SONYA FATAH

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Joanna Harries is reconsidering her decision to spend a year in Mumbai.
December 01, 2008

SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI–When Joanna Harries was deciding whether to head to India or Pakistan after learning she had been selected for the Acumen Fund’s year-long fellowship program, she opted for India.

“I said `no’ to Pakistan because I figured it would be a dangerous place for a woman,” the Toronto native said.

The irony of that decision isn’t lost on her.

Harries, 28, arrived in Mumbai two weeks ago. She was at a reception at the Cricket Club of India in the south of the city when the news of the attacks reached her. “There was absolute chaos. Everyone was stranded in south Mumbai and wanted to get out. There were 10 to 12 people in each cab, and we knew that bombs had gone off in some cabs but we couldn’t do anything.”

She and her colleagues made it to the safety of their homes in the northern suburbs, but the experiences of that night and the past few days have left her rattled.

Harries, who worked as a brand manager with Unilever in Canada and the United States, was married last year but didn’t want to pass up the Acumen Fund opportunity, so she and her husband are spending the year apart. Acumen, which also operates in Pakistan and Africa, is a non-profit social venture fund that invests in “sustainable and scalable” businesses to tackle poverty.

In Mumbai, Harries has been working for DIAL 1298, a private ambulance service operating in a city starved for good public medical care. During the three-day siege in Mumbai, DIAL 1298 played a significant role in aiding government, police and hospital officials.

Its 51 ambulances, half outfitted with state-of-the-art advanced life support, some charged by solar panels, scurried from location to location ferrying hostages from the city’s two premier hotels.

“I spent the night in the call centre just watching and trying to be helpful, talking to blood donors, and watching what was going on, on television … I don’t know how to evaluate what has happened. In Canadian terms, this number of deaths never happens.”

These are days of second thoughts. She says she feels fine, but she is questioning whether being in Mumbai, away from a new spouse and the safety and security of home, is a smart decision.

Her family in Toronto is deeply concerned about her safety. Although they understand her reasons for being in India and taking on the fellowship, they would be happy if she returned home to Canada, Harries said.

“I’m going around talking to many people – Indian and otherwise – to see what they think. I feel safe in my apartment but I don’t want to spend the rest of my year here holed up in there.”

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Charles Cannon, left, spoke of ordeal. Larry Koftinoff, of Kelowna, B.C., turned to meditation during hotel siege.

December 01, 2008
SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI–Days after they escaped the besieged Oberoi hotel, many of the surviving members of a meditation group are still traumatized by their experience.

Lured to India in search of spirituality, the group of 25 meditation practitioners from Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand instead found themselves in a prolonged terrorist attack.

By the end of their 45-hour ordeal, two members of the group had died and three – including Montreal actor Michael Rudder who was shot three times – were recovering in Bombay Hospital.

The remaining three Canadians, Helen Connolly of Toronto, who was grazed in the arm by a bullet, and Kelowna, B.C., couple Larry and Bernie Koftinoff, are well and looking forward to returning home.

The group’s leader, known to members as Master Charles Cannon, told reporters yesterday of the harrowing hours during which the group mustered its strength, he said, to emerge from the experience feeling profoundly more spiritual.

Cannon, 63, paused from time to time to check his emotions as he talked about the group’s ordeal.

“As I sat in that room in the Oberoi hotel with the door barricaded and guns and bombs going off for over 45 hours … thinking that the next moment the door would be blown away and life would be ended, I kept trying to look into myself and see what sense I could make of the situation,” the American said.

In the end, he said, the experience was an “affirmation of life, of compassion, of love, kindness and of the oneness of humanity.”

Larry Koftinoff, 56, who introduced Cannon to reporters, appeared calm and composed. But he said some of the group’s members were starting to show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It’s this time when the post-traumatic stress starts – a lot of the women especially – now that they are now coming out of the shock that you’re in originally and realize what has happened.”

Koftinoff and his wife, Bernie, also turned to meditation during the siege.

“We had each other,” Koftinoff said. “For some of the other people, it’s harder because they don’t have anyone else there to help balance the tensions.”

The group arrived in India on Nov. 15 for a two-week meditation course under Cannon’s leadership. Cannon heads the Synchronicity Foundation, which he started up in 1983, as a “modern mystic” and a “master of meditation” after spending 12 years in India. The foundation, a non-profit organization, focuses on meditation and has a 180-hectare sanctuary not far from Charlottesville, Va. On the Wednesday evening of the attack, most of the group’s members had retired to their rooms after returning from a meditation session.

Rudder, Connolly and four Americans had opted to dine at Tiffin, a restaurant in the hotel, when gunmen entered the room and sprayed the guests with bullets.

