Von Mira Kamdar

I’d picked up a bottle of scotch for my Mumbai hosts at the duty-free shop in Newark. I needn’t have bothered. One of the features of the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport is a gleaming duty-free hall through which one must pass between immigration and baggage claim with a far bigger selection of booze, perfume and chocolate than the cute little spot at the Newark Airport where I’d stopped. Cheaper too: I’d paid $37.00 for my bottle of 12-year-old Chivas in Newark, and was dismayed to see the same on offer in Mumbai for $29.00. http://worldpolicy.org/wordpress/2009/12/04/mira-kamdar-reflections-on-mumbai-%E2%80%94-arriving/#more-3968

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Coming to Kerala:
As we learned in Mumbai, access to jobs is a major source of communal strife. In Kerala, the lack of jobs for educated citizens is an omnipresent challenge. Unemployment in the state hovers around 25 percent, depending on how and whom you count; roughly twice as many women as men are jobless. Moreover, Kerala has no industrial base. Workers are unionized and wages are high compared to neighboring Tamil Nadu. Land is in short supply and expensive; consumer goods are imported. Jumbo-sized billboards pepper the landscape; television commercials interrupt programming—a Mad Man’s delight. Print journalism flourishes, and people are well informed and opinionated. But in the words of a friendly critic, “Keralites know their rights, but not their obligations.” http://worldpolicy.org/wordpress/2009/12/01/karl-e-meyer-and-shareen-brysac-gods-own-country/#more-3879