Jason Overdorf

Jason Overdorf covers India for GlobalPost. Overdorf has spent most of the past 15 years living and working in Asia. He worked as an editor with Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Singapore and Hong...

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Jason Overdorf's Notebook:

October 15, 2009 20:32 ET | Updated: October 16, 2009 08:15 ET

Indian drug companies lead the fight against AIDS

An interesting note from India's Business Standard newspaper: the U.S. president's emergency plan for AIDS relief (Pepfar) depends almost wholly on Indian pharma companies.

According to the report, out of the 100-odd proposals to manufacture retrovirals for use in developing countries that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a whopping 95 percent have come from Indian drug makers.

The Indians save the program a lot of money, thus saving more lives.

"It is estimated that FDA’s actions are allowing Pepfar to spend $150 million (Rs 690 crore) more each year on patient access to care,” the paper quoted a statement by U.S. FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg as saying.

But it also makes Indian companies a lot of dough.

Though the breakdown for each company isn't available, a top executive from Cipla says the company gets $20 to $25 million in revenue annually from the relief program.

 
 

October 5, 2009 05:53 ET

troubled ceos, thank god you're not running air india

It ain't easy running an airline these days. Fuel prices see-saw. Nobody wants to travel. You have to take off your shoes every five minutes. And bankruptcy always looms just over the horizon.

But listen to this, troubled CEOs: It could be worse; you could be in charge of Air India.

Yep. India's lumbering state-owned carrier has all your problems and more. Not only is the company on the verge of going bust, with customer service modeled on Aeroflot and efficiency learned from the Indian Administrative Service, but it's also got strike-happy pilots, a decrepit fleet, and a host of new low-cost competitors. And that's not all.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, the “Maharaja of the skies”--which has never been known for its brilliant spin doctors—now faces a veritable media feeding frenzy over the discovery of a pesky (and difficult to catch) rat aboard one of its birds and mid-air fisticuffs on another flight that saw the cockpit left unattended for several tense minutes after the co-pilot streamed out bench-clearer style to get his homey's back. Making matters worse, the reason for the punch-up was that the pilot allegedly "molested" a flight attendant, and the purser was defending her honor.  (Video footage is NOT available on Youtube, so don't even go there).

This kind of thing may be good for ratings if you're an NBA team.  But it doesn't sell plane tickets.

The funny thing is, there are probably still people who would fly on Air India if the price was right. Heck, I'm one of them. There are some places that only Air India will go. Plus, though their flight attendants have not been very easy on the eyes for a few decades, they incomprehensibly have the best food available in the air. Bar none.

Why else would the rats put up with the surly service?

October 3, 2009 05:29 ET | Updated: October 3, 2009 08:45 ET

Shot in the act: the first casualty of "urinal rage"

A 22-year-old Indian guy was shot this weekend for pissing in public, according to a report from the staid old BBC.   

Nope, this isn't some newfangled interpretation of Shariah law, or a draconian new manifestation of India's usual liberal (and tortuous) legal system.  It was plain old "urinal rage."

Delhi has road rage, bus rage, queue rage, heat rage, post office rage, even chicken rage (well, actually, that happens in the "hill station" of Shimla, which tends to run out of the best-beloved bird when the Punjabis ascend on the place).  But as far as I know, this is the first incident of urinal rage in this usually piss-tolerant city, about which one of my fondest memories remains a drunken slash taken on some unsuspecting basement-dweller's window before a huge meal of egg paranthas on a midnight, post-bar run to Delhi's Fleet Street.

Maybe Himanshu Sharma was a casualty of the Home Minister's call for Delhi-ites to curb their rude behavior before the Commonwealth Games next year--an inevitably disastrous event that seems to me to be the country-sized equivalent of David Letterman's confession.  I don't know.  But you have to feel for the guy.

Here's the Beeb: "Correspondents say spitting and urinating in public is a common sight across India.  The culprits are almost always men but this is the first time that someone has been killed for urinating in public."

Huh?

What's the logic of that last sentence?  What does the culprits being men have to do with somebody getting shot?  Are we meant to infer that this should have happened a long time ago, because it was so unfair to women?  Is there some hint that this was militant feminism gone even more militant?

Not so.  Apparently, Himanshu and his buds were eating some snacks in their car (a favorite place to consume whiskey in Delhi, notwithstanding the laws against drunk driving) when Himanshu got out to drain the main vein.  The owner of the petrol pump (i.e. gas station) where they'd parked registered his objections.  (The exact phrases he used were not included in the article).  Then things "escalated."