Cannon said all six dove under the table for cover. Survivors watched in horror as the gunmen went table to table and sprayed bullets at those cowering underneath. Two Americans, Alan Scherr, 58, and his 13-year-old daughter Naomi, were killed while they held onto each other. Connolly held their hands and felt their lives ebb away as the attackers stormed the hotel.

After the gunmen left, a waiter whispered, “If you can move, follow me.” The surviving four – three of them with bullet wounds – crawled to safety and left through a back entrance. All four were taken to hospital, and Rudder, who was in critical care at first, is recovering and expected to be in Bombay Hospital for another two weeks after undergoing surgery.

For the remaining 19 members of the group, gun battles, explosions and the sounds of footsteps of terrorists running between the floors, continued for 45 hours before their release was secured.

Cannon, who was in his room with two of his assistants, broke the thick glass of the hotel window when fire broke out and smoke began to fill the air. In his room on the 12th floor, Koftinoff did the same.

“What was amazing was that a lot of people in Canada sent us a lot of prayers, energy and healing across,” said Gautam Sachdeva, who heads Yoga Impressions.

“We got calls and emails and heard about a lot of special prayers held for the group. People got together in ashrams and prayed for them.”

Despite experiencing loss and feeling low, neither Cannon nor any in his group seem to blame anyone for their ordeal.

Yesterday afternoon, Cannon visited the three members in hospital.

He said one of the injured women told him, “We are not the victims of terrorism, we are the victors over terrorism. We chose the affirmation of life, we chose love and we forgive.”

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November 29, 2008
Sonya Fatah THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI–Worried relatives and friends rushed to the city’s many hospitals yesterday, hoping their search for the missing would not take them down the road to the mortuary.

Police teams and paramilitary troops stood guard on the sprawling 26-hectare grounds of the 160-year-old Jamshedji Jijibhoy Hospital in the heart of Mumbai, keeping journalists at bay as family members gathered in the hospital’s lobby to pore over the lists of the dead at a makeshift control centre.

Many of the dead were brought to this hospital. Nurses helped people look for names but many were on a hospital-to-hospital hunt for loved ones who were still missing.

The smell of dead bodies hung heavily in the air just outside the hospital’s mortuary. A family huddled together, waiting to receive the body of a loved one. One man anxiously leaned over the information counter asking for help.

“I’ve been looking in all the hospitals. His name isn’t on any list. Can you help me find him?”

The harried man behind the desk replied: “The names are all on the list. I don’t have any other information.”

There were also many unidentified bodies, including those of two foreigners, waiting to be collected by the overworked mortuaries.

Throughout the day at the city’s southern hospitals – Breach Candy Hospital, St. George’s Hospital and Bombay Hospital – ambulances with wailing sirens brought in more casualties and injured folks as evacuation proceedings continued at the Oberoi hotel along Marine Dr.

Despite the additional pressure, however, hospital workers were efficient and tried their best to help the many on city-wide desperate searches.

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November 28, 2008
SONYA FATAH
THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI–Mumbai is usually India’s busiest city, legendary for its bustling commercial culture and its frustrating traffic jams.

But today, more than 24 hours after the co-ordinated attacks on the city’s elite southern suburbs, Mumbai was still paralyzed.

Air traffic to the city was significantly down, with early-morning flights from New Delhi carrying less than one-third their capacity.

The domestic airport, normally jam-packed with business people and tourists, was like a ghost town, quiet and subdued, matching the mood of the city.

“Things are better today than they were yesterday,” said Vinod Sharma, 42, a taxi driver who has been driving in the city for the last year.

“Yesterday no one was stepping out of their homes. Today at least there are cars on the street.”

Sharma was working Wednesday night when he witnessed one of the first attacks – a bomb explosion inside a fellow cab driver’s vehicle.

“I was standing barely 200 metres away,” he said. “The light had just turned green and the taxi shot ahead carrying this passenger.

“Who knows if he was the terrorist or not but all of a sudden there was a massive explosion and there was absolute carnage.

“I’m still shaking at the memory.”

Sharma said the roof of the taxi was blown so far away it couldn’t be found.

“There were limbs and blood and body parts everywhere. And one poor guy on a motorbike right there lost his life, too.”

Although the streets of Mumbai were quieter than usual, there were signs of a return to life in this city of 14 million. While some stores and offices remained closed in the area close to the Oberoi Hotel, one of the terrorists’ targets, a few public buses made their rounds past the area cordoned off by police.

Journalists and onlookers crowded around the barricades around the hotel.

