SLOW Movement

NY Times: Pavement to Parks

September 22, 2009, 10:00 pm

Pavement to Parks

Last Friday, cities and towns throughout the world celebrated Park(ing) Day, an event created to bring awareness to the importance of using and enjoying public space. Witnessing all those swaths of pavement transformed into plant-filled community gathering spaces (Streetfilms.org has a short film of San Francisco’s Park(ing) Day) got me thinking about — given the tangential way my brain works — the process of land-banking.

Top image courtesy ChiPhilly; bottom image courtesy San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Top, (Park)ing Day installation by S.M.P. Architects, Philadelphia; bottom, Park(ing) Day, San Francisco.

Land banking — the strategic acquisition of land in advance of expanding urban development, and the holding on to it as long as possible to maximize profits — is especially pronounced in once-booming, now-busted city centers like Las Vegas, Baltimore and Phoenix, which by the way now has more vacant land than any other major city in the United States. With the economic downturn things have changed somewhat, but there remain huge amounts of empty lots being “banked” in downtowns nationwide, all waiting for a real estate recovery.

Of course, if an entity bought property for future development, it is understandable that they’d want to wait until it began to recoup its value before building on it. But cities across the country are now left to grapple with the grim reality of abandoned lots and buildings that leave gaping holes in our urban fabric.

The downside of this isn’t hard to discern: the streetscape is rendered not only uninteresting and unsightly but unsafe. Pedestrians stay away, and the streets become even less safe owing to a lack of what the urbanist Jane Jacobs famously referred to as “eyes on the street.” With no foot traffic, existing businesses suffer and new ones hesitate to come in. A similar condition emerges in a very different kind of urban setting, where traffic flow exceeds neighborhood capacity, pulling pedestrians off streets because of noise, fears about safety and general unpleasantness.

An innovative and practical concept for new urban parks most directly addresses the latter condition, but I can see it working in the former as well. San Francisco’s “Pavement to Parks” program creates spaces for people by reclaiming excess roadway, through the use of simple and low-cost design interventions. What’s innovative about these parks isn’t so much the design as the implementation. As Andres Power, urban designer at the San Francisco Planning Department explains, because there is no structure in place to do something like this “it fundamentally changes the old impasse of years of planning and just lets the space evolve over time.”

European Pressphoto Agency/Justin Lane Times Square, New York City.

Pavement to Parks was given particular impetus by the success of similar projects in New York City, especially the recent transformation of Broadway from 47th to 42nd Streets, and 35th to 33rd Streets, where plazas and seating areas have been created in excess roadway simply by painting or treating the asphalt, placing protective barriers along the periphery and installing movable tables and chairs.

Similarly, PTP begins with the goal of “transforming a sea of asphalt,” says Power. A pro bono designer (one hopes a budget will emerge to pay designers for their efforts) works on each park (there are 12 scheduled to be finished through 2010; three have just been completed) with the mandate of using materials the city already has to maximize greenery and, says Power, “transform a sea of asphalt.”

This approach diverts resources that would have gone to landfill and keeps the budget of these interventions low. Composted soil comes from city landscaping and plants are either donated or purchased at cost. Volunteers, typically community residents, are mobilized to plant, motivated by the desire to beautify their streetscape and meet their neighbors. And as part of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s initiative to provide edible landscapes throughout the city, fruit trees will be planted at each location. The plantings also add storm water management capacity to streets.

One of the first three pilot parks was created to transform a dangerous and poorly conceived intersection (below) at 28th and San Jose Streets on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Mission District.

Intersection of San Jose/Guerrero before the park. Photo (c) Google Maps.

In 1947 San Francisco planned to build a new freeway here, and in preparation for doing so the city tore down or moved close to 200 homes in this neighborhood. The homes you see above on the right-hand side of San Jose Avenue were lifted and moved back onto their backyards to make room for the project. A protest stopped the freeway from happening, but little could be done in the way of reparations for these displaced families. Half a century later, some of those families are getting their yards back — though now they’re out front.

(Click to enlarge.) Left, San Jose/Guerrero park; right, Showplace Triangle park.

Landscape architect Jane Martin , who designed the San Jose/Guerrero park, had no problem finding treasure in the city’s trash: her park plan uses trees felled in a storm and old air ducting made from stainless steel as giant planters for a broad array of plantings ranging from agave to apple trees. Similarly, REBAR’s design for the park — REBAR is, not incidentally, the creator of Park(ing) Day — at lower Potrero’s Showplace Triangle transforms dumpsters into planters for its South African palette of plants, and uses old surplus granite countertops for bench seating. The first of the three projects involved the least intervention: Public Architecture at 17th and Castro transformed an unsafe and confusing intersection into a sidewalk café by simply blocking the area off with planters.

Though two pedestrian islands were depaved for the Castro project, the Pavement to Parks model is designed to be reversible, and pavement is typically undisturbed. The effort reflects a “renewed interest in what our streets might look like,” says Power, as well as “a pent-up desire to create public space.”

17th and Castro park.

These plantings and plaza aren’t just about aesthetics: the expanding array of planting projects along with other traffic calming measures, dedicated pedestrian enforcement stings and new traffic signals, the collision rate for the 11 blocks on Guerrero between Cesar Chavez and Randall Street, where the San Jose/Guerrero park is located, has been reduced by 53 percent since 2004.

Of the two major public space projects in New York City this year, certainly the High Line has received the most press — and its near-universal praise is well-deserved. But it is the Green Light Manhattan project and Pavement to Parks that I think will have the greatest legacy. The High Line took 10 years and $152 million dollars to complete — that’s not a criticism of the project, but of the systems in place nationwide that force these sorts of projects, and really just about any project, to proceed at a snail’s pace and at astronomical cost.

The High Line, New York City.

Today, people and the cities they live in are short on cash but long on ingenuity (and on boneyards full of discarded materials waiting for inventive reuse). Programs like Pavement to Parks and Green Light Manhattan have an irresistible immediacy to them, and while they may not rival Olmsted or Field Operations (who designed the High Line) in their aesthetic, they make up for it in spirit and sustainability. And remember, these are being done for next to no money.

But back to that land-bank tangent. I know what you’re thinking: “Why give over valuable real estate for a picnic table and a couple of planters?”

You don’t have to give it up; let people borrow it. The barely discernible footprint (and next-to-nothing budgets) of these parks allows for temporality. Just look at the deal brokered for the recently inaugurated LentSpace on Canal, Varick, Grand and Sullivan Streets in Soho. It’s a model for citywide land use in New York and, indeed, any city or town cursed with empty lots; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has created an “in the meantime” activity for a vacant site awaiting future development. In the case of LentSpace, the developer, Trinity Real Estate, is providing a three-year lease — and receives a write-off in return. (One hopes Trinity will eventually give in to LentSpace’s request to remove the chain-link fence that still surrounds the space.)

Courtesy Dean Kaufman View of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s LentSpace.

Some will continue to argue that no, Trinity and others will never get their land back, that this is too complicated, too risky. I’ll argue that the alternative — to let us all live oblivious to the blight that surrounds us — isn’t a viable one. And the idealist in me will point to France, where earlier this month Nicolas Sarkozy announced his championing of a revolutionary way for the world to measure a country’s performance: quality-of-life issues like the environment, leisure time and health sharing the stage with hard economic growth data. I love the fact that this is entering into the global conversation for many reasons, not least that it acknowledges the importance of small yet impactful gestures in our daily lives, like the recent spate of public spaces, created on the cheap, and full of heart.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

ST: Rajaratnam, keeper of the faith

Sep 20, 2009

Rajaratnam, keeper of the faith

The Pledge is the enduring legacy of the late minister, to whom Singapore was worth fighting and dying for

By Irene Ng

Mr Rajaratnam understood the power of language and of ideas. And the idea he loved most was: A Singaporean Singapore where its citizens transcend their boundaries of race, religion and language, and unite to become one people. -- ST FILE PHOTO As any writer knows, first drafts are subject to revision. Good writers hone, sculpt and polish their drafts to make sure that their final versions sparkle. Mr S. Rajaratnam, who drafted Singapore's national Pledge, was a very good writer. Before he joined politics in 1959, he had distinguished himself as an influential newspaper columnist and a short-story writer. He understood the power of language and of ideas. And the idea he loved most was: A Singaporean Singapore where its citizens transcend their boundaries of race, religion and language, and unite to become one people. The Pledge and its origins have been much discussed recently. The subject is of particular interest to me as I am writing Mr Rajaratnam's biography for the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. In the course of my research over the last five years, I have gained a deeper appreciation of how the Pledge came about and why it stands as Mr Rajaratnam's enduring legacy to Singapore. Before the then Foreign Minister put his mind to the wording of the Pledge in 1966, the initial idea, as envisaged by the then Education Minister Ong Pang Boon, was that the Pledge would be recited by students in classrooms and during flag-raising ceremonies. The original idea arose, in fact, as a sort of administrative compromise, given the constraints of schools. It can be traced back to October 1965, shortly after Singapore's separation from Malaysia. The Education Ministry wanted to inculcate national consciousness and patriotism among students in schools by assembling them for a flag-raising ceremony to the strains of the National Anthem. However, the mass singing of the anthem, to be accompanied by a brass band, required a large field or assembly hall. Many schools lacked such facilities. Even those with the facilities could not carry out the flag-raising ceremony daily because of the tight curriculum. In a letter dated Oct 20, 1965, Mr Willie Cheng, the Ministry of Education's principal assistant secretary (administration), proposed that the flag-raising ceremonies be carried out in the classroom instead, where students would salute the flag. In a response dated Oct 22, 1965, Mr Kwan Sai Kheong, acting permanent secretary and director of education, wrote that Mr Ong had suggested, as a compromise, a pledge of two to three lines to be recited in the classroom, in place of singing the national anthem. On that basis, two earlier versions of the Pledge were produced. The first, dated Dec 17, 1965, was by Mr Philip Liau, adviser on textbooks and syllabuses. He used the American Students' Pledge as a reference: 'I pledge (reaffirm) my allegiance (loyalty) to the Flag of Singapore, and to the country for which it stands; one sovereign nation of many freedom-loving people of one heart, one mind and one spirit, dedicated to a just and equal society.' The second version, dated Dec 30, 1965, by Mr George Thomson, director of the Political Study Centre, read: 'I proudly and wholeheartedly pledge my loyalty to our flag of Singapore and to the honour and independence of our Republic whose banner it is. We come from different races, religions and cultures, but we are now united in mind and heart as one nation, and one people, dedicated to build by democratic means a more just and equal society.' Both versions were submitted to Mr Ong on Jan 26, 1966. His senior staff preferred the first version, considering it shorter and less abstract. It was no surprise that Mr Ong then turned to Mr Rajaratnam, a master stylist known for his strong convictions on building a common national identity. In a letter to Mr Rajaratnam dated Feb 2, 1966, Mr Ong asked him for comments on the two versions and for 'whatever amendments you wish to suggest'. By the time Mr Rajaratnam reverted with his earliest draft dated Feb 18, 1966, the Pledge was completely transformed. While the first two versions were all about pledging loyalty to the flag and country, Mr Rajaratnam's was about pledging to shared ideals, to a vision of Singapore that was, to his mind, worth fighting and dying for. And while the first two versions used the personal pronoun 'I', Mr Rajaratnam opted for the collective 'We, as citizens of Singapore'. Defying the evidence before his eyes, he imagined a nation pulsating as one people. Only he would have the boldness to envision a people giving voice to such ideals in unison, declaring their identity as 'citizens of Singapore', as opposed to 'the Malays', 'the Chinese', 'the Indians' and so on. More profoundly, he changed the entire premise for the Pledge as originally conceived by the Education Ministry. It was not just a few lines to be recited to the flag. It was a promise made to oneself, to each other and to future generations. Mr Rajaratnam's earliest draft which we have on record went: 'We, as citizens of Singapore, pledge to forget differences of race, language and religion and become one united people; to build a democratic society where justice and equality will prevail, and where we will seek happiness and progress by helping one another.' When he wrote 'to forget differences of race, language and religion', it was not a call for collective amnesia. He was not enjoining the people to deny their differences. He was calling on them to disregard these differences in their quest for a Singaporean Singapore. As his speeches during that period show, he was not blind to the fact that these differences were deeply rooted. On the contrary, he was all too conscious of their potency after the trauma of the racial riots in 1964 and the Separation in 1965. He was subjected to repeated reminders of the emotive power of appeals to these differences. During the years of merger, he was the strongest advocate for a Malaysian Malaysia, as opposed to a Malay Malaysia. Indeed, it was he who coined the slogan 'Malaysian Malaysia'. What he did not foresee was that Singapore would be expelled. The Separation in 1965 was, as he put it, 'the crushing of my dreams'. 'I believed in one nation, regardless of race and religion. My dreams were shattered,' he said. In the wake of that agonising moment came another test. Shortly after the Separation, a group of Chinese chauvinists, aware that their community now constituted 75 per cent, wanted Chinese language and culture to be the dominant consideration in government policy. Mr Rajaratnam recounted: 'They charged the PAP government with betraying Chinese language and culture. They believed that, in a predominantly Chinese Singapore, where the Chinese had overwhelming strength, the Government could be panicked into opting for Chinese chauvinism.' The minorities, particularly the Malays, were fearful of what Singapore would be like. When Mr Rajaratnam wrote his first draft of the Pledge, asking people to 'forget their differences', it was in the context of such anxious times. Disregard these differences of race, language and religion; do not let them stand in the way of becoming a united people, to the dream of creating a Singaporean Singapore, where justice and equality will prevail. Help one another to seek happiness and progress. Do this regardless of race, language or religion, we are implicitly urged. This ideal permeates many of his speeches on the topic at the time. Indeed, he was the first minister to use the phrase 'unity in diversity' in the 1960s, enjoining people to come together while celebrating the diversity among them. From available records, we can ascertain that the Pledge - as is used today - was finalised in July 1966. There is unfortunately a gap in the historical records on the revisions between Mr Rajaratnam's first draft, dated Feb 18, 1966, and the final one. But knowing how he worked and liked to work, in his days as a journalist as well as a politician, he would have refined it along the way, taking into account various views. As part of this process, he consulted the then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. According to Mr Lee's recollection, as related in an interview with me, he had pointed out to Mr Rajaratnam that some words sounded too idealistic. Mr Lee also tightened the draft. Unlike the Singapore flag which was discussed in the Cabinet in 1959, there is no record of any discussion in Cabinet on the Pledge. A search of the Cabinet minutes of meetings and papers in 1965 and 1966 revealed nothing on it. From this and available records, one can conclude that the final version was firmed up between individual ministers with input from Ministry of Education officials. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that the final words, spirit and sentiments of the Pledge owed much to Mr Rajaratnam. Mr Lee rightly described him as 'a great idealist'. He was also a great visionary. Without such qualities, the Pledge would not have been the imaginative leap that it was. He had great faith in the power of the human will to overcome the differences of race, language, and religion, and to transform the separate communities into a nation. After Mr Rajaratnam left the Cabinet in 1988, he became concerned with policies which appeared to encourage Singaporeans to assert their communal identities. In 1990, he spoke up against what he perceived as a dangerous form of Chinese self-assertion in the Speak Mandarin campaign. While making clear that he supported the campaign just as he would for others encouraging people to speak 'Malay, Tamil, French, Japanese, or even better English', he took issue with the campaign's slogan 'if you are Chinese, make a statement - in Mandarin'. This, for the nervous minorities, would carry the subliminal message that the Chinese are different, he warned. Had he been asked, he would have suggested this slogan instead: 'Make a Singaporean statement in Mandarin.' Such episodes underscored the importance of Mr Rajaratnam's role as the keeper of the faith, a role which few others could play with equal conviction. He became an institution as a protector of the vision in the national Pledge - his enduring legacy to Singapore. The writer is a Member of Parliament and writer-in-residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Iseas). The first volume of Mr S. Rajaratnam's two-part biography will be published by Iseas by early next year.

