Everything is on a grand scale in Russia – all is colossal. Too colossal for man. It’s mindboggling, it's dizzying, it's dwarfing. The three letters/words that keep slipping past your gaping mouth are Wow and OMG! Much like Moscow’s historic Bolshoi Theatre, the city itself plays out like one giant show, leaving its audience gaping and gasping
But Moscow surely has its human side too. Soon after I touched down at the Sheremetyevo airport on the outskirts of Moscow on a nippy August morning, it dawned on me that I had to negotiate a language whose sound and script are both Russian! Not a sign in English, not a person who understood. Having managed to roll out my baggage I was to run into Woody Allen or rather his Russian twin. Maybe a few years younger wearing the same nerdy spectacles and a huge Uber inscribed on his jumper he approached with a smattering of English. “Good price. Nice big car. Drop you to hotel…” His look was what got me suckered for 3000 Roubles only to find on my way out of Moscow that the trip costs less than a thousand. Welcome to Moscow! Cab drivers, especially the older suave gentlemanly looking ones take you for a real ride.
After a sumptuous dinner at the Russian Tower, which looks out to the Bolshoi Theatre and serves an amazing Beef Stroganoff and Chicken Kiev (both Russian in origin) along with some of the most delicate Pelminis (beef/pork/bear dumplings) you can find in Russia. Our hotel was just about a kilometre away, but it was late and the feet weary and the stomach heavy and sluggish. The three cabs stood invitingly at the kerb – two yellow, one black. The oldest and the most ‘gentlemanly’ looking of the three walked up and I asked him “How much?” showing him my hotel card for the address. With both his hands in the air, he said nonchalantly, “Meter control, meter control.” Well, little did I realize that what he meant was that he was going to control the meter. On arrival at the hotel, I stared at the figure 1537. I couldn’t believe my eyes and he wouldn’t stop having an animated conversation in Russian. No choice had to pay up. The woman at the front desk informed me that it should have cost me all of 250 roubles.
Moscow has a very efficient Metro and bus service, but you got to know Russian to get around them. The Moscow subway is more the 80 years old and one of the grandest in the world. A masterpiece of the Soviet era the Moscow Metro, with its stations decorated with marble, mosaics, stained-glass panels and bronze sculptures, looks more like a vast art museum. It was one of the proudest achievements of the Soviet era and it still beats many other European underground systems with its ultra-reliable service.
The Moscow Metropolitan is one of the busiest subways in the world. It is the world record-holder for on-time departures and arrivals. It is also the most beautiful in the world – 44 of the nearly 200 stations are listed as cultural heritage sites.
But sadly all signages in Russian. My two attempts seemed like getting lost in a Bhool Bhulaiya. And so I stuck to cabs even at the cost of getting ripped off.
St Petersburg is not only grander in my opinion, but also a far more friendly and easy city to negotiate. In Moscow amidst the glitter and the glam of a prosperous and racy city, people don’t spare you any time or even a look. But Petersburg brings you face to face with the Russian working class, the friendly countenance. And to top it all signages in English! My recommendation to those headed towards Russia, keep more days for St Petersburg than Moscova. Here’s a quick tour of the two cities.
At nearly every turn in Moscow, you'll see golden domes peeking out over the rooftops and hear church bells peeling through the streets, which are dotted with some 600 churches. Moscow lives and breathes Russian history
The very founding site of the city (and arguably, the country), the Kremlin and Red Square are at the heart of Moscow – historically, geographically and spiritually.
The Kremlin and the Red Square will move you, it will tantalise your senses, soothe your spirit and boggle your mind. The Kremlin is enclosed by high walls 2.25km long, with Red Square outside the east wall. The best views of the complex are from Sofiyskaya nab across the river.
Immediately outside the Kremlin’s northeastern wall is the celebrated Red Square, the 400m-by-150m area of cobblestones that is at the very heart of Moscow. Commanding the square from the southern end is St Basil’s Cathedral. This panorama never fails to send the heart aflutter, especially at night. The icon of Russia, the St Basil’s Cathedral, is a crazy confusion of colours, patterns and shapes, the culmination of a style that is unique to Russian architecture. .
Legend has it that Ivan had the architects blinded so that they could never build anything comparable
What is more thrilling than watching a ballerina defy gravity, leaping across the stage at the glittering Bolshoi Theatre?? Or feeling the force of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, just a few blocks away from where it premiered more than a century ago? The classical performing arts in Moscow are still among the best in the world. An evening at the Bolshoi is still one of Moscow’s most romantic and entertaining options for a night on the town. The glittering six-tier auditorium has an electric atmosphere, evoking over 240 years of premier music and dance.
A stroll along a historic canal. St Petersburg is an almost unrivalled treasure trove of art and culture. Perhaps the jewel in St Petersburg's crown, the Hermitage is the largest museum in the world, so you can easily spend your whole day here getting lost amongst the myriad of artwork and sculptures.
Established in 1895 by a decree of Emperor Nicholas I, the bulk of the exhibitions lies within the Winter Palace. A magnificent artefact within itself, the Winter Palace was once the main residence of the Russian monarchs. The museum contains works of arts from ancient times, right up until the early 20th century, with highlights including paintings by da Vinci, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky.
You can spend days in the Hermitage, seeing everything from Egyptian mummies to Picassos, while the Russian Museum, spread over four sumptuous palaces, is perhaps the best collection of Russian art in the world.
Drift along waterways and see St. Petersburg from a different angle on a leisurely boat cruise. Pass under some of the city's 400 bridges and admire the 18thcentury palaces, amazing cathedrals, and churches as well as many architectural landmarks that line the banks of the Neva River.
Affectionately known as the “Venice of the North,” the city rivals Venice and Paris in its romantic atmosphere. St. Petersburg was originally built on 33 islands separated by canals in the delta of the Neva River. Now, these canals and rivers offer a unique view of the iconic landmarks that dot the city, such as the magnificent Hermitage Museum and the Vasilyevsky Island with its famous Palace Bridge.
Glide past historic monuments and landmarks during this cruise and visit otherwise inaccessible areas of the city.
St Petersburg’s most spectacular venue for ballet and opera, the Mariinsky Theatre is an attraction in its own right. The magnificent interior is the epitome of imperial grandeur, and an evening here will be an impressive experience.
INITIALLY, IT WAS just an experiment when 25-year-old Sarika Gowda, made a parantha and a raita for her husband with Zaatar. “Someone had brought us a half-kg packet and it had been lying there for over a month. When I googled it, I found it was mostly just a mix of some herbs like oregano and thyme and sesame seeds. I thought the best way to determine if we like the taste is to use it in something familiar”.
