbroad blog, which uncovered the whole charade:

Human hair soy sauce

The Chinese media busted a Hubei factory in 2004 for making soy sauce out of unwashed human hair. The hair, which was gathered from barbershop floors, was distilled to extract amino acids. The practice was worrisome enough that the government instituted a human-hair soy sauce ban.

Shanzhai pandas

The fluffy-dog-as-exotic-animal thing isn’t actually new. Dyeing and coiffuring dog to look like pandas is an occasional fad in China. This 2008 Xinhua article (link in Chinese), which has lots of great pics, says that chows are ideal for this look. More shanzhai dog dos here.

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​Imaginechina via AP Images

“Made by the Yellow Emperor”

A $9.8 million museum in Hebei province was busted in July after it was discovered that more than 40,000 of its exhibits were fake. Perhaps the most notorious item was a vase “signed” by the Yellow Emperor, a mythical ruler from around 2600 BC. A few things about this tripped suspicion wires, such as the fact that the emperor wrote in simplified Chinese characters, the script widely promoted only in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as that the Yellow Emperor’s legendary rule actually predates modern writing.

Villagers apparently long suspected the museum was a money-laundering front.

Archaeoraptor, the “missing link”

Back in the late 1990s, the discovery of the fossil of a creature named Archaeoraptor liaoningensis took the paleontology world by storm. After careful scrutiny from archaeologists around the world, it was hailed the crucial “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds.

The “missing” part, at least, was right. It turned out that, back in the late 1990s in Liaoning province, selling fossils illegally via the black market was a common side business for farmers. In 1997, one such farmer unearthed a fossil that appeared to have teeth and feathers, only to break it slightly upon collection.

Since complete fossils commanded a much higher price, he glued on fragments from elsewhere in the pit using homemade paste, inadvertently combining dinosaur and bird parts. His handiwork was smuggled to the US, where a Utah museum eventually paid $80,000 for it.

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They didn’t notice the homemade paste.AP Photo/Dennis Cook

One India, Different People

By Rahul Karmakar

Guwahati, Aug 16 : India's northeast is often out of the subconscious when it comes to ‘Indian culture’. Featured here are people across the NE spectrum who feel as Indian as anyone else until mainland dwellers make their otherness a talking point.

John M Sohtun, Meghalaya

What's Meghalaya for the rest of the country is ‘Meiglya’ for most of its inhabitants. You can perhaps attribute it to pronouncing a Hindi or Sanskritised name given to the state when it was carved out of Assam in 1972.  

But few feel the name is an imposition in a state that would have struggled to come up with a localised alternative acceptable to its three matrilineal tribes – Garo, Jaintia and Khasi – after they sought not to be a part of the Assamese-dominated polity.

The average person in the Abode of Clouds, though, is an Indian at heart. Until Indians elsewhere hurt their Indianness.
“I do take myself as an Indian first but frankly speaking even doubts do creep into my thoughts, particularly when my fellow citizens from the mainland consider me a foreigner.
"I suppose it’s because of our different physical characteristics and different cultural practices. But Indianness is not only restricted to race and culture but to an ideology rooted in mutual acceptance of our diversity,” says John M Sohtun, a writer-musician-thinker from Shillong.

Sohtun generally feels comfortable among his own, the reasons being similarities in physical characteristics, culture and maybe similar socio-economic status ‘when considered broadly’. Superiority complex is certainly not a factor, he says.

“Superior in what sense? There are many facets to this term. But I suppose we are superior in our acceptance for change in mindset. In other words, we are superior in absorbing the goodness from other cultures and imbibing into ours thereby making us more tolerant towards people from different places,” Sohtun, a biochemist who writes operas for theatrical dramas, says.

“We will always see differences until and unless we consider ourselves to be above race and culture and have a common ideology,” he adds.

Dahey Sangno, Arunachal Pradesh

In India's Land of the Rising Sun, the fear of a Chinese eclipse is often in the subconscious. It almost happened 51 years ago, making many wonder if Mandarin or Cantonese would replace Hindi as the lingua franca of some 140 tribes and sub-tribes in Arunachal Pradesh.

Arunachal Pradesh was too remote to merit adequate military set-up prior to the 1962 Chinese aggression. Most locals, scattered across virtually inaccessible mountain slopes, didn’t know a world called India existed beyond the boundaries of their villages. Yet Hindi unwittingly bound them to Bharat.