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

FT: Singapore to rein in immigration

Singapore to rein in immigration

By Kevin Brown in Singapore

Published: September 16 2009 16:35 | Last updated: September 16 2009 16:35

Singapore is to impose curbs on immigration amid fears of social friction between citizens and hundreds of thousands of foreign workers who have poured into the country over the past decade.

Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister, said Singapore had taken in more than 100,000 foreign workers a year for several years as high economic growth burnished the lure of south-east Asia’s richest country.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Singapore may tap reserves amid recession - Jan-19

Death of Singaporean maverick - Sep-30

Singapore set to sue paper - Sep-13

Lawyers accuse Singapore on human rights - Jul-09

Lawsuit threatens Singapore opposition party - May-27

Singapore apologises for terror suspect escape - Feb-29

“We will not continue to admit people at this pace,” Mr Lee said. “We know we cannot take in unlimited numbers of foreign workers.”

The announcement follows moves to restrict immigration in several other countries, including the US, Australia and the UK, which have sought to target migrants with in- demand skills.

However, the prime minister’s comments, made to a group of students on Tuesday night, appeared designed to soothe public concern at the surge in migrants rather than signal a clampdown.

Mr Lee gave no details of how immigration would be reduced, which groups of potential migrants might be targeted, or how big the cut in numbers might be. Officials said there were no plans beyond an intention to “moderate” the flow.

The prime minister said the government understood public concerns about the level of immigration, and promised to shore up the attractions of citizenship in response to claims it confers few useful benefits that are not available to permanent residents.

However, Mr Lee also said that a “sustained, calibrated inflow” of immigrants was the only way for Singapore to maintain its international competitiveness, adding “Singapore will need new immigrants for the indefinite future”.

Trading Places: Migration in the Crisis

The economic downturn has inevitably hit migrant workers hard. Here, reporters from the FT’s foreign bureaux investigate the plight of migrants from Poland and the US to Brazil and China, to see which groups are returning home and which are finding innovative ways to survive the downturn abroad.

About 3.2m of Singapore’s 4.8m people are citizens, according to the government statistical service’s 2008 estimates, with a further 478,000 living in the island state as permanent residents. About 1.2m foreign workers without permanent residency make up 25 per cent of the population.

This compares with just 312,000 foreign workers without permanent status in 1990, who then accounted for 10 per cent of a total population of just over 3m.

Permanent residents cannot vote, are not eligible for some benefits and tax concessions available to citizens, and cannot purchase subsidised government-built housing. However, they are not required to do two years’ national service, although their male children are.

Concern about the influx of foreigners – many of whom are relatively unskilled migrants from Indonesia and mainland China – has mounted as the economy has slowed in the face of the global financial crisis. The government is forecasting that the economy will contract by 4 to 6 per cent this year.

Contributors to one popular blogging site listed a range of complaints on Wednesday, including claims that foreigners had pushed up residential property prices. However, some also defended immigration as a means of accessing essential skills.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

ST: Past in posters

Past in posters

Excerpt: The show, Coping With Vulnerability: The First 50 Years. Posters From Our Past, will be a merry trip down memory lane for many, but in its own graphic way charts five decades of self-governance and the changes in society along the way. COPING WITH VULNERABILITY: THE FIRST 50 YEARS. POSTERS FROM OUR PAST Where: Basement 1, National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street When: Till Oct 15, 10am to 9pm daily (closed on public holidays) Info: www.mysingapore.sg === Sep 12, 2009

The nation's growth through 50 years of public education posters is on show at the National Library

By deepika shetty

Singapore's story has been told in books, films, photographs and maps. Get set for a new way of framing its history: through posters. If you Stopped At Two, or actually did cut your long hair, or still think of a camel when you save water, it is due to the influence of public education posters over the years. Now, these posters with their quaint pictures and earnest messages are, for the first time, the subject of a free exhibition that opened last week at the National Library Building. The show, Coping With Vulnerability: The First 50 Years. Posters From Our Past, will be a merry trip down memory lane for many, but in its own graphic way charts five decades of self-governance and the changes in society along the way. About 300 posters produced by the Government and its agencies make up the show, organised by the National Resilience Division of the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts and the National Archives of Singapore. A 'poster boy' for the impact the posters had on society is musician Jatt Ali, 53. The Long Hair poster with the tag line: Males With Long Hair Will Be Attended To Last, has some hair-raising memories for him. The authorities at that time associated people with long hair with hippies and drug addicts. Jatt tells Life!: 'This is from the 1970s. I had long hair and each time I went to the post office, I was served last. People took these posters seriously. 'Once I was even picked up during a police ambush in the Peninsula Plaza area and ended up missing the show I was meant to perform at. Together with 20 other long-haired boys my age, I was locked up for 12 hours. My parents made a lot of noise after that and kept asking me to cut my hair, but I never did it.' Arts impresario Robert Liew, 60, too, recalls the poster. He says: 'We equated long hair with individualism. The Government equated it with undesirable Western influence, primarily drug consumption. 'There was a fair amount of consternation, but before things came to head, no pun intended, it was all over, the drug threat abated and the length of one's hair returned to the domain of fashion.' Sociologist Paulin Tay Straughan, 46, points out that beyond the obvious and in-your-face messages, these posters tell an important story. 'My mother was a nurse in the Family Planning Department and I pretty much grew up with the Stop At Two message. Things were so much simpler then. The fact that we have to use fancy effects, new media and phrase our messages cleverly now shows how far we have advanced as a nation.' History lesson She adds: 'I know some of these posters seem like a real blast from the past and are extremely amusing. But they also show how Singaporeans did not question as much in the early days. Having survived the war, all people wanted was stability. They had full faith in their lawmakers and there was no cynicism.' The trials and tribulations of the early days Dr Straughan refers to is something the exhibition organisers want viewers to reflect on. Supplementing the posters are news clippings, archival photographs and illustrations. The exhibition is divided into four sections with an introduction showcasing how different countries and governments employ posters as a simple and effective means of communication. From there, its three sections touch on issues of Water, Public Health and Internal/ External Threats. Collectively, these posters explore the many challenges Singapore has faced over the years, from communism to communalism, the lack of water resources, exposure to infectious diseases and transnational terrorism post 9/11. Dr K. Unnikrishna Menon, 59, director of the ministry's National Resilience Division, calls the exhibition a 'logical progression'. Two years ago, the ministry organised an exhibition on Infectious Diseases, Past, Present And Future to educate Singaporeans on the threat of pandemics such as Sars and avian flu. Before that was another exhibition, The Changing Faces Of Terrorism. Dr Menon says of the latest show: 'The idea is to get people to pause and reflect and ponder on the eventful journey of 50 years, and the amazing advances we have made. So many Singaporeans take these for granted. 'The posters serve as visual records of our culture and evolution.' Artist and curator Alan Oei, 33, who is working on a project based on posters in the 1970s, says the show reflects a significant part of Singapore's history. He says: 'Sometimes you wonder why Singaporeans expect the Government to do everything for them, and here you have the answer - because we have always been told what to do and what values to aspire to. 'I grew up with lots of posters, which were more campaigns than simple messages. There are still plenty of campaigns, but the messages have become a lot more sophisticated and subtle. The in-your-face kind of approach is gone.' deepikas@sph.com.sg

=== 1970S CONCERNS MALES WITH LONG HAIR WILL BE ATTENDED TO LAST Iconic. It bluntly spells out the official stand on long hair. Men with long hair would be served last. You can laugh about it now, but things were dead serious then. Apart from being served last, male artists with long hair were not allowed to appear on television. TWO IS ENOUGH In 1966, the National Family Planning Campaign was launched and the Government embarked on a Stop-At-Two policy with the slogan: Girl Or Boy - Two Is Enough. The Government feared that unchecked population growth could strain the country's limited resources. At the same time, Singaporeans preferred boys. This Two-Girl poster, as it was called, was meant to highlight that two children, of either sex, were enough. WATER ISSUES SAVE WATER (undated) A camel grins and bears the message of water conservation. It is simple, it is sweet and it drives the point home. CHILD IN A PAIL POSTER (1980s) Things become a little more subtle. A child in a pail raises issues about water conservation. SECURITY ISSUES PROTECTING SINGAPORE DAY AND NIGHT (1983) OUR ARMED FORCES. BECAUSE A GENERATION'S EFFORTS CAN BE WIPED OUT IN DAYS (1983) Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. These posters produced by the Singapore Armed Forces and the Ministry of Home Affairs drive home the point. WHAT WILL YOU DEFEND? (2009) Slick look and a clever question. Produced by NEXUS (Mindef) as part of the Total Defence Campaign, this latest in the line shows how posters and their underlying messages have evolved over the last 50 years. PUBLIC HEALTH STOP THE HORROR WITH SOAP AND WATER (2009) Produced by the Health Promotion Board, there were complaints when these hard-hitting posters were put up at some bus shelters near primary schools. The board removed the posters and explained that its research had shown that people did not cite handwashing as a way to protect themselves from flu. This poster aimed to show how germs can be present on hands and that handwashing with soap and water would reduce their number - and the likelihood of serious infections.

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

FT: Driving social change for profit in South Africa

Driving social change for profit in South Africa

By Richard Lapper

Published: September 6 2009 18:47 | Last updated: September 6 2009 18:47

There is a Rolls-Royce, a Maserati, an Aston Martin and a couple of Porsches, but it is the Bugatti Veyron that occupies pride of place in the collection of fast cars owned by Sizwe Nxasana, the chief executive of FirstRand, the South African financial services group.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lex: South Africa - Aug-18

Analysis: Deft amid difficulties - Aug-13

Millionaire minister to help S African poor - Aug-04

New S Africa police commissioner appointed - Jul-30

Rebellion of South Africa’s forgotten - Jul-28

Mandela grandson eyes Africa deals - Jul-24

But the vehicles are models that line a shelf in the Johannesburg office of the first black South African to head one of the country’s big four commercial banking groups. And the 52-year-old Mr Nxasana is a very different kind of businessman to the politically well-connected black entrepreneurs well known for their lifestyles and powerful motors.  

While state-sponsored black empowerment and asset transfer policies have created an elite of “black tycoons”, Mr Nxasana came through the apartheid system as one of the country’s first black chartered accountants and has prospered in the largely white corporate world. His management record – at Telkom, the partly state-owned telecommunications concern, and since 2006, as head of FirstRand’s banking business – has won him plaudits. 

Although his ascent owes little to affirmative action, he is a firm believer in black empowerment policies – under which some R500bn ($65bn, €46bn, £40bn) of corporate assets have been transferred to black owners since 1994. He believes the real significance of his appointment is “a demonstration that the country is making progress in the area of transformation. [It is important] that my appointment acts as a catalyst for other corporates to do the same or even for other black people to have confidence in themselves that it is possible you can be appointed to a position like this”.

Leader with ambitious vision and an impressive record

Mr Nxasana’s vision might seem ambitious but he can point to an impressive record at Telkom, the state-controlled telecoms company, where he worked hard to make the operation more efficient as it adjusted to the realities of part privatisation.

The restructuring was “conflictive ... [but] to be honest we just had a few strikes and demonstrations. We negotiated redundancies – it was all approached in a very humane fashion,” he says. “We outsourced a lot of functions and protected people in their jobs.”

But Mr Nxasana also believes that the shake-up was necessary to empower new black managers in a company that was mostly dominated by whites when he took over.

Telkom, in fact, had 24 separate layers of management and no fewer than 63,000 staff when he was appointed. By the time he left, more than 33,000 workers had been laid off and 16 levels of administration removed.

“When you have so many layers it is so difficult to empower because you have to go through so many levels. It had major implications as to the way people saw their status,” he explains. “It slows down the process and creates frustrations.”

Telkom has stumbled into more difficult times recently, but few analysts lay the blame at Mr Nxasana’s door.

“He is in a league of his own,” says one observer who worked with him on the company’s stock market listing in 2003. “He is measured and not remotely arrogant.”

Speaking over a hastily assembled working lunch of grilled fish, fruit and cheese, Mr Nxasana is courteous and charming, as comfortable talking about his own humble background as he is about his plans for FirstRand.

His story might seem to exemplify the importance of individual drive and the possibility of social mobility. But this is not a perspective that Mr Nxasana shares. Indeed, his plans for FirstRand are influenced by a commitment to social change. Although improvement in operating performance and returns is a priority, it is one that sits alongside a belief in the necessity of black empowerment. For Mr Nxasana, the two objectives are intertwined. “The goal of transformation is complementary to the goal of growing the business,” he says.

All the more so in the light of a decision announced in June to refocus the bank’s activities on Africa and the region’s growing trade and investment links with India and China. The bank’s domestic commercial clients are increasingly attracted to these growth markets and Mr Nxasana believes there is also considerable potential to exploit Africa’s own emerging markets, either alone or alongside strategic partners such as the China Construction Bank Group, with whom an alliance was formed in July.  

At home in South Africa there are emerging markets, too. Mr Nxasana sees the rise of a black middle class as crucial for the group’s prospects. “Just anecdotally, if you look at WesBank [an asset-based financing business] in the early 2000s, only about 5-8 per cent of new business came from the black population in terms of financing motor vehicles,” he says. “Today, that number is close to 40 or 45 per cent. Therefore, there’s been a significant growth over the last couple of years of the contribution that comes from the black population into the economy. And the same applies to home loans or other parts of our business.”

 Moreover, Mr Nxasana intends to build on FirstRand’s reputation for providing finance for black empowerment deals. “It is important that black people get an opportunity to create wealth for themselves,” he says.  

Although none of this is new, Mr Nxasana has already indicated that the focus will be pursued more single-mindedly. In the past, heads of the group’s subsidiaries enjoyed considerable leeway in deciding their priorities, a looseness that allowed the bank to make loss-making investments in areas such as Japanese and German property.  

Mr Nxasana now says that strategic priorities will be determined at the centre. “It is a much tighter definition and a lot more co-ordinated across the business units,” he says. 

Part of this strategy includes bringing in more black and Asian managers so that the group will better reflect and understand the markets in which it is operating. Although this will take time, Mr Nxasana says that efforts – such as the provision of grants to black students studying chartered accountancy and other financial disciplines – has picked up speed and been given more focus since his arrival. And despite dipping profits, the amounts contributed to social responsibility programmes have increased.  

More generally, Mr Nxasana is insistent about the need to increase the skills and knowledge of black students, whose under-performance in areas such as maths and science is a source of acute concern to the government. And he believes that vernacular languages such as Xhosa and Zulu, which millions of South Africans speak at home, and poor teaching are a big part of the problem. “[These] languages are not that good at handling the abstract concepts of trigonometry or algebra,” says Mr Nxasana.  

Few business leaders are in a better position to make that judgment. In the 1960s and 1970s, when he was growing up in KwaZulu-Natal, Mr Nxasana says he was able to surmount these obstacles because his father was a science teacher. The answer today though could lie in the development of more dual-language teaching materials, an option that a charity – which Mr Nxasana chairs – is exploring. “We really [need to] sort out the schooling system so that we can, as a country, produce a lot more skills in engineering, in accountancy, in marketing, and in medicine and so on,” he says. “Language is the biggest impediment by far.”  

These changes will not happen overnight but Mr Nxasana’s experience has taught him the virtue of patience. His time at Fort Hare University coincided with an upsurge of violent protests among black youth, and teaching was frequently interrupted. “There were running battles with the police and tear gas everywhere,” he says. “At the end of the first year we ended up in prison.”

In spite of recent unrest, South Africa is today much more stable politically, a context that can help advance the kind of economic and social changes that have accompanied Mr Nxasana’s own ascent.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Skipping Spouse to Spouse Isn't Just a Man's Game

September 1, 2009

Basics

Skipping Spouse to Spouse Isn’t Just a Man’s Game

By NATALIE ANGIER

In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. Unless forced to because some bounder has abandoned her, why would any sane woman choose another trot down the aisle — for another Rachael Ray spatula set? Spare me extra candlesticks, I’m a one-trick monogamist.