The ‘experiment’ was a great hit. Both Gowda and husband Rajendrakalyan liked the taste. Now they ask everyone returning from any country in West Asia to look for and bring back Zaatar for them.
“We did try it out on cheese toast and pasta too, but we both prefer it in paranthas with lots of green chillies,” said Gowda.
For Golf Links resident, Damini Vishwanathan Singh, it was a tin of coconut cream from South America. “I live with my husband’s parents and they are very conservative in their food tastes. The tin just kept lying around. It was one of those things that people get because they are inexpensive.” Malayali to the core, Damini, rustled up a Maambazha Kootaan (ripe mango curried in curd and coconut milk), using a tin of mango puree and some curry leaves.
“It was a revelation. And now, that has become my go-to party trick. All I need is some mango puree, coconut cream, a few pieces of cucumber or radish for texture, and a tempering with some mustard seeds. Every guest we’ve had in the last four years has loved it,” says she.
This sort of fusion cooking doesn’t really have a name. It isn’t discussed, or known, or even talked about much. In some cases, it is people like the Gowdas, who prefer to try new ingredients in familiar dishes. In others, it is because the ingredient was a gift.
Yet others bought expensive ingredients on a whim and then ended up using them in Indian dishes as the expiry date neared.
Shimla resident, Sheenu Chauhan, recalls, “I had gone on a very salad-heavy (pun not intended) diet prescribed by a Delhi dietician. And I’d bought a whole set of Western spices – Oregano, Thyme, Rosemary, Pasta herbs, Salad Spice…”
“The diet died the expected natural death and the pretty spice jars adorned a shelf at the back of a kitchen cabinet,” her brother Rohan says. “One day we had guests coming over and we ran out of some masala. My mother improvised some garam masala by throwing in a bit of this and a dash of that. That was the best dal we’ve had,” he added.
The icing on the cake is that mother Pushplata now regularly asks Sheena to get another set of the ‘Italian Spices’ from Delhi because they’ve given her gharelu dal, an altogether new flavour.
Bangalore architect, Suman Kumar, says his best friend is Pumpkin Pie Spice. “I am single, I live alone, and I don’t really like to cook. My sister sent me this spice mix, which I use whenever I need a dessert fix. I just microwave some cooked rice, milk, and sugar and add the spice mix. It’s a sort of kheer meets pie flavour. And the last time I went home to Bhubaneshwar, I made my mother try it too. She liked it and now uses it to flavour the halwa for bhog (offering to God),” he said.
Monisha Roberts has a similar tale to tell about Sumac. “I had asked my sister to get me some sumac because I wanted to know what it would taste like. After I got it, I realised it is sour like she said but it is a very mild sort of sour.” Now Roberts sprinkles it over dals, mixes it in chutneys, and even uses it as a substitute for Anaardana (pomegranate seed powder) or Aamchur (dried mango powder) - both are souring agents - in snacks like bhelpuri and paprichaat.
It was seeing Roberts’ experiment with Sumac that inspired her best friend Neera Badgaiyan to use a pack of Sriracha as an instant “achaar masala” when she needed to rustle up a large batch of “kaccha achaar” in a jiffy. “Kachcha Achaar is a mix of chillies, salt, spices, that we sauté in oil and pour over chopped vegetables. In my family recipe, it’s essentially cauliflower, carrots, turnip, and radish… a pickle that hasn’t soaked and marinated… an absolute must when the whole family gathers for any event. Everyone eats vast quantities of pickles with everything,” she said. Solution: “Easy-peasy, I simply mixed two packets of Sriracha (which I’d been wondering what to do with), in a bowl with hot oil, and poured it over the veggies and that was it.”
“The recipe was such a hit that I now only make the Kachcha Achaar with Sriracha and most of my younger cousins have started doing the same because this way it’s much easier than measuring out spices and cooking them in oil stirring the whole time.”
Law professor Afshaan Khan says she no longer remembers how to make “kadhi” the traditional way. “It started one rainy evening many years ago when we had guests and no time to rustle up a quick meal. I didn’t really know how to cook in those days, so I had no pre-set notions about what one can and can’t do. So when my husband told me the kadhi was not sour enough, I stirred in apple cider vinegar… and it is precisely because I didn’t know how to cook that I did that. A seasoned cook would never have added vinegar to a dish with curds or milk. It worked and since then that’s how I make it – always.” Husband Shahrukh Khan smiles and adds “but that’s not a kadhi which can be reheated if there are leftovers… we learnt that the hard way.”
These are just a few examples of how Indian families have begun incorporating the “foodie” gifts that people bring them, into wholesome Indian fare.
Catering student, and amateur food critic, Balbir Singh (“Balboa” is what my friends call me”), believes that this is merely a stage in culinary evolution.
“Tomatoes, chillies, and cauliflower weren’t native to India either, but try finding a North Indian family where they aren’t used. Many of today’s children don’t even realise that momos or chow mien or pasta weren’t Indian, to begin with. So it makes perfect sense that newer generations are introducing newer ingredients or flavours into familiar foods.
It’s not easy to tag a billion people into a single database. But when the government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decided to go ahead with the Unique Identity card (UID Card) project in India in 2009, who would he turn to, to head this most ambitious project — the biggest social project on the planet. The man he turned to was none other than Nandan Nilekani, the man who had taken the biggest Indian software company Infosys to great heights as its CEO. The Multipurpose National Identity Card which came to be known as the Aadhar card was aimed to provide a unique identification number for all residents of India and used primarily for the efficient delivery of welfare services. Nandan gave up his coveted job at Infosys to drive this mammoth project home. Despite a change in the government and judicial questions, Aadhar today is being made mandatory for use by all citizens, linked to all financial transactions. A look at this unique man.
Just like the Aadhar was revolutionary at the time, the present government has launched an ambitious project to bring the nation under a single tax system – the GST – which has divided the business community over its benefits. Exactly a month from its midnight launch, we take a view in our Platform section on how this one nation, one tax has united and divided the nation.
In Business, we dive into the world of some amazing startups which are getting more and more inventive with each passing day and offering services and goods that were unimaginable a few years ago. Startling we must say!
As we move on to an increasingly digital world, health and environment are becoming big concerns for the young and growing. Lack of exercise and pollution being the biggest, there are attempts to offer simple solutions to such complex issues. Cycling is being promoted by a young woman in Ahmedabad as one such simple solution. Cycling Cities takes a look at why our cities are not cycle-friendly.
