Young and Restless India » Social Issues

Young Indian Men Shaving Off Mustaches

Raj — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:33:39 +0000

According to Washington Post article “New generation of men in India shaving off mustaches“ a survey found that 72 percent of the women who responded in Mumbai and 83 percent of those surveyed in the southern city of Chennai said they were more likely to want to kiss a cleanshaven man. The numbers were similar in New Delhi, India’s capital, and in the eastern city of Kolkata, often seen as a center of tradition.

The number of women rejecting facial hair appeared to surprise many Indian cultural commentators. Indian women’s magazines have printed letters to the editor saying how happy they are that the great Indian mustache may be trimmed, a sentiment that many young women here say they agree with. “The mustache represents all the aspects of old India — the corruption, the baddie cop in an old film, the government job for life — that the young generation want to leave behind,” said Richard McCallum a pogonologist, or student of facial hair. “Besides, no one wants to look like their parents.”

Grass Root Innovation

Raj — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:27:07 +0000

India’s databank of grass roots inventors is swelling as the nation officially marks the 2010s as a decade of innovation according to CNN article titled “India’s inventors seek markets in innovation decade“.

The country’s National Innovation Foundation (NIF) has 140,000 entries compared with 10,000 when it was set up by the federal government in 2000. But 10 years later, India acknowledges that bringing its innumerable small-scale experiments to the masses remains a challenge in an economy that is attracting businesses worldwide partly because of high-tech capabilities and a growing middle class.

According to the NIF, most geniuses on its roster are school or college dropouts with little means and access to markets. India needs to promote research and development efforts for its poor and for its massive informal economy in order to put their existing know-how to mass use. But experts regret that most Indian innovations have not hit domestic markets, let alone international.

Khadi- New Fashion Statement

Raj — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:14:07 +0000

Sabyasachi Mukherjee is a young, hip, Bengali designer is insisting that khadi can be a great fashion statement. Khadi, which is simple homespun weave championed by Gandhi in the 1930s to boost the rural economy and give India a sense of nationalist pride during the fight for independence, is refined, sophisticated, eco-friendly and comfortable, and has too long been regarded as the poor man’s fabric. Read more about it in BBC.com article titled “Indian designer champions homespun“.

According to Mukherjee, to wear Khadi is a sign of being well-dressed and cultured. At the same time it should help India’s rural craftsmen and women to share in the country’s growing wealth and economy. According to the article, he has dressed superstar Aishwarya Rai in homespun for two films currently in production – Ravana and Guzaarish – and the actress Vidya Balan in Paa which is due to be released in November. The nostalgia may be part of the style, but Mukherjee is very much in the new wave of Indian designers – a graduate of India’s National Institute of Technology and recipient of the Femina British Council/Times of India prize.

Fashion writers have labelled him “intellectual”, but he describes himself as a modern, practical and a socially aware businessman. It’s vital to him that the rural poor share India’s growing economy – a Gandhian concept and one that puts India right at the centre of being Indian.

His surprise hit earlier this year was the chhotu sari – the sari worn for hundreds of generations by women in the tribal areas that are woven to calf length for freedom of movement. It was, he decided, the perfect metropolitan sari for young women – long enough to give them the flowing shape, but short enough to differentiate them from their mothers and to allow them to show off their ankles and shoes.

Educating Rural Indian Youths

Raj — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:28:49 +0000

Courtesy mckaysavage on flickr

Yahoo India news article titled “Giving young India a foothold into the future”. The leading companies in India have joined hands with the central government to improve the career prospects of bright young people from rural India. In a public-private partnership effort to be shortly announced, foundations run by Wipro chief Azim Premji, Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Group and others corporate chiefs will fund the coaching of school leaving rural youth to prepare them for engineering, medical and other technical entrance examinations.

Around 4,000 youth will be selected every year from a network of 576 schools across the country set up to promote quality education in the rural areas. The government and the private sector may share the cost equally.

This unique public-private model for education is one of the ways India can translate demographic challenge into demographic dividend. Still the number of rural youth wanting to get good education is very large and India needs to move aggressively in tackling this issue.

Future of Urban India

Raj — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:46:40 +0000

As the number of people living in cities continues to increase, India needs to be proactive in solving the problems of Urbanization according to LiveMint.com article titled “Future for Urban India”.

In 2001, when the last census was taken, only 28% of the Indian population—about 285 million people—lived in urban settings and by 2030 40% of population will be urban. By 2030, India’s total population will be around 1.5 billion—the largest in the world—therefore, the urban population will be around 600 million, more than twice as much as in 2001.

There are five questions with far-reaching implications:

Where will these additional 300 million people live? There are vast stretches of the country where there is little employment or urban growth and that has to change.
What type of settlements are likely to absorb such a large population growth: new or existing ones? India’s experiment with creating new settlements has resulted in some cities but II and III tier cities needs to take on the main burden.
How large can a metropolis become? Mumbai has gone from a population of eight million in 1981, to 12 million in 1991, to 18 million in 2001—a 50% growth rate per decade. That level of growth cannot be sustained in the future.
How will people get into and around a city that has grown to a population of, let’s say, 30 million by 2030? How many airports and miles of highway will it need, and is there a train system that can handle this amount of people? If a subway system is not feasible, should elevated rail systems be used? What are the local environmental and energy implications of moving so many people around on a regular basis? It is not clear that there has been much thinking on transportation alternatives for this impending city.
Where will the poor live in this city? If current trends continue, it’s quite possible that Indian cities will become symbols of a new apartheid, with vast slums surrounding enclaves of middle-class comfort.

India’s experiment with creating new settlements has resulted in some cities but II and III tier cities needs to take on the main burden going forward. New and different urban cities need to be developed in the future.