Yet in a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man’s game, finessed by him and foisted on her. To the contrary, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, among the Pimbwe people of Tanzania, whose lives and loves she has been following for about 15 years, serial monogamy looks less like polygyny than like a strategic beast that some evolutionary psychologists dismiss as quasi-fantastical: polyandry, one woman making the most of multiple mates.

In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of wifetime total.

Provocatively, the character sketches of the male versus female serialists proved to be inversely related. Among the women, those with the greatest number of spouses were themselves considered high-quality mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew. Among the men, by contrast, the higher the nuptial count, the lower the customer ranking, and the likelier the men were to be layabout drunks.

“We’re so wedded to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women won’t, that women are victims of the game,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic situation goes up and down.”

The new analysis, though preliminary, is derived from one of the more comprehensive and painstaking data sets yet gathered of marriage and reproduction patterns in a non-Western culture. The results underscore the importance of avoiding the breezy generalities of what might be called Evolution Lite, an enterprise too often devoted to proclaiming universal truths about deep human nature based on how college students respond to their professors’ questionnaires. Throughout history and cross-culturally, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, “there has been fantastic variability in women’s reproductive strategies.”

Geoffrey F. Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, agreed. “Evolutionary psychology and anthropology really need to take women’s perspective seriously in all its dimensions,” Dr. Miller said. “You can construe sequential relationships as being driven by male choice, in which case you’d call it polygyny, or by female choice, in which case you’d call it polyandry, but the capacity of women across cultures to dissolve relationships that aren’t working has been much underestimated.”

Pimbwe culture has been too disrupted over the years by colonialism and government interference to serve as a quaint museum piece of how our ancestors lived, but the challenges the people face are more survival-based than how to get your child into an elite preschool program. The Pimbwe live in small villages, have few possessions and eke out a subsistence living farming, fishing, hunting and gathering. Virtually all Pimbwe get married at least once, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, and they do it without the blessing of judge, priest or Las Vegas. “Marriage is not formalized with any specific set of rituals,” she said, “and marriages break up by one or another partner leaving.”

Nor is there much formal sexual division of labor. “In terms of farming, men and women do pretty much the same tasks,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “The men will cook, do a lot with the kids.”

Unlike in the West, where men control a far greater share of resources than women do, or in traditional pastoral societies like those found in the Middle East and Africa, where a woman is entirely dependent on the wealth of her husband and in divorce is not entitled to so much as a gimpy goat, Pimbwe women are independent operators and resourceful co-equals with men.

This does not mean that mothers can go it alone, however. Again in contrast to the contemporary West, childhood mortality remains a serious threat, and it takes the efforts of more than one adult to keep a baby alive. A good, hardworking husband can be a great asset — and so, too, may his relations. The evolutionary theorist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy proposes that one reason the offspring of much-marrying Pimbwe women do comparatively well is that the children end up with a widened circle of caretakers. “The women are lining up more protection, more investment, more social relationships for their children to exploit,” she said. “A lot of what some people would call promiscuous I would call being assiduously maternal.”

The goose, like the gander, may find it tempting to wander if it means that her goslings will fly.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Shopping habits of China's 'suddenly wealthy'

Shopping habits of China’s ‘suddenly wealthy’

Published: August 21 2009 14:41 | Last updated: August 21 2009 14:41

In the past decade China has become the workshop for the world, its low-cost labour force toiling in factories to churn out cheap goods destined for western consumers. Many of the raw materials needed to feed this industrial juggernaut have to be imported from other countries and today China is the biggest driver of markets in commodities such as copper, oil and iron ore.

But as well as a multitude of low-paid factory workers, the country’s manufacturing boom has also ­created a large and growing number of baofahu – literally, the “suddenly wealthy”. Their shopping habits and changing tastes are reshaping global trade flows at the other end of the production chain.

The rise of the Chinese consumer has ­provided unprecedented opportunities for enterprising global corporations and many now look to the country as their biggest growth market for the indefinite future. And while China’s nouveaux riches share many of the tastes of their counterparts in any other part of the world, there are also a number of customs and cultural legacies that have ­created new markets for ­products that have little value elsewhere. This has encouraged global companies to invest an increasing amount of time and money in understanding what makes the Chinese customer special and how best to market or customise products.

In some cases, traditional Chinese tastes, combined with the explosion in wealth during the past decade, have created a rapacious and unsustainable call for the body parts of endangered species. The manufacture of ­traditional delicacies, ornaments and medicinal ingredients has helped to cut swathes through populations of sharks, elephants, seahorses and other species across the world – and that demand is only expected to increase.

Jamil Anderlini, FT deputy Beijing bureau chief

. . .

Big cars, flashy cars

In the US, cars need giant cup-holders, but in China, it’s chauffeurs that are de rigueur. So when Porsche recently decided to launch a four-door sedan in the midst of financial Armageddon, it chose to do so in China – perhaps the last place on earth where anyone still has RMB2.5m (£200,000) to spend on a chauffeur-driven sports car.

At the Shanghai auto show in April, the Porsche Panamera – which offers the ample legroom required by China’s back-seat-riding bosses – premiered alongside the Geely GE, otherwise known as the Baby Rolls-Royce (much to the displeasure of the real Rolls-Royce). Then came news that China plans to buy Hummer and make it greener. China’s love affair with big, flashy autos is clearly just beginning.

The newly wealthy everywhere love to flaunt their money, but China’s rich are even more shameless than most: cars are not a means of locomotion for the affluent Chinese, they are a symbol of success, status and the naked power of the internal combustion engine over the bicycle or pedestrian.

According to Friedhelm Engler, director of design for GM’s Shanghai-based Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center, cars in China are all about “face”. He says the bulky, “three-box” shape that is still overwhelmingly popular is deeply embedded culturally in a country where the rich traditionally rode in palanquins. To western eyes, that makes many Chinese cars look old-fashioned, especially on the futuristic streets of Shanghai, with its space-age skyscrapers. And parking such cars – not to mention parking a “Baby Rolls” – is a nightmare in the city’s congested, narrow streets.

China needs smaller cars, and some younger consumers are leaning toward hatchbacks; but in a country where grandpa or dad is often footing the bill, four doors still often win out over five (not least because grandpa or dad may not know how to drive, so they rely on the younger generation to squire them around at weekends in the three-box). This is a world where the young can start their motoring life with a Buick, not a 2CV or Beetle; Buicks are more popular in China than they have been in the US for decades.

But western car manufacturers are betting that things will change, as China’s budding love affair with the automobile matures. The country is on track to become the world’s largest auto market this year – several years ahead of expectation – and car styles could be transformed at the speed of light. “Chinese consumers are used to moving quickly, from no TV, to a flatscreen,” says Engler. Their auto style may be dowdy today – but in China, tomorrow is always just around the corner.

Patti Waldmeir, FT Shanghai correspondent

. . .

Gold

China loves gold in all its forms: as a reserve currency, jewellery, an investment – even gold that is not real at all, or “virtual gold”, the internet commodity used as currency in online games such as World of Warcraft. The Chinese government is trying to crack down on trade in virtual gold, which is “farmed” by online gamers in China and sold to online gamers in the first world.

But when it comes to the real stuff – gold jewellery and gold bullion, for either adornment or investment – trade in China has risen sharply. Beijing recently revealed that it had been secretly buying gold for years in order to diversify its foreign reserves, and had almost doubled its bullion holdings. But they are not the only ones: the rising tide of wealth among middle-class Chinese has made China the second-largest gold jewellery market in the world since 2007, behind only India. Sales of gold and silver jewellery in China rose by an astounding 28.7 per cent in May year on year – proof, if any more were needed, that Chinese consumers have certainly not stopped spending money during the financial crisis. Total gold demand in China last year was nearly 400 tonnes, up by 21 per cent from 2007.

But Chinese people like their gold purer than their western counterparts: 24 carat, rather than 18 carat. The reasons for that, says Shi Heqing, gold analyst at Beijing Antaike Information, are partly historical: “Chinese people have gone through several wars in the last century, and the memory of those is still fresh, so they like secure ways of keeping their money. In the west, people seem to use gold more for decoration or beautification.”

The recent rollercoaster ride in the mainland stock market – which at one point last year had fallen by 70 per cent from its 2007 height, but has since crawled back to half the peak level – has also prompted more investment interest in gold in bullion form, gold market analysts say.

Mr Yu, a 55-year-old antiques trader in Shanghai who declined to give his first name, says he bought 500g of gold in 2007 and increased his holding to 2,000g at the end of last year. “I know people who are still buying stocks at this moment … but gold may be better for people my age who are more risk-averse.”

Or as Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research in Shanghai, puts it: “In China, the banking system has only recently become stable. Chinese people like gold: you can always melt it down and it’s easy to carry.”

Patti Waldmeir, with additional reporting by Yan Jin, former FT Shanghai news assistant

. . .

Barbie

No one knows more about shopping than the women in the Shanghai typing pool: all those one-child babies have grown up into over-indulged 20-somethings with office jobs and 100 per cent disposable income. Their parents or grandparents pay for rent, food, healthcare and every other human need; all the rest goes on clothes, shoes, make-up and … Barbie?

Mattel is banking on Shanghai’s girlie-girls to revive its flagging fortunes. The biggest Barbie store in the world recently opened on the city’s Huai Hai Zhong Lu shopping street, where all six floors are infused with the spirit of that 1960s model of female perfection, the blonde and cinch-waisted doll whose brand must rank as one of the greatest successes in the history of world marketing.

But in China, Mattel is breaking that brand mould in a big way: Barbie is supposed to transform herself from a doll into a lifestyle. Nearly a whole floor of the store is devoted to Barbie clothing in grown-up sizes – exorbitantly priced sequined tops that my American eight- and nine-year-old girls would not be caught dead in because Barbie (to them) is a little kid thing. But Shaun Rein of China Market Research says “cute sexy” is what the typing pool wants, and judging from the huge popularity of the Hello Kitty character in that age group, it might just work.

Jinky Gu, spokeswoman for the Shanghai store, has another perspective altogether. “Chinese parents won’t stop investing in their children’s education even during the economic crisis.” The notion that Barbie is an educational toy might horrify the feminists among us, but it just might work among the stiletto-heeled Shanghainese. It would not be the first time that a jaded western brand got a new lease of life in China.

Patti Waldmeir, FT Shanghai correspondent

. . .

Spirits and fine wine

Shanghai White is the latest product offering from Diageo, the UK drinks business behind such brands as Johnnie Walker and Guinness, and its launch this summer gave the world a glimpse of how the tastes of China’s new rich are changing the liquor landscape.

Shanghai White is being marketed as premium vodka but it is produced in a venture with a Chinese baijiu distillery, combining the distilling process of both vodka and baijiu. The “but” in there is because baijiu is the national firewater in China, with a taste sometimes described as a mixture of tequila and dirt.

Of the roughly five billion litres of spirits consumed every year in China, the vast majority is baijiu; the combined consumption of all foreign spirits is estimated at less than 1 per cent of the total. The allure of such a large market has convinced Diageo that it needs to adjust its product line.

In the wine market, meanwhile, bottles of Château Lafite and Louis XIII are indispensable accoutrements for display in the gleaming new mansions of China’s super-rich, although such badges of wealth are more likely to be seen as investments. The cachet of ordering an expensive bottle also still far outweighs the pleasure derived from drinking it, and Chinese nightclubs are filled with wealthy people ordering top-shelf cognac then mixing it with gallons of sweet, green-tea-flavoured soft drinks.

Only around 5 per cent of grape wine consumed in China is currently imported but this is changing and at numerous recent European wine auctions the winning bidder has been Chinese. While European winemakers have not yet contemplated changing their products to suit Chinese tastes, the marketing strategies of wine dealers are already shifting eastward.

Jamil Anderlini, FT deputy Beijing bureau chief

. . .

Ivory

For more than 7,000 years, Chinese artisans have been crafting elephant ivory. Favoured by the Imperial household as far back as the Qing dynasty (1680), ivory has an illustrious reputation and an association with the wealthy and elite. But in 1989, the trading of ivory was banned worldwide through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), after more than half of Africa’s 1.3 million elephants were poached in a single decade. And yet, with a carving trade established in antiquity and a burgeoning middle class who, for the first time, can afford to buy ivory, China remains its biggest importer.

As Asian elephant herds dwindle, African elephants have become the only source of ivory. In late 2008, Cites authorities allowed China to bid with Japan for tusks from official stockpiles – consisting of ivory collected from elephants that had died a natural death – in four southern African countries. In an open declaration of a continuing demand, 12 Chinese traders bought 62 tonnes at an average price of $144 per kilo. Since this legal purchase, more than 11 tonnes of illegal African ivory have been impounded en route to China.

Elephant poaching largely takes place in central Africa, where poverty and political instability are rife. Chronic unemployment, the availability of firearms and corruption all facilitate the illegal ivory trade. These regions are also home to unregulated domestic ivory markets, where carved items are bought and sold. According to ivory expert Esmond Martin, the majority of buyers are Chinese. In a scramble for Africa’s minerals and resources, the continent has seen a recent influx of Chinese workers – a presence that is visibly reflected in the illegal retailing of ivory. On a recent trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Martin recorded 1,433 items of ivory openly displayed in the city’s main streets and central market. Among these were 149 pairs of freshly carved ivory chopsticks, selling for $16 each – in sharp contrast to a Chinese retail price of $139 – and signature stamps and jewellery. All of these items were small enough to potentially smuggle through customs.

Martin had previously estimated that 4,900 to 12,000 elephants from central Africa were killed each year to supply tusks to the craftsmen of Africa, China and Thailand. Conservationists are deeply concerned. According to Barbara Maas, CEO of Care for the Wild International: “With the number of Chinese nationals resident in Africa rising, and poaching on the increase, the frontline between supply and demand for ivory is now perilously close, with a disastrous outcome for elephants.”

Rose Gamble, freelance journalist

. . .

Dairy

The Chinese have become the second-biggest consumers of milk globally, after Indians. Demand has been helped by Beijing bombarding the populace with health messages about the benefits of dairy, by urbanites adopting more western diets and by rising incomes. Dairy consumption in China has doubled since 2000, and reached some 30 million tonnes in 2007, according to Rabobank, the food- and agriculture-focused bank.

International dairy producers got a further boost last year in the form of China’s milk and infant formula contamination scare, which led to two death sentences for men involved in deliberately tainting the country’s milk supply with the chemical melamine. “China’s milk powder imports have more than doubled since the melamine crisis,” says Tim Hunt, senior dairy analyst for Rabobank. “It played a huge role in shoring up market prices for internationally traded products in the first half of 2009.”

Nevertheless, at just 22kg per head each year, China’s dairy consumption falls well short of wealthier Asian countries such as Japan (where people eat some 75kg of milk, cheese, ice cream and yoghurt each year) and is piddling next to European Union residents, who consume 223kg each year. Still, foreign dairy groups see potential in the Chinese market. Although consumption fell in the wake of the melamine scare, it is expected to return close to pre-crisis levels by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, MilkLink, the UK dairy co-operative, this year became the first British cheese maker to export Stilton to China, targeting urban Chinese as well as western expats. The company’s cheeses, which will soon include English cheddar, are being sold in supermarkets along the country’s east coast, including branches of Tesco and Wal-Mart. Simon Mercer, head of export at The Cheese Company, part of MilkLink, claims natural cheeses will be the next big growth story in China’s dairy sector, a forecast backed up by research group Zenith International. It says cheese consumption, currently less than 4 per cent of the country’s dairy market, will rise alongside the expansion of fast food chains such as Pizza Hut and McDonald’s.

As the dairy sector grows, Mercer forecasts China will “suck in” imports, but warns that the UK – where milk production is in decline – is not in a position to meet demand.

Jenny Wiggins, FT consumer industries correspondent

. . .