Then we have an interesting column from a globe-trotting Indian journalist who has interviewed more heads of states and visited more countries that any other journalist in India. Saeed Naqvi reminisces about his visit to Israel, the Jewish state.
In the Books section, we take a look at India’s most formidable politician. She was someone who dominated our political narrative and forged a cult of personality so deep that we still feel the reverberations today. Indira Gandhi loomed larger than life for much of India’s post-independence history. On the centenary of her birth, journalist and author Sagarika Ghose takes a look back at Gandhi; delving into not just the political animal but the woman with a complex private life.
ELECTED// India has a new President in Ram Nath Kovind who took over from Pranab Mukherjee as the 14th President of India on Tuesday, July 25. Kovind, who was earlier the governor of Bihar, won the Presidential election last week, defeating opponent Meira Kumar. 71 year old Kovind was born in a poor family in Kanpur in 1945. His father was a farmer who had to sell his land in order to educate his son. Kovind trained as a lawyer and worked in the Delhi High Court and Supreme Court. He joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1991.
Over the years he has been involved in issues and protests connected to the rights of the Dalits. Dalits are people who were labeled ‘lower caste’ and ‘untouchable’ in many parts of India. Although this practice is now frowned upon, Dalits continue to be ill-treated in some parts of India. As a lawyer, Kovind provided free assistance to Dalits. He was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1994 and he completed two terms in Parliament. His nomination as the BJP’s candidate surprised many, as he was not a famous politician.
In the final vote count, NDA nominee Kovind received 65.6 per cent votes translating into 702,044 electoral college votes, while UPA candidate Meira Kumar managed to get 34.35 per cent (367,314 votes). 522 MPs voted for Kovind, while 225 parliamentarians voted for Meira Kumar. In the last Presidential polls held in 2012, Pranab Mukherjee had defeated PA Sangma by over 69 per cent votes
Let’s see what the next five years of Kovind’s term brings!
POLITICS// Nawaz Sharif has resigned as prime minister of Pakistan following a decision by the country's Supreme Court to disqualify him from office. The ruling came after a probe into his family's wealth following the 2015 Panama Papers dump linking Mr Sharif's children to offshore companies. Mr Sharif has consistently denied any wrongdoing in the case. The five judges reached a unanimous verdict in the Islamabad court, which was filled to capacity.
“Following the verdict, Nawaz Sharif has divested himself of his responsibility as prime minister,” a spokesman for Mr Sharif's office said in a statement. However, it said he had “serious reservations” about the judicial process.
There was heightened security in the capital, with tens of thousands of troops and police deployed. The court's ruling stated that Mr Sharif had been dishonest in not disclosing his earnings from a Dubai-based company in his nomination papers during the 2013 general election
One of the judges, Ejaz Afzal Khan, said that Mr Sharif was no longer “eligible to be an honest member of the parliament”.
Pakistan's Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan earlier advised Mr Sharif to accept Friday's verdict. The court has recommended anti-corruption cases against several individuals, including Mr Sharif, his daughter Maryam and her husband Safdar, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and others.
CRICKET// The Indian woman’s cricket team lost the Women’s World Cup finals very narrowly to England last month. Had they won the match, which was played at the Lord’s in London, it would have been the first ever title win for India in the Women’s World Cup
As big as cricket is in India, the women’s game is not watched much. Mithali Raj and her band changed that when they charged their way to the final of the Woman’s World Cup. Half-hour before it all ended, India was in a winning position needing just 29 runs from 33 balls with 5 wickets in hand. That was before English bowler Anya Shrubsole ran through the Indian batting order, taking a series of wickets, pulling off a win for her team.
The tournament saw wonderful performances from some players. Captain Mithali Raj was the top scorer for India and with 409 runs in the tournament, she was the second highest scorer overall. Middle order player Harmanpreet Kaur won millions of fans when she smashed a famous 171 runs against Australia in the semi-final.
The Indian woman’s team may have lost the World Cup but they have won a million fans-and that may be the biggest result yet of this tournament
POLITICS// In less than 24 hours, Nitish Kumar has returned as Bihar’s chief minister, rekindling an old alliance with the BJP. Nitish was sworn in at 10 am at Raj Bhavan in Patna by governor Keshari Nath Tripathi. Senior BJP leader in Bihar Sushil Modi has been sworn in as deputy chief minister. He has previously served as Nitish’s deputy from 2005-2013.
The JD(U) has 71 lawmakers in the 243member state assembly. With the BJP’s support, Nitish’s party now has 124 – one over the halfway mark. The “decision to form new government taken in the interest of Bihar, we will take the state to the path of prosperity,” Nitish said after he was sworn in on Thursday. Prime Minister Prasad Yadav’s son Tejashwi Yadav met state governor Keshri Nath Tripathi on Thursday morning, echoing Gandhi’s view that this decision was part of a longer plan. He registered protest that the RJD – the single-largest party in the Bihar assembly – had not been invited to form the government. “RJD being the single largest party should have been invited to form the government. We are taking legal advice and will move court against the governor’s decision,” he told reporters after the meeting. He said the people of Bihar had given the grand alliance the mandate to run its government for 5 years which Nitish “betrayed”.
CRICKET// Former Indian allrounder and team director Ravi Shastri has been appointed as the new head coach of the Indian men's cricket team last month. The 55-year-old was among ten applicants who applied for the position earlier this month. He was interviewed by the Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC), comprising of former cricketers Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar and V V S Laxman, after being included in the shortlist of six names. Besides Shastri, Virendra Sehwag, Lalchand Rajput, Richard Pybus, Ravi Shastri and Tom Moody were interviewed by the CAC.
Shastri was also the director of the Indian team between 2014 and 2016 during which time he led the Men in Blue to the semi-finals of the World Cup and 2015 World T20.
Shastri had also applied for the job in 2016, but legendary leg-spinner Anil Kumble was chosen over him by Board of Control for Cricket in India's Cricket Advisory Committee.
The head coach position has been vacant since Anil Kumble’s resignation following India’s 180-run defeat against arch-rivals Pakistan in the Champions Trophy final at the Oval on June 18.
DEATH// Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who was the first woman to win the Field Medal in 2014, died recently. She was suffering from cancer. A brilliant mathematician, Mirzakhani was given the Field Medal, which is seen as equal to a Nobel prize in Mathematics, for her work in theoretical mathematics.
Theoretical math is a very complex area that studies ideas and concepts in math rather than real life problems involving addition, subtraction and multiplication. However her work can be applied in related subjects such as physics to understand how the Earth came to exist and within math itself to better understand prime numbers.
