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SEPTEMBER 2003 |
IN THIS ISSUE
MAIN FEATURE Westward Ho! : Indian IT Firms in Wales By Deepak Goyal COMMENTARY Dr King's Dream : A Latin American Perspective By Ariel Dorfman TECHNOLOGY Bengali Unleashed! : Free Bornosoft Download By Ashfaque Swapan Publisher’s Note • Infotech India • Indians Helping UN Vote No! on Prop 54 • Photo Essay: Celebrating India Healthcare and Language: Accidental Interpreter Legal Issues: Choosing Your Attorney Community: Cricket Academy... Little India... Andhra Fest... State Capitol Auto: 2003 Acura MDX • Bollywood • Tamil Cinema Recipe: Kalmi Vada • Horoscope |
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Publisher's Note
The IT boom in India has had a ripple effect that continues, culminating in the truly surreal spectacle of the Wales Development Agency being overjoyed that Indian companies like GTL Limited—India’s leading telecom infrastructure company—BPL Telecom—the country’s top provider of mobile telephony—Infrasoft Technologies—a financial software specialist and Elan—a company which is developing a unique laser technology for use in heart surgery—are willing to invest there. Quite a different scene from Indian leaders flocking to the West to woo investors. This month’s cover story focuses on the welcome development of the growing international reputation of Indian companies in the wake of India’s IT prowess. Main Feature
You bet you never thought you would live to see the day when the opposite would happen, i.e. a Western agency would woo Indian companies and be thrilled when Indian IT giants decided to take them up on their offer. This is exactly what’s happened and I am not making this up. Here’s what the Welsh Development Agency said in a press release: “India is one of the world’s leaders in biosciences and information and computer technology and is seen by the WDA as a prime source of investment by growth-minded Indian companies looking to expand into the European market.” WDA chief executive Graham Hawker said: “India has developed remarkable strengths in these sectors and many Indian companies are now looking for new opportunities in Europe. “We believe that there is a tremendous opportunity for Wales to benefit from joint ventures and partnerships with Indian entrepreneurs.” Hard to believe, but true. India’s sustained excellence in knowledge-based, value added skills is now blossoming into a powerhouse of corporate firms led by the likes of Wipro and InfoSys, and the world is sitting up and taking notice. The Indian invasion in Silicon Valley, the German Green Card carrot dangled before desi IT professionals and the huge trend of outsourcing of IT and IT enabled services like call centers and back office work are now passé. The new wrinkle in global business is the emergence of Indian firms which are beginning to go out and invest. “Four leading companies from India’s world-class computer technology and bioscience sectors are taking part in a new Welsh Development Agency project aimed at making Wales a major base for high technology Indian investment in Europe,” the WDA happily announced. The companies will establish operations initially employing some 300 people in North and South Wales when negotiations with the Welsh Assembly Government and the WDA are completed. The four include GTL Limited, India’s leading telecom infrastructure company, BPL Telecom, the country’s top provider of mobile telephony, Infrasoft Technologies, a financial software specialist and Elan, a company which is developing a unique laser technology for use in heart surgery. GTL head of European operations Deepak Rao said: “We are delighted to take part in this exciting venture. It will provide a number of very exciting propositions and avenues to us which we believe will build a long term partnership with Welsh organizations in our approach to European markets.” An essential aspect of the program is an undertaking by the WDA—working with partnership with Dina Dattani, a London-based corporate lawyer specializing in fast growth Asian companies—to help the companies establish themselves in business in Wales. Said Dattani: “We are now working to embed these first four companies in Wales, and to provide them with services such as advice on all legal and regulatory matters. Based on the success of this first phase we are planning to work with another 30 companies by the end of the year.” WDA is believed to be keen on bringing smaller companies to Wales after the dramatic failure of electronics giant LG Philips to bring thousands of jobs to Newport, the BBC reports. The closure of the LG Philips factory last month, with the loss of 870 jobs, was the final chapter in a story which began with grants of £220m and promises of 6,000 jobs. Brian Morgan, former chief economist at the WDA, said the new wave of companies would boost the hi-tech sector in Wales. “These firms that are coming in will be competing with firms we have already got here - it will be very helpful to bring in some new blood,” he told the BBC. Turning the table around the practice of Indian state governments taking their roadshows to Western capitals to bring in foreign investment, WDA’s pilot project with Indian companies stems from Welsh participation in one of India’s most important trade fairs. For the past three years, the WDA has been a main sponsor of the annual Nasscom conference at Mumbai. Feedback