Dried seahorses

The aphrodisiac counter is always the most arresting section in the menageries that are Chinese medicine shops. Among the eyes of newts and toes of frogs are mounds of dried seahorses. In traditional Chinese medicine, consuming seahorses is thought to be beneficial for human kidneys, improving memory, reducing swelling, helping women give birth, treating arthritis and even curing breast cancer. But the most important function of the humble hippocampus is the treatment of impotence. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that seahorses are the only known vertebrate species for which males rather than females give birth. Or maybe it’s just because they are so exotic.

For most of the past 1,000 years, only the richest Chinese patients could afford to include seahorses in their love potions. But with industrialisation, rapacious modern fishing techniques and China’s economic renaissance, dried seahorses have become widely available and are even sold pre-packaged by the dozen in supermarkets across the country.

Chinese consumers demand up to 250 tonnes of dried seahorses annually, but populations in China’s own territorial waters have been so depleted that only 10-20 tonnes a year can be sourced domestically. The remainder is imported from places such as Vietnam, the Philippines, India and Africa. And because dried seahorses weigh so little, 250 tonnes is equivalent to tens of millions of seahorses killed every year for Chinese aphrodisiacs – figures so enormous that even some in the Chinese medicine industry have started to voice concern that this precious ingredient will soon be fished into extinction.

The obvious answer? Farming seahorses. But attempts to do so on a commercial scale have so far had little success.

Jamil Anderlini, FT deputy Beijing bureau chief

...............................................................................

“Penny pinching, ruthless, suspicious shoppers”

Hail the Chinese consumer, putative saviour of the global economy, writes Sameena Ahmad. China is still growing, at an enviable 8 per cent clip, and within that retail sales are rising by 15 per cent and more each year. The country now boasts more millionaires than the UK and glossy malls to serve them are springing up even in tawdry third- and fourth-tier cities. Parched of profits at home, a growing number of multinational corporations are betting on China’s billion-strong army of shoppers to bail them out and the rest of the world.

But in order to sell successfully to the Chinese, you have to understand them – and too many international companies (still) don’t. While the country is growing richer rapidly, the absolute numbers remain relatively small. Total consumer spending in China reached $1,700bn in 2007, according to the most recent figures available, compared with $12,000bn in the US. In new research on the Chinese consumer to be published next month, McKinsey, the management consultancy, classifies just two million households out of a population of 1.3 billion as “wealthy” and that is based on fairly modest annual earnings of more than $30,000. The mass middle class is certainly growing and numbers some 70 million urban households, but these still earn just $5,000-$10,000 a year. That buys western shampoo, Ikea furniture and a television, but not many cars or diamonds.

The current healthy growth in retail sales is also not as good as it looks. Government purchases at retail stores are included in the figures and in many cities, including Beijing, the government has also been helping indirectly by handing out vouchers to finance purchases of anything from computers to weddings. The big spender in China, in years past and even more so today, is the state: private consumption as a percentage of gross domestic product has fallen from 60 per cent in 1968 to 36 per cent last year and could be as low as one-fifth in 2009 as the government ramps up capital investment.

In fact, the Chinese, who already have a world-beating savings rate of nearly 40 per cent of their income, tend to become more frugal when times are tough. As bank deposit rates decline, most of us spend more. The Chinese tend to stash away even greater sums to make up for the lost interest. The reason for this conservatism is the lack of a social safety net in China – citizens have to provide for their own medical care, old age and possible unemployment.

This makes them “penny pinching, ruthless, suspicious shoppers”, says Tom Doctoroff, north Asia director of advertising agency JWT and a writer on Chinese consumer trends. In a recession this behaviour only grows worse. “The downturn has made people keener on finding the cheapest deal,” says Yuval Atsmon, an associate principal in McKinsey’s Shanghai office. Even when they can easily afford it, buying a PC typically involves six visits to a store, and more often than not, customers will wait six months before making their decision after consulting blogs, online comparison sites and – the most important source of information in China – friends and family. Sales of copycat mobile phones, with all the functions of top models but a lower price, have soared from 17 million units in 2006 to 62 million units last year.

Brand consciousness is high, at least in the big cities, but brand loyalty is much lower than in the west. A price cut or good in-store promotion can often sway shoppers. And for cultural reasons, appealing to an individual’s taste or personal comfort typically doesn’t work, Doctoroff points out. A purchase either has to publicly signal status or wealth, like a flashy car does. Or provide a practical benefit: the latest craze in China is chocolate with added calcium, eaten not for pleasure but for the health benefits. The growing appeal of diamonds to women is not based on romance, but as a financial signal of a man’s commitment. Trust is another key issue in a country where so many consumer products are faked. Chinese mothers, for example, will pay 30 per cent more for safe baby milk – and this should favour foreign brands.

But foreign retailers and manufacturers have to cope with vast regional differences in demographics, language and culture that make it hard to plan a single marketing strategy – indeed treating China like a single country is usually a mistake. Natives of Zhejiang on the east coast like “toilet roll as rough as sandpaper”, the former head of Wal-Mart China liked to observe, a penchant thankfully absent elsewhere. Atsmon points out that cities even an hour apart can be entirely different: in southern Shenzhen, more than four-fifths of the population consists of migrant workers, mostly under the age of 35, who speak Mandarin and drink in bars. In nearby Guangzhou, migrants number just over a quarter, more people are older, enjoy watching Cantonese TV and go out to restaurants to drink with family members. Adequately addressing such niches requires an army of local suppliers, costly infrastructure and several layers of wholesalers and intermediaries. Even then, success may remain as elusive as it always has been: “No matter what you may be selling, your business in China should be enormous, if the Chinese who should buy your goods would only do so,” lamented Carl Crow, an advertising executive in Shanghai and author of the original book on how to sell to the Chinese … more than 70 years ago.

Sameena Ahmad is a business writer for The Economist

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Outside Edge: Korea's white van man is a herbivore

Outside Edge: Korea’s white van man is a herbivore

By Christian Oliver

Published: August 14 2009 18:43 | Last updated: August 14 2009 18:43

South Korean retailers are stocking their shelves and shop windows to cater to the tastes of “dried-fish woman” and “herbivore man”.

Even more than baby boomers and Generation X in the west, these young professionals have come to epitomise social change in Asia’s fourth-biggest economy, disconcerting their elders with their apathy towards traditional family values. They are the subject of television dramas and a forthcoming film.

Offending family-orientated Confucian values, neither dried-fish woman nor herbivore man is much interested in romance, part of the reason why Korea’s fertility rate is lamentably low.

It is almost inconceivable that the two might mate with each other. Herbivore man is a dandy metrosexual with an abhorrence of martial arts. He has no qualms about ordering wine or soft drinks instead of Korea’s fiery spirits, de rigueur among the old guard. Dried-fish woman is an impeccably dressed model employee, but after work she just wants to lounge on the sofa in a track suit, watch television and munch on dried squid.

Both are rebels from Korea’s crippling and prohibitively expensive treadmill of education, marriage and family, hailed as the be-all and end-all by the taciturn older generation. As consumers, they lavish money on their free time, buying DVDs, furniture and comfort food.

In a society that prides itself on being collectivist, they are suspicious loners. Herbivore man is particularly distasteful to the macho fathers and grandfathers whose values were forged in Korea’s agricultural and highly militarised past.

Both colourful names hail from Japan, source of so many Korean cultural trends. But Japan’s most haunted social group is the “firefly tribe”: harried businessmen who escape their wife and bawling baby by smoking alone on the balcony of their apartment blocks at night. So many of them seek this refuge that the glowing tips of their cigarettes appear like fireflies.

British soubriquets, such as the reactionary “White Van Man” of the 1990s, lack poetry in comparison.

North Korean defectors are the most shocked by the revolution in the peninsula’s youth, frequently warning that the soft-bellied Athens that is Seoul will be steamrollered by the Spartans sweeping down from the North. Herbivore men who wear cosmetics only reinforce their arguments.

But there’s no need to panic. South Korea has those little military necessities the North lacks, such as food, fuel and F-16s. Herbivores and dried-fish women are of interest precisely because they are newish minorities. Seoul is still awash with broody women and red-blooded males who like competitive business, strong booze and muddy football matches. There’s no need yet for the defence ministry to sponsor a show promoting the merits of “Carnivore Man”.

The writer, the FT’s Korea correspondent, is omnivorous

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

NY Times: Why 'Cheap' May Really Be Expensive

July 30, 2009

Letter from America

Why 'Cheap' May Really Be Expensive

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

NEW YORK — The other day, Ellen Ruppel Shell was listening on the radio to the chief executive of a Boston advertising company talk about how the economic downturn had forced him to impose pay cuts throughout the company he ran, including on himself.

“He talked about how he and his wife had looked over the family budget and figured they could manage a 10 percent pay cut, by rethinking some of their purchases and making a few adjustments, like delaying a vacation,” Ms. Ruppel Shell said. “This is in marked contrast with what the C.E.O. of an advertising company would have said a few years ago.”

Ms. Ruppel Shell was agreeing with a comment that I’d made, which is that it’s become acceptable, even fashionable, in the wake of the economic crisis, to go for a bit of conspicuous economizing, rather than conspicuous consumption.

“I think that people are now a little embarrassed to lead the high life, at least publicly,” Ms. Ruppel Shell said.

Ms. Ruppel Shell, a correspondent for The Atlantic and an occasional contributor to The New York Times, has written a book about what she calls “America’s dangerous liaison with Cheap,” and her timing, during the worst financial crisis in living memory, couldn’t be better.

But this is not a book that will tell you how to get by or to save money. Her book, “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture,” carries what might seem at first glance to be a counterintuitive message: Far from making economic sense, the American obsession with cheap goods — the craze for bargains, discounts, factory outlets and Wal-Mart — is actually bad both for the planet and the individual shopper.

“Cheap fuel, cheap loans, cheap consumer goods do not pave the road to salvation,” Ms. Ruppel Shell writes in her opening chapter. “The economics of Cheap cramps innovation, contributes to the decline of once flourishing industries, and threatens our proud heritage of craftsmanship.”

It has, in Ms. Ruppel Shell’s view, spiritual and moral consequences as well: “The ennoblement of Cheap marks a radical departure in American culture and a titanic shift in our national priorities,” she writes.

Cheap used to be associated with shoddiness and stinginess, an absence of style and craftsmanship. Now buying cheap is fashionable and even gives a sense of power. Factory outlets, she says, are America’s No.1 tourist destination. We buy without needing to because some things seem cheap. It’s a way, Ms. Ruppel Shell writes, “to wrestle control from the baffling mystery that is retail.”

Moreover, Ms. Ruppel Shell argues, there’s a pervasive social effect of Cheap, though one that’s generally invisible to the consumer, whose interest is making ends meet. The money saved has to come from somewhere or somebody: from cheap labor, materials procured without regard for the environment, or just the lower quality of the product itself. Nothing, in this sense, is really cheap. Somebody is paying somehow.

Needless to say, not everybody agrees with this. Indeed, Ms. Ruppel Shell’s ideas run directly contrary to the powerful, even dominant opposing idea, which is that globalization, economies of scale, and factories in China make many goods affordable for people who wouldn’t be able to afford them otherwise. Anyway, you can’t stop the engine of economic change, which now goes by the name globalization, any more than you could have stopped the automobile from replacing the horse and buggy a hundred years ago.

Still, clearly, if the frequency of Ms. Ruppel Shell’s appearances on talk radio and elsewhere are any indication, she has struck a nerve.

“I thought I would get a lot of anger,” she said. “I feared that the book might get misrepresented as an elitist argument that people should buy only high-end, expensive stuff, but that’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m arguing that the discount culture has created a false dichotomy between quality and price that has made quality goods unnecessarily expensive.”

There are several arguments here: for one, the discount marketers have developed an arsenal of techniques to make you buy what you think is cheap but might not actually be cheap. People don’t know the prices of most things, so they assume they’re getting bargains in stores like Wal-Mart, but sometimes they’re not.

Then there are the various psychological marketing ploys, the creation, for example, of what Ms. Ruppel Shell calls “cheap chic,” the concept that made the furniture retailer Ikea, about which Ms. Ruppel Shell is very critical, a global brand, with stores in 52 countries.

Wal-Mart “can’t escape its downscale connotations,” she writes, but through clever image-making, Ikea succeeded in making itself appear to be the place where “value and good values coexist.” In fact, according to Ms. Ruppel Shell, who visited Ikea’s headquarters In Sweden, Ikea relies on cheap labor and illegal forestry practices in Eastern Europe and Russia to keep its prices down, and keeping prices down is everything.

Objections can be raised to this as well. Probably, people in 52 countries haven’t been buying Ikea only because of its “sly, ironic commercials, its conspicuously progressive outlook,” but because they’ve found it to be a reasonable combination of style and price.

Ms. Ruppel Shell complains about Billy bookcases, one of Ikea’s signature products, on the ground that you have to keep your heavy books on the ends of the shelves to keep them from sagging, but I’ve had Billy bookcases for years, and they were affordable and mine haven’t sagged. (On the other hand, lots of Ikea stuff is, let’s face it, cheap and flimsy.)

Ms. Ruppel Shell has also been criticized in some reviews for having unconvincing solutions to the problem she so effectively describes. Her reply: “I don’t offer a policy solution because I don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t see price controls and/or tariffs as part of our future, nor do I think they should be. I believe in free trade — but to me, free trade does not necessarily have to entail stalking the globe for cheap resources and cheap labor made possible by the absence or near-absence of the rule of law. I believe in the power of knowledge to change behavior.”

E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com Tomorrow Akash Kapur on transformation, and ambivalence, in India.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

TIME: Will High-Heel-Friendly Streets Keep Seoul's Women Happy?

Wednesday, Aug. 05, 2009

Will High-Heel-Friendly Streets Keep Seoul's Women Happy?

By Veronica Zaragovia

Pedestrians in Seoul's Myungdong shopping district on Nov. 21, 2008

By 2010, Seoul's women should officially be happy — at least the ones with driver's licenses. In May, the city government started to paint 4,929 public and private parking places pink throughout the city, with thousands more slated to go under the brush next year. The pink parking spots, reserved for women drivers so they don't have to walk so far to work or the mall, are part of the South Korean capital's Women Friendly Seoul Project, an effort for the notoriously macho Asian city of more than 10 million to transform itself into a safer, more heel-friendly "space for women."

A nice idea, but the plan may end up reasserting South Korean women's secondary status more than boosting it. Led by Mayor Oh Se Hoon, the $104 million program launched in 2007 under the slogan "Happy Women, Happy Seoul," with a focus on mothers of young children and the unemployed. Assistant mayor of women and family policy affairs Cho Eun Hee says the program will be, among other things, helping to find work for jobless women, paving streets to make them high-heel friendly, building more women's public restrooms, improving lighting in public spaces, creating safe parks for women, expanding a women's taxi service and adding more public day-care centers. Cho says the project aims to eliminate "the inconveniences, anxiety and discomfort that women in Seoul experience on a daily basis." (See 10 things to do in Seoul.)

It's not that working women in South Korea couldn't use the help. Though South Korea is Asia's fourth largest economy, only about half of its women have full-time jobs; in June, nearly 10 million women were employed nationwide, according to the National Statistics Office, compared to almost 14 million men. In Seoul, many women work infamously long hours, with employers offering few systems to help working mothers keep a manageable balance between their jobs and families. "Because of the very high price of child-rearing in Korea, it may prove more economical to stay behind helping children to do better in the school," says Professor Chang Pil Wha of Seoul's Ewha Womans University. Finding a job after maternity leave can also be an uphill battle.

While Seoul's project may help women "worry less about harassment or violence," Chang says, "the question remains about how to share the household chores and responsibilities" so that women can more freely enter — and stay — in the labor market. Eunyoung Cho, a 25-year-old who will be leaving Seoul this fall to pursue a degree in economics at the University of California, Davis, also questions its efficacy, saying the project seems more political than personal. "The policies make the citizens feel that their mayor is doing something, but they do not feel the changes in their lives," Cho says. "President Lee Myung Bak got huge political fame during his term as the mayor of Seoul. He reformed the public transportation system and constructed a big park in the center of the city. I guess Mayor Oh wants to follow in President Lee's footsteps." (See pictures of Seoul.)