Mirzakhani was born in the West Asian country of Iran. As a young student, she won many prizes in math competitions earlier reserved only for boys. She won gold medals for Iran in the International Math Olympiad in 1994 and 1995. She later moved to the United States to study and work
SPACE// Iran successfully launched its most advanced satellite-carrying rocket into space, the country’s state media reported, in what is likely the most significant step yet for the launch vehicle. A confirmed launch of the “Simorgh” rocket would mark another step forward for the Islamic Republic's young space program, but is likely to raise alarm among its adversaries, who fear the same technology could be used to produce long-range missiles. The U.S. State Department called the launch “provocative”. Iranian state television said the rocket, whose name means “phoenix” in Persian, is capable of carrying a satellite weighing 250 kilograms. The report did not elaborate on the rocket's payload. Other state-linked agencies including the semiofficial Fars news agency also described the launch as successful.
Media reports did not say when the launch took place at the Imam Khomeini National Space Station in Semnan, some 220 kilometers (138 miles) east of Tehran.
Iran frequently announces technological breakthroughs that are difficult to independently verify. It has carried out multiple tests of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles as well as other domestically produced weapons over the years. The Simorgh is a two-stage rocket first revealed in 2010. It is larger than an earlier model known as the Safir, or “ambassador”, that Iran has used to launch satellites on previous occasions. The launch comes as the United States has criticized Iran’s ballistic missile tests, which American officials argue violate the spirit of the 2015 nuclear deal that Iran struck with world powers. Under the agreement, which does not expressly prohibit missile tests, Iran agreed to limit its uranium enrichment program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
It was the summer of 2009 when Nandan Nilekani left Infosys, the Indian outsourcing company that he had co-founded nearly 30 years earlier. He had been invited by the government of India to launch and head the most ambitious project of tagging every Indian with a unique number which would all part of one database, a sort of social security ID like in the West. At the going away party Nilekani made a speech which was live streamed on the company’s internal network watched by more than a hundred thousand employees. Nandan said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made him an offer which he could not refuse
He famously said, “My only identity in Infosys. I will be going to lead a programme to give identity to every Indian. But today I am losing my identity.”
Nandan left that day with a gift of a Toshiba laptop and his holding in the company amounting to 1.45 per cent which today is valued at about half a billion dollars. It was a big shift from the private to the public.
“It wasn’t fuzzy,” Nilekani said of the I.D. project. “Five years from the day I took it, you would be able to say I succeeded, if people got numbers, and you’d know I screwed up if people didn’t get numbers. So it was a zero or a one.”
After he left Infosys in July 2009,Nilekani began building a government department from scratch which was a huge dislocation from his comfort zone, having to zip between Bangalore and Delhi. The UIDAI had to look solid from the start or else there was the risk of political will slipping away. Soon he had a small team of civil servants and tech experts to establish much of the project’s architecture.
The main thrust of the project was to reduce the economic distance between the have and the have-nots. Designed to be the biggest social project on the planet, it was described to be a project of national transformation. The scheme came to be known as Aadhar which means foundation in Hindi. Its logo a red fingerprint, in the guise of a rising sun.
A national ID seemed to be the need of the hour. After all just thirty-three million Indians, out of 1.2 billion, pay income tax, and only sixty million have passports. Hundreds of millions of Indians are barely visible to the state: they have either no ID at all or a weak form of it, issued by local authorities. Consequently, they can’t easily open bank accounts or buy cell-phone SIM cards, and they can’t secure state services owed to them. Their official opacity hampers economic growth and emboldens bureaucrats who steal from welfare funds or harass citizens for bribes.
Nilekani, who has often called Aadhaar “humongous” in scale, managed to bring two clashing worlds together – Delhi’s world of bureaucracy and Bangalore’s information-technology entrepreneurship. Nilekani’s friends were quick to point out that if he succeeded in establishing an ID protocol — thereby helping to create an inclusive, low-corruption identity for India itself — it would be because he drew Delhi and Bangalore into an awkward embrace.
Nilekani has a round face as if reflected in the back of a spoon, and the wry, detached manner of someone so taken by visions of the future that the present seems too mundane to merit his full attention. Although he is often persuasive, he is not always eloquent; sentences often fall away to phrases like “the branding thingy.” He is known as a great salesman, but he sells softly, blithely, by making it seem almost an imposition to have to explain the benefits of his product.
Though many countries have long traditions of people-listing — in records connected to baptism, taxation, or conscription — India does not. Nilekani’s digital effort is what he calls “leapfrogging stuff.” If the project is successful, India would abruptly find itself at the forefront of citizen-identification technology, outperforming Social Security and other non-biometric, and not fully randomised, systems.
Nilekani’s closest equivalent in America could probably be Michael Bloomberg. His biggest challenge while executing the project was how to bring the best people from government and from the private sector into one place?
His company, Infosys, is worth nearly thirty billion dollars and makes its money by hiring young, technologically minded people, providing them with a comfortable workspace on one of the company’s 11 Indian campuses — vivid lawns, subsidised meals, gyms, and pools — and then selling their skills abroad. In the company’s core business, technicians write and support custom software that performs unglamorous tasks, such as inventory and payroll, for large overseas corporations. Clients have included Amazon, Apple, Ford, and Bank of America.
The company was founded in 1981 when Nilekani was a laconic 26-year-old. He hailed from an educated, middle-class, English-speaking family. His father was the manager of a Bangalore textile mill, a leftist and a socially conscious citizen. His mother, a college graduate, stayed home. When Nilekani was 12, and his older brother was at college, his father lost his job, and his parents moved away from Bangalore in search of work. Nilekani was sent to live with his uncle, in Dharwad, a town north of Bangalore. From there, in 1973, he won a place to study electrical engineering at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, or IIT, in Mumbai. He was an average student but a social leader, a wide-ranging reader, and a star of the college’s quiz team.
Upon graduating, Nilekani became a trainee at a Mumbai software-engineering firm. His interviewer was Narayana Murthy. Two and a half years later, Murthy left the firm to found Infosys and invited Nilekani and five others to come with him.
