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Q. and A. With Damien Cave and Reader Reactions on Drug Policy in Latin America

By DAMIEN CAVE

Thank you â€" gracias a todos â€" for sending along your smart, tough questions and comments. I was impressed to see readers contributing (here, on Twitter and on Facebook) from at least a half dozen countries and many parts of the United States, which is proof, perhaps, of how far and wide the debate over drug policy has become.

Clearly, especially in Latin America, there is a growing desire for new ideas as frustration with the war on drugs expands. My article on Uruguay's plans for marijuana legalization offers a close look at just one of the alternative policies being considered, but your questions ranged more broadly to issues of economics and American policy.

This will be an ongoing Q. and A., and this is a topic that I will continue to cover (after a few weeks in the Middle East), so please keep asking questions. In the meantime, here are some answers.

As Uruguay moves forward with this plan, it is unimagina ble that Washington will tolerate it. How far will the U.S. go to maintain marijuana prohibition abroad, and how far will Uruguay go to resist pressure from our country?

There were a lot of questions about the likely American reaction. When it comes to drug policy at home and abroad, the United States is in the midst of what could be seen as either a messy moment of contradiction, or a period of transition. American officials in Washington and around Latin America no longer walk in lockstep, no longer speak only of ridding the world of drugs to stamp out American addiction. Some, especially those in the Drug Enforcement Agency, still insist that because prohibition is the law (worldwide because of United Nations treaties), their job is to enforce the law with as much force as possible. But there are also those who have become more pragmatic, and more accepting of the fact that other countries may want and need to go their own way.

For example, some advocates of m arijuana legalization point out that the Obama administration has moved ahead of its predecessors by letting Latin American leaders â€" at the recent meeting of the Organization of American States â€" know that American policy makers are at least willing to discuss legalization, even if they remain extremely skeptical that the idea is worth pursuing in the United States. Officials I have interviewed said they mainly need to see some specific proposals that do more than just blame American drug consumption for the region´s crime problem