Eideard

A court in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has sentenced 10 people to death for killing a young couple who married against their parents’ wishes.

Vijaya, 18, and her husband, Udai Pal Singh, were killed by her family after they found out about the marriage, the court in Etah district heard.

The groom’s brother was also killed.

India’s Supreme Court recently said so-called honour killers should face the death penalty. It is carried out only in the rarest of cases in India.

The BBC’s Ram Dutt Tripathi in Lucknow says hundreds of young Indians are killed every year for falling in love.

These murderers dishonour their family, their community and above all – their country.

Puja for a new car

This new year will bring the 20th anniversary of that shimmering, amorphous thing, the new India.

Like China and South Africa and other made-over nations, India has more than one birth date. There is that midnight hour in 1947 when Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed the end of British rule and spoke of India’s “tryst with destiny.” But it is to 1991, when India began to open its doors to the world and loosen the economic controls on its own citizens, that the present form of the country can most easily be traced…

Who is this new India? Its character is coming into ever sharper focus, and it is becoming clearer which ideas have most shaped its remaking.

Here, based on my own years of traveling in and reporting on the country, are five ideas that have done much to turn the new India new — out of a larger pool of ideas that could be mentioned.

Class is a situation. Every society has distinctions of class. But in an earlier India, these distinctions were taken to be intrinsic and eternal and heritable; class was not circumstance, but identity.

The ancient caste system was the most obvious symbol of this idea. But it had many subtler expressions, too.

Businessmen made a point of hierarchically noting that “he came to meet me” or “I went to meet him,” rather than simply saying, “We met.” Waiters hunched and bowed and obsequiously overdosed on the word “sir” or “sahib” when serving.

A rising group of young Indians conceives of class very differently: not as a fixed identity, but as a transient situation, and a situation that can change…

The next three areas of change are Family, English language, Gold is old. RTFA.

Modernity is best served traditional. Changes of this kind have been disruptive, to say the least, in many parts of the developing world. India is often faulted for modernizing too slowly and chaotically. But there is perhaps another way of seeing its journey over the past 20 years: as a different model of modernization.

It is a model of forward movement in which the past retains the upper hand and the future stands on the defensive. Change, however inevitable it might seem, must prove itself before being allowed to work on India.

But the Indian model is more than just cautious. It tends to assume, against all odds, that the traditional and the modern are ultimately compatible.

I don’t think that’s so unusual, although not necessary. Where it might be considered a requirement, say, in Mainland China – much, much less so on Taiwan. For a direct comparison.

Time will tell. Indians will make the decision. How much of the nation is involved is still a key question.

Ravindra Misal

I came to Umred to write about a riot. A few months earlier, power blackouts that rural Indians always suffered silently triggered a violent reaction. Why? Umred was just another small town in the middle of nowhere, dusty and underwhelming. But Umred had begun to dream, townspeople told me, because of television, because of cousins with tales of call-center jobs and freedom in the city. Once Umred contracted ambition, blackouts became intolerable. A psychological revolution, a revolution in expectations, had taken place.

“Electricity is essential to ambition,” an energetic young man named Ravindra Misal explained to me, “because I need it to do my homework, I need it to listen to music if I am a dancer, I need it to listen to tapes of great speakers, I need it to surf the Internet. But I cannot, so people get angry.” Over plates of mutton and chicken, Misal and his friend Abhay offered examples of the little things that were changing in Umred: young men hunting online for wives, farmers’ sons deserting the farms to work at a bank in a nearby town, a deluge of students signing up for English classes. And beauty pageants. “I see Fashion TV on television, Miss India contests in the big cities,” Misal said. “So I thought, Why can’t we have that also?” And so he organized the first Mr. and Miss Umred Personality Contest, which seemed to be half about physical appearance and half about the communication skills that are all the rage in small-town India.

Misal embodies the type of person who will truly transform India: not an engineer or a financier, but an average person who refuses to be satisfied with the status he was born to. Umred rioted because its people had somehow acquired the courage of their own dissatisfaction. But what kind of India will they build?