There were reports that up to 30 hostages had been rescued today and were being taken away in a bus to safety but it was difficult to ascertain from the distance because riot police trucks had blocked off the street. Behind the hotel, a white tourist bus was parked outside and a steady stream of hostages emerging from the hotel began boarding it. Most appeared to be foreigners.

Beyond the public barricade, a bevy of fire trucks were parked still, and there was no sound of activity.

Earlier, police had told guests in the hotel to stay in their rooms.

“The situation is almost over but they are firing shots inside so we have to wait it out,” said police officer Tanaji Ghardze.

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Leopold Cafe renowned as a Mumbai institution and as a favourite haunt for hungry backpackers

November 27, 2008
SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

NEW DELHI–Nabbing a table at Leopold Cafe in Colaba, a south Mumbai neighbourhood that rubs shoulders with the Arabian Sea on one side, likely involves a wait.

The cafe, which opens up onto a bustling shopping street, has a string of tables that are practically on the pavement. The street is filled with makeshift stalls that are set up every morning to lure travellers.

Leopold Cafe is a favourite among the constant stream of backpackers to Colaba but it’s also a south Mumbai institution.

The cafe was always popular but became an international destination after the escaped Australian convict-turned writer Gregory David Roberts made numerous references to it in his 2004 bestseller, Shantaram.

In addition to its long-time local reputation, it’s high on the Lonely Planet checklist of places-to-eat-in.

Colaba is also a stone’s throw from the Gateway to India, a colonial arched structure that forms the city’s southern-most point of entry from the jetties that take people to villages and sights across the water.

The Taj Hotel, one of the city’s oldest hotels that dates back a century, is just across from the Gateway and overlooks a long glimmering stretch of the Arabian Sea.

Its Victorian architecture makes it a landmark building for just about everyone: taxi drivers, visitors from the suburbs, people from the elite cocoon of South Mumbai and, of course, a place to stay for those who can afford its pricey rate, often north of $400 a night.

It was built in 1903 by Jamsetji N. Tata, the Indian industrialist, who believed that Bombay (as Mumbai used to be known) needed a grand hotel to take its place among the great cities of the world.

The Taj was built by the Tata family, and is one of India’s most popular luxury chain hotels, with some properties overseas as well.

South Mumbai is really an enclave of the city’s rich and famous. The streets are broad, flanked in many places by large green parks, fountains, and a mix of turn of the century art deco buildings and earlier Victoria-era structures that remind the city and India of its British colonial heritage.

Victoria Terminus – named after Britain’s long-reigning queen – and now more proudly known as the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, after a local historical warrior figure, is one of Mumbai’s tributes to Victorian Gothic architecture that can be seen in several South Asian cities.

As the headquarters of the city’s busy central railway line that brings commuters from the suburbs and into the old city, it’s one of the busiest areas of India’s railway stations, not simply a place for commuters but also a must-see destination for anyone visiting the city.

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November 26, 2008
SONYA FATAH
THE TORONTO STAR

NEW DELHI–For months, Ajit Singh had been chasing off calls from collection agencies. The calls then turned into home visits with threatening overtones. Finally, a collector came to his home, hurled a volley of abuse at him and threatened to beat him up.

Singh, 31, called the city’s police hotline, and was rescued just in time. But others, who have amassed vast debts in a scramble to be part of India’s new consumer culture, haven’t been so lucky.

India today boasts roughly 10 million credit-card customers. But consumer credit is relatively new here. Transactions have historically been cash-based.

Without a federal credit-checking system, and no legal apparatus to make cardholders responsible for their payments, companies have resorted to outsourcing recovery companies, which send out thugs and goons to intimidate clients, and in some cases beat them up.

Over the last few years, banks have targeted India’s rising middle class, an estimated 300 million strong population that forms India’s mass consumer market. They’re the target market for advertisers using massive billboard ads, full-page newspaper advertisements and television promos featuring Bollywood actors.

“There has been a geometric growth in credit card holders among the Indian middle classes in the last 10 years,” said S.R. Khanna, of Consumer Voice, a volunteer organization that seeks to improve consumer awareness. “Borrowing for consumption was not a part of the social practice in traditional India.”

But now the rush to purchase glitzy new products – from washing machines and fridges to the latest in cellular technology – has been intense over the last few years. Those purchases have been possible thanks to a liberal handout of credit cards, leading to massive amounts of individual debt that is now beginning to cripple those who splurged in their desire for an elevated, more fanciful lifestyle.

That’s exactly what Singh did.

After he got a job as a sales manager last year with Bajaj-Allianz, a major insurance company and began earning a monthly salary of 19,000 rupees (roughly $460), Singh found his desk flooded with offers from credit card companies. He accepted them all, and before he realized it, he’d amassed about $2,950 in debt.

