India

NEW DELHI -- Members of India's lowest castes have struggled for generations for dignity and a better chance in life. But job and education quotas aimed at helping them have unintentionally spawned a new phenomenon: The eager downwardly mobile. Over the past week, tens of thousands of members of India's Gujjar community -- politically powerful traditional farmers and shepherds from India's Rajastan state -- have burned buses, shut down interstate highways and sparked clashes that killed 25 people, all in an effort to be downgraded in caste.

Manil Suri, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will discuss his first book,The Death of Vishnu, which is about the social and cultural divisions in India, at a free public lecture at 7:30 tonight at Goucher College's Kraushaar Auditorium, 1021 Dulaney Valley Road, Towson. For more information, call 410-337-6333. Sun music critic Tim Smith is on vacation. His column does not appear today.

Dec. 3 1984 Thousands of people died after a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.

In the Indian folk tales that appear in the book Tales from a Faraway Land, a brave prince rescues a cursed princess, Mother Earth saves her long-lost daughter and a sage helps end a drought. All of these mythical characters have found a real-life champion in Priya DasSarma of Ellicott City, who worked with her mother-in-law, Seba DasSarma, to preserve the 14 Indian stories and introduce them to new audiences. It is a task she said is particularly meaningful as the mother of two children, ages 7 and 10. "It is important for my kids to realize that they come from a certain context," she said.

Nation: Labor AK Steel reaches Ohio agreement AK Steel Holding Corp. said yesterday it has reached a tentative settlement with union workers at its Middletown Works plant in Ohio, ending a year-old lockout fought over the steelmaker's demands for lower labor costs. Leaders of the Machinists union weren't immediately available for comment on the deal, which comes on the lockout's anniversary. The company has continued to operate the mill with replacement workers and salaried employees, and union membership has dwindled from about 2,700 a year ago to just over 1,700 because of retirements and resignations.

NEW DELHI -- The streets of India's sprawling capital are not for the faint of heart. Platoons of motorcycles, ramshackle buses, fume-spewing trucks and struggling bicycle-rickshaw riders jostle for space with wandering sacred cows, motorized rickshaw taxis, legions of cars, magazine-waving vendors, horse-drawn carts and the occasional plodding elephant. Motor-scooter drivers, fed up with traffic jams, roar down the sidewalks, threatening to flatten pedestrians. Everybody honks, all the time.

India needs faster growth to create more jobs for its expanding population and to make it easier to relieve poverty. The awkward truth is that although the economy is sprinting ahead, most people are only crawling. Although the educated middle class has enjoyed big salary increases and a surge in the value of their homes and shares, the 60 percent of the population close to or below the poverty line have not yet seen a material gain. Measured by the commonly used Gini coefficient, India has less income inequality than China or America.

Washington-- Even though she's ill and on her 11th interview of the day, film director Mira Nair gets starry-eyed when discussing her new film, The Namesake. Dressed in a South Asian salwar kameez, a burgundy shawl elegantly draped over her, the native of India sips tea in a Georgetown hotel room while she recalls the moment she read the novel, The Namesake, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. Nair's mother-in-law, a native Ugandan, had just passed away. And she was having to bury a beloved in a land foreign to her. It was in that quiet moment of utter displacement that The Namesake came to her. It was a story, she found, she had to tell.

NEW DELHI -- At least two powerful explosions ripped through the Southern India high-tech city of Hyderabad yesterday evening, killing more than 30 people and injuring dozens more. The blasts struck an outdoor laser show and a popular restaurant around 7:30 p.m., leaving bodies and pools of blood amid smoking rubble and shattered glass. Some 50 people were injured. "This is a terrorist act," said Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, chief minister of Andhra Pradesh state, to reporters. While Indian officials often blame Muslim militants for bomb attacks, there were no immediate accusations against Islamic groups in the blasts.

BOMBAY, India -- Fans of the world's largest film industry were unlikely to tune in for the Academy Awards. After all, their favorite stars carried off their trophies more than a week ago right here in Bollywood.Bollywood, as Bombay is known to fans of Indian cinema, is the capital of an industry that produces some 800 feature films a year in several Indian languages. That's well over double the number made in Hollywood, and almost one-fifth of the world's total. Revenue from India's colorful song-and-dance extravaganzas and melodramas surpasses $1 billion a year.

On October 4, 2009, HIAWATHA P. WATKINS; beloved husband of India; loving father of Hiawatha D., Kelvin D., and Melissa; cherished grandfather of Alex and Breanna; loving brother of Linda and the late Bettie and a host of other relatives and friends. Memorial service will be held at a later date. Memorial contributions may be sent to the American Cancer Society.

