RoustAbout

The iconic river Danube is central to Budapest’s identity and it runs right through the centre of the city dividing it into two parts, Buda and Pest, which were actually two cities united to create Budapest in the 1873. The most imposing structure by the river is the Buda castle which dominates the river front, especially if you are on the Pest side. The river is full of life, especially tour boats going up and down the river with tourists enjoying the view of the magnificent buildings on the riverside. It was summer and the peak tourist season, and there were the larger cruise boats with cabins and decks which took tourists on a longer tour on the river. The most imposing building on the Pest side of the river is undoubtedly the Parliament building. It is best viewed from the other side, because walking below it and taking the grand sweep gives you a crick in the neck. On the river bank, close to the Parliament building is an iconic installation of Shoes on the Danube. This installat...

Our Prime Minister has just returned from another international tour – this time around the islands in the Indian Ocean – including Mauritius and Madagascar that have a strong diasporic presence. In fact the diaspora has been a matter of great concern for our PM. His visit to the US included a film star like appearance at the Madison Square Gardens in New York City. Following this he soon changed the rules for the PIO programme making it initially a life time validity programme, and then merging it with the OCI programme, granting all PIO automatic quasi-citizenship status. Clearly the diasporic Indian is very important in the scheme of things especially at this point in time. According to recent estimates over 2 million people of Indian origin live in the US and about 1.4 million in the UK. Even though the numbers are high they are miniscule. However their friendships and opinion counts high, at least for the Indian Government. I have recently made two visits to the UK and the US ...

Last week we went to the Andamans. Our daughter Diya was joining the masters course in Marine Biology of the Pondicherry University which is offered from its campus in Port Blair. We went there for the ostensible purpose of settling her in, but more importantly we wanted to see a new and exotic place, and spend some time together. We also wanted to make up for the very little parenting that we had done during the last two years while she had roamed about the cities and beaches of Southern India, familiarising herself with the discipline and relevant researchers. Sea, volcanic rocks on the coast line and swaying palms We left for Port Blair, with little idea of what to expect.  While shopping to equip Diya for her stay there we had pondered about what to get and what one could safely assume would be available there. Was there a Bata shop there in Port Blair? Better not take chances, and Diya bought the pair of sneakers she wanted in Delhi itself. Would there be ATMs, or a ...

Every time there is a discussion on a sustainable development or on environmental issues a discussion on population becomes inevitable. It would appear that these two issues are joined at the hip, at least in India. While the world debates environmental issues in far-off Rio, on the occasion of the twentieth year of the Earth Summit, citizen’s of Delhi are reeling from a very hot summer with huge shortages of electricity and water. This makes for a classic case for applying the environment – population logic with climate change neatly tied into the argument. The middle-class denizen of Delhi can additionally fume about the daily increments to the 20 million or more people already in the city, complaining of crowds, price-rise and population in the same breath. Population it may thus appear is the one BIG problem which leads to many of our middle-class woes.      India’s population is now over 1.2 billion and growing. Most would argue that alone should qualify ...

Street-side Vendors Lagos, Nigeria was the sixth African city that I have visited in the last one and half years. I did not get to do much sight-seeing or tourism on my three day flying visit but I was privileged to spend most of my time with Nigerians. Nigeria I knew was the largest African country, but I learnt that it was very fragmented. It has 36 states or provinces, 6 regions and over 250 ethnic groups with their different cultures and languages. English is the common language which binds the country together. The other common features, at least among the men seemed their love of football and their propensity to discuss politics. The car that took me from the airport had two football banners hanging from the centre of the windshield – one of Chelsea and other of the ‘Super Eagles’ as the Nigerian national team is known. This passion for football and politics reminded me of the Kolkata I had left behind in the 80’s when passionate discussions on these subjects would be st...

People from the sky Indigenous woman in Oaxacan village I was third time lucky in being able to visit Mexico. Even though a recent change in immigration rules allowed all Indians with a valid US visa an automatic entry into Mexico, I stood with a strained smile at the immigration counter explaining to the lady behind that my US visa was valid even though it looked quite old dog-eared and was in the fifth of my stapled stack of passports. With a short overnight stop in Mexico City I was off the next morning to Oaxaca in southern Mexico. The short flight over the mountainous country, with dawn breaking over the eastern sky was a spectacular sight and soon I was in Oaxaca – a historical and cultural hot-spot of Mexico, but unfortunately also a state which ranked among the bottom three states (along with the Chiapas) on all development parameters. Nearly 50% of the population in this mountainous state comprised of indigenous peoples and many modern amenities had yet to reach t...

Many people live in hard to reach places  like this village within a  Sanctuary It is the 11 th of July today, the first world population day since the provisional results of the Census 2011 were released earlier in the year. As on all such occasions the discussions today are sure to be on the fact that we continued to add more than Australia to our population. However mention is certainly to be made that the population growth rate is now the lowest it has been in the last fifty years, denoting a success for a our population stabilization programme. However the disappointment of those who work on the issue of declining sex ratio around the census results may not be mentioned. This begs the question does population stabilization still concern itself only with numbers, or there are other things that need to be considered as well? In this article I will try to share some of the concerns that I feel need to be considered even though I feel that growth in numbers continues t...