Word: aiyar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...else on earth, but they know astonishingly little of each other. Though diasporas from both nations have swept the world, it wasn't until the past 20 years that Indians and Chinese began visiting each other in significant numbers. Among those crossing the Himalayas was New Delhi native Pallavi Aiyar, who became the Beijing correspondent of the Hindu...
...Some parts of her debut book, Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, are disappointingly familiar (denunciations of the destruction of old Beijing, lamentations over the supposedly materialistic nature of Chinese college students), but these are worth thumbing through for the sharp comparisons Aiyar makes between China and her own country. Interviews with Beijing's toilet cleaners prompt her to ponder their Indian counterparts. The former harbor entrepreneurial dreams and say they prefer toilets to farmwork; the latter endure a lifelong stigma as "untouchables." In China, Aiyar observes, the word servant "described a job that someone did rather than defining...
...Sharp lines are also drawn between India's fervent religiosity and China's secularism, and Aiyar searches vainly for traces of spirituality behind China's materialistic façade. A Shaolin abbot who styles himself as a CEO, or a cabbie who, when asked about religion, growls, "I believe only in money," are expressing attitudes incomprehensibly alien to India's devout...
...Aiyar offers little economic comparison, but she does ask one very pertinent (and Indian) question: How has China been able to build fabulous highways when the pothole-ridden streets of her homeland have hardly changed? Millions of her compatriots would love to know why China's path out of poverty is so much quicker than their own. Maybe if the neighbors spent more time together, some answers would emerge...
...should be available. But because the global price remains a benchmark, Indian rice traders are resistant to selling their stocks for much less than they would get on the international market. That means less rice on the domestic market and higher prices for Indians. As economist Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar wrote recently in the Times of India, cutting exports is a form of national hoarding: "Governments would like to believe that hoarding by traders is terrible, whereas hoarding by governments promotes the public interest. But the impact on prices is exactly the same. Indeed, when governments start to hoard food...