Beijing’s taking of Tawang in 1962 changed all that, and the Arunachalee brand of patriotism was the most intense in the Northeast. Gradually, though, locals began asking if the rest of India cared for them beyond the rhetoric.


“I am an Indian first – this no one can change. Perhaps, I am a better Indian than most of the non-Hindi speaking Indians of the mainland.
Like all other Indians, I grew up singing old Hindi patriotic songs, swearing Daily Pledge in school and making a lot of friends from the mainland. Hindi as a lingua franca bridged the great regional divide at that point of time.
Today, ironically, my ability to speak Hindi stands against me. I am branded as a daju or kanchha (terms to mean Nepali) outside my state,” says Itanagar-based Dahey Sangno, an Arunachal Pradesh Civil Service officer belonging to the Nyishi tribe.

Sangno, 35, has never faced discomfort in mingling with people outside his ethnic background; hardly anyone in the multi-ethnic state with age-old socio-economic ties with Assam does. But at the same time, he finds it is easier to connect with people of his own community.

“Trust is the factor. If I go outside the Northeast, say New Delhi, I would trust a Naga, a Mizo or an Assamese more than a Delhiite no matter how sober that Delhiite may appear. Our first impression about this mainland people is that they are cunning, deceitful, untrustworthy and timid by birth. That’s why I feel we are morally stronger and mentally tougher — in other word superior – than them,” Sangno says.

The daily instances of discrimination against people of Northeast India in metros also hurt him a lot. “It is accentuated when they ask, ‘Where is Arunachal Pradesh?’, as if we are non-existent. It takes a Chinese claim on Aruanchal to remind the mainland about our existence. Our only links to the mainland appear to be the Central grants-in-aid, colleges and three MPs representing the state,” Sangno adds.

Rina Jamir, Nagaland
A country is nothing but the last word in your address, wrote Hiren Bhattacharyya, the pithiest of Assamese poets who conveyed an epic in his two-line rhymes.

In the Northeast, there are few takers of his idea of a global citizen. Fewer still in Nagaland, witness to a violent insurrection for sovereignty since the 1950s. But anyone familiar with the frontier state’s history would be aware of the Naga pride, each tribe fiercely protective of its territory or area of dominance and reluctant to be ruled by the other.
It is thus not unusual for Nagas on social networking sites or using other forms of communication to end their postal addresses with Nagaland. That, however, doesn’t make a Naga alien to the idea of India, often wielded as a politically-loaded word to mean ‘a government with colonial attitude’.

The Nagas’ best ‘Indian’ connection is perhaps Nagamese, their lingua franca that is an Assamese-Hindi hybrid. Their acceptance of a mainland moniker to generalise more than 50 ethnic groups across Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Myanmar is also a case in point.

But, as Kohima-based executive Rina Jamir says, it is not so much a case of Nagas aligning psychological with the mainstream as Indians elsewhere accepting the Naga way of life as ‘Bharatiya sanskriti’.

“I have travelled widely, and I consider myself as an Indian. But at times I do feel alienated when people go by our looks (call us chinkies) or dresses or what they call exotic food habits,” says Jamir, 45.

Exotic, many in Nagaland feel, works both ways. To a Naga, the way northern India dresses or eats is exotic too. It is a case of respecting the difference in each other’s cultures and finding a common thread, they say, adding even the 15 Naga tribes of Nagaland are different from each other and do not speak the same tongue.

“I am comfortable in my state and with people from my own ethnic backyard,” Jamir says. She is a tad more at home among the Aos, the Naga tribe she belongs to. But, she adds, that does not mean her state or her community is superior or inferior to any other community or state.

“Each has its own uniqueness and reason for existence on earth,” she says.

Manik Barman, Assam

Ever since he stepped out of his western Assam village after dropping out of high school, Manik Barman has had to be specific when asked about his ethnic identity.

“Initially I would parrot one of my Hindi teachers to say ‘India mein raheta hoon, Indian hoon’. But people are not satisfied, and I have to say either Assamese or Bengali. If they are still not satisfied, I say I am a Koch-Rajbongshi.
Nowadays, I don’t beat about the bush,” says Manik, 26, who travelled 220 km west to Guwahati after stepping into his teens to work at a construction site before graduating to be a cab driver.
Manik has heard elders say how the medieval Koch-Rajbongshis ruled much of present-day Assam, West Bengal and Bangladesh. He is also aware of community leaders fighting for Schedule Tribe status and seeking a Kamtapur state straddling western Assam and northern Bengal.