from the conferences and contacts made with businesspeople and intermediaries prompted the WDA to launch the pilot program earlier this year to gauge reaction from leading Indian businesses to a new, collaborative approach to investment in Europe. “We’re delighted with the progress which the pilot has already achieved and we believe that our involvement with Nasscom has been a very worthwhile investment of Welsh resources,” said WDA international executive director Hilary Hendy. “More and more world-class technology companies in India want to internationalize their activities. So far, these companies have been targeting the London area to start up in the UK or Europe.” To borrow the title of Charles Kingsley’s poem, “Westward Ho!” - Deepak Goyal is a freelance writer. He lives in Kolkata. |TOP| Infotech India “Already, over 50 Indian IT companies are operating in Germany, mainly in Bavaria which currently has 20,000 IT companies and 2.4 lakh employees in the multimedia and IT sector,” he told reporters here. Peter Englert was in the city in connection with his agency’s ongoing road show in Indian cities soliciting IT investors into Bavaria. He said Bavaria offered the least cumbersome entry for Indian IT companies to set up joint ventures in the state in areas like health care. “Bavaria is a premier location to exploit the European market by Indian companies,” he said. Announcing the deal at a joint conference with the company, Konsortium Logististik Bhd, Ramalinga Raju, chairman of Satyam Computer Services, said this was a milestone development, not just in terms of the technological competencies but also for the company’s strategy to grow operations in Malaysia and the region. “We are quite committed to this market place. We believe that there is enormous opportunity for the growth of business. We find government and economy here very responsive to the dynamics of market environment. This growth will be fuelled by the use of technology and knowledge based approaches,” he said. This is the first major business contract for Satyam since it firmed up operations in Malaysia in April last year with the launch of a Global Development Centre. The company expects a large growth from Malaysia. “By the end of the current financial year, we expect to earn around two million US dollars,” Virender Aggarwal, Satyam’s senior vice-president, Asia Pacific, told reporters, referring to the company’s Malaysian operations. “We already have about 40 professionals based here and around 35 in India are dedicated to the Malaysian operations,” Aggarwal said, adding that this will be further enhanced as the business increases. With the expertise gained by developing the indigenous multi-role LCA, an indigenous AJT could be developed in about six to eight years, he said here Sept. 5 night. He was giving a talk on: “Can it be a boom time for Indian Aerospace?” at an interactive session organized by Prasthutha, a student body of the Indian Institute of Science. Indian scientists, he said, two decades ago had an option of building either an indigenous AJT or LCA, but chose to develop the latter as they did not have adequate technical resources and manpower for both the projects. “We then decided to go for the LCA and the expertise gained over the last two decades has helped in Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd developing the Intermediate Jet Trainer in about 22 months... which was unthinkable even a decade ago,” Narasimha said. He said India had no option, but to buy AJTs from abroad given the urgency on the part of IAF to train its pilots. He asserted that if Indian aerospace industry should see a boom time, the government and policy makers should play a larger role. There should be larger orders for the LCA and the Advanced Light Helicopter from the armed forces. This significant expansion and additional capital investment in product development will allow Aventail to meet the growing demand for its EX-1500 SSL VPN family of appliances, a company statement said in Bangalore. “This is an exciting time in Aventail’s story and we are putting a stake in the ground to extend our market and technology leadership worldwide,” Aventtail Corporation president and chief executive officer Evan Kaplan said. “We expect this investment to help us more fully extend our technology leadership to take advantage of the surging SSL VPN market, which is expected to grow to $1 billion in 2005,” he said. “The India team would accelerate the development of new cutting edge technology to meet the future demands of the company’s expanding customer base,” he said. The initiative is designed to provide ISVs with technical and marketing support to help meet the needs of SMB customers, an IBM statement said. As part of the initiative it said ISVs work with IBM India to port their applications to IBM’s open infrastructure, with a special focus on IBM WebSphere Express and IBM DB2 Express running on Linux, as well as IBM WebSphere and IBM DB2 Universal Database. IBM India intends to broaden the scope of ISV advantage program over time to include new IBM Express software, hardware and services offerings as they become available. This will further enable ISV Advantage participants to build comprehensive solutions to better serve SMB customers, the statement added. Bangalore-based Biocon is finalizing its plans to raise a debt capital of $ 30 million (Rs. 150 crore) from domestic and foreign