And that’s what the several pages of this article examine.

An interesting read. Questions that had better be answered equitably and quickly if India is to realize the potential the moneyboys think is there.

Chezi K. Ganesan looks every inch the high-tech entrepreneur, dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of denim shirt and khaki trousers, slick smartphone close at hand. He splits his time between San Jose and this booming coastal metropolis, running his $6 million a year computer chip-making company.

His family has come a long way. His grandfather was not allowed to enter Hindu temples, or even to stand too close to upper-caste people, and women of his Nadar caste, who stood one notch above untouchables in India’s ancient caste hierarchy, were once forced to bare their breasts before upper caste men as a reminder of their low station.

“Caste has no impact on life today,” Mr. Ganesan said in an interview at one of Chennai’s exclusive social clubs, the kind of place where a generation ago someone of his caste would not have been welcome. “It is no longer a barrier…”

India is enjoying an extended economic boom, with near double-digit growth. But the benefits have not been equally shared, and southern India has rocketed far ahead of much of the rest of the country on virtually every score — people here earn more money, are better educated, live longer lives and have fewer children.

A crucial factor is the collapse of the caste system over the last half century, a factor that undergirds many of the other reasons that the south has prospered — more stable governments, better infrastructure and a geographic position that gives it closer connections to the global economy.

“The breakdown of caste hierarchy has broken the traditional links between caste and profession, and released enormous entrepreneurial energies in the south,” said Ashutosh Varshney, a professor at Brown University who has studied the role of caste in southern India’s development. This breakdown, he said, goes a long way to explaining “why the south has taken such a lead over the north in the last three decades.”

Cynicism isn’t required to look somewhat askance at this article. Yet, I understand the process of history. After all, taking part, taking a leading part in commerce is not so much a leveler for individuals but a bringer of opportunity. Especially to those outside the backwardness of previous political royalty.

RTFA. There is a great deal of information whether you accept the analysis or conclusions. Some of the latter are confirmed – and welcome. I only speak as someone who has witnessed decades of American stubbornness at maintaining our national racism as a cultural “heritage”.

Eight members of an impoverished family from one of India’s most lawless regions were shot and beheaded in a gruesome honour killing after one of their relatives dared to secretly marry a girl from a rival clan in a forbidden “love match”.

The killings took place after Ratan Mandal, 21, eloped with Kanchan Kumari, 18, last month, according to police.

The bodies were discovered floating in the Ganga river in the northern state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest territories. Police said they have charged 15 people, most from the Miss Kumari’s family, with murder.

“The girl’s family invited the boy’s family for a meeting on the pretext of settling the dispute [over the marriage], but killed all eight and beheaded them,” said Raghunath Prasad Singh, a senior police officer from the district of Bhagalpur.

The whereabouts of the newly married couple is unknown.

This still happens every day in some part of India. Until the rule of lawless gangs is ended, it’s difficult to see the sophistication, growth and sensibility of urban India extending to all of the nation.

Accounts of India’s changes focus on its economic growth, its surging migration, its skyward construction: changes in outward trappings. Less apparent, but no less momentous, is the decline and fall of the Anglicized ancien régime.

Some in the old elite saw change coming. They sold inherited businesses, learned new professions, reined in maharajah-like spending. But many did not, and now a wave of aspirations is rising from dank slums and hopeless towns, crashing at last into the delicate structures of unearned privilege.

Quietly but unmistakably, a whole country is changing hands.

In cities, middle-aged graduates of India’s leading colleges struggle to get their children into the same schools. With children of humbler backgrounds aiming higher than ever, even a 90 percent score on the entrance exam is no longer enough. This is the secret reason why, in a new age of Indian opportunity, many rich Indians still send their children abroad for college: not to escape India, but because their children are unable or unwilling to compete in an increasingly fair society.

The newspapers print photographs of those who “top” the exams. They are routinely scrawny and dark-skinned, drawn from the distant suburbs and villages, Indians whose ancestors might have cooked and cleaned for the ancestors of the students they now displace.

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