Consumer aid organizations claim banks tack on additional charges and fees, aside from the interest rate, forcing customers to pay much more than they legally owe.

“One lady came to me in complete distress,” said C.V. Giddappa, general secretary of the Credit Card Holders Association, a voluntary organization formed in 2001 to protect the interests of cardholders.

“She had bought a television for 10,000 rupees (approximately $246) on her Standard Chartered credit card, and she was making monthly payments of $24. She made 17 payments, and after she had paid almost double the cost of the original item, her balance had reached a ridiculous ($566).

Giddappa’s organization recently filed a suit for a refund of some $1.2 billion. “We have investigated the balance sheets of these credit card companies and its clear to us that they are looting customers,” said Giddappa.

Others believe the onus also lies with the Indian consumer to take responsibility for poor borrowing practices.

“There are two sides to every coin, and the situation is complicated because Indian consumers don’t want to pay their monthly balances either,” said S.K. Virmani with the National Consumer Hotline. “They know they can just get another credit card and keep purchasing so they try to trick the system.”

Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that banks have resorted to all sorts of means to recover bad debt. In the western Indian city of Ludhiana, last month, Vivek Uppal, a businessman who had reached a settlement to end his financial woes, was picked up by two strongmen and a police officer, taken to a warehouse and beaten up.

“They abused and tortured me to pay 250,000 rupees as a recovery of the credit card,” Uppal wrote.

In the end, Uppal had to hand over an extra $2,000, despite official letters from the bank that stated otherwise.

Uppal’s case is not unique.

In mid-October this year, a family of four in Mumbai who were renting an apartment in a plush suburb of the city, committed suicide after debt accumulating on their 72 credit cards became enormous.

It’s likely that things won’t look up unless clients are better informed, and unless a federal system of credit checks is enforced.

“(The middle class) have been systematically trapped into debt,” said Giddappa. “The bank issues them one credit card, and … before they know it they have 10 to 12 credit cards, and they’re wrapped in a vicious cycle of debt.”

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As urban India booms, thousands of workers insist on having meals ferried in from home

November 18, 2008
SONYA FATAH, THE TORONTO STAR

MUMBAI, India–Rajesh Vora sat at a table inside his office’s air-conditioned cafeteria, carefully opened the three-tier steel lunch box, and released the various, familiar aromas of his kitchen.

Around him, most folks availed of cafeteria food, piling their trays with Indian cuisine prepared at the office’s kitchen. But Vora and at least 15 others at ICICI Securities, one of the nation’s largest bank affiliates, prefer to get their food delivered to them from home just as they break for lunch.

For Vora, 38, who is vice president of equity research, the posh and unusually well-equipped cafeteria just isn’t a substitute for his wife’s cooking. For the last 10 years, he’s been subscribing to a uniquely Mumbai phenomenon: the dabbawalla or lunch-box man, paying a monthly rate of less than $10 to get his lunch picked up from home and delivered to his workplace.

“It’s a full-course meal,” said Vora, as he began digging into his curry, lentils, rice, Indian-style bread and fruit. “If I had eaten at home, I would have gotten absolutely the same meal.”

Over the past decade, urban India has undergone fast-paced change with tradition being quickly swapped for a slice of modernity. But in the country’s largest city – formerly known as Bombay and home to 25 million people – a 128-year-old business of ferrying lunch boxes across the city still thrives.

Some 200,000 dabbas are collected, delivered and returned six days a week by 5,000 dabbawallas who skirt their way through the city’s bustling streets, wearing their trademark white caps and balancing a multitude of boxes filled with home cooking on the handlebars of their bikes or on iron crates stacked on wooden carts that are wheeled around for delivery. Each is an independent businessman, leasing his services to Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Supplier Trust for between $100 and $250 a month.

The labour-intensive dabbawalla business became such a successful management phenomenon that Harvard University’s prestigious business school uses it as a case study even though dabbawallas are either illiterate or semi-literate.

“The secret to our business is that we use our skills to our advantage,” said Raghunath Medge, president of Nutan and a third-generation dabbawalla, and despite never having completed high school, can spit out management jargon with lightning speed. “We’re all uneducated, but we do much better than educated people because we rely on our excellent memories and on physical labour, both areas in which the educated need assistance.”

The business started in 1880 with just 25 customers. Today, Nutan has a website, accepts orders via email and even hosted Prince Charles when he visited India a few years ago.

What brings together this community of box labourers isn’t necessarily the profession but the labourers’ ethnic and communal ties. All hail from the same area outside the Maharashtran city of Pune, 170 kilometres from Mumbai.