For most of the 1980s, Nilekani lived in the US. In 1993, he and his co-founders became rich when Infosys went public in India. By then, the government, which had long leant toward socialism, had begun to enact pro-business reforms. In 1999, Infosys became the first Indian company to be listed on a North American stock exchange. Three years later, Murthy stepped aside, and Nilekani became CEO. The company’s rate of annual growth accelerated, reaching 50 fifty per cent in 2005
Nilekani handed over his CEO position to a successor in 2007, but he stayed at the company as co-chairman, and began writing a book, “Imagining India,” a smart, social-democratic reading of the country, in which his anxiety about national shortcomings—education, inequality, urban infrastructure—was offset by confidence about the reforming potential of information technology, open markets, and a bulge in the segment of the population about to enter the workforce.“
“Imagining India” was published at the end of 2008. In the book, Nilekani made a case for unique I.D. numbers. As he noted, a right-of-center Indian government, which was in power from 1999 to 2004, began to introduce a national ID scheme, largely driven by anxiety about border security. Nilekani rethought the idea as a more liberal, and more economically oriented, one. Such a programme would remind citizens of their “rights, entitlements, and duties,” and would oblige the state to improve services. It would boost the national economy, by allowing hundreds of millions of Indians without bank accounts to open one, and it would cut government losses from corruption.
Nilekani’s book became a best-seller. In May 2009, India reelected the government that had been in power for five years: the United Progressive Alliance, a coalition dominated by the Indian National Congress, with Manmohan Singh again as Prime Minister. Nilekani was offered a place on the Planning Commission, a body that guides national social policy. This did not appeal to him. He put himself forward as a possible education minister, but the idea was rejected. So the conversation turned to ID. The rest is history.
Israel has been in the news in the context of the Prime Minister’s visit and I may be forgiven for a touch of nostalgia. I was the first Indian journalist to visit Israel after an Australian fanatic had set fire to the pulpit of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in August 1969. The Arab World was ablaze.
Indian passports in those days were not valid for South Africa, Israel and Southern Rhodesia. Under a special dispensation, you could obtain a separate passport for travel to countries with which India did not have diplomatic ties. Israelis were more practical: they pinned a piece of paper for entry and exit which could be pulled out when travelling to other countries.
The reception I received at Ben Gurion airport was the stuff of fairy tales for a reporter in his 20s. Never will Jerusalem Municipality have a public relations officer more beautiful than Bathsheba Herman.
Something that had not touched the Israelis then was arrogance. They came across as clever, wise, modest people, working diligently on their Kibbutz, the typically Jewish cooperatives, where inequalities were not discernable. It was possible to contemplate Fa Giladi, the exquisite Kibbutz in the shadow of Mt. Hermon, as the dream location for research on the Palestinian issue.
The simplicity of the people helped tone down shades of Zionism instilled in us and which was the bane of the Palestinian people. Ambassadors like John Kenneth Galbraith held Pandit Nehru in their thrall with their intellect. But during the Indira Gandhi years, changes were creeping across the diplomatic corps. There were various ways to gauge how well informed an Ambassador was. A simple test could be this: was the ambassador a regular fixture at the New Year eve party hosted by Indira Gandhi’s leftist adviser, editor of Seminar, Romesh Thapar. By this and several other criteria, the trophy belonged to Clovis Maksoud, Arab League’s first ambassador, articulate, even bombastic, with an unerring eye for New Delhi’s well-groomed ladies. His role in sensitising the New Delhi elite to the intricacies of the Palestinian case must never be underestimated.
Nehru as leader of the Non-Aligned and Afro-Asian bloc obviously had a large constituency among left liberals and Muslims. His charm offensive even on the Arabs worked such magic that Raees Amrohvi, an Urdu poet from Pakistan, was moved to write a quatrain:
“Jup raha hai aaj mala ek Hindu ki Arab Barhman zaa de mein shaane dilbari aisi to ho!
Hikmat e Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru ki qasam Mar mitey Islam jispar, kafiri aisi to ho!”
(What a spell this Brahmin has cast on the Arabs Who now chant his name on their beads. Look at the magic of this kafir (non-believer); Believers of the Arab world lie at his feet)
Until the 1990s, it was anti intellectual to cast a positive light on the Israeli case. When Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1984, he was advised by Muslim Congressmen in his vicinity (but totally out touch with the community) not to upgrade relations with Israel because that would adversely affect the party’s would at least lead to a two-state solution.
TAn episode firmed up my appraisal of the Israeli-Palestinian two-state process.
It was a Shabath lunch, at a friend’s house in Herzilia. Among this very small group happened to a person at one end of the lawn, wreathed in cigarette smoke, a glass of red wine in one hand, rapidly replenished, obviously revelling in the company of three well-groomed ladies who had formed an admiring circle around him. It was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, lighting one Kent after another, like Belmondo in a Godard film.
He came across at first a shy man but once he opened up, he was transparent and obviously trustworthy. His approach to Oslo was not at a variance from another loveable Israeli, Yossi Beilin, very much the author of the Oslo accords.
Obsession with survival and security had injected some iron in the Israeli soul, but the Jewish state became hard as nails after the 9/11 wars, Islamophobia, and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister who visited India on the first anniversary of 9/11, just when the war-on-terror rhetoric was being amplified here too.
Sensitive defence deals with Israel begun under Atal Behari Vajpayee were boosted by Manmohan Singh. The Palestinian issue, which was the highest priority up to Indira Gandhi, dipped in saliency
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit, however, is fired by an atavistic Hindutva adoration for a small country on top of its mischievous Muslim neighbours. Ramallah has been bypassed, of course. But it should not be lost on the insiders that during the September non aligned summit in Venezuela the Indian delegation received instructions from South Block, to drop the routine reference to the Palestinian issue altogether. It was a tradition from the earliest days of NAM.
No, Ramallah was not just bypassed; Palestine has been downgraded to the level of irrelevance.
It is not only the conservative Rightwing in Britain which is weary of the rise and rise of Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn. They are of course hurting badly with a hung Parliament scenario under the botched up and sudden electoral gamble of Prime Minister Theresa May, which witnessed an unprecedented increase in the share of votes for the Labour party to a high of 40 per cent seats, with 30 plus seats in the new Parliament.
However, what is becoming a pain within the Labour party is the dilemma of the Tony Blair supporters – the Blairites – who once rode the war machine with George Bush, and the neoliberal project with such gusto that often the twilight zones between Thatcherism and Blairism seemed to evaporate. So much so, the most famous cartoon of those days was that of Tony Blair, all teeth in display in full glory as a public spectacle, simultaneously being branded as a caricature and an American puppet. Indeed, those days, between the New Labour and the New Tory, the lines seemed to have blurred distinctively, with both looking almost the same in the cracked mirror of the times, even as no one found any WMDs in Iraq, despite the highpitched hyperbole of the American rhetoric.
