A participant in the "financial diaries" research in Madhupur, Bangladesh, March 2009. Photo: Robin Saidman /VitalEdgeAid.org

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More than 2.7 billion people in the world live on two dollars a day — or less. For most Americans that may sound impossible. Or like a living hell.

In fact, there is much more nuance to it, to that life, than images of hungry kids with tin cups might suggest.

A detailed new study of the planet’s poorest billions finds a lot of sophistication among those poor in handling money. They don’t have much. They have to stretch it. Save it. Borrow and lend. For food, a home, even retirement. On two bucks a day.

We might learn something. This hour, On Point: Half the world, on two dollars a day.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Daryl Collins joins us in our studio. She was project director of the most recent Financial Diaries Project at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, which researched how poor people in South Africa spend, borrow and save. She is also a senior associate at Bankable Frontier Associates, a Boston-based consulting firm that tries to find ways to extend financial services to underserved people worldwide. She is co-author of the new book “Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 Dollars a Day.”

Read the first chapter (pdf) of “Portfolios of the Poor.”

Stuart Rutherford joins us from Exeter, England. He did the first Financial Diaries project, in Bangladesh, and is co-author of “Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 Dollars a Day.” He’s also the author of “The Poor and their Money” (2000) and founder of SafeSave, a non-profit based in Dhaka, Bangladesh that provides saving sevices to the poor there. He has consulted with the world-famous Grameen Bank, the microfinance bank bounced by Nobel Prize winner Mohamed Yunus.

Lufefe joins us from Langa, a township outside Cape Town, South Africa (he asked that we not use his surname). He’s married and a father of two. His wife and children live in their village and he lives in a hostel area and sends money back to them. He has a job, not always steady and makes about 3,000 to 4,000 Rand a month, which translates to about $3 per day for each member of his immediate family.

Below is a slideshow of pictures from Langa Township, near Cape Town, where researchers recruited many of the South Africa study’s participants. You can also open the slideshow at full-screen size on Flickr or click on each photo below to view captions. (Photos: Robin Saidman / VitalEdgeAid.org).

Infosys Technologies Ltd. co-chairman Nandan Nilekani, looks on at the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) India Leadership Forum 2009 in Mumbai, India, Wednesday. Feb. 11, 2009. (AP)

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When it comes to business in India, the names don’t get much bigger the Nandan Nilekani.

He’s been compared to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs. His company, Infosys, became huge taking over backroom software operations for companies around the world — many in the U.S. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman used Nilekani’s firm as Exhibit A in arguing that the world has turned “flat” — that is, wide open for global competition.

Now, the world economy has also turned stone cold. How does it look from the land of Nilekani?

This hour, On Point: Superstar Nandan Nilekani, and the view from India now.

You can join the conversation. If the world is flat, what do you need to hear from India about how we all get out of this mess? Do you see India as an economic partner? An economic problem?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Nandan Nilekani joins us from New York. He is a co-founder and now co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, based in Bangalore, one of India’s largest IT companies. In 2006 Time magazine listed him as one of the world’s 100 most influential people and Forbes named him “Businessman of the Year” for Asia. New York Times columnist and author Tom Friedman made Nandan Nilekani a global brand in his book “The World is Flat.” Nilekani’s new book is “Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation.” Watch Nilekani’s appearance on last night’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Joining us from Palo Alto, California, is Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, co-founder of the American IT firm Sycamore Networks and chairman of its Board of Directors. He and his wife are founding donors of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation and trustees of the Deshpande Foundation in India. Himself Indian, he has lived here in the U.S. for the last 30 years.

A man walks past a poster of "Slumdog Millionaire," posted on a wall in Mumbai, India, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009. India's movie-mad millions have not yet seen "Slumdog Millionaire," but this Mumbai-based fairy tale, which opens here next week, is already the toast of Bollywood. (AP)

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It was “Slumdog Millionaire” mania at the Golden Globe awards this week. Best drama, best director, best screenplay, best score.

And all that for a film made on a shoestring, by a British director, with a slew of first-time actors, in the slums of Mumbai.

Director Danny Boyle made his name with the down and dirty “Trainspotting.” Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy we know from “The Full Monty.”

But “Slumdog Millionaire” is something new. Wild Dickens in boomtown India. A surprise smash in America.

This hour, On Point: An Indian take, and your reviews, on “Slumdog Millionaire.”

You can join the conversation. Have you seen it? The slums? The torture? The city on steroids? The love? What did you make of the story of a boy from the hard side of Mumbai? Is this the India you know?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

From New York, we’re joined by Aseem Chhabra, entertainment writer and columnist for the Mumbai Mirror. He’s interviewed director Danny Boyle, female lead Freida Pinto, and Slumdog’s Golden Globe-winning score composer A.R. Rahman. He gives the film a big thumbs-up.