Vital Savanth, 33, has been a dabbawalla for 13 years, like his father and grandfather before him. He bikes a three-kilometre route for his daily collection of 20 boxes.

“This is a good job,” said Savanth. “We work hard moving the boxes onto and off the trains, but we’re quick and we enjoy our work.”

For Deepti Trivedi, whose husband and daughter work as lawyers in the city’s financial district, the service is a godsend.

“I’ve been using the dabbawalla service for the past four years. I send home-cooked food because it’s so much healthier and more nutritious than restaurant food, and it’s also much cheaper.”

At Andheri station in Mumbai’s northern suburbs, a few dozen dabbawallas bring their boxes together every morning and sort them on the platform according to the code.

Prabhakar Laxman Adhawa, 55, has been delivering the boxes for 35 years. Both his sons also work as dabbawallas. “I knew all about the business before I came here. It was a guaranteed job when I got to the city because we work as a community and we look out for one another. This has been my first and only job in all these years.”

Adhawa also pointed to dignity of self-employment as one reason for his happiness.

“Look, with our education we could be workers in an office earning a paltry salary or working as a servant in someone’s house. This way we employ ourselves, and we earn a decent income.”

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Mass conversions spark violence in India, but rival tribes’ quest for state funds also at play
September 22, 2008
SONYA FATAH

The Toronto Star

KANDHAMAL, India–Rabindranath Pradhan grabbed his wife and son and took shelter amid the lentil stalks of a nearby field.
Cowering in fear, Pradhan, 45, who had left his paralyzed brother inside the house, watched as 200 right-wing Hindu youngsters entered his brother’s bedroom, poured gasoline over his body, and burned him alive.
“I could hear him screaming for me to save him, but I was unable to move,” said Pradhan, recounting the horror of his brother’s suffering on Aug. 24. Unarmed and outnumbered, Pradhan and his neighbours could only watch as his brother’s shrieks faded and their homes and church were burnt to the ground.
Afterwards, the area’s 37 Christian families took refuge in the nearby hills. While torching their homes, the crowd had chanted “Jai Bajrang Dal!” revealing themselves as members of the youth brigade of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a right-wing group that aims to cleanse the Hindu soul of mother India and end the slaughter of cows and conversions to Islam and Christianity across the country.
Increasing conversions to Christianity in Kandhamal, one of India’s most “backward” regions, have triggered a reaction among India’s right-wing Hindu organizations.
Foreign and local missionary groups of varying denominations have been proselytizing in the area for decades, but now they’re facing a staunch Hindu right that’s determined to counter Christian missionary zeal with a bit of their own.
What’s happening in Kandhamal, however, is also a struggle between two dominant tribal groups over acceptance into India’s complex affirmative action system, which gives communities defined as “backward” better access to education and jobs.
The targeting of Christians, their homes and places of worship began after the murder of VHP leader Swami Laxmiananada Saraswati on Aug. 23. Although the government blamed Maoists, VHP leaders and the Bajrang Dal blamed militant Christians and set about taking revenge. Since Aug. 24, at least 20 people have been killed, countless houses burnt and at latest count 20,000 people had taken shelter in relief camps under the protection of regular police deployments, paramilitary squads and riot police.
Kandhamal, in India’s eastern state of Orissa, is an unlikely place for a religious confrontation. Lush green valleys dotted with small fields of rice paddies and lentil plantations are flanked by forested hills. On the face of it, its villages demonstrate religious harmony; their short commercial stretches boasting both churches and temples. Beneath the surface, however, tension has been building.
Many in Orissa’s political establishment trace the problem to Christian missionary work.
“So much money comes into the state for missionary efforts,” said MP Tathagata Sathpathy, a member of the ruling Biju Janata Dal party. “These guys offered Dalits better chances by offering them jobs, free education and other benefits … That’s one reason why there have been mass conversions to Christianity.”
Kandhamal’s people rely mostly on subsistence farming to survive. Some 650,000 people live in the area, according to the 2001 census. Members of the Kandha tribe are predominantly Hindu. The Panos, who were Dalits, the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy, have over the years embraced Christianity.
Orissa is 95 per cent Hindu. Christians only make up 2.5 per cent of the population. But in Kandhamal district, Christians make up roughly 25 per cent of the population.
Since Saraswati’s death, they’ve been hounded, killed and made to retreat from the areas that have been their homes for centuries.
“It’s not simply a religious issue,” said a district official in Kandhamal. “Religion is being used for this purpose, but essentially the Kandhas and the Panos are fighting for access to (job) reservations.”


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