Jeremy Corbyn seems to be turning everything upside down in the current circumstances if not exactly in the manner Karl Marx turned the metaphysical Hegelian dialectic upside down. This is a new landmark in British politics, ushered in by a transparent and dogged rebel with a consistency marked by years of antiestablishment politics, even as he openly announces himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ in contemporary times when the word, ‘socialism’, is looked at with utter disdain and cold war phobia by the neoliberal Right-wingers across the West, even while Trumpism struggles to score a victory even in the smallest chess game in the murky politics of hate.
Even as Theresa May seemed to have evoked a retrograde scenario of a return to 1950, scaring her die-hard supporters, Corbyn has been accused to harking back to a return to the 1970s. Surely, Corbyn is much more street-smart than to be obsessive about this back to the past syndrome. He has touched a chord within and outside the party, especially among the young, the educated and the working class, by evoking a completely different kind of a scenario, almost like a pragmatic utopia in the time of globalisation, which itself is in deep crisis.
He is opposed to austerity measures, like the Greek Leftists, and is asking for the impossible; nationalisation of the railways, all public services, with more public investment, a national education service, among other social welfarist and socialist schemes — issues which have distinctly struck a chord with the populace, struggling in a slumping economy amidst high unemployment with vast differences in wealth, and organised inequality. As in the current crisis on pay scales in the BBC, Corbyn and his supporters have ripped apart the mask of corporate capitalism where celebrities get obscene amounts as pay, even while the folks in the lower rung in the hierarchy are always vulnerable and fragile, pushed below the economic margins. In that sense, this Labour party under Corbyn is strikingly different.
One, he is opposed to the Tony Blair dream sequence which wanted to run the party and the State as a huge corporation with neo-capitalism as its mantra. He is also opposed to the entrenched structures of Thatcherism. Instead, he is pushing for large-scale decentralisation, grassroots initiatives, more democratisation and income equality. He is also pushing an old socialist agenda – more and more government investment and intervention in the social sector, in public services, and in social welfare schemes.
This is at once a revolutionary project in a scenario loaded with the dynamics of global capitalism, something which reminds of the early days of social welfare policies, especially as experienced so remarkably and with such high success in terms of human development index in the Scandinavian countries.
Add to this his ancient, stoic and relentless commitment against the war machinery, in support of the peace process, against nuclear armament, and his opposition to climate change and global warming – this is a Corbyn which has reignited old memories and dreams of the 1960 and 70s generation. It is almost like a redux of the great students’ uprising in Sorbonne and Paris in France in 1968, and the debates which followed across the world in redefining a paradigm shift in the world order, in terms of values and institutions, including in the academia, family, industry, justice systems, and the State.
This was a generation of rebellion, and though Corbyn is not leading a similar eclectic or spontaneous rebellion like shooting stars in the sky with rainbow coalitions and a counter culture philosophy, he is surely giving a more reasoned, balanced and parallel political dream sequence to both Britain and the European Union. Indeed, despite Brexit, his popularity has only risen higher than expected, with a hung Parliament as testimony to this new phenomenon.
Hence the dilemma for the Blairites as much as it is for Theresa May, who is walking a tight-rope with fledgeling support from unreliable partners. In the days to come, undoubtedly, the Corbyn phenomenon will mark a radical shift in British politics, with a new political and aesthetic culture dominating the discourse. How far that discourse will change the face of the country and Europe, only time will tell. However, this parallel cinema is a running documentary, and it is unfolding each day, though Corbyn is not growing any younger. Truly, his rise and rise will surely lead to a new legitimacy for the ‘socialist’ and social welfare project and redefine the shape of corporate capitalism
Surely, even as the world was in despair after the victory of Donald Trump, the rise of both centrist, anti-Nazi and socialist forces in Germany, France and Britain, along with strong radical and progressive forces in Spain and Greece, marks a rupture in world politics. In that sense, the new socialist in Britain’s Labour horizon is the new red star in the sky. Clearly, the long march has already begun.
Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sales are on the rise, truck queues at state borders for octroi have been drastically lowered but eating out has become an uncomfortably expensive affair: One month after the historic midnight hour launch of the GST regime in India, people are yet to make up their minds on whether they think it is a good thing or not.
Among those who believe in the GST regime is Ganesh Jayadevan, VicePresident, Products, and Innovation, at ANSR Consulting, a firm that helps Fortune 500s set up a global presence in India.
“GST is a good thing, it is a perfect law. It is just widely misunderstood and that comes because people don’t understand the complications that existed in the previous system with central taxes, state levies, octrois, intra-state taxation, inter state taxation and the like. People can, and indeed had made an entire career of understanding the taxation mire,” he added.
“GST helps businesses. If a truck took 11 days from Kashmir to Kanya Kumari earlier, stopping at every state border, now it takes only five days. The ease of doing business will be much higher. More importantly, transparency will be higher as will compliance for taxes. Buyers will insist on billing so that they can claim the credit for GST,” said Jayadevan.
He agrees that there is a downside as with all things. “Smaller businesses have slabs for exemption but intermediate and larger firms who deal with them won’t be able to claim the GST credit so there is bound to be some impact there. It will be a problem and will constrict the market place.” Another problem, he contends is that there is no law preventing states from levying any further taxes. Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu have already imposed their own taxes, over GST. “If every state starts doing this, you’re back to square one,” said Jayadevan.
On a more grassroots level, Export house manager, Alokeshwari Ranaut is among those who benefitted after the GST regime began. She travels to Karnal from her Noida residence twice a week. “Those ugly Octroi queues on the run-up to every border checkpoint have all but disappeared. There are trucks and it isn’t as though truck drivers have suddenly acquired road manners and the highway is heaven but things are so much better.”
“GST is a great step towards transparency... How many consumers knew before GST what all taxes they paid? How much of the price of each item was VAT, or excise, or multi-tax? GST has subsumed 72 taxes and 17 taxes. Additionally, there is no state entry tax or octroi on GST paid goods,” Information and Broadcasting Minister, Smriti Irani, pointed out in her usual articulate manner.
Prafulla Kumar, an economic researcher tends to agree. “It is a fact. Consumers earlier had no idea what taxes and cesses were really being added on. As long as there was a printed bill (and who knows how many establishments had dual bill Books people would accept whatever bill they were given. Now, at least one is sure that what we’re being charged in the name of taxation is in fact, reaching the government’s coffers. Or at least most of it.”
Kumar asserts, “traditionally, the middle-class has always believed and resented that traders and the business class get away without paying taxes. And so, there is malice, glee and righteousness – all mixed up in how people view GST. People do feel happy that the business community is having to shell out because there is always a feeling (rightly or wrongly) that traders don’t pass on the benefits to consumers.”