financial institutions for funding the expansion of its facilities for Statin (a molecule being produced by Biocon), research and biological and monoclonal anti-bodies, Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar Shaw told reporters in Bangalore Sept. 3. Besides the $30 million raised through debt, she said, the expansion would be funded by internal accruals also. Biocon recorded a profit of Rs .50 crore on a revenue of Rs. 285 crore in the last fiscal, Shaw said, adding the company was aiming at a revenue of Rs. 520 crore and profit of Rs. 120 crore during 2003-04. She said Biocon was in the process of human clinical trials development for its recombinant human insulin, for which it is in discussions with firms in several countries. The recombinant human insulin was expected to hit the market during the first quarter of the next financial year. On the firm’s initial public offer plans, Shaw said, the company would finalize the book makers by the year-end and the issue, with a 10 percent dilution in equity stake, would be held next year. About 70 percent of the Biocon equity is held by Shaw and her family, 15 percent by employees, 12.5 percent by AIG, which it bought from ICICI Ventures, and the remaining 2.5 percent by other investors. Software development and maintenance as well as business processing including back office functions like accounting, human resources, call centers and data analysis are the major areas of outsourcing to India, Forbes magazine said. English speaking IT graduates, low wage structure and an attractive labor pool takes India to the top position, the study concluded after comparing it with six other destinations — China, Russia, the Philippines, Canada, Mexico and Ireland. While analyzing profiles of seven countries, the study praised India for its friendly IT policies and commitment to ensure best possible facilities for its development. “Outsourcing is so ingrained in the fabric here that the Indian government has a national minister specifically for IT. The government favors IT foreign ownership and imposes no export taxes,” it said. Talking about the future, it said India’s outsourcing functions would change over time and it would get more complex jobs as countries like Vietnam offer rock bottom wages. “Simple base level back office payroll and data entry will got to rock-bottom-wage countries over time and countries like India will move up the chain and take on more complex software and product development services,” an analyst with Forrester Research, John McCarthy, was quoted as saying. The study said U.S. companies would outsource more than three million jobs by 2015, up from 300,000 today. The companies it has decided to invest are Bioserve Biotechnologies, Genomik Design Pharmaceutical and Silico Insights, APIDC-VCL chairman S.M. Balasubramaniyam told reporters in Bangalore. APIDC-VCL is a public-private partnership between the Ventureast Group and the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Development Corporation. APIDC-VCL managing director Sarath Naru said the fund has targeted a size of Rs. 150 crore, of which Rs. 50 crore had already been reached. The fund was in discussions with a number of financial institutions, banks and insurance companies for investment to reach the target, he said. Balasubramaniyam said they were also looking at a Singapore-based healthcare company for investment. The CDMA WLL service with limited mobility would also be commissioned in Tirupur soon, Chief General Manager, Tamil Nadu circle, K. Mahadevan, told reporters in Coimbatore. He said 5,000 fixed WLL facility would be given and the call charges would be similar to landline telephone. Mahadevan said both the services would be commenced shortly at Coimbatore, since testing was yet to be completed. The WLL instrument would be supplied by BSNL which would collect Rs.20 per month towards insurance coverage from the subscriber, in addition to the initial deposit and installation charges. On the status of CellOne, Mahadevan said another 100 towns in the circle, which has coverage of 126 towns, would be added by March 2004, by which an additional 1.7 lakh mobile connections would be provided. Admitting that there is decline in the basic telephone connections due to various reasons, he said it had come down to 28.42 lakh as on July 2003 as against 28.78 lakh at the end of March 2003. SAP, which has bagged the award for the third successive year, said, quoting a survey by PC Quest that 87 percent users of SAP had indicated that they will stick to SAP. “The award is a result of our unmitigated customer focus, high-quality customer support and the fact that our customers have been able to gain tangible benefits from SAP solutions,” SAP India president and managing director Alan Sedghi said in a statement in Bangalore. The joint venture is named French Ceilings Pvt Ltd and the production facility at Pondicherry, presently under construction, would start by February next, D.B. Radja, managing director of the joint venture told reporters in Chennai Sept. 3. Initial investment in the Pondicherry facility was to the tune of around Rs. 7 crore which, he said, would be doubled by 2005. He said 50 percent of the production from the facility would be exported to the Middle East and South East Asia. GAIL, Infraline Both Infraline and GAIL will be jointly working on this project. An expert panel has been formed by GAIL for