To be fair to the mayor, President Lee hasn't done much either to improve a better sense of gender equality in South Korea. In the 2007-08 Gender Empowerment Measure of the United Nations Human Development Report Office, South Korea ranked low at 64 out of 93 countries. James Turnbull, who writes about Korean gender issues in his blog, Grand Narrative, says that at an Emergency Economy Management Council meeting in January, Lee was quoted by the press as saying, "The most urgent issue on our hands is to create jobs for the heads of households." In other words: men. In 2008, Lee considered dissolving the government's Ministry of Gender Equality, established in 2002 to promote women's rights, into the Health and Welfare Ministry, a move that he backed off from when it ran up against criticism. (See 50 essential travel tips.)

Cho, the economics student, hopes to eventually return to South Korea as a professor, a position that would enable her to pursue a career and, one day, a family. But she knows that other Korean women may not be as lucky, and their needs aren't being met by a plan that accommodates shoe choice over equal opportunity in the workplace. "They are saying that they are doing many things for women, but we do not see any noticeable changes," she says. "They are wasting citizens' money out of the tax that they pay. We don't want pink parking spots." What South Korean women do want, says Cho, is to see more choices for child care so that they don't lose jobs to men when they have families. And a few more female taxi drivers wouldn't hurt either.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1914471,00.html

Telegraph UK: Chinese parents hope for daughters after glut of sons

Chinese parents hope for daughters after glut of sons

Expectant Chinese parents are for the first time more likely to hope their offspring will be a daughter rather than a son, turning their backs on decades of tradition.

By Veronica Chau in Shanghai

Published: 6:00AM BST 03 Aug 2009

The country has 32 million more young men than women Photo: GETTY

China's one-child policy has produced a calamitous glut of men, but an increasing number of families are now hoping their only child is a girl.

The country has 32 million more young men than women, a situation that is already leading to an increase in prostitution and sex crimes.

 

However, in the country's enormous cities, the huge cost of raising a son has meant that for many families, daughters now make more economic sense.

In Shanghai, government researchers questioned almost 3,500 prospective parents. Of those, more than 12 per cent said they were hoping for a boy, while more than 15 per cent wanted a girl.

Reversing the traditional preference for sons is a crucial issue for the Communist Party, which is dealing with the consequences of having millions of unmarried men. The latest population figures show there are still 120 boys born for every 100 girls.

Sons are seen as more valuable, especially in the countryside, because they have been traditionally responsible for caring for their parents in old age. Many families take advantage of cheap ultrasound tests and abortions to guarantee their one child is male.

However, the traditional roles are now being reversed in urban China. "The reality is that having a son or daughter makes no difference when parents need support. Unlike in rural areas, city residents are covered by social security," said Chen Youhua, a demography and sociology professor at Nanjing University.

"Besides which, daughters are much more thoughtful and caring than sons."

He added that China's gender imbalance had reached its peak and would slowly return to equilibrium.

Tough economic conditions, and the spiralling cost of living, has also helped diminish the appeal of male children.

In most marriages, it is the son's family which is required to buy a house for the couple - a ruinous expense in many cities. Property prices in China's major cities soared by as much as 60 per cent between 2007 and 2008, and are expected to rise another 10 per cent this year.

"I want my child to be a girl," said Yang Min, 32, an expectant mother in Shanghai. "Although I prefer boys, there are endless things to worry about, such as finding him a good school, helping him get a good job, and buying a house and a car for him. It's just too much trouble."

Li Qian, a 27-year-old secretary in a private bank, said the economic crisis had left parents with sons having to provide for two families, their own and their children's. "Many would-be parents want to have daughters to reduce their financial burden. Girls can marry rich husbands," she said.

Zheng Zizhen, the director of the Institute of Sociology and Population at the Guangdong Academy of Social Science, said although opinions are changing in the cities, the overall preference for men will only be shaken off by the "full and thorough coverage of social security and insurance, particularly in the countryside".

Prof Zheng said that families in areas such as Guangdong, which was one of the first regions to modernise, are already more pragmatic about dowries and house purchases.

"As China develops, traditional practices will eventually fade away," he said. "When that happens, there will be a preference for daughters generally because it is the women that stand by the bed and care for you in old age, not the men."

ST: Fresh food, fresh look

Aug 9, 2009

Fresh food, fresh look

Buying groceries at wet markets is no longer a dirty job as these places get spruced up in style

By Tay Suan Chiang

The Singapore institution - the wet market and hawker centre - used to be dark and smelly, but no longer. Now, they look cleaner, brighter and even have that designer touch. Three recently revamped markets boast just that. Geylang Serai Market opened last month after a 40-month, $18.2-million upgrading. Earlier this month, the popular Tekka Centre resumed business after a near 15-month revamp that cost $10.38 million. Joining them is the heartland market and hawker centre at Block 93 Toa Payoh Lorong 4, which was upgraded at a cost of $2.66 million over 11 months. The three markets and hawker centres were upgraded under the National Environment Agency's Hawkers Centre Upgrading Programme. The agency manages 110 markets and hawker centres. Since the upgrading programme's launch in 2001, 77 centres across the island have been spruced up. Other markets and hawker centres that are undergoing upgrading works include Block 270 Queen Street, Beo Crescent Market and Food Centre and Block 11 Telok Blangah Crescent. Ms Chan Wai San, the National Environment Agency's hawkers department director, says that through 'the upgrading of the physical infrastructure, cleanliness and hygiene standards of the centres are improved, which is increasingly important to patrons today'. She adds that the upgrading allows stallholders to stay competitive against other food businesses so that they can continue to provide a variety of produce at affordable prices. Among the recent three, Geylang Serai Market has a more distinctive facade now. Reflective of its location and heritage, the building has sloping roofs and Malay motifs to resemble an old kampung. The former one-storey market now has two floors, with the produce section on the first and cooked food and clothing stalls on the second. It also boasts modern necessities - escalators and a lift - so there is no need to climb stairs. That is especially useful when one is lugging bags of groceries. Other improvements made to the upgraded markets and hawker centres include wider aisles to handle crowds, handicap-friendly features such as ramps and new sanitary and plumbing pipes. More importantly, the ventilation and lighting system have improved too. Fans are installed on the walls and ceilings just outside the stalls to make shopping a more pleasant experience. Public relations account director Shen Jegathesan, who is in her 50s, has been going to Tekka Centre every Saturday morning for the last six years. Before the revamp, she says, the old market was smelly and dark. 'It was the fresh produce and great service that kept drawing me back,' she adds. She gives the revamped market the thumbs up. 'The stalls are so organised and there is more space to move about. The smell is gone and the place is so clean.' The revamp has also attracted new marketgoers, such as housewife Melissa Lee, 37. The Tanjong Katong resident used to buy her groceries from supermarkets. A recent visit to Geylang Serai Market turned her into a convert. 'The seafood and vegetable selection here is wider and the produce is fresher. Wet markets are now better than what I remember,' she says. 'There's so much buzz here and I can always bargain.' taysc@sph.com.sg

=== Geylang Serai Market at 1 Geylang Serai After a 40-month, $18.2-million upgrading, Geylang Serai now boasts modern facilities, better ventilation and higher hygiene standards. History This popular market was originally built in the 1960s before it was closed in 2006 for upgrading. It was originally a one-storey market and moved to a temporary site in 2006. It hit the headlines earlier this year when two people died after eating tainted Indian rojak from a stall there. Another 152 people fell ill. What's new A newly constructed market with sloping roofs and Malay motifs to resemble an old kampung. There is also a drop-off porch on the first level, with escalators and a lift to the second level. The toilet areas have fancy floral grilles. The wet market is on the first storey, while food and clothing stalls are upstairs. Well-known stalls Geylang Briyani Stall, 02-146, sells mutton and chicken briyani Eeh! Eeh! Nak Lagi, 02-120, sells Malay kueh; 'nak lagi' is Malay for wanting more Hajjah Mona Nasi Padang, 02-166. Be prepared for long queues at this nasi padang stall. To reflect the location and heritage of Geylang Serai Market, Malay motifs are used to decorate the spacious interior of the two-storey building (above). Besides escalators and lifts, improved features include wall fans in the hawker centre. What stallholders say 'I like the fans that have been installed outside the stalls, which help to keep the area cool. But construction for the overhead bridge is still ongoing, which makes the place dusty.' MS MALAN SURYANING SIH, 36, who owns a clothing stall 'The market is well-built. The aisles are more spacious than before. But the area around my stall tends to be dark in the evening, making it hard to shop.' MS B.B. DALLAR, in her 40s, owner of B B Spices What customers say 'The market is now cleaner. I've been here several times already, to eat and shop for groceries and clothes. My favourite food stalls are still around.' MS YATI SAPUAN, 26, a housewife 'The design of the market is very impressive. The high ceilings make it cool too.' MS HASLEEN SALLEH, 18, a student === Tekka Centre at Block 665 Buffalo Road History Originally known as Kandang Kerbau market, it moved to its present site in 1982. It was then called Zhujiao Centre but was later renamed Tekka Centre. Tekka got its name from Tek Kia Kha, Hokkien for 'foot of the small bamboo', as bamboo plants used to grow on the banks of the nearby Rochor Canal. What's new Escalators to the second storey where the clothing stalls are, new floor and wall tiles and new washing areas for customers. Well-known stalls Allauddin's Briyani, 01-232, famous for its fish briyani Chia's Vegetable Supply, 01-201, offers more than 100 types of vegetables M A Osman, 01-130, sells quality goat meat What stallholders say 'The stall area is now smaller, but the aisles are wider, making it easier for customers to walk around.' MADAM YEO HOON MOI, 61, owner of Lee Hoe Seafood 'The market is now brighter and cleaner than before. Even my customers have noted that my stall is now so beautiful.' MR JOHARI, 55, owner of Joe's Butchery What customers say 'The market is much cleaner now and I can still find my regular vegetable and fruit stalls.' MRS SUMA MURTHY, 67, a housewife 'Apart from the escalator, there doesn't seem to be much difference. We still need to climb a flight of stairs to get to the hawker centre.' MR THAMIL, 48, a regular visitor === 93 Toa Payoh Palm Spring Market at Block 93 Toa Payoh Lorong 4 History Built in the 1980s What's new The former two-storey market is now a single- storey one for easier access and better ventilation. Besides an updated facade, other changes include new floor and wall tiles and fans outside the stalls. Well-known stalls He Ji Yong Tau Foo, 01-60, a yong tau foo stall that is popular with the lunch crowd Wang Ji Hainanese Chicken Rice, 01-53, sells chicken rice and char siew rice Jian Fa Fish Ball Noodles, 01-35, a popular choice among the dinner crowd for its juicy fish balls What stallholders say 'The market is now neater and easy for customers to find the stalls. The ventilation is also much better than before.' MADAM KANG HWEE LENG, 44, owner of a floral stall 'The aisles between the produce stalls are now wider. The ceiling of my stall is now lower but thankfully, there are fans outside, so it is still cool.' MR TOH KHAI CHEW, 41, owner of a joss paper stall What customers say 'It's good that everything I need is just on one floor as I don't need to climb stairs anymore.' MR TONG AH MING, 78, a retiree 'I find the aisle between the food stalls and the tables too narrow. Once a queue forms, there's just no space to walk.' MADAM YEO LAY LING, 39, a housewife

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

FT: The appeal of miniature villages

Excerpt:

Miniaturisation is a recurring British cultural phenomenon. The richness of our children’s literature is unimaginable without it, from Gulliver’s Travels to Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows and The Borrowers. These are archetypal tales that play games with scale, humans exiled to tiny worlds or becoming playthings in the world of giants, or the tales of little people inhabiting miniature parallel worlds constructed from the detritus of our everyday existence.

===

The appeal of miniature villages

By Edwin Heathcote

Published: July 18 2009 01:36 | Last updated: July 18 2009 02:07

A visitor walks through Bekonscot model village

Just below the algae-specked surface of the moat, monstrous fish glide past Epwood Castle. These horrible, bloated carp have bulging eyes as big as the boulders beneath the castle walls. A Brobdingnagian bird flies by, its wings casting a shadow over a whole suburban street, and then lands in a patch of green. Elsewhere, hundreds of people have been frozen solid in their tracks, captured in a moment, while clouds of smoke rise from the roof of a burnt-out building.

This is not an apocalyptic film set but Bekonscot, the oldest miniature village in the world, which next month celebrates its 80th birthday. Opened by accountant Roland Callingham in his back garden in Buckinghamshire, this strange, static version of an English idyll has attracted nearly 15m visitors since 1929.

Bekonscot, squeezed between semis and a superstore in the pleasant dormitory town of Beaconsfield, is the most complete example of what appears to be a peculiarly English obsession, a whimsical cocktail of miniature villages, model railways and ornamental gardens. It is a second-hand picture of what life looked like in the Ladybird books of my schooldays.

Like most other model villages in England, it offers a snapshot of a bygone world of local shops, village greens, friendly bobbies, idyllic pubs and a perfect balance between town and country. However, the comforts of technology and the mechanisms of suburbanisation are all present: electric lights, steam trains; cars; delivery trucks; even an airport. There is a mine, a fishing village, a seaside town, a funfair, a zoo and that on-fire house, which is periodically extinguished by a static fire brigade. New models are added every year.

Miniaturisation is a recurring British cultural phenomenon. The richness of our children’s literature is unimaginable without it, from Gulliver’s Travels to Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows and The Borrowers. These are archetypal tales that play games with scale, humans exiled to tiny worlds or becoming playthings in the world of giants, or the tales of little people inhabiting miniature parallel worlds constructed from the detritus of our everyday existence.

The writer Will Self, a big fan of Bekonscot’s reduced reality, picks up on the theme in his druggy short story “Scale” in which the morphine-addicted protagonist lives beside the model village and is surprised to find a replica of his own house there, which he enters only to find another, yet smaller version, and so on. All Self’s works were recently reissued with jackets based on Liam Bailey’s photographs of blurry, scaleless figures taken at ground level at Bekonscot.

There are 17 other model villages in the UK open to the public. Some, like the one at Corfe Castle, capture a historic moment (before the town was destroyed in the civil war), others the moment they were built, like the beautiful village at Wimborne Minster, completed in 1951, which has become a curious mirror of the real and now far less picturesque town. All are the result of passionate hobbyists’ desire for completeness, for accuracy in the relentless search for miniaturisation.

Tim Dunn, 28, who works in online marketing, has long been involved with Bekonscot, having grown up locally, and still volunteers there. He is also an expert on the history of model villages. “The earliest model villages were very rural,” he says. “The first ones were in people’s gardens and they were about creating a vision of a rural England that never existed. They began in cottage gardens and their scale is appropriate to that. The buildings are vernacular, rural because that was also what was appropriate. Bekonscot began as a ‘Swiss village’ of a kind that was popular at the time in ornamental gardens.”

But aren’t most of the villages we see today suburban rather than rural or Alpine? “They are a product of their environment. The people who built the ones we see today lived in the suburbs and they tended to be built on a whim rather than with a masterplan, growing from a few houses into a village.” But there is also, Dunn proposes, an idealism, even utopianism at work. “There’s some evidence to suggest that Callingham built Bekonscot not to show how life had been but how it could be. It is a miniature version of the Garden City movement.”

This didacticism is highlighted in the correspondence between the two meanings of “model village”. There is the miniature and there is the exemplar. The latter group includes Saltaire in Bradford, the vision of Victorian factory owner and philanthropist Titus Salt. Now a Unesco World Heritage site, it is one of many utopian settlements built in response to the brutal conditions of the industrial world. Dame Henrietta Barnett’s posh Hampstead Garden Suburb in its frozen tweeness is the model of the Arts & Crafts fantasy .

