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India - News
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News Updates - July 2005
A new kind of company -
Newsweek International
A New Kind of Company4 July 2005, Newsweek International magazine, By George Wehrfritz/ Ron Moreau
A new kind of multinational corporation is emerging out of India, the hot newcomer in the global economy. It is the Tata Group, a 131 year old family conglomerate that has gone professional without losing a distinct set of old-school values. Consider: one of the largest of its 32 businesses, Tata Steel, has cut almost half its work force to 45,000 to become the lowest-cost competitor in this brutal industry—yet has kept its promise to pay all laid-off workers full salary until retirement. Tata also spent $2.5 billion replacing century-old machines, transforming one of the world's oldest mill to one of the newest.
When Jamsetji began to carve Jamshedpur from a jungle nearly a century ago, the British scoffed. Sir Frederick Upcott, India's railway commissioner, mockingly vowed to "eat every rail pound of steel rail they succeed in making." Tata’s rigid ethical standards are so well known that corrupt officials typically don't even bother asking Tata executives for bribes. Tata Steel has gone 75 years without a strike. At Tata "corporate social responsibility" is not just a hot buzzword, as it is in the West. 66% of the profits of the highly successful investment arm, Tata Sons, go to charity.
The story of Tata is thus a window into the rise of India. Unlike the boom in China, which has been orchestrated by the government, India's rise is primarily the story of an enterprising private sector. India also has a wider potential that is mirrored in the range of Tata's ambitions—from luxury hotels and jewelry to a planned $2,000 car. Tata's Indica sedan, introduced in 1998, was an instant hit, with exports going to Europe, South Africa and Russia. Since 2000, Tata has acquired Tetley Tea of Britain, Daewoo Motor of South Korea, New York’s legendary hotel, the Pierre and NatSteel of Singapore. Yet it's also moved into Bangladesh and Africa where Western multinationals dare not tread. For one, Ratan says, Tata has always performed best "when we went beyond the role of just the ordinary corporate citizen." For another, Tata's profit margins rival any multinational's, he says, proving a gentle giant can make it in global competition.
STARS OF
ASIA – INNOVATOR Raghunath Mashelkar
Five years ago former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha asked Raghunath Mashelkar, the director general of the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research, for some guidance as he presented his annual budget. Within an hour, Mashelkar sent Sinha a detailed plan outlining how India could make "world-beating products" by creating partnerships between private companies and government institutions. Sinha was so impressed that he quickly promised Mashelkar $55 million to start the program. Since then the initiative has matched 65 private companies with 160 government institutions. CSIR last year earned $1.26 billion from doing contract research for the likes of GE. That's double what it earned 10 years ago. And CSIR’s 21,000 researchers received 196 patents last year, up from eight in 1995. "India developed nothing in the 20th century," says Mashelkar, 62. "The 21st century has to be different. Now, multinationals are doing more research and development in India, and Indians have plunged into original research.” Mashelkar knows well the despair of 20th-century India. Born into a poor family, with a widowed mother who worked as a domestic helper, Mashelkar almost dropped out of school because he couldn't scrape together tuition. In the end, he managed, and studied hard, often under the streetlights. He earned a doctorate from Bombay University and taught for 7 years in Britain, before returning to India in 1978. These days, Mashelkar is turning his attention to India's traditional products. His labs are developing drugs by merging ayurveda, with modern medicine, which will allow more poor people to benefit from treatments. With the likes of Raghunath Mashelkar taking the lead, India just might see the sort of 21st century this scientist dreams of.
Looking Into the Divine Eyes of Spiritual 22 July 2005, By HOLLAND COTTER, New York Times
"Images of the Divine: Sculptures from the Rockefeller Collection" at the Asia Society in New York has 50 sculptures from what is considered to be one of the finest gatherings of such material in the US. They are also, individually and in concert, thrilling examples of spiritually activist art, which is what all great religious art is. They were not made primarily to entertain or give optical pleasure, although they do both. Their job was to wake you up, point you in a moral direction, make you look at the greed, hatred and delusions that sit like sharp rocks in the soul. Once you see the truth about yourself, you can change yourself. And when you change yourself, you change the world. That's the karmic deal.
Hinduism isn't one religion but many religions, with deities beyond counting. Most exist only on a local, even household, level and in abstract and ephemeral forms. Buddhism, a religion that shares many elements with Hinduism, but is focused on the life of Gautama, born in the 5th century B.C. The combined geographical reach of Hindu and Buddhist sculptures stretch from era to era, through India, upward into the Himalayas and Tibet, downward and outward to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and the Indonesian archipelago, merging with indigenous traditions all along the way. Mingling of Indian, Central Asian and Hellenistic cultures was further refined from the 4th through 6th centuries during the Gupta dynasty, a period that was once routinely called India's golden age.
One glance at these objects leaves you puzzling, yet again, over why the art of ancient India isn't more popular in the West. Never mind its formal perfection and intellectual complexity. Everything we love in Hollywood is here: sex, violence, heroism, humor, not to mention family values and religion. The elephant-headed god Ganesha’s image (from the Chola dynasty 880-1279 A.D.): it is at once highly naturalistic and utterly fantastic. Multiple limbs are entirely logical. How better to depict the multi-tasking potency of a divine being? Ganesha is a charmer. To love him, you don't need to know that with his lasso he rounds up devotees like stray lambs and sets their hearts free. Nor do you need to know that he sits at the threshold of time and space, a cosmic guardian, just as he sits at the doors of temples, shops and homes, overseeing and easing all beginnings: birth, marriage, the start of a journey, the first played notes of a raga and the moment of death - when a spirit either enters another cycle of existence or achieves a state of fear-free rest. Ganesha says: "Approach without fear!"
Jaipur’s Oberoi Rajvilas has been ranked third best in the world by 'US Travel and Leisure' magazine (13 July 2005). The Four Seasons Resort, Bali, and Singita Private Reserve, South Africa, occupy the top two slots. The magazine's 9,00,000 readers were asked to evaluate each island by its sights, activities, restaurants, food, people and value for money.
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