One of my fondest memories from childhood is of playing Monopoly and crushing my friends. I was a ruthless landlord. I’d shoot the dog with the revolver from Clue if he couldn’t pay. Now there is Desi-opoly, UK Desi-opoly to be precise. From the Yorkshire Post Today:

Called Monopoly UK “Desi” – the Asian term for homeland – it will feature Indian icons such as the Taj Mahal and Bollywood, as well as British streets famous for Asian culture, such as London’s Brick Lane and Manchester’s Wilmslow Road.

The traditional counters of top hat, dog, racing car and boot are to be replaced with three-wheeled scooters, tigers, cricket bats and Indian sweets.

Creator Gurdip Ahluwalia, who came up with the idea while working for games manufacturer Hasbro, is still seeking street names and landmarks to replace Mayfair, Park Lane and Old Kent Road.

One of the playing pieces is an Indian sweet? Somehow I can’t picture demanding money from a gulab jamun. Then again I could never understand the purpose of the iron in regular Monopoly. After “Punjabi Boy” (the frequent Brit commenter on SM)plays this we’ll get a full report.

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A rookie air traffic controller just earned a medal for narrowly preventing an Air India disaster (thanks, Ennis). On July 24 last year, an Air India pilot landing at Newark Airport forgot to extend landing gear and came within half a mile of crashing the 747 on its belly. Was anyone you know on that flight?

I love it when desis take the initiative to cut through red tape, such as landing checklists with exaggerations like EXTEND WING FLAPS and LOWER LANDING GEAR. Bah, more unnecessary government regulation. You go, tiger!

One afternoon four years ago… out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a Comanche coming over the threshold and preparing to land. The aircraft’s landing gear was still up… my trainer told me, ‘Look for feet (landing gear). Always look for feet on the (propeller-powered aircraft). The prop guys don’t have the warning systems, but the jets will always have feet.'”

Fast forward to the afternoon of July 24, 2004… “We had a (Boeing) 747 coming in,” he said. “You can point out a 747 easily on a clear day.” It was Air India Flight 145, with 409 passengers aboard.

“He was on five-mile final approach,” Dittamo remarked. “I saw him but I couldn’t see gear.” With his Fort Lauderdale trainer’s instructions in his head – ‘Always look for feet’ – Dittamo glanced in a different direction and then turned back to the 747 to look again. No gear. “I thought, ‘something just doesn’t seem right,'” he said. “In my mind, I said I would pick it up in my next scan. But then I looked up and the plane definitely had no gear.”

By this point, Flight 145 was on a half-mile final at an altitude of 600 feet. “I was surprised he didn’t go around,” Dittamo stated. “I was going to let it go for one more second, because this was a critical phase of the flight for the crew. But then I just said to myself, ‘I’m not going to let this go for any longer.'”

Dittamo keyed the mike: “Air India 145, check gear down. Gear appears up.” The pilot acknowledged the transmission with a calm, “Air India 145.” Down came the gear and the 747 landed safely on Runway 4R.

The Washington Post features a story on the shifting strategy of large brokerage houses to recruit minority investors, particularly from amongst the South Asian an Hispanic communities (where they see the most opportunity):

A handful of well-dressed professionals gathered in a gallery at Christie’s auction house here the other day to listen to a South Asian art expert discuss works soon to go on sale, including several by Maqbool Fida Husain, considered India’s Picasso.

No one in the crowd planned to buy any art. In fact, few even cared about it. They just wanted to sound smart at a cocktail reception later in the evening.

The Christie’s event provides a snapshot of Merrill’s aggressive effort, replicated to varying degrees among Wall Street firms, to harness demographic shifts in American wealth.

The Merrill effort, headed by three-time cancer survivor and former star financial adviser Subha V. Barry, has so far focused on wealthy South-Asian Americans and Latinos in a handful of big cities, including the District…

According to the article the sudden shift in strategy is tied to the fact that as baby boomers retire they will only be withdrawing from their investments. Thus, Merrill is targeting South Asians because, “25 percent of South-Asian Americans earn more than $100,000, far more than the average.”

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A couple of months ago, I had a delicious lunch (at Manhattan’s Jaiya Thai, which seems to hold a monopoly on the Thai-food-for-desis market) with a friend who had just been to Pakistan on business. He told me about a company in D.C. which had outsourced its receptionist to Pakistan via videoconferencing. Today, our mutual friend Mitra Kalita published the story in the Washington Post:

In a chic downtown lobby across the street from the Old Executive Office Building, Saadia Musa answers phones, orders sandwiches and lets in the FedEx guy. And she does it all from Karachi, Pakistan.

As receptionist for the Resource Group, Musa greets employees and visitors via a flat screen hanging on the lobby’s wall. Although they are nine hours behind and nearly 7,500 miles away, her U.S.-based bosses rely on her to keep order during the traffic of calls and meetings…

She turns the camera — which is usually focused on her face — to offer a view of her surroundings in Karachi: a lounge, a cafeteria, a pool table… Just then, a phone call interrupts her. It is 1:15 a.m. where Musa sits. “Good afternoon,” Musa says brightly. “Thank you for calling the Resource Group.”

Musa went through Stepford Wife-like call center training:

“A smile can be heard,” Musa recited in an interview via her flat screen. She worked as a call-center operator before being promoted to secretary. “Posture can make a difference. A dress code makes a difference.”

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Traditionally, the Pakistani economy has been based in agriculture, so I was surprised to learn that Pakistan has made a leap into the new economy. Pakistan is now one of the top 10 sources of pirated recordings and movies. The quality of the material and the packaging is apparently as good as the original source, and (according to the International Federation for Phonographic Industries) “illegal replication facilities in Pakistan were doubling their copying capacity every 18 months“

Here’s how it all breaks down:

• Pakistan produces over 230 million priate CDs annually
• 25 million of those disks are for the local market, the rest go abroad to Dubai, Nepal and India and from there, all over the world.
• Pakistan exports at least 13 million disks monthly (back of the envelope calculations indicate this should be at least 17 million, so I don’t know why the BBC says 13 million)
• These disks sell for $1 in Pakistan (less for orders of more than 10) and $10 elsewhere.
• Profit margins on pirated CDs / DVDs are four to five times the cost
• The recording industry tells us that the annual cost to copyright holders is at least $2.7bn [Source: Pakistan – copyright piracy hub (BBC)]

This is a serious problem for the recording industry:

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has published a report claiming that 35% of all CDs sold around the world are illegal copies – that’s 1.1 billion pirate disks. …Clearly the biggest threat to the record industry today is not P2P networks but the more traditional CD copying seen in the the IFPI’s ten priority countries where anti-piracy offensives are most needed

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Lakshmi Mittal’s fortress isn’t made of steel, which calls into question his affinity for the source of his eye-popping wealth:

The steel magnate set real estate records last year when he paid $128 million for a townhouse in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens…Mittal’s mansion, tucked between Kensington Palace and the Sultan of Brunei’s spread, has garage space for 20 cars, and is embellished with marble taken from the same quarry as that for the Taj Mahal. [Forbes]

Forbes: Homes of the billionaires 2005 — Lakshmi Mittal

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