this project. The primary author for this project will be Infraline. Proshanto Banerjee, chairman and managing director, GAIL, will be writing a foreword for the book. The project also has inputs from CRISIL, Trilegal, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and Shell India Ltd. According to Banerjee, “GAIL Infraline Natural Gas in India project will provide a central resource for the entire industry to follow. We are glad to be associated with it.” Speaking on the development, Yogesh Garg, director, Infraline Technologies, said: “The reference book will be a source of definitive information on the entire natural gas scenario in India and will help anyone with an interest in this sector, to formulate their strategies for future.” GAIL (India) Limited has become the exclusive sponsor of the reference book. In order to make the project more useful, there will be updates in the 13th and 25th month of publishing. The draft has been shared with key leaders in the sector, who have reviewed and given their respective inputs. According to Shaajee Verghese, director (Sales and Services), GE Power Services, India: “The information (presented in the book) can be of great help for the all industry segments (power producers and power consumers). The book puts together information gathered from various resources, hence it should be of great help to people at the corporate level, investors planning and also to new entrants into the segment.”
Commentary
 (Background) Dr. Martin Luther King (r) with President Lyndon B. Johnson. (Inset, top) President Salvador Allende, the world’s first democratically elected socialist president with poet Pablo Neruda (r) (Inset, bottom). Dr King's Dream: A Latin American Perspective - By Ariel Dorfman Forty years ago in August, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a clarion call for civil rights. Activist and author Ariel Dorfman reflects on King’s relevance to Chile’s struggle and today’s dangerous world. Far away. I was far away from Washington, D.C. that hot day in August of 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I was far away in Chile, twenty-one years old at the time and entangled, like so many of my generation, in the struggle to liberate Latin America. The speech by King that was to influence my life so deeply did not even register with me. I cannot even recall having noticed its existence. What I can remember with ferocious precision, however, is the place and the date, and even the hour when, many years later, I had occasion to listen for the first time to those “I have a dream” words, heard that melodious baritone, those incantations, that emotional certainty of victory. I can remember the occasion so clearly because it happened to be the day Martin Luther King was killed, April 4, 1968, and ever since that day, his dream and his death have been grievously linked, conjoined in my mind then as they are now, forty years later, in my memory. I recall how I was sitting with my wife Angélica and our one year old child Rodrigo, in a living room, high up in the hills of Berkeley, the university town in California where we had arrived barely a week before. Our hosts, an American family who had generously offered us temporary lodgings while our apartment was being readied, had switched on the television and we all solemnly watched the nightly news, probably at seven in the evening, probably Walter Cronkite. And there it was, the murder of Martin Luther King in that Memphis hotel and then came reports of riots all over America and, finally, a long excerpt of his “I have a dream” speech. It was only then, I think, that I began to realize who Martin Luther King had been, what we had lost with his departure from this world, the legend he was already becoming in front of my very eyes. In the years to come, I would often return to that speech and would, on each occasion, hew from its mountain of meanings a different rock upon which to stand and understand the world. Beyond my amazement at King’s eloquence when I first heard him back in 1968, my immediate reaction was not so much to be inspired as to be puzzled, close to despair. After all, the slaying of this man of peace was answered, not by a pledge to persevere in his legacy, but by furious uprisings in the slums of black America, the disenfranchised of America avenging their dead leader by burning down the ghettos where they felt imprisoned and impoverished, using the fire this time to proclaim that the non-violence King had advocated was useless, that the only way to end inequity in this world was through the barrel of a gun, the only way to make the powerful pay attention was to scare the hell out of them. King’s assassination, therefore, savagely brought up yet one more time a question that had bedeviled me, as so many other activists, in the late sixties: What was the best method to achieve radical change? Could we picture a rebellion in the way that Martin Luther King had envisioned it, without drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred, without treating our adversaries as they treated us? Or did the road into the palace of justice and the bright day of brotherhood inevitably require violence as its companion, violence as the unavoidable midwife of revolution? Questions that, back in Chile, I would soon be forced to answer not through cloudy theoretical musings, but in the day-to-day reality of hard