These model villages remain a powerful part of the British psyche. But today we have returned to an even earlier, feudal model with Poundbury, built on Duchy of Cornwall land in Dorchester, Dorset, using the Prince of Wales’s principles on town planning, a paradigm of traditional values and design. It is, in its way, as weird as Bekonscot, a toy-town plaything blown up rather than reduced.

Sam Jacob, a British architect whose practice FAT makes wonderful buildings that look like joyful toys blown up to actual scale, is intrigued by model villages. “Modern landscapes can be alienating, seemingly indifferent to you as an individual,” he says. “By shrinking the town it changes the power relationship. They are a way of compressing reality into something more digestible and they allow you to get a sense of the whole society working. It’s a way of seeing and understanding how the world works. What is it that makes a place? What is it that makes a society? What makes us? It overcomes our alienation by giving us a god’s-eye perspective.”

God’s eye or Godzilla’s eye? There is something very strange about seeing children towering over houses and churches. Model villages may have been conceived in a spirit of nostalgia and affection but there is something undeniably creepy about the leap in scale from macro to micro. Even jovial Tim Dunn can’t help but agree: “There can be something Stepford Wives about it, the Village of the Damned.”

It is this uneasiness and sense of the sinister that has made the miniature a recurring motif in art. Last year Rachel Whiteread exhibited her impressive collection of second hand doll’s houses at the Hayward Gallery’s Psycho Buildings. Illuminated from inside but emptied of life and both decorated with and haunted by the remnants of former owners’ left-over wallpapers they glowed eerily in the dark gallery. “It’s a suburban vision of England,” she told me in a deadpan voice.

The London-based Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp makes landscapes that are densely populated by endless crowds of badly manufactured Statues of Liberty, Mickey Mice, Leaning Towers of Pisa, Smurfs and Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons. This teeming city is the contemporary, urban version, the global model village, a wonderful riot of outrageous difference and badly remembered, garish images. Vriesendorp, married to architect Rem Koolhaas (whose passion in architecture is, ironically, what he has termed “bigness”), fondly remembers taking their children to Bekonscot: “Children don’t really know about scale. Ours used to get down to the level of the houses on their hands and knees and imagine themselves part of it, just like boys get their heads right down on the floor to play with their cars, putting themselves into the perspective.” If there is a sense in which the model village is a peculiarly English phenomenon, deeply embedded in a particular idea of yearning for a romanticised past, there is, in fact, nothing particularly English about them – it is more that the English themselves would like to see this kind of eccentricity as unique and central to their being.

According to Will Self, “Bekonscot is a simulacrum of small town middle England, a timeless arcadia. It is a depiction of the sort of place Prince Charles would be happy for us all to live, a silver-wedding, commemorative-plate, biscuit-tin place.”

In fact, as the poster for the International Association of Miniature Parks at Bekonscot shows, this is a truly international phenomenon. What is compelling about the national variants is the distinct agenda that each brings to their interpretation of the theme. Mini-Europe in Brussels is an impressively, almost obsessively, detailed amalgam of European capitals, which are placed intimately close to each other, a closeness they never have in the nearby real parliament.

The Dutch mini-city of Madurodam in The Hague was conceived in part as a war memorial. After the completion of Schipol airport, it became the biggest construction project in the Netherlands.

These miniature villages almost exclusively concentrate on a banal version of tourist cliché or local nostalgia. The only modernist building in Bekonscot is an homage to Berthold Lubetkin’s spiralling concrete penguin pool (1934) in London Zoo. Dunn justifies this quite sensibly: “It’s much easier to build a tiny half-timbered cottage than a glass skyscraper. Also, all model villages are built by obsessives. A fixed date in the past gives them a focus.”

There was a brief moment in the mid-20th century when the first Futurama began to take off, most notably the futuristic vision of a potential city shown at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. This was a modernist fantasy of a 1960s of freeways and skyscrapers.

Do Bekonscot and the Futurama, built only a decade apart, tell us anything about ourselves, about our own cities? Self says, “The small scale is fascinating but also, when you look up close, you see how distorted these figures are. It also brings attention to the disparities in scale inherent in our own built environment. If you look closely at the models and the shop displays, then pull back from the small view, it all looks wrong, the scale of the grass, then trains. Our own cities are just as out of scale.”

Perhaps it is that combination of the ideal and the strange, the controlled and static miniature world and the huge and frightening changing world that draws generations of children and, perhaps more importantly, their parents, back to Bekonscot and its descendants. Ultimately, these model villages are a suburban riposte to the romanticism of the English garden with its follies, grottoes and fake ruins. Both refer to half-remembered, half-mythical, bucolic worlds, one of arcadia and the other of suburbia. “In some ways,” says Self, “the miniature is the archetypal artwork. In its own way even the Sistine Chapel is a miniature. I always refer to what Claude Lévi-Strauss said, ‘When we alter scale we sacrifice the sensible in favour of the intelligible.’”

Ultimately, that is what these miniature places do. They allow us, as in a dream, to step outside the everyday and perceive it instead from above. It then becomes something full of wonder, just as the most mundane and familiar landscape becomes mesmerically fascinating when seen from an aircraft. These tiny towns transform through scale and, through making everything artificial and strange, make it all fascinating again.

Bekonscot’s birthday celebrations are on August 5;www.bekonscot.co.uk

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture correspondent

..................................................

A close-up view of miniature art

Miniature art first became fashionable in the 1500s, when there was a vogue for painted portrait miniatures at Henry VIII’s court, writes Isabel Berwick. Five hundred years later, artists continue to find inspiration in tiny representations of people and places, and by playing with our notions of scale.

Willard Wigan’s ‘Nine Camels in the Eye of a Needle’

Willard Wigan is a British micro-sculptor, who makes incredible pieces so detailed and tiny they can be seen only under a microscope. His works include Henry VIII and his six wives sculpted within the eye of a needle, and a dressage horse and rider on a pinhead. Wigan has recently opened a permanent gallery in London and will speak at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford next week.
www.willard-wigan.com

Museum in a Shoebox is a new online project that mimics a real art museum, complete with café with model people in it and a model summer pavilion in the grounds.
Created by the Swedish artist Kristina Dalberg, it presents real and imaginary works by real and imaginary artists.
www.museuminashoebox.com

Charles LeDray, a New York-based artist, has a show called Men’s Suits featuring racks of hand-made, scaled down suits and other men’s clothes. The show, which runs until September 20 at the Fire Station in London W1, took three years to prepare and each piece is perfect but scaled down for tiny people of 2½ft tall.
www.artangel.org.uk

Thomas Doyle, a US artist, makes works on a 1:43 scale and smaller. These complex and peopled worlds are often enclosed under glass, “allowing for the intimacy one might feel peering into a museum display case or doll’s house”, says Doyle.
www.thomasdoyle.net

Ron Mueck is a well-known Australia-born “hyper-realist” working in the UK who began as a TV model-maker and now produces minutely detailed and disturbing human models, scaled down – and scaled up. His work includes “Man in Blankets”, an old man scaled down, and “Boy”, a 5m model of an adolescent made for London’s Millennium Dome.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Sex snare for top executives

Sex snare for top executives

By Luke Johnson

Published: June 30 2009 22:26 | Last updated: June 30 2009 22:26

I was interested that an Italian former deputy culture minister said last week that “men in power need lots of sex” and “if Berlusconi does not gain sexual satisfaction he governs badly”.

While the minister was no doubt referring to Mr Berlusconi’s recent troubles as prime minister, I wondered how true this was of business leaders, who also wield lots of power.

Some two decades ago, I bought part-ownership of a recruitment agency that supplied receptionists and secretaries to entertainment and media companies. It was an obvious, but unwritten, policy of the firm to put forward only nubile women as job applicants – since this is what clients wanted.

Bluntly, advertising agencies, theatre impresarios and television producers all preferred to hire stunning females. Interestingly, our business was run by four women, who made it clear that I was banned from the floors where applicants were interviewed. I think they had a cynical view of male bosses.

In spite of the risks, ageing male leaders are forever tempting fate by misbehaving with young women. Perhaps they believe it enables them to manage better. I often think these are men who lacked confidence with girls when younger, and probably married in their early twenties.

Perhaps they were too busy doing homework and holiday jobs – always striving to succeed and make a fortune. No time to attract the opposite sex. So maybe they didn’t have a chance to sow their wild oats much, or indulge in the wild sex the younger generation talk about.

But once such characters reach the top, their ego has expanded and their narcissism is running riot. And by then they have marvellous new levers at their disposal. As Henry Kissinger said: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Having seen him charming the ladies at a party once, I think he may just be right.

Of course, ambition and testosterone are intimately connected. It seems that alpha males invariably have lots of both, and are driven to conquer in various different directions – work, sport, sex.

All this takes money and energy but then top dogs usually have large quantities of both of those, too. Some psychologists put forward the theory that chief executives are not really driven by a desire to sell more products or amass great riches: in truth it is all a substitute for being a rock ’n’ roll star and having lots of groupies.

The examples of tycoons destroying their marriages – and sometimes endangering their careers and companies – thanks to their lusts are legion. So many of the business elite leave behind a trail of broken marriages, desperate infidelity and emotional chaos. Perhaps they need the drama to enliven the sterile atmosphere of the boardroom. Or possibly such forbidden fruits are available to them for the first time only when they have risen to great corporate heights, and the thrill of it all goes straight to their head and loins.

There is, of course, something disturbing about the idea that so many businessmen making all these serious decisions might be constantly distracted by their outsized sexual appetites. Yet we are all human, and far more influenced in our behaviour by our basic instincts than many of us care to admit.

Sociologists, anthropologists and biologists should do more studies on the motivations of entrepreneurs and politicians, to help us understand better the secrets of power. Scientists should look at the interaction of adrenaline and testosterone, and work out how their combination can create a dangerous cocktail for certain high achievers.

In fact, I fell into business as a way to meet girls. At 18, my university parties were so riotous I was threatened with being thrown out.

We shifted our get-togethers to a local nightclub and my co-host had the brilliant idea of charging guests to attend. Suddenly our parties had become a business, and I was hooked on capitalism by accident.

Since then I have attempted to become respectable and act my age. So far, I reckon I’m doing rather better than the Italian prime minister.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: A categorical imperative to twitter

A categorical imperative to twitter

By Gideon Rachman

Published: June 29 2009 19:00 | Last updated: June 29 2009 23:17

Most days I get an e-mail informing me that somebody or other is “now following you on Twitter!” I find this slightly baffling, since I hardly ever tweet – that is, broadcast my every thought and deed to the world, using 140 characters or fewer. I tried Twitter out on the night of the US presidential election in November and did not like it much. One of my very last tweets was: “This is possibly the most moronic form of journalism I have ever done.” Since then, I have fallen largely silent.

But now I am having to rethink my disdain. Twitter is the most fashionable political medium of the moment, widely hailed for the role it played in allowing Iranian demonstrators to stay in touch with each other and avoid censorship. The US state department was so impressed by the role the microblogging service was playing it asked Twitter to delay an update that would have taken it off air. A headline in the Los Angeles Times summarised the conventional wisdom when it roared: “Tyranny’s new nightmare: Twitter”.

Even before Iran, Twitter was becoming increasingly trendy. Everybody from Senator John McCain to Britain’s Foreign Office was tweeting. The whole phenomenon has made me belatedly accept that the most important and profound political messages can, in fact, usually be encapsulated in 140 characters.

The power of extreme brevity was brought home to me in another context when I told a friend that I was thinking of writing a book. He said: “It won’t work unless you can summarise the argument in a single sentence that can fit on Twitter.” Initially, I found this a repulsive idea. How stupid, I thought – name me a great book that can be summarised in 140 characters? But when I considered the matter further, I realised that most great works of political philosophy could be summarised on Twitter. Indeed, their very greatness lies in the fact that they can be boiled down to a sentence.

The Communist Manifesto is often summarised by the very twitterable: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” (Marx’s original version was less succinct.) Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would also have been a natural on Twitter. “The greatest happiness of the greatest number” is fewer than 50 characters. Kant is a bit more long-winded. But even the categorical imperative makes it under Twitter’s limbo bar: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”, is fewer than 140 characters.

There are some great works that have not produced that single killer sentence that encapsulates the whole thing. Still, even they can usually be summarised in a tweet. Machiavelli’s The Prince comes down to “nice guys finish last”. As for the Bible, how about, “God made the world in seven days. Respect”.

Twitter, it seems, is the ideal medium for both politics and philosophy. In practice, however, the tweetings of western politicians and civil servants are often disappointing, even alarming. Colleen Graffy, one of the first senior American diplomats to latch on to Twitter, was criticised for tweeting about her visit to the Apple store, as Israel invaded Gaza. I was worried to find that on the morning of the North Korean nuclear test, Britain’s Foreign Office twittered: “North Korea – what are your views?” This sounded a bit forlorn.

Mr McCain is certainly keen – and is currently twittering three or four times a day. His tweets are authentically personal, unlike the wooden scheduling updates, filed by the likes of Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN.

But I cannot say Mr McCain’s twitters fill me with regret that he is not sitting in the Oval Office. They seem to be a mixture of sports scores and self-congratulation. He crowed recently about the number of followers he has on Twitter: “800,000!!! Think we can make it to one million?” Some of the senator’s tweets make him sound like a peasant. On May 19th he said: “Meeting with Dr Kissinger – the smartest man in the world.”

The problem is that Twitter simultaneously encourages extreme brevity and endless communication. Each shot is short but you can keep twittering all day if you want – and many addicts seem to do just that. If Marx really had lived in the age of Twitter, he would probably not have been sending out thunderous political messages. It is more likely that his Twitter feed would have read: “Just arrived at British Museum. Going for a cup of tea.”

Marx never got a chance to consider the importance of Twitter to a successful revolution. But my feeling is that it is mainly hype. The French revolutionaries somehow managed in 1789, without being able to tweet to each other: “Big demo planned outside Bastille.” The Iranians of 2009 look likely to fail, in spite of the invention of Twitter in the intervening 220 years.

Still, even if Twitter will not clinch an Iranian revolution, it does a fine job of providing snap-shots of unfolding events. Under normal circumstances, Twitter is a compendium of banalities. But in Iran, the medium’s terseness and immediacy came into its own.

One day some great thinker will have the time and the perspective to make sense of the real role played by Twitter and the communications revolution in the challenge to the Iranian mullahs. Whatever the ultimate conclusion, I strongly advise that it is summarised in 140 characters or fewer.

gideon.rachman@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/rachman
Read and post comments at Gideon Rachman’s blog

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Control, halt, delete

Control, halt, delete

By Joseph Menn, Richard Waters and Kathrin Hille

Published: June 26 2009 19:30 | Last updated: June 26 2009 19:30

User ID: a police officer checks registrations at an internet café in Xuchang, central China. From next month, Beijing wants new computers to be installed with extra controls

This week, an open letter appeared on Chinese blogs and online bulletin boards. “Hello, internet censorship institutions of the Chinese government,” it said. “We are the anonymous netizens. We hereby decide that from July 1 2009, we will start a full-scale global attack on all censorship systems you control.”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Editorial Comment: Internet censorship - Jun-28

Obama aide hints at perks for cyber security - Apr-23

Back seat for NSA on cyber security - Apr-22

Analysis: Deeper peeper - Apr-14

Efforts to fight cyber-crime fall short to virus - Apr-02

Report reveals China-based cyber spying ring - Mar-30

Beijing’s attempts to manipulate the internet would, the message predicted, “soon be swept on to the rubbish pile of history”.

Chinese internet users, although skilled at dodging the censors, are angrier than they have ever been. The anonymous declaration of war is just one sign of the strains emerging as the global spread of internet access, and its embrace by activists of all stripes, triggers an unprecedented crackdown by national governments that threatens to transform the way hundreds of millions of people communicate.

China is trying to force censorship software on to every new personal computer, while Iran succeeded this week in virtually eliminating the spread over the internet of first-hand accounts from protests in the streets at the handling of its presidential election.