Eating out is one area where this antitrader sentiment runs high. It has become more expensive. In roadside tea-stalls, the price of tea has doubled one Rupee to two or three. Upmarket restaurants have hiked their prices by as much as 20 to 30 per cent, citing GST of 18 per cent on airconditioning as the excuse.
“The rational side of my brain tells me that the dust will settle down in a few months and prices will start to make sense. But last week, when I took out a visiting cousin and his wife to dinner, I was horrified that the bill was much higher than what we usually pay there,” said Bhupesh Chauhan, an IT professional
“Usually for four people to have a nonvegetarian meal (and no alcohol), our bill would be around Rs 2,000. This time it was Rs 3,000. We ordered the same meal we always do and though I’ve been hearing in the news that eating out would be marginally more expensive, the bill was very high and we will have to reduce dining out,” he added. Most restaurants in Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai have already increased cover prices. “GST has gone up on air-conditioning to 18 per cent,” explained the manager at a popular eatery in Delhi’s Khan Market. But pushed to explain, how exactly this worked to merit a steep increase in menu prices, all that the man could say was “Ma’am, I’m only an employee. This is the owner’s order. And prices were due for a hike anyway because everything has become more expensive.” Employees at several eateries in Mumbai and Chandigarh confirmed similar price hikes were on the cards if they had already not been implemented.
Meanwhile, organisations like the Institute of Cost Accountants of India have set up online help-desks for people to get answers to GST related queries. “There are at least 50-60 queries that are coming up regularly, and we have over 50 experts across India who are helping provide answers online,” said an institute official.
The larger impact of the GST regime is yet to be determined. The Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation, for instance, has estimated that costs of construction will go up but has not arrived at a concrete figure yet. Most people, however, agree with Central Board of Excise and Customs Vanaja Sarma, who said at an FICCI meeting in mid-July that different things would keep coming up as the situation evolves. “When you roll out something this mammoth, various nuances and issues will keep emerging for at least six months or a year,” she said.
Invest in original art from a student, who may well go on to be the next Picasso; sick of your ‘Presswaala’ not getting the creases right; do you need your loos deep cleaned? Did you move to a new city and want classy furniture without getting into lifetime debt? Or did you want to upgrade your existing setup to a smart-home where your Wi-Fi works in every room to maximise content from your various gadgets to be consumed anywhere in the house? There’s a startup providing every one of these services and more and at rates that you can afford
Take chip-monks.com for instance, which is extremely popular with young professionals. Chip-Monks is a team of young people who help clients make the most of their devices. “This could mean teaching you how to use voice operated commands on your iPhone, or setting up a cloud for the whole family to access, or identifying the hardware and software needed to serve all your professional and entertainment needs,” explains CEO, Ambar Narula.
Narula gave up an extremely lucrative, senior management job at Airtel to set up Chip-Monks where his team is now teaching individuals, corporate, and even schools, on how to maximise what they can get from their expensive gadgets. There is even a customised service for clients, “to help identify which device is best for their individual needs because the most expensive are not necessarily the one you need.” And in keeping with his philosophy of optimisation and access, Narula, has ensured that their services are not just found online; Chip-Monks has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and most other social media platforms.
With 30,000 plus entities – and that’s just the ones who have already formally registered themselves – there’s a start-up or fledgeling web-only firm to take care of all your needs.
So much so that last month, Commerce and Industry Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman said she wanted to arrange an SAARC meet for start-ups from member countries, to enable such firms to claim benefits from the government, while also spreading themselves further internationally. A senior government official indicated that if efforts to coordinate with Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, bore fruit, the meet could take place as early as December this year.
So what contributed to the momentous rise of the Indian Startup Ecosystem? Independent business analyst, Rakesh Salwan, says, “A recent Nasscom report on the startup industry said startups have begun leveraging technology to solve problems that have been plaguing India for years and in some cases decades. And that is the essence of why most startups are doing well.”
Often people who can’t get a need met with a service or a product, end up starting a business to provide that very thing to others in need. That, however, was not the case with Sabira Kalsi, who started ‘saas ko patao’ (yes that really is the name), last year. Her clientele is mostly working couples, who want food provided for small family parties. There’s a twist though. “They want the food to not be too fancy because they need to pass it off as made by them at home. One couple in Saket actually asked for subzi to be slightly undercooked... social pressure can be very high in some cases,” she says
On the other side, you have start-ups like www.cookgourmet.co where you can choose a recipe and have measured, cleaned, and prepped ingredients delivered within two hours at home with a recipe card. They have a new menu each week, and recipes are categorised from easy to medium with indicators of how fiery they are, how much cooking time is needed and most importantly how many calories per portion it is.
On the more artistic side, there are startups galore. The painting and visual side, for want of a better umbrella description, includes www.printoctopus.com (T-shirts, mobile skins, posters and canvas prints with prices starting at Rs 600. There’s www.maiyapublishing.com that helps wannabe authors find editors, photographers, designers and the like to ensure they retain control of how their book turns out.
If it’s raw talent that excites you, try www.bestcollegeart.com. A Delhi-based start-up, they describe themselves as a platform to showcase future superstars. But you can buy original watercolours at as low as Rs 300 if you want to fill your home with original art that won’t pauper you.
Similarly, for young professionals in transferable jobs or temporary postings, who need a classy home, without the hassle of worrying about disposal, www.furlenco.com comes to the rescue. It already has a presence in six cities and offers you everything from beds with mattresses, sheets, and pillows to fridge and microwave combos, all on rent. The biggest appeal that furlenco provides to a prospective client is that all furniture and upholstery is cleaned or sterilised before it is sent to another home. The company often does not require linens to be returned at all, if a client has had them for a long time.
On the laundry front, a simple search of the word ‘dhobi’ throws out page after page of results – “dhobiwala, dhobilite, hellodhobi, calldhobi, dhobimart, dhobibulao” and so on. They’re all offering the same services that your parents had a dhobi for – they come home, collect your laundry, and return it after a few days, washed, ironed, and (when requested) starched.
There are, however, many nonfinancial, non-technology start-ups that are extremely interesting, like batsondelivery.com which acts as a night service to provide food, groceries, toiletries, plumbers and electricians at night, or passiton.in which convinces people to actually pass on stuff “that can’t be thrown or sold”. For instance, there are artists who will take the glass bottles you donate. There are poor students who will take books donated by students who’ve moved to higher classes.
On a more serious note, startups have begun making their presence in sectors like power, renewable energy, traffic monitoring, data analysis, IT based healthcare, financial inclusion, agricultural productivity, skills development and of course, education. Or in other words, startups are beginning to disrupt every inconvenience in our lives.
There was a time when driving to the office in the morning one would see hundreds of cyclists making their way to work with their tiffins dangling from the cycle bars. They were quite a menace and if you hit one, God help you! But have you wondered where those cyclists have disappeared? The peddling two wheelers have been replaced by scootys and bikes, a bigger menace on the road these days. If one was in a small town, it was quite a sight to see thousands of cyclists taking over the roads on to way to work. No more. Why has India not taken to cycling, giving the modest transport up for fancy bikes and cars?
Every morning, thousands of commuters in big cities are caught up in nasty snarls and long hours of waiting at traffic lights. Yet we never think of doing something about it. But one woman is showing us the way by leading the pack on two wheel-pedalling. She is Nikita Lalwani from Vadodara in Gujarat. It all happened by accident. Nikita is an instrumentation engineer and was used to commute long hours to work. It was in 2014 when the construction of a flyover near her home made her commuting time to work nearly double.
She happened to also visit Germany the same year and to her surprise she found a large majority of Germans pedalling to work. That was an inspiration for young Nikita and her colleagues and they decide to return home and follow this healthy and clean mode of travel. The next year, Lalwani launched Cycling Cities, an initiative that targets motivating one-third of the population of every Indian city to embed cycling into their everyday life by 2030. It is a huge attempt to revive old habits and bring back the cycling culture.
Through the Cycling Cities project, Lalwani hopes to create a sort of cycling ecosystem, both on and offline, encouraging users through their ‘TRING’ or ‘Try Cycle’ project, in which they can buy and sell used cycles in their cities as well as receive advice and guidance related to the advantages of such a mode of transport and how it also has personal benefits. Cycling Cities believes that every school and college should encourage cycling and is doing all they can to promote a healthy lifestyle through cycling. It has been quite an encouraging journey so far with good responses from many cities. In fact, Nikita got selected for the IIM Udaipur woman entrepreneurship programme in 2016, barely a year after she launched her ambitious project.
But what came as a huge boost to Nikita’s efforts was the surprise recognition by CycleSpace, a Dutch organisation that promotes cycling around the world
CycleSpace elected Nikita Lalwani to be the Bicycle Mayor of Vadodara, the first mayor of its kind in the country. This opened up many doors for Nikita. As a Bicycle Mayor she was invited to the Bicycle Mayor Summit in Amsterdam in June this year and is to be followed up by a much bigger conference, the Velo-City later this year.
Nikita was delighted by the overwhelming response she has been getting from people across the world. In fact, she was encouraged and motivated by managing to crowdfund her visits to Netherlands. The CycleSpace project is aimed at setting up a Bicycle Mayor Network across the world to promote cycling and sustainable mobility by developing innovative ideas. The idea is to build a huge network of cycling representatives worldwide to promote and spread the idea and benefits of cycling to the environment and health.
Nikita is already busy developing an infrastructure to promote cycling in her city Vadodara. She is working with the Vadodara Municipal Corporation to build cycling tracks across the city and provide for parking facilities for bicycles. She has also launched Baroda by Cycle which conducts guided tours around the city and let people experience the joy to cycling around. It is a small step to start with but Nikita is not the one to give up easily.
Ride through busy city centres, scenic valleys and historical sites with Condé Nast Traveller’s pick of the most bike-friendly destination
Once considered a necessary playtime activity for kids, cycling today has caught on big time with the increasing tribe of experimental travellers eager to explore different places in a different way. From dedicated bike lanes to guided tours, many cities across the globe are cashing in on this trend and are going all out to promote the joys of travelling on a two wheeler. Condé Nast Traveller presents its pick of some of the best cycle-friendly places in the world.
Regarded as the cycling capital of the world, Beijing is probably one of the few cities where it's perfectly normal to see more cycles on the road than cars. With dedicated lanes and routes for cyclists, one of the best ways to experience China’s capital would be on a wheelie. Whether you’re simply riding on city roads or through the majestic mountains surrounding the Great Wall, there are plenty of bike rental facilities along with guided tours to help you explore this fun and environmentally friendly way of sightseeing.
In an increasingly green-conscious world, bicycle-sharing schemes have taken off in a big way, encouraging people to use more efficient and practical modes of transport. Barcelona recently started Bicing — bicyclesharing programmes — across the city where travellers can simply rent a cycle by using a card that unlocks the bike, thus reducing the chances of theft and vandalism. The best districts to ride in are Eixample, Gràcia, Sant Martí, Sants and Sant Andreu, which are perfect for a leisurely journey around the city due to the absence of steep gradients. For the more adventurous cyclist, there are plenty of routes along Montjuïc (a hill located in near the centre of Barcelona) that offer challenging rides.
If you want a cheap, fun and eco-friendly way of discovering this urban city, there’s no better way to explore it than on a cycle. Montreal has 3,862km of trails with plans to expand. It also has the first urban bikesharing infrastructure in North America — the Bixi programme —making it convenient for travellers to simply rent a cycle and embark on a green adventure. Sights and routes that must make it on your itinerary include St Lawrence River and Lachine Canal, which begins at Atwater Market — an expansive area that houses local, organic and exotic food stalls. Make your way down to Lawrence River to take in the astonishing views of Montreal.
The best way to discover rural parts of a region is by making your way through the area like the locals. In this historic city, people ride around on two wheelers all the time. Grab a cycle and make your way through the rustic royal plains of Udaipur, discovering ancient forts, temples and majestic palaces. The city invokes one of the best biking experiences that will have you manoeuvring through hordes of camels, local villagers and markets of all kinds — where you could halt for a quick buy or a scrumptious bite. Hiring a bike here is easy with several rental companies sprawled all over. And, with barely any vehicles in sight, it’s as easy to ride too.
With over 40km of cycle paths and routes in Paris and an array of beautiful locations to visit, this is one city that has to be enjoyed at a leisurely pace. With a wellorganised bike-sharing system and clear dedicated lanes for cyclists, you’ll find half the city using this non-fuel mode of transport. Paris boasts one of the largest and most efficient bike-sharing programmes — Velib, which ensures bike rental at any given time with maximum security. There are also plenty of guided bike tours in and around Paris, so you’ll be spoilt for choice in the world’s most romantic city.
Located to the North of the Indus River at an elevation of 11,811ft above the sea level, and home to pristine lakes and regal mountains is the tranquil district of Leh. Cycling here is not for the faint-hearted. Its rocky terrains and extreme weather make it a perfect destination for adventurous cyclists looking for some thrills. With barely any vehicles on the road, expansive nature trails and several Buddhist monasteries worth visiting, Leh is definitely a city to explore on your bike.