history, when Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970 and we became the first country that tried to build socialism through peaceful means. Allende’s vision of social change, elaborated over decades of struggle and thought, was similar to King’s, even though they came from very different political and cultural origins. Allende, for instance, who was not at all religious, would have not agreed with King that physical force must be met with soul force, but rather with the force of social organizing. At a time when many in Latin America were dazzled by the armed struggle proposed by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, it was Allende’s singular accomplishment to imagine as inextricably connected the two quests of our era, the quest for more democracy and more civil freedoms, and the parallel quest for social justice and the economic empowerment of the dispossessed of this earth. And it was to be Allende’s fate to echo the fate of Martin Luther King; it was his choice to die three years later. Yes, on September 11, 1973, almost ten years to the day after King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington, Allende chose to die defending his own dream, promising us, in his last speech, that sooner rather than later — más temprano que tarde — a day would come when the free men and women of Chile would walk through las amplias alamedas, the great avenues full of trees, towards a better society. It was in the immediate aftermath of that terrible defeat, as we watched the powerful of Chile impose upon us the terror that we had not wanted to visit upon them, it was then, as our non-violence was met with executions and torture and disappearances, it was only then, after the military coup of 1973, that I first began to seriously commune with Martin Luther King, that his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial came back to haunt and question me. As I headed into an exile that would last for many years, King’s voice and message began to filter fully, word by word, into my life. After all, if ever there was a situation where violence could be justified, it would have been against the junta in Chile. Pinochet and his generals had overthrown a constitutional government and were killing and persecuting citizens whose radical sin had been to imagine a world where you do not need to massacre your opponents in order to allow the waters of justice to flow. And yet, very wisely, almost instinctively, the Chilean resistance embraced a different route: to slowly, resolutely, dangerously, take over the surface of the country, isolate the dictatorship inside and outside our nation, and make Chile ungovernable through civil disobedience. Not entirely different from the strategy that the civil rights movement had espoused in the United States. And indeed, I never felt closer to Martin Luther King than during the seventeen years it took us to free Chile of its dictatorship. His words to the militants who thronged to Washington, D.C., in 1963, demanding that they not lose faith, resonated with me, comforted my sad heart. He was speaking prophetically to me, to us, when he said, “I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells.” Speaking to us, Dr. King, speaking to me, when he thundered: “Some of you come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering.” He understood that more difficult than going to your first protest, was to awaken the next day and go to the next protest and then the next one, the daily grind of small acts that can lead to large and lethal consequences. The dogs and sheriffs of Alabama and Mississippi were alive and well in the streets of Santiago and Valparaiso, and so was the spirit that had encouraged defenseless men and women and children to be mowed down, beaten, bombed, harassed, and yet continue confronting their oppressors with the only weapons available to them: the suffering of their bodies and the conviction that nothing could make them turn back. And just like the blacks in the United States, so in Chile we also sang in the streets of the cities that had been stolen from us. Not spirituals, for every land has its own songs. In Chile we sang, over and over, the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the hope that a day would come when all men would be brothers. Why were we singing? To give ourselves courage, of course. But not only that, not only that. In Chile, we sang and stood against the hoses and the tear gas and the truncheons, because we knew that somebody else was watching. In this, we also followed in the cunning, media-savvy footsteps of Martin Luther King: that mismatched confrontation between the police state and the people was being witnessed, photographed, transmitted to other eyes. In the case of the deep south of the United States, the audience was the majority of the American people, while in that other struggle years later, in the deeper south of Chile, the daily spectacle of peaceful men and women being repressed by the agents of terror targeted the national and international forces whose support Pinochet and his dependent third-world dictatorship needed in order to survive. The tactic worked, of course, because we understood, as Martin Luther King and Gandhi had before us, that our adversaries could be influenced and shamed by public opinion, could eventually be compelled to relinquish power. That is how segregation was defeated in the South of the United