That stifling of web freedoms that many people around the world take for granted are being accompanied by more novel means of combating cyber opponents. Those methods range from directing stealthy technological attacks that shut down dissident websites to unleashing swarms of paid commentators to argue the government position on supposedly independent blogs.

Both carry the added attraction of deniability: many regimes are employing advanced repressive techniques that are hard to identify in action, let alone circumvent. At a time when new communication technologies, from text messaging to Twitter, promise to put greater power in the hands of the individual, these techniques are having a chilling effect. Internet experts from more open societies fear that this will lead to greater self-censorship by organisations and individuals, which they see as the most effective tool of all.

Even the optimists warn of setbacks. “In the end, the winners of the race are most likely to be citizens and activists who use these technologies for democratic purposes,” says John Palfrey of Harvard University, an authority on internet filtering. But he adds: “With respect to individual battles, the states that practise censorship and surveillance are winning some of them.”

The number of such states is in the dozens, researchers say. In Burma and Moldova, governments recently resorted to pulling the plug on mobile phone networks amid unrest magnified by text messages; in Uzbekistan, there is widespread suspicion of internet monitoring but few ways to prove it. That is despite the fact that a lot of the surveillance and security software in the hands of governments across the world comes from western suppliers. In what is by its nature among the most globalised of industries, technology companies are seeing a revenue boost from governmental interest in data mining, search and storage products, though they periodically draw fire from activists for assisting repressive states.

The most gripping evidence of the change at hand has come from Iran. The theocratic regime has been in a protracted struggle over the free flow of information and communication with many of its largely young urban populace since the day after this month’s disputed election.

STRONG-ARM TECHNIQUES

How curbs on net users work:

Internet filters
Method: Set up on the main conduits of the internet, known as backbones, these software filters block traffic from websites on a proscribed list.
Example: “Great Firewall of China”.

Deep packet inspection
Method: A layer of software that looks to identify the content of individual pieces of information, or “packets”. This can be used to read, store or block individual messages and connections to websites.
Example: Commercial providers including Phorm and NebuAd.

Denial of service attacks
Method: Large numbers of PCs bombard a website with requests, making it inaccessible to other users.
Example:Sites in Estonia and Georgia during conflicts with Russia.

Toeing the party line
Method: Some regimes recruit people to present their case online, sometimes paying them.
Example: “50-cent bloggers” in China.

Self-censorship
Method: Governments bring pressure on companies to restrict access to content. Bloggers must register.
Example:MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging service in China, bans phrases including “human rights”.

Edge-of-network restrictions
Method: Censors push control to a more local level. Internet providers’ terms of service make them act as agents of the state. Restrictions at the edges of the network can reach all the way to curbs installed in PCs.
Example: China’s Green Dam/Youth Escort software.

Tehran has a decided advantage in that it runs the country’s leading internet service provider. Called DCI, it throttled back the amount of bandwidth available to its citizens so that web video traffic dropped by as much as 90 per cent and e-mail leaving the country fell by nearly as much.

Data assembled by Arbor Networks, a US internet security company, show the Iranian government was picking and choosing what types of traffic to let through and which parts of the net to leave unimpeded. Just as the security forces adjusted their response to counter the changing nature of the protests on the ground, Iran’s internet police changed which sites could be reached.

Facebook and other social networks were easy to block and fell quickly. Twitter, a web-accessible broadcasting service that can process messages from mobile phones, proved harder to take down without killing off all text messaging.

Activists proved agile at hopping from one medium to another. For more than a week, outsiders would send people in Iran the addresses of “open proxies”, computers outside the country set up to relay traffic. That way, Iranians could still reach sites they were blocked from accessing directly. But the authorities hunted down most of those proxies and cut off access. Finally, on Thursday, they killed most outgoing traffic, including Twitter blasts.

“It’s a big problem when a government is just willing to shut down communications,” says John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, who was helping dissidents get the word out. “If they do that, you’re down to smoke signals.”

Iran’s response evolved rapidly, aided by filtering technology in place long before the election. No country, though, has been as thoroughly policed through as many means as China, which has long been on the cutting edge of censorship.

Now, Beijing is trying to cement its control with a decree that from July 1, all computers sold in the country must come with a program called Green Dam/Youth Escort, which the government says will be used to block access to pornography sites. Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other computer makers are protesting and have won the support of US trade officials, who are threatening to bring the matter to the World Trade Organisation.

“Green Dam will be a game-changer, if in fact it goes into effect,” says Harvard’s Mr Palfrey. “The desktop is the last bastion of personal freedom. It would change the way people use these devices in extraordinary ways.”

Beijing has for years blocked many sites by setting up filters on the country’s largest internet backbones, using a method nicknamed the Great Firewall of China. The central government has more recently heaped additional blocking and monitoring responsibilities on to internet service providers, web companies and local censors, all of which have been upgrading the technology they use.

TRS, a Chinese supplier of internet security products, says growing numbers of police departments are replacing their traditional search engine-based efforts with state-of-the-art data mining applications, which are capable of analysing large bodies of information.

All this has its limits. “Controlling public networks is very, very difficult,” says Tony Yuan, chief executive of Netentsec, another Chinese security provider. “Bandwidth and traffic are huge, so normally you don’t have the computing power.”

But the latest effort by China’s central authorities takes them further still, to the PCs that stand at the edge of the network. It is not clear they will succeed. The computer makers and US government are being joined in their opposition by security researchers who have identified flaws in Green Dam that could allow third parties to take control of PCs.

Even if the blanket order is delayed, circumvented or quietly forgotten, the Chinese government has already gained access to many PCs. Earlier this year, Beijing made the bundling of Green Dam a precondition for eligibility of PCs in its subsidy programme for PC sales to rural residents. In May, it ordered all schools to install the program. “I would estimate that we’re already looking at more than 10m computers in China with Green Dam installed,” says an executive at a Beijing internet portal company.

An estimated 300m Chinese have online access. Though the more determined among them are likely to find ways around Green Dam, many may not even try to defy the message of disapproval being sent by Beijing.

Some of the surveillance and censorship technology in Iran and China is home-grown but much of it is western. Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between the two European companies, says, for example, that it was required to sell Iran equipment for monitoring phone calls as part of a contract for a communications network. Cisco has periodically come under fire for selling its routers to China but says the same equipment is used in both open and closed internet systems.

Under laws in the US and elsewhere, telecommunications companies must make it easy for law enforcement agencies to conduct authorised wiretaps – and equipment providers say they cannot shut that capability off depending on the customer.

Collection, in fact, is no longer so much the problem: analysing the masses of data is a bigger issue, as is massaging search technology to look for more than simple keywords that alarm officials, such as “Tibet” and “democracy”. That technology is becoming much better – spurred in part by the increasing global attention to cyber security. Notably, the US defence department this week approved a new military cyber command that will answer to the National Security Agency, which in recent years has been exposed for mining Americans’ e-mail without warrants.

Concerns about pernicious criminal software and “denial of service” attacks, which have shut government websites in Estonia and elsewhere with bombardments of useless data, have prompted further efforts to scrutinise internet traffic. But according to some researchers, technologies developed to counter insidious attacks such as these will only serve to advance the techniques of information control – to the eventual detriment of future mass revolts against oppressive political forces.

“If security starts becoming job one, then a lot of things being used by repressive states will become commercialised and normalised,” says Rafal Rohozinski, a founder of the OpenNet Initiative, which tracks filtering. “We’ll be doing the same thing as Iran, or using the same technologies. And that’s what I worry about.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

NY Times: Lending Talent, and Money, on a Micro Scale

June 25, 2009

Small Business

Lending Talent, and Money, on a Micro Scale

By KATE MURPHY

Government agencies and international aid groups have long supported programs that train the world’s poor in how to start and run their own businesses. The training is seen as a way to end hunger and stabilize societies.

But interest in these programs has grown lately with the wider availability of microloans, or very small enterprise loans made to the poor. As with any start-up, these businesses are more likely to survive, advocates say, if the owners have basic operational skills.

“There’s been a realization in the microfinance community that loan recipients are more likely to succeed if they also receive business education,” said Bobbi L. Gray, research and evaluation specialist with Freedom From Hunger, a nonprofit organization in Davis, Calif., that provides financial education in developing countries.

Indeed, the nonprofit research group Innovations for Poverty Action in New Haven, Conn., published a paper in May that found that Peruvian villagers who had received microloans and had been randomly selected to receive business training performed significantly better than peers who had received loans and no financial education.

“Even those who reported having the least interest before getting the training had higher revenues,” said Dean Karlan, a professor of economics at Yale, a founder of Innovations and lead author of the study.

From Botswana to Bolivia, entrepreneurship training has resulted in thriving microenterprises — like soap makers, cocoa processors and handicraft exporters — that would not have existed otherwise. Some programs may gather villagers in huts and use multiple baskets to demonstrate how to allocate capital. Other programs may focus on established but struggling businesses, giving owners DVDs that cover topics like pricing and distribution.

“A good intervention doesn’t treat everyone the same,” said Bruce McNamer, chief executive of TechnoServe, a nonprofit group in Washington that has worked with entrepreneurs in developing countries since 1968 to expand their businesses and foster economic growth in their communities. “How you help depends on the circumstance.”

Mr. McNamer’s group, which works with the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department, provides free business consulting services and also sponsors business plan competitions to identify aspiring entrepreneurs in developing countries. “These are usually people who have started a business but they just don’t know how to get from point A to point B,” he said.

An example is a cooperative of 50 farmers in northern Nicaragua that four years ago was just getting by while cultivating coffee, he said. But the cooperative, with assistance from TechnoServe, turned to other crops, like the starchy staple malanga, that increased their profits. The cooperative now has 250 farmers and has opened its own packaging plant, which employs 80 people. The plant’s products are exported as far as Miami.

Teaching financial literacy and entrepreneurial skills is seen as particularly important to the reconstruction of war-torn regions like Afghanistan and Iraq. “It doesn’t matter if you build roads if one in four kids dies by age 5” because of illness or malnutrition, said Ross Paterson, a self-described business coach and retired Army officer in Keller, Tex.

He has been to Afghanistan 10 times in the last seven years to teach entrepreneurship. It is more important, he said, to give Afghans the ability to build businesses that will provide the income to sustain them.

Occasionally fearing for his safety because of the continued Afghan fighting, Mr. Paterson says he primarily teaches leadership skills by helping the local residents to recognize and successfully work with different personality types, whether colleagues or customers.

While Mr. Paterson’s courses last only a few weeks and are limited to those who speak fluent English, other organizations emphasize the importance of finding and training local people to teach business fundamentals.

“You need people who are going to be there for the long term and who know what really works on the ground,” said Fiona Macaulay, founder and president of Making Cents International, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization in Washington that creates entrepreneurship courses for the disadvantaged and trains the people who teach them.

Continuing mentorship and support are crucial to helping entrepreneurs succeed, Ms. Macaulay said. Her organization also offers networking opportunities for its students. “At a business fair in Jordan, for example, we were able to connect a woman who made cakes with a woman who made boxes to transport the cakes,” Ms. Macaulay said.

Many of those who teach entrepreneurship in remote and impoverished areas say the biggest hurdle is persuading students to believe that there are opportunities beyond, say, selling fruits or trinkets in an open-air market.

“I’d say getting them to identify new approaches and opportunities is the hardest part,” said Harsh Bhargava, a business consultant in McLean, Va., who with his wife, Aruna Bhargava, a sociology professor at Rutgers, started the nonprofit group I Create in 1997 to teach entrepreneurship in India, their native country.

He says many people I Create works with are so downtrodden they cannot envision another way of life. He discussed an Indian woman who was so abused by her husband and in-laws that she lacked the confidence even to look anyone in the face. After a local I Create trainer persuaded her to take an entrepreneurship course, she left her husband and started a grocery store.

Moreover, she successfully sued her husband and in-laws for the return of her dowry and for child support for her son. “She’s now studying to become a lawyer and hopes to work to protect women against dowry-related crimes,” Mr. Bhargava said. “It’s these kinds of stories that make what we do so gratifying.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Germany's stay-at-home fathers

Germany’s stay-at-home fathers

By Gerrit Wiesmann

Published: June 27 2009 01:27 | Last updated: June 27 2009 01:30

Frank Fischer with his son Alexander

Frank Fischer opened the door on a Friday morning last month with his son Alexander in a sling on his chest. The nine-week-old slept soundly as Fischer steered me past an overfilled coat rack, along a narrow hallway with family photos and into a large living room, half of which has been given over to child-size furniture, toys and art materials. Come December, this will be the setting for Fischer’s second solo attempt at child-rearing: the silver-haired 53-year-old will take a four-month break from his career in the information technology department of insurer Allianz to become Alexander’s sole daytime carer – while his wife, Jeannette Böning, returns to work.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

For now, Böning and Fischer are home together with Alexander, but from next month they will alternate: she’ll be holding the fort from July to November, he’ll be at home from December to March. “It’s not fair, she gets to do the summer shift,” jokes Fischer. In Munich, cold, snowy winters will keep father and child indoors for much of the time. Despite this, he seems relaxed about the challenge of caring for Alexander. After all, he notes at one point with a smile, things went smoothly with “the prototype” – their daughter Zoé.

In fact, Fischer was as much the prototype as she was. Two and a half years ago, when Zoé was born, he became one of the first men in Germany to take advantage of a recently introduced scheme funded by the government called Elterngeld (parental allowance). This allows new parents to take up to 14 months off work between them, at two-thirds of their respective salaries up to a ceiling of €1,800 a month – an idea pioneered in Norway a decade ago. Before 2007, German parents could take up to three years off work between them, but the government paid an allowance of only €450 per month for the first two years – and only to couples earning less than €60,000 per year.

Fischer and Böning met in the early 1990s, when they both worked at one of Allianz’s Munich campuses, and became friends later, through a company-sponsored English course. At the time, she was married and he was dating someone else. In 2000, when both were single again, they discovered that they’d both be holidaying in Greece at the same time that year. Böning, who drifts in and out of the living room during our interview, reminds her husband: “When you found that out, you did everything to make sure we’d also meet there.” They became a couple in 2001 and married four years later.

The question of whether to have children was one that needed to be answered quickly because Fischer felt, as he approached 50, that this was a now-or-never moment. Böning, meanwhile, hadn’t wanted children during her previous marriage but felt differently with Fischer. “I knew it was the right thing,” she says. But she also knew she didn’t want to sacrifice her career. She had worked for Allianz since her mid-20s; now, at 42, she helps manage the company’s pension scheme. “I always thought children were damn hard work, and this is one reason why I left it so late,” she explains. “I always wanted to combine my family with my job so it was clear to me we’d have to do it together.”

Böning seems uneasy when she refers to her demand for equal parenting as “the terms of doing business”, but the stance is typical of her generation. More than 40 years of battles by women for greater parity in education and employment have changed the way families evolve: in 1990, women living in the European Union married, on average, at 25 and had their first child at 26; by 2003, the average age at marriage had risen to 27 and mothers gave birth to their first child at 28. What looks like a moderate change can have startling effects – in Germany two years ago, twice as many babies were born to 35-year-olds as to 21-year-olds. Moreover, with careers and economic independence offering fulfilment outside the family, the EU’s birthrate fell from 1.6 children per woman of childbearing age in 1990 to 1.5 children 15 years later – well below the rate of 2.1 needed to keep the local-born population constant. (The 0.1 is to make up for adults who can’t have children.)

Germany’s average birthrate was falling faster than in other countries, and so, in the late 1990s, Berlin began introducing policies that helped women combine work and family: there’s now more funding for kindergarten places, and many schools are building government-funded canteens as they move from the traditional half-day to a full-day timetable. The Elterngeld, however, is the first programme to put fathers in the frame as well by offering respectable compensation for interrupted salaries.

. . .

