1. San Francisco Chronicle on the alarming drop in venture capital fundraising. US venture capital fundraising dropped to the lowest in eight years in the third quarter as a slowing economic recovery and debt crisis in Europe led to fewer initial public offerings. Venture firms raised $1.72 billion in the period, down 53% from the same period a year earlier and the lowest amount since the third quarter of 2003.
2. The Guardian on Delhi’s traffic having a character of its own. The best time to drive in Delhi is at dawn or, even better, around 7am. By then the last of the trucks that cross the city during the night are halted at roadside restaurants with the drivers sipping scalding tea and eating fried parathas and eggs, and there is a short period before the traffic builds up. Delhi's urban sprawl is now so extensive that entire satellite cities, where several million people live, have disappeared into the mass of the metropolis. Gurgaon, the new town to the south, is still separated by a thin belt of scrubby grassland, but Noida, the vast development to the east, is, to all intents and purposes, part of the city. If these satellites are included, the city's population probably touches 25 million.
In 2008, a government report announced that the ring road had reached capacity with 110,000 vehicles a day and predicted the total would reach 150,000 cars, trucks, buses and bikes by the end of the decade. Road deaths in India reach 140,000 a year. This means that every two years, more people died in accidents in the country than were killed in total in the 2004 tsunami.
3. The Guardian on this weeks clashes in Cairo. Egypt’s military rulers held emergency talks with Christian leaders after the violence left 26 people dead and 300 injured – and raised grave doubts about the country's democratic transition. The Coptic church called on followers to fast and pray for three days from Tuesday to mourn Christians killed in clashes with Muslims and security forces on Sunday night. Egypt's Copts, numbering between 10 million and 15 million, are the largest Christian minority in the Arab world. Video clips of the incident showed military vehicles ploughing through crowds of demonstrators so that several were crushed to death.
(Copts are Egyptian Christians. Christianity was the majority religion in Roman Egypt during the 4th to 6th centuries and until the Muslim conquest and remains the faith of a significant minority population. I belong to a Christian minority sect in Kerala that also has its roots in the Middle East, known as the Syro-Malabar Church, planted in Kerala – once broadly known as Malabar – by Syrian Christians.)
4. New York Times on Pastebin.com, which has complemented the Occupy Wall Street protest. A strength of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement has been its flexible organization and non-doctrinaire agenda. If a blog is akin to an online diary, and Twitter offers repeated telegraph-style status updates, Pastebin is something like the empty space on a phone-booth wall or at a community center, where you can anonymously tack up an announcement, or write someone else’s phone number along with a crude description, or offer your first try at a manifesto.
(Here is a sample I found on pastebin, from someone who calls himself Sabu, perhaps a Keralite.: I am not a media whore. I post on my twitter and RARELY do any interviews at all (only newscientist.com about my profile and reddit.com users were interested in answers to some questions). That makes me a media whore? In fact I could give a shit if the media interacts with me; if anything I attack the media itself for being in bed with the government. anonymouSabu)
5. Johannesburg Times on Dutch trains substituting bathrooms with plastic bags. The Dutch national railway has an unusual solution for passengers who need the bathroom on a train line designed without them: plastic bags. The rail operator underlined that the bags are for use in emergencies only, when a train has stopped and passengers can't be evacuated. A spokesman confirmed the "pee-bag" plan was not a joke. The bags are kept out of sight in the conductor's booth. The bags have a cup-shaped plastic top and contain a highly absorbent material that turns urine into a gel-like mixture. After use the bags can be sealed and thrown in the trash.
6. Khaleej Times on Dalai Lama and China eyeballing each other, with Lama insisting on modernity and China on tradition! When the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader-in-exile, suggested at the end of September that for the first time in 600 years his successor might be an emanation and not a reincarnation, he may have wrong-footed the Chinese government that runs Tibet. China quickly rejected the proposal. China’s rejection creates a deep irony: The tradition-proud Dalai Lama, and Tibetan Buddhism, now appear more modern and flexible than the self-styled modernising Chinese state, which insists on the more old-fashioned and rigid reincarnation system.
7. MJ Akbar writing in Khaleej Times, ‘Seen, obscene and unseen’. Wealth is far easier to recognise than poverty. Wealth is either seen or obscene; poverty remains largely unseen. Poverty of the worst kind is hidden in those parts of India — or indeed the world — where it is outside the provenance of government, and beyond the interest of individuals and institutions who fuel the engines of modern life, like business concerns or bureaucracy or media. We take our eyes off the hungry. We leave the responsibility to government.
Data keeps whirring away in some dark corner of government, giving the illusion that someone is actually doing something about anything. In our case, data is the preserve of a cavernous Planning Commission, headed at the moment by an impervious “foreign-returned” bureaucrat who confuses self-importance for governance. It would be a good idea to introduce Montek Singh Ahluwalia to India. Both he and India would benefit from greater familiarity, since Ahluwalia will remain the effective head of the Planning Commission as long as Dr Manmohan Singh is Prime Minister. Ahluwalia is now even more famous as the father of the Rs 32 a day poverty line.
8. Wall Street Journal story on Steve Jobs’ biological father Abdulfattah "John" Jandali. Mr. Jandali, 80 years old and general manager of the Boomtown casino in the barren hills in Nevada, presides over a staff of around 450 casino workers. "I can't take credit for my children's success," said Mr. Jandali, who is also the father of the celebrated novelist Mona Simpson. Mr. Jobs was put up for adoption as a baby. Mr. Jandali said he had almost no contact with him and also has a strained relationship with Ms. Simpson. Mr. Jandali only learned around 2005 that Mr. Jobs was his biological son. He doesn't remember how he heard, but he said the news was "a major shock." Mr. Jandali said he was born and raised in Syria's third largest city, Homs, to a prominent family that owned villages and vast amounts of land outside the city, where workers tended wheat and cotton to enrich his family. (There, another Syrian connection! Now you know why Steve Jobs' features are shared by many Syrian Christians and Muslims in Kerala.)
9. Wall Street Journal's 'Din of Absolutist Dissent'. Arundhati Roy, Basharat Peer and Anna Hazare, three disparate individuals, have one thing in common: they are poster children for a new school of aggressive, adversarial dissent in India, one that is absolutist, defiantly seeking all or nothing. Dissent is an essential part of the public discourse. But at this consequential moment in India’s history, the country deserves constructive contributors – voices that will mobilize people towards affirmative change not just create celebrities out of obstructionist dissenters.
10. The Economic Times' edit on economics Nobel winners, one of them for providing policymaking insights and the other for explaining why different things like income and inflation take different periods of time to respond to a change in, say, interest rates.
11. The Economic Times' special feature on the urban slum economy and what corporates are doing to tap what Kishore Biyani calls ‘India 2’.
12. The Economic Times' pocket cartoon by Salam: Who told you HR is only about hiring and firing … What about torture?
13. The Times of India on Chennai-based Yokesh Salon owner KRS Siva who has been giving free haircuts for mentally ill and homeless people for years.
14. A Prathap’s photo in The Times of India, capturing a Chennai woman selling pots in front of a roadside mural depicting pot-making. The real and the mural seem to mesh into each other.
15. Business Standard asking whether Uttar Pradesh state needs so many districts. It now has 75 and the newest three are Prabudddha Nagar, Panchsheel Nagar and Bhim Nagar. Maharashtra has 5 million people per district while UP has only 2.85 million in each district.
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