States; that is how the Chilean people beat Pinochet in a plebiscite in 1988 that led to democracy in 1990; that is the story of the downfall of tyrannies in Iran and Poland and the Philippines — although parallel struggles for liberation, against the apartheid regime in South Africa or the homicidal autocracy in Nicaragua or the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, also showed how King’s premonitory words of non-violence could not be mechanically applied to every situation. And what of today? When I return to that speech I first heard thirty-five years ago, the very day King died, is there a message for me, for us, something that we need to hear again, as if we were listening to those words for the first time? What would Martin Luther King say if he contemplated what his country has become? If he could see how the terror and death brought to bear upon New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 had turned his people into a fearful nation, ready to stop dreaming, ready to abridge their own freedoms in order to be secure? What would he say if he could observe how that fear has been manipulated in order to justify the invasion of a foreign land, the occupation of that land against the will of its own people? What alternative way would he have advised to be rid of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein? And how would he react to the Bush doctrine that states that some people on this planet, Americans to be precise, have more rights than the other citizens of the world? What would he say if he were to see his fellow countrymen proclaiming that because of their pain and their military and economic might they can do as they please, flaunt international law, withdraw from nuclear treaties, deceive and pollute the world? Would he warn them that such arrogance will not go unpunished? Would he tell those who oppose these policies inside the United States to stand up and be counted, to march ahead, never to wallow in the valley of despair? It is my belief that he would repeat some of the words he delivered on that faraway day in August of 1963 in the shadow of the statue of Abraham Lincoln. I believe he would declare again his faith in his country and remind us of how deeply his dream is rooted in the American dream, of how, despite the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, his dream is still alive and how his nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” Let us hope that he is right. Let us hope and pray, for his sake and ours, that Martin Luther King’s faith in his own country was not misplaced and that forty years later his compatriots will once again listen to his fierce and gentle voice calling to them from beyond death and beyond fear, calling on all of us to stand together for freedom and justice in our time. - Argentina-born playwright, poet, novelist, cartoonist, essayist and |TOP| Report:  (Background) Indian students like these benefit from a host of UN programs in India (Doranne Jacobson/ UN photo) Indians Helping UN The Pride in India Challenge – A Siliconeer Report Indians are responding warmly to a fundraising call from the United Nations Foundation. A Siliconeer report. Indians have warmly responded to a $56,000 challenge grant issued by the Washington D.C.-based United Nations Foundation to celebrate India’s 56th Independence Day, already giving $20,000, according to a UNF press release. Gifts for the “Pride in India” challenge ranged from a $5 contribution from Tokyo to a $5,000 check from the U.S.-based Suri Sehgal Foundation, said Seema Paul, senior program officer at the UN Foundation who is now leading the organization’s focus on India. “I am really proud to find there are people around the world who want to make a positive contribution for the development of India, even if they don’t live there anymore. As an Indian myself, it gives me a lot of hope for the future of my country,” she said. The UN Foundation reached out to the 20 million-strong global Indian Diaspora, through the media, flyers and an email campaign built around India’s Independence Day. The campaign will continue through Diwali, creating a tradition of giving around India’s most celebrated festival, Paul said. The UN Foundation, created by philanthropist and entrepreneur Ted Turner, is matching every gift contributed to its United Nations projects in support of India’s advancement, dollar-for-dollar, up to $56,000. Givers have a choice to decide on one of three areas they want to impact most — environment, children’s health and women and development. Donations can be made through the UN Foundation’s India website, PrideInIndia.org, which was launched to coincide with India’s Independence Day on August 15. For more information on the UN Foundation’s grantmaking to India, visit www.PrideInIndia.org. Politics:  Fighting for Minority Rights Vote No! on Prop 54 – By Birjinder Anant and Bhavna Shamasunder South Asians should oppose an initiative that could take the state back decades in terms of civil rights, write Birjinder Anant and Bhavna Shamasunder. An initiative on the Oct. 7 is receiving little press, but has potentially tremendous consequences for the lives of all Californians. Proposition 54 advocates statewide censorship — a ban on racial and ethnic data collection throughout the state. If enacted, Proposition 54 (CRECNO—Classification by Race, Ethnicity, Color, National Origin) would censor essential