Fischer sits down, cups his hands around a knee and rocks back and forth. Alexander “wants to be in motion at all times”, he explains. “If I stop, he starts crying.” The baby sleeps for the first half of our conversation as his father rocks or rises to waltz him gently around the living room. But an hour in, he wakes and begins to wail; Fischer hands him to Böning for a feed.

In the mid-1990s, the German government commissioned Wassilios Fthenakis, then professor of applied developmental psychology at Augsburg University, to conduct a long-term survey of the modern family. He published his research on how couples share household chores and child-rearing in 2002. Fthenakis noticed that the would-be mothers in his sample of 175 couples approaching parenthood were more likely to be confident of their partners’ fathering abilities if the two were in an egalitarian relationship – where money-earning and housekeeping were shared responsibilities rather than the province of one partner or the other. Women in more traditional relationships – where the man was seen as breadwinner and the woman as carer – were less confident of their partner’s parenting abilities. Those results and others like them have led psychologists to talk about women’s role as “gatekeepers”, in which they only give fathers a chance to participate actively in childcare if they are confident that their partner believes in sharing the burden.

Not surprisingly, the men in the couples applying for Elterngeld seem to have passed the gatekeeper test: a 2007 survey for the government showed that 46 per cent of men planning to stay at home for a portion of their baby’s infancy said chores were split evenly between both partners – or carried out by the man alone. (Note, however, that only 34 per cent of the female side of the sample saw it that way.) On the other hand, more than half the men surveyed who were not planning to take paternity leave said their partners did all the housework.

Even during Zoé’s infancy, Fischer and Böning sought to share the burden. When Fischer began his shift as a stay-at-home father, Zoé was eight months old and still not weaned, despite his best efforts – “purée on a spoon, milk in a bottle, milk in a cup”. After prolonged bouts of crying, he began taking her to Böning’s office twice a day to breast-feed – the “Milk Bar Express”, as they christened the routine. When Böning had to go on a longer business trip, husband and daughter tagged along. He describes those now as “nice days for me in the country with my wife”.

But Fischer also struck out on his own, even hosting a mother-and-baby group. (Böning says that the first time, all the dads came along, “maybe to see who this man was who their wives were going to see in the middle of the afternoon”.) Later, he and Zoé were regulars at a raucous twice-weekly play-date in a local church hall: “60 children with their [parental] assistants,” Fischer says, shaking his head. “Just imagine the scene.” It’s obvious that Fischer revels in his role. Spurred by their partners and more recently by the Elterngeld, there is a clear tendency among German men to reassess their role in the family. In Berlin, several men have set up a “fathers’ centre” for stay-at-home dads. They host Thursday coffee hours, screen football matches and organise toy-car races. In 2007, they estimated 1,500 men passed through their doors; the number has risen steeply – by their reckoning, it has doubled. This growing audience has also attracted the attention of publishers, who are now releasing a steady stream of books about stay-at-home fatherhood.

“We are seeing more and more fathers stay at home,” says Jochen Kluve, an economist at the RWI think-tank, which was commissioned by the government to look into the effects of the Elterngeld. “Two-thirds [of fathers] might be opting only for the minimum time at home of one or two months. But I think the scheme has triggered a change in thinking about how women and men look after their children.”

In the first 18 months of the Elterngeld scheme, meanwhile, Berlin approved almost 752,000 applications for the allowance, with 13.7 per cent filed by mothers and fathers together or by men alone. That was about four times the rate of male participation seen in applications for the old-style allowance, for which high-earners were not eligible.

. . .

Fischer is biased, of course, but he says he’s sure that Zoé is better off for having both parents involved in her day-to-day upbringing. “I think the male influence made her freer,” he says. “She’s a careful child but one that loves to do things.” And his being home with Alexander has helped Zoé, too. “I’m always here to devote my attention to her when she comes home [from the crèche] and mum’s busy with Alexander. We’ve had none of the older-sibling jealousy because of that, thank God.”

That is not to say that there are no difficulties on the horizon. Zoé will start kindergarten in the autumn and the family is desperately searching for one that will look after her until 5pm. Moreover, the German school day often ends at lunchtime, forcing parents to find childcare for the afternoons. Fischer concedes that it will get “more and more difficult” for both parents to continue working full time – but hopes they will be able to do so nonetheless. He hopes Munich will have a good selection of all-day schools by the time Zoé turns six. “Maybe we’re just optimists,” he says, “but we’ll sort this out. We’ve always been able to deal with things. We certainly don’t want someone to stay at home because of it.”

But Fthenakis’s study of parents before the birth of a child and at various stages afterwards shows modern egalitarian ideals increasingly challenged by realities of not-so-modern society. While would-be dads said they hoped to lend a hand with 69 per cent of chores after the baby was born, the constraints of work and other social obligations pushed the actual proportion to 47 per cent soon after the child was born. Some 20 months later, only 36 per cent of chores were shared; 37 per cent were carried out by the mother, and only 26 per cent by the father. (The EU reckons the average woman in 2004 spent an hour a day on cooking, washing, cleaning and childcare. Men spent 22 minutes.)

Fthenakis, now teaching at the Free University of Bolzano, warns that the “traditionalising forces” of old-style school systems or archaic regimes at work could spell trouble – both for Germany’s efforts to share out the burden of raising a new generation and for other governments, too. “Fathers today,” he says, “can experience a psychological closeness to their children, which many thereafter will not want to do without. But what happens to these ‘revolutionised men’ when the pressures of work and family life mount? Can they really meld family and work over a lifetime?”

In Britain, where the state pays new mothers 90 per cent of their salary for the first six weeks of maternity leave and £123 for 33 weeks after that, and where fathers are entitled to just two weeks’ paternity leave at £123 a week, the revolution may have to wait. Fischer seems the mildest of revolutionary footsoldiers, but his call to arms has poignancy nonetheless: as he rocks Alexander back and forth, back and forth, he looks up and says, “You only get to do a project like this twice in your life.”

Gerrit Wiesmann is the FT’s Frankfurt correspondent

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Washington Post: It's a Match - Arranged Nupitals on Indian TV

It's a Match: Arranged Nuptials on Indian TV

By Rama Lakshmi
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 27, 2009

MUMBAI -- In a two-minute video clip televised here last month, 29-year-old Amit Daruka and his doting parents listed the attributes of the ideal bride for him -- she must be tall, fair-skinned and respectful of her elders, share Daruka's ethnicity and horoscope, and be ready to work in the family's garment business.

The video also showed Daruka enjoying a meal at home with his parents, praying with his mother, driving his Honda to work and out clubbing with friends. The program's hosts then chatted with the family in the studio and urged interested viewers to send a text message.

Welcome to the latest wrinkle in India's age-old tradition of arranged marriage.

News of eligible prospects is no longer brought by helpful priests or family aunts. In the past couple of decades, as Indian communities fragmented and families scattered, people looking to marry had already begun using other means, such as classified newspaper ads, marriage bureaus and the Internet. Now, India's booming television industry wants to play matchmaker, expanding the universe of arranged marriage with three wedding reality shows.

"My parents have been looking for a wife for me for the past four years. We have tried every other medium, but nothing clicked," said Daruka, a businessman and vegetarian who defers to his parents in the search. "Television is a very transparent medium. You can assess compatibility by watching a person's body language, the pitch of her voice and the kind of home she lives in."

Star TV, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, conducted audience research that it says revealed two major issues vexing Indian families: their sons' education and their daughters' weddings. So the channel, which until recently aired mostly soap operas dominated by family squabbles and intrigue between mothers and their sons' wives, decided to help viewers find mates. Last month, it launched "Star Vivaah," or "Star Weddings," the daily afternoon show on which the Darukas appeared.

"Our program is the YouTube of arranged marriages," said Rasika Tyagi, Star TV's vice president of programming, calling the show "a huge leap forward from four lines in a newspaper classified and a grainy clip on the Internet."

On "Star Vivaah," she said, viewers can see prospective partners' homes, "the view from their balcony, the kitchen, how they dress and live, what car they drive."

Tyagi said it often takes months for families to share photos of their eligible sons and daughters. "We shorten the process and empower them to take decision," she added.

The show's creators decided to feature only engineers, doctors and MBAs in the first few episodes, so viewers would not brand it a platform for losers. But family members are also required to appear along with the prospective brides and grooms.

"The new Indian woman wants to check out what the mother-in-law will be like. She wants to see who takes the decisions, the son or the mother," Tyagi said.

Perhaps the biggest service the show provides is to pose the questions that a young woman and her family are afraid to ask.

"The arranged-marriage market is mostly tilted unevenly against the woman's family, who are always in an inferior position. They fear the boy may just walk off if they ask tricky questions," Tyagi said. "We ask every question they want to ask but don't dare to -- about his job, income . . . and the number of children he wants."

The show takes care not to upset the social apple cart too much, invoking all the cliches of arranged marriages except for the outlawed but still prevalent practice of dowry-giving. Men want "simple," sari-clad wives who can balance the demands of career and joint families. They want a wife who is trendy but also observes India's age-old cultural traditions. Mothers say they want a daughter-in-law who will not take their son away from them. Women are shown going to the office and driving cars but also washing rice and demurely disclosing details of horoscope, caste and clan.

On a recent afternoon, a crew from Star TV interviewed the family of Rachna Dalal, a 25-year-old pilot who earns $4,500 a month flying Boeing 737s and lives alone in a rented New Delhi apartment.

"I want to marry a pilot. Only a pilot can understand my work schedules and the night flights," said Dalal, round-faced with dimples, adding that she would also prefer a vegetarian, nonsmoking teetotaler. "He should earn more than me. And I do not want to live in a joint family and will not tolerate anyone who asks for dowry."

As she spoke her mind on camera, her brother painted a more coy picture. "She can be a good Indian wife," Manoj Dalal said. "She performs all the housework, cooks well and respects elders. And we want a man from our caste, or the relatives may boycott the wedding."

To portray Dalal embracing career, tradition and modern urban life with ease, the video crew shot her in her pilot's uniform, running on a treadmill, driving and attending salsa classes. But they also showed her in a traditional salwar-kameez, making tea and serving it with biscuits to the family.

The channel is finding just one problem with its new show: Perfect arranged-marriage matches often make for boring TV. "We want to provide a valuable service. But the nicer the matches are, the less entertaining the show gets," Tyagi said. "My battle now is to figure out if my job is to play matchmaker or to entertain." 

WSJ: Ya Gotta Have (Real) Friends

Today we can maintain friendships with more people than ever before, but it's not the quantity of relationships that really matters.

===

OPINION: TASTE
JUNE 12, 2009

Ya Gotta Have (Real) Friends

by TONY WOODLIEF

My 4-year-old son, Isaac, is in his bedroom, putting on a shirt. He talks to himself as he harasses the buttons into their holes. "Everybody loves me," he says. "I love me. I don't know who doesn't love me. Nobody doesn't love me." My little aspiring pop star/cult leader comes to his logical conclusion: "All love me."

Being loved by everyone sounds wonderful, and perhaps it's possible when one's universe of friends is as small as Isaac's. I once heard him run down the list, naming his brothers, his parents, his friends. This seemed to give him a particular form of pleasure, to say a name and announce that he is loved by that person. What Isaac hasn't learned is that there are gradations of friends, and different kinds of love, and cycles to life. I don't know many adults who can, like Isaac, list without hesitation or doubt the people who genuinely love them.

It's a tempting exercise in narcissism nonetheless, and suitable for our day. Now may be a better time than ever to think about friendship, because we can maintain some semblance of it with more people than ever before. Isaac is far more likeable than I, yet on paper I dominate -- he can go through his entire friend list before his Cheerios get soggy, while I have 298 friends on Facebook alone. But while Isaac can say with confidence that everyone in his little circle loves him, I'm not sure if everyone in my huge circle even likes me. What's worse, I don't know if I care. Two-hundred ninety-eight genuine friendships sounds exhausting.

Friendship seems to be the key, however, to a longer, happier life. Recently The Atlantic published a fascinating story by Joshua Wolf Shenk about Harvard's Grant Study, which in 1937 began following 268 undergraduates through the intimate details of their lives. Some of the men drank themselves to death and others became prosperous and powerful. Some had loving marriages, others made multiple women unhappy. While no formula seems to emerge from these accounts, the study's longtime head, George Vaillant, claims love is the most essential ingredient. David Brooks at the New York Times gives it a more clinical-sounding summation: "Relationships are the key to happiness."

Of course it's not the quantity of relationships that matters, or else Isaac and I would find our outlooks reversed. There's the quality of friendship to be considered, something social network sites neglect. In fact, maybe a high number of relationships indicates shallow friendships. Think about it: We acquire friends through our experiences -- where we live, go to school and work. We have more opportunities to make friends the broader these experiences. But the more far-flung our adventures, the less time we have to grow roots in one place and develop intimate bonds.

That's an appealing theory, but we all know of people who defy it. In "The Girls From Ames," for example, Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow offers a heart-lifting account of 11 women who became friends as children in Ames, Iowa, and have remained close even as their lives carry them through marriages, divorces, business success, unemployment, childrearing, illnesses and the deaths of loved ones -- all of it spread across multiple cities. Mr. Zaslow's exploration of research into friendship indicates that women are more likely than men to sustain such intimacy. "Women talk," writes Mr. Zaslow. "Men do things together." With modern communication devices women can do more talking than ever, no matter where they live or how busy their lives become. When male friends move away or start a family, however, the opportunities for doing things together -- the dominant expression of their friendship -- diminish.

Given the research indicating how important friendships are to health (Mr. Zaslow cites one study where women with the most friends lived 22% longer than those with the fewest number), perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that women tend to outlast men. And if Digby Anderson, author of "Losing Friends," is to be believed, we'll need medical improvements to carry a greater burden, because friendship and its social benefits are on the wane, done in partly by a left-wing emphasis on egalitarianism over loyalty, and a right-wing elevation of the nuclear family. Valuable same-sex friendship institutions (Elks clubs and the like) and norms have deteriorated, he argues, especially among men. While men are hard-wired to live out friendship through shared activities, legal and social pressures render them less able to do so.

We needn't rely on the research; we can surmise that friendship is essential to life by the myriad ways we tailor the word friend to our individual wants: work friend, church friend, drinking friend, workout friend, friend with benefits. We are less than we were meant to be, it seems, without friends. Wendell Berry captures this idea: "By ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity." In "Friendship: An Exposé," Joseph Epstein is more blunt: "Friends can be an immense complication, a huge burden, a royal pain in the arse. . . ." Yet, he writes, "without friendship, make no mistake about it, we are all lost."

We assemble relationships because we need them, but many of us -- particularly men -- shrink from intimacy, generating the modern dilemma of dense social networks afflicted with loneliness. Allan Bloom indicates this in "Love and Friendship": "Isolation, a sense of lack of profound contact with other human beings, seems to be the disease of our time." He decried the word "relationship" as "pallid" and "pseudoscientific," itself an obstacle to genuine intimacy.

My 298 Facebook friends aren't the ones who remember our dead daughter's birthday or leave flowers at her grave. Nor among them is the pastor who baptized each of our children and waged a personal holy war to keep our marriage from crumbling years ago. We have these deeper friendships because we've tried to build a life in one place. They sprang up because the stuff of life happened to this cluster of us living near one another, and much of it was too joyous or heartbreaking not to share with someone. If friendship is the key to happiness, then maybe this is the key to friendship, to be enmeshed -- not just tangentially or voyeuristically, but physically -- in the lives of others. That can be hard to swallow in a culture that prizes individualism, mobility and privacy.

And perhaps that is why Isaac is so confident in his affections, because the boy isn't self-absorbed enough yet to value individualism as an end. His idea of mobility is to ride his bike without training wheels, and he hasn't -- trust me on this -- the first inkling of what privacy means. He doesn't have a great many friends, this child. But he loves everyone he knows, and I'm pretty sure they love him. Would that we were all so lucky.

Mr. Woodlief's memoir, "Somewhere More Holy," will be published by Zondervan in 2010.

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