Starring Dev Patel, Freida Pinto. Directed by Danny Boyle. Released by 20th Century Fox. $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95. **** (4 STARS) Slumdog Millionaire is the rare film that deserves all the accolades it has been receiving. With verve and panache, it transports American audiences to a world they've never experienced; makes it seem believable and wonderfully alive; presents us with characters we can identify with and, more important, root for; and leaves audiences craving more. Salman Rushdie's curmudgeonly dismissal notwithstanding, Slumdog is not crammed with "impossibilities" - at least no more so than any other Hollywood drama (Has Rushdie seen The Reader?

The crime lab technician, Evana Hebb, fingerprinted India Mouton, a 10th-grader from Dunbar High. All five fingers on her right hand rubbed in black ink and pressed hard onto a white sheet of paper in a garage at the headquarters of the Baltimore Police Department. It's part of a monthlong lesson for teenagers at city recreation centers on the criminal justice system - they are following a mock murder from corpse to trial - but for this 15-year-old student, it's the start of what she hopes will be a career as a scientist investigating crime.

The documentary India begins tonight on MPT. And the six-hour miniseries will tell you more about India than you probably wanted to know. But the sub-continent is laid out, probed and oohed and ahhed over with such enthusiasm by host Michael Wood that viewers may just be swept up in the whole enterprise. One of the great pleasures in this series is that India is so un-American. There is simply very little about India that is comparable to this country or continent. And this production is beautiful.

India says Pakistan is dodging blame in attack NEW DELHI: Pakistan is shifting blame and responsibility for last month's deadly attacks in Mumbai, India's foreign minister charged yesterday, adding that Delhi would take action against the perpetrators if Islamabad failed to. India also gave Pakistan a letter written by Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the only gunman captured after the rampage. Kasab wrote that he and the nine other gunmen involved in the Nov. 26 attack all came from Pakistan, India's Foreign Ministry said.

Pakistan took its first concrete step toward making good on its promise to cooperate fully in prosecuting those responsible for last month's terrorist attack in Mumbai. Yesterday, Pakistani troops raided a training camp run by the Islamist extremist group Lashkar-e-Taiba and arrested Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, whom India accuses of having masterminded the attacks. With the suspected militant in custody, however, Pakistan now faces the problem of what to do with him. India wants to put him on trial, though the countries have no extradition treaty and handing him over could provoke a backlash at home against Pakistan's fragile democratic government.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A hoax caller claiming to be India's foreign minister threatened Pakistan's president with war during the final hours of the Mumbai attacks, prompting Pakistan to put its air force on its highest alert for nearly 24 hours, a news report said yesterday. Meanwhile, authorities in India reported the first arrests since the end of last month's siege in India's commercial and entertainment capital, which killed more than 170 people. Police in the eastern city of Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, announced that they had detained two men who owned the mobile phone cards that were later used by the attackers.

I met Padma Viswanathan at a reading at the Johns Hopkins University - where she got a master's degree in creative writing - and was captivated by her story. The Toss of a Lemon is an intergenerational tale set in India, drawn from family lore and her imagination. Here's an excerpt of an interview via e-mail; the complete version is on Read Street: What was your inspiration? The Toss of a Lemon was inspired by stories my grandmother told me of her grandmother, who was married as a child and widowed at 18. My great-great-grandmother, like my main character, Sivakami, chose to raise her children in her own house, despite severe restrictions on Brahmin widows in south India in the early 20th century.

MUMBAI, India - With a bit of pluck, even if was not always heartfelt, a touch of defiance and a dose of the city's famous resilience, Mumbai dusted itself off yesterday from last week's terrorist attack and headed back to work. The trains were reasonably packed, traffic was beginning to resemble its normally chaotic self and shoppers eased back into the stores, even if many still were not buying much. "Sure I'm scared," said Roshan Tengra, a housewife, as she headed into a Bank of India branch a few blocks from the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel where the most protracted militant attack occurred.

MUMBAI, India - Facing mounting public anger over the response of his government and security forces to last week's assault on Mumbai, India's prime minister vowed yesterday to beef up anti-terror measures, and a top police official more pointedly fixed blame on a Pakistani group for the violence that left nearly 200 dead. But analysts and citizens alike questioned whether the government's promise of reform would lead to serious changes in an anti-terrorism effort whose systemic problems were laid bare by the assault.