And from Seattle, Bollywood maven Nupur Kohli. Her radio show “Jhankar” covers the Indian film industry every week in the USA.

More links:

Here’s the official site for “Slumdog Millionaire.”  And you can watch the trailer courtesy of YouTube here:

Employees of a nanomanufacturing technology company play volleyball before a backdrop of office towers which house several information technology companies at the International Tech Park in Bangalore, India, the capital of Indian outsourcing. (AP)

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The parents came to America, out of India, for opportunity. The son went back to India, to see what the old country has become. To stare at a miracle — at what has changed, and what has not.

In a single generation, India has gone from economic backwater to sizzling global player. It was famous for temples and bureaucracy. Now it’s famous for economic growth and offshore software.

Shining India. But it’s also the India of Mumbai terror, of ethnic tension, of millions still locked in poverty.

This hour, On Point: An Indian-American goes back to India.

You can join the conversation. Have you gone back to where your family came from? Back to India? Is the opportunity there now? Or still here, in the USA?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Anand Giridharadas joins us from Goa, India. His column “Letter from India” appears twice a month in the International Herald Tribune. From 2005 to 2008 he was South Asia correspondent for the paper, based in Mumbai. The American-born child of Indian immigrants, he moved to India in 2003 to work at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He now lives in the village of Verla and is writing a book about social change in modern India.

His recent essay in The New York Times, “India Calling,” discussed his return to the country.  He wrote about the Mumbai terror attacks one week later.

Fire engulfs a part of the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, India.

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In three shocking, bloody days, the whole world got a crash course in the urban landscape of Mumbai.

It was already India’s most cosmopolitan city, financial center, Bollywood movie hub. Now, it’s a familiar front-page map — a blood-stained city guide of terrorist destruction.

The Leopold Cafe. The Taj Mahal hotel. The train station. The Jewish welcome center. And on, and on.

Today, Mumbai is already back on its feet. But its three days of terrorist guns and grenades are still echoing loudly, dangerously, from India to Pakistan to Washington.

This hour, On Point: After the terror in Mumbai.

You can join the conversation. What did you see in the flames and gunfire and death toll in Mumbai? Who do you blame? And what now?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Mumbai is Somini Sengupta, India bureau chief for The New York Times. She’s been in Mumbai covering the story since last week.

From London, we’re joined by Rahul Roy-Chaudhury. A senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, he previously served on the National Security Council Secretariat in the Indian Prime Minister’s Office.

From Madrid, we’re joined by Ahmed Rashid. A Pakistani journalist and author, he’s a renowned expert on the Taliban and security issues in Central and South Asia. His most recent book, published this year, is “Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.”

And joining us from Washington is Lisa Curtis. A former CIA analyst posted to the U.S. embassies in both India and Pakistan, she has served as a senior advisor in the State Department and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee handling South Asia issues for the former chairman Sen. Richard Lugar. She is now a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

The Dalai Lama, right, confers with Samdhong Rinpoche, Prime Minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, in Dharmsala, India, Nov. 20, 2008. (AP)

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For decades now, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has smiled and talked of peace and won Western hearts — and dreamed of autonomy for Tibet.

And China has listened, intermittently, and said no, consistently.

This fall, after riots in Tibet last spring, China said no loudly — flatly rejecting Tibetan autonomy and the Dalai Lama’s smiling appeals.

For the last week, more than 500 Tibetan exiles from across the world gathered in Dharamsala, India, to debate their way forward: whether to stick with the Dalai Lama’s peaceful “middle way,” search for autonomy within China, or to reach openly for independence. Whether to pray, to fight, to wait, to hope.

Their path looks as steep as the Himalayas.

This hour, On Point: The Dalai Lama, China, and the fate of Tibet.

You can join the conversation. Are you still rooting for the red-robed Buddhists and their struggle to reclaim their kingdom at the “roof of the world”? Will that struggle outlast the Dalai Lama? Will old Tibet simply disappear one day under a wave of Chinese immigration and development?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

We’re joined from Dharamsala by Tsewang Rigzin. He is president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an exile group that advocates full independence from China.

From Vancouver, we’re joined by Tsering Wangdu Shakya, a Tibetan scholar and professor at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Asian Research. Born in Lhasa, he fled to India with his family after the Chinese invasion. He is the author of “The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947,” which The New York Times called “the definitive history of modern Tibet.”

Joining us from New York is Robbie Barnett, director of the Modern Tibetan Studies program at Columbia University.

And from Melbourne Australia, we’re joined by Cameron Stewart. An associate editor at The Australian. He was in Tibet in early November, one of only a handful of Western journalists to have been in Tibet since the March riots.

]]> http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/11/the-fate-of-tibet/feed 34 http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/11/novelist-amitav-ghosh http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/11/novelist-amitav-ghosh#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:00:31 +0000 Hilary Barngrove McQuilkin http://www.onpointradio.org/?p=13077 Post your comments below

Globalization in the 19th century wasn’t gentle, but it sure was exotic. Ships at mast and crews from all over. Cutlass and cannon, silk and slaves, blood and glory.