The map of Kamtapur covers Bodoland, specific to the Bodo tribe that is demanding an upgrade to statehood. And this is causing friction between the Bodos and Koch-Rajbongshis who are almost equal numerically.

Manik’s village Bamnigaon was in Kokrajhar district of Assam. But since 2003, it has come under the administration of Bodoland Territorial Council to make a huge difference.

“But you can feel the divide only in towns where the educated and powerful people stay. Our village has some 500 Koch-Rajbongshi households but we have Bodo, Muslim and Assamese neighbours and we have had no reasons to distrust or hate each other. We know we are inter-dependent,” Manik says.

In the urban areas, he has learnt a big lesson – coexistence depends on what others think of you. “You have to be wary. And as a villager used to trusting his neighbours, it doesn’t come easily. But I hope ours is a safer place so that I can go home as often as I like to, not wait for this bandh or blockage to get over,” he says.

From Manipur Protest Band Comes A Rousing 'Lullaby'

By Gargi Gupta
New Delhi, Aug 15 : “Blood soaked streets/ That’s my ground/ That’s where I play around/ Sound of gunshots/ That’s my song...”

So go the lyrics of ‘Lullaby’ by the Manipuri ‘protest’ band ‘Imphal Talkies’ that, since its release in March this year, has become quite a hit online. Ronid Chingangbam, the band’s founder, frontman and lyricist-vocalist-lead guitarist, says he’s surprised at the response: “I’ve had people writing to me from all over, from Canada and Sweden, saying they like our music. And here we are sitting quietly in far off Imphal, making music and putting it up on the Internet. It’s very encouraging.”

‘Lullaby’ talks about the situation is Manipur: the long-standing insurgency and the army’s brutal repression of it, particularly through the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). Most of the band’s songs deal with the experience of living under the shadow of the gun, of people being kidnapped or killed, and women raped. There is anger, of course, in their songs but also pathos and biting satire. An early song is cheekily called ‘AFSPA (Toilet session with Netbook and 50RS condenser mike)’ and ‘Qutub Minar’, another huge hit, tells an elaborate story about lifting the 12th-century monument, the icon of Delhi and carting it off in the Assam-Avadh Express to Imphal, in order to place it next to the Samu Makhong sculpture there. 

Keith Wallang, founder of Springboard Surprises, a Shillong-based company that manages several musicians from the North-east, says that while there has been an explosion in rock bands from the region, no one is doing such baldly political stuff, or hitting out at the army excess as Akhu, as Chingangbam is known everywhere. “Back in Manipur, people are so caught between the police and politicians that they have no voice. It is perhaps because he was away in Delhi that Akhu could be objective about the situation here.”

But not all the songs of Akhu, who formed Imphal Talkies in 2008, have to do with Manipur. ‘India, I see Blood on your Hands’ talks about everything from Kashmir and Narendra Modi to Binayak Sen and the salwa judum, and the recent release ‘Song for Bangladesh’ expresses solidarity with the Shahbag protesters.

It was as a PhD student in JNU, Delhi that Akhu first began making music, spending half his scholarship money to record his first song. “There was just me and my guitar in my room,” he says, only a little fancifully. It was also here that he gained a following, with gigs at university campuses, then small concerts, followed by more established venues such as Blue Frog and NH7 Weekender.

Has there ever been a problem at any of his shows, I ask him. “No, not really,” he says, sounding a little uncertain. “We were dropped from a few concerts in Guwahati and once, after I had performed ‘India, I see blood...’ at a college in Pune, a few students came to me and said that I should not sing such songs. And yes, the students of Manipur University asked me not to perform ‘I want to go to Moscow’ at a recent concert.” (‘I want to go to Moscow’  talks about an army camp inside the university.)    

It is, thus, ironical that Akhu has moved back to Imphal this month. “Our music is not something that is commercially viable. You just don’t earn enough to survive in a place like Delhi. In Imphal, I have a house. I don’t have to struggle, except for the political turmoil. Besides, I have applied for an asistant professor’s position at the National Instituteof technology here. Hopefully, I’ll get it.” And Delhi is just a flight away.