data collection on public health, employment discrimination, racial profiling, education, and consumer protection. If passed, this initiative would have devastating impacts on the South Asian community, particularly in the areas of health and civil rights. CRECNO is an initiative sponsored by Ward Connerly, an anti-civil rights crusader, who spearheaded the passage of Prop 209 to end affirmative action in California in 1996. Connerly is banking on our ignorance to propel California backwards and make it virtually impossible for our communities to gather information that would improve our health, our access to jobs, and our quality of life. Originally dubbed the “Racial Privacy Initiative,” CRECNO has little to do with privacy (government data is already collected anonymously), and a lot to do with censorship and anti-democratic repression of basic information that empowers all California citizens. If enacted, CRECNO would potentially prevent South Asians from knowing and acting on facts such as:
Bad for Our Health These programs exist in every state in the country, and allow for the prevention and detection of thousands of cases of genetic disease every year. Diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia are conditions that affect different racial groups to differing degrees. Early treatment in some of these genetic conditions can prevent serious mental retardation, profound disability, and death. California would go backwards in our ability to provide good health care and forward thinking research if this initiative is enacted. Virtually every public health and medical association in California is opposed to Prop. 54. Rather than propelling California backwards, we must arm ourselves with information and work constructively to achieve equality in California. We can only do this by acknowledging and confronting racial disparities in health, employment, and education. We must continue to conduct rigorous analyses of the racial and ethnic impact data that Prop. 54 are targeted to eliminate. In public health, as in many other critical disciplines, ignorance is not bliss. Connerly claims the initiative will bring us closer to a “colorblind” society. In actuality, it would leave Californians blind, deaf and dumb to the problems all around us—disproportionate health burdens, unequal schools and unfair discriminatory practices in employment, housing, transportation and law enforcement. We would also be unable to celebrate our community successes and achievements because we would not have the information as to where we stand as a community. Instead of banning information, we should demand more knowledge about social and economic conditions. CRECNO amounts to an undemocratic gag order. The South Asian community should not allow themselves to be tricked into voting for an initiative that could take the state back some 40 years in terms of civil and human rights. CRECNO will have the greatest impact on members of ethnic minority groups. But make no mistake: it is censorship that will ban the collection of basic facts on public health, employment and education that serve to improve the lives of all Californians. Vote “NO” on Prop 54 on October 7, 2003. Interested readers can find more information about Concerned Desis Against 54 at their Web site: www.DesisAgainst54.org - Bay Area-based activists Birjinder Anant and |TOP| Technology:  Bengali Unleashed!: Free Bornosoft Download – By Ashfaque Swapan A fundraising campaign has made a Bengali word-processing software free, writes Ashfaque Swapan. We take great pleasure in announcing that Bornosoft, the best Bengali software, is now a free download. (Go to www.digitalbangla.org for the link) The International Institute of Bengal Basin launched the campaign to make this software free through the Digital Bangla Project in Dec. 16, 2002. The great thing about BornoSoft is that it anybody can start using almost immediately, because it is a phonetic software that uses a consistent, easy-to-learn transliteration system. In today’s IT age, languages will fall by the wayside if computer usage in the language is not universal. Alas, Bengali, like other South Asian languages, is in a sorry mess. Only five percent of Bangladeshi computer users can type their language in the computer. The lack of computer word-processing skills in Bengali means that IT tools like the Internet, digital archiving and searching of information is beyond the reach of Bengali speakers. Popular Bengali software is so difficult that Bengali word-processing has become the sole domain of professional typists. Yet with Bornosoft, it takes just an hour to learn to type fluently. We made a deal with Bornosoft: We raise $30,000, Bornosoft makes the $55 software a free download. We blew the deadline and raised a little over a third, but Dr Abdus Shakil, the developer, accepted what we had raised, and at considerable personal financial loss, he has made Bornosoft a free download. We thank him and our donors, who are the real heroes of this campaign. Interested readers can find more information about the Digital Bangla Project at www.digitalbangla.org. - Ashfaque Swapan is a journalist who lives in Berkeley, Calif. |TOP|
Photo Essay:
Celebrating India: Independence Day Bash – By Som Sharma Bollywood star Dharmendra headlined FIA’s Festival of India in Fremont, Calif. Photo essay: Som Sharma
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