And on the fabled seas between India and China, opium. Mountains of opium. The banks of the Ganges planted for miles in poppy. The wharves of Calcutta surging with dark opium for the dens of China.

In his epic new novel “Sea of Poppies,” novelist Amitav Ghosh captures the romance, and cruelty, and wild, rough globalization of the age of opium.

This hour, On Point: Amitav Ghosh and “Sea of Poppies.”

You can join the conversation. Have you read it? Been transported to its polyglot, cultural mash-up opium days? How do you weigh the romance against the brutality of the time?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Amitav Ghosh joins us in our studio. He’s author of the novels “The Glass Palace,” “The Hungry Tide,” and most recently, “Sea of Poppies.”

Read an excerpt from “Sea of Poppies.”

India is home to one of the world’s oldest societies, with thousands of years of religious and cultural traditions.

Journalist Anita Jain, born in India but raised in northern California, felt drawn back to her homeland to find a husband the old-fashioned way — by an arranged marriage.

At thirty-three, she was feeling pressure from her Indian family to marry. Her father placed ads in Indian papers and brokered online dates. Her mother cried. Fed up with the New York dating scene, Anita moved her search for a husband to Delhi.

What she found was not the India of her parents, or not exactly. Instead, she found a thriving Generation Y, partying in tight jeans and tank tops to Bhangra club beats, harvesting the fruits of the high-tech boom. A hybrid of old and new, where clubgoers encounter cows in the street.

This hour, On Point: Looking for love, marriage, and tradition, in modern India.

What do you know of that gear-grinding between generations? How do you reconcile the clash of the traditional and the new? Tell us your story. You can join the conversation right here on this page.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

* * *

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Anita Jain. She’s a journalist born in New Delhi and raised in northern California. Her new book, out yesterday, is “Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India.” You can read an excerpt from the book.

And from Cambridge, England, we’re joined by Perveez Mody. She’s a lecturer in social anthropology at Cambridge University and author of “The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi.”

From the misty, half-attuned, still-in-the-American-Century shores of the United States, China and India can look like peas in a pod: two rising Asian giants with screaming growth rates and lots of what used to be American jobs.

Look closer, and these are very different cats. China is the factory floor and India the back-office, software shop. China is top-down party driven. India is a messy, vibrant democracy. And the two, one-time enemies.

Look closer again, and this may be the complementary duo that changes the world. Including your world.

This hour, On Point: China, India and all that is to come.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School and author of “Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures–and Yours.”

As stock markets around Asia and the world headed south today, India’s finance minister tried to calm the selling: “Look,” he said, “India’s economy is headed for a booming 9 percent growth this year.” So he hopes.

And what will Indians spend that plenty on? India’s industrial giant Tata hopes they will soon be spending it on a new car: the Nano. The cheapest car in the world. $2500 to get your family off the scooter and into a four-door five-seater.

The world’s near-poor may say “hooray.” Environmentalists are shouting “calamity.”

This hour, On Point: a car for the global masses, and what it means for the world.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

John Paul MacDuffie, co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program at MIT and associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Lee Schipper, director of research for the World Resources Institute Center for Transport and the Environment and visiting scholar at the University of California Transportation Center.

Here’s a callout to American fans of Indian food. After you’ve enjoyed your samosa and chicken tikka masala, and maybe a curry and some goolab jam, Chitrita Banerji wants you to know there’s a much bigger world out there.

A universe barely touched on most Indian menus in America of rich and varied cuisine from the subcontinent. We tend to eat the flavors of the north and Punjab. Banerji wants to take you on a tour of Karnatika and Goa, Bengal and Amrtisar, to taste the food and learn a nation.

This hour, On Point: spread your banana leaf. We’re eating India — all of it — with Chitrita Bannerji.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Chitrita Banerji, author of “Eating India: An Odessey into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices”

With all the hullabaloo in Washington over Dubai port operators and Iraq war woes, President Bush may glad to get out of town this week – and he’s getting way out of town, to India and Pakistan.

Half a world away, booming India is emerging as a new partner and a new challenge — as a nuclear-armed power, as an economic power and destination for outsourced American jobs, as an ancient, post-colonial nation with its own distinctive view of the world.

For decades the US and India barely spoke. Now, India needs America and its markets. And America needs India — as a market, as a balance to rising China, as an example of democracy at work in the developing world.

Hear about America, and the meaning of booming India.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Scott Baldauf, South Asian bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor.

Jim VandeHei, White House correspondent for the Washington Post.

Sumit Ganguly, Professor of Indian Cultures and Civilizations, and Politcal Science, at Indiana University.

Teresita Schaffer, Director of the South Asian program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.