So far, neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch have issued a statement.

October 1, 2009 23:44 ET | Updated: October 2, 2009 08:48 ET

Montblanc launches Gandhi pen; Karl Marx rumored to be on deck

I saw the ad for Montblanc's new Gandhi pen yesterday — a day before the holiday celebrating the birth of the father of nonviolent resistance Oct. 2.  But I didn't think a ridiculous advertising campaign was enough fodder for an article. Luckily, Andy Buncombe at the Independent decided it did.

"Little is recorded about Mahatma Gandhi's choice of writing implement," Andy said, "but one thing is clear: when the great ascetic set down the ideas that would prompt a generation of Indians to a peaceful revolution, he probably did so with a pen that cost rather less than £14,000."

But that's exactly what Hamburg-based Montblanc plans to charge for a new pen manufactured in his honor (and, presumably, to make a killing off newly rich Indians).

Naturally, Montblanc focuses on Gandhi's skill as a writer and his crusade for peaceful resistance, while ignoring his famed asceticism. But come on. Can anybody miss the fact that the guy's wearing a dhoti (loin cloth) and spinning his own clothes? This is about as far from luxury branding as it gets, right?

Here's Montblanc's version, as per Buncombe's article:

A gold wire entwined by hand around the middle of each pen, said Montblanc, is designed to "evoke the roughly-wound yarn on the spindle with which Gandhi spun every day for half an hour, regardless of where he was or whom he was talking to."

What's next? The Karl Marx commemorative credit card? The Joseph Stalin autographed pillow?

It makes me proud to have left the world of ads and marketing behind.

 

October 1, 2009 00:43 ET | Updated: October 1, 2009 07:31 ET

Pakistan: $1.5 billion in aid from the US cleared, terrorist outfits intact, and still stalling action against Mumbai attackers

Where India-Pakistan relations are concerned, it now seems to be a tug of war between the end of patience and the onset of fatigue. In other words, when India gives up in disgust, will it be too tired of the hassle to do anything, or so angry at the way it got played that it can't help but retaliate?

The way things are going, New Delhi has good reason for both reactions.  Pakistan continues to play a stalling game when it comes to taking action against the leader of Lashkar-e-Toiba founder Hafeez Saeed, whom India alleges masterminded the Nov. 26 attacks on Mumbai last year.  And, as Home Minister P. Chidambaram pointed out yesterday, Islamabad doesn't show any signs that it plans to change course — after Pakistan's official statement that the case against Saeed is "half-baked."

According to the Indian Express:

“If it is half-baked, they are welcome to bake it fully,” Chidambaram said responding to media queries about Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s latest remarks stating that a “half-baked case” on Saeed could not be taken to court.

“All the baking ingredients are in Pakistan. The entire evidence is on Pakistani soil. They are most welcome to bake it fully and take it to court,” Chidambaram said adding that all evidence available on Indian soil had been shared with Pakistan and that the remaining evidence is “on Pakistani soil”. 

Meanwhile, despite New Delhi's hopes that the US and the international community would deliver against Pakistan — the sole hope when, in the aftermath of the attacks, India resisted calls for surgical air strikes across the border — Washington recently approved a fat new aid package for Islamabad that flies in the face of any claims of a crackdown. Tripling non-military aid to $1.5 billion a year (if Obama signs the bill into law) is hardly a rap on the knuckles — especially since the supposed limitations on how the money is spent are laughable after reports that Islamabad misspent up to 70 percent of US military aid to develop weapons for use against India (instead of fighting terrorism).

The results haven't been good yet, either, where New Delhi is concerned. India's papers are making much of a New York Times report on Islamabad's failures (for lack of trying?) to reign in Pakistani terrorist groups.  

“The group behind the assault remains largely intact and determined to strike India again,’’ a New York Times report quoting intelligence officials and current and former members of the terror group has said. The Lashkar network, according to the report, has "persisted, even flourished" since the Mumbai terror attacks. A senior Lashkar operative in Karachi said in an interview to the newspaper that "our funds increased and more people wanted to join us" after the Mumbai terror attacks. A midlevel ISI officer told the newspaper that Lashkar’s membership extended to 150,000 people this year.

If you've read this far, you're probably less disgusted than the people of India.