International climbers play witness to shooting involving Tibetan refugees and Chinese border guards

By Austin Ramzy (’00), Time
October 16, 2006

Avalanches, high altitutude and bad weather make the Himalayas a dangerous place for anyone. But for Tibetan refugees attempting to flee their Chinese-occupied homeland, the mountains can be even more perilous. On the morning of Sept. 30, more than 100 international climbers at a base camp on Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest mountain, watched as border guards from the Chinese People’s Armed Police opened fire on a group of several dozen Tibetans ascending the 5,700m Nangpa La, a pass linking China and Nepal.

“At first I was thinking it was simply warning shots,” says an American who watched the scene through binoculars. “The reality is that they were taking direct aim at people trying to cross the pass.” As the mountaineers looked on, the guards allegedly shot dead one Tibetan—later identified by the Washington D.C.-based NGO International Campaign for Tibet as Kelsang Namtso, a 17-year-old Buddhist nun—while the others scattered. Shortly after, Chinese border guards marched through the base camp with about half a dozen Tibetan children they had apparently captured.

Read the rest of the story here.

Aryn Baker (’01), Time Asia
June 12, 2006

New word has appeared during water-cooler conversations in offices across the U.S. The term is “Bangalored.” It means your job just moved to India without you. But in the shifting global labor market, vernacular can quickly become outdated. What’s the term for a job that is outsourced to India only to be relayed on to China, Uruguay or Romania?

There is none—but one may soon be needed. That’s because India, which virtually invented offshore outsourcing of software programming and back-office business operations, is becoming a victim of its own success. Companies such as Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s top three outsourcing companies, became giants by tapping armies of quick-coding, English-speaking, low-wage technoserfs. But Indian salaries are rising—the median annual wage for a software engineer jumped 11% from $6,313 in 2004 to $7,010 in 2005, according to India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM)—and there’s a mounting shortage of qualified workers that is crimping further growth. Fewer than one-third of the 400,000 Indians who annually graduate from the country’s technical colleges have the right skills, says Kiran Karnik, president of NASSCOM. “We are sucking the well dry,” he says, “and the current education [system] cannot replenish it quickly enough.”

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Former journalism students Brent Huffman (’05) and Xiaoli Zhou (’05), now a husband-wife filmmaking team, have recently completed a half-year odysey for the Discovery Channel that included encounters with blood-thirsty mastiffs, grisly car accidents and fading traditions in Yunnan, Tibet and other remote corners of China. Huffman is in writing up his behind the scenes notes for a series called “China Diaries” on the Frontline/WORLD website. See it here.

Sudhin Thanawala (’07), Chronicle Foreign Service
October 12, 2006

Many Indian authorities here proudly claim this seaside metropolis — the nation’s largest — as an Asian financial hub on par with Shanghai and Tokyo.

But critics quickly point out that India — touted as an international powerhouse in the 21st century along with China — will never become an economic success story until it eradicates its many urban slums. More than 40 million people, or 14 percent of the nonrural population, live in shantytowns, according to the 2001 Indian census.
India, which has 1.1 billion people, is expected to expand its urban population to 575 million by 2030 from 285 million today, making an increase in slums one of the nation’s most pressing problems. Urban blight is most evident in Bombay, more than half of whose 16.4 million inhabitants reside in shantytowns. Also known as Mumbai, Bombay is often called “Slumbai.”

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[NOTE: This story came out of the Spring 2006 Covering India course taught by Carolyn Wakeman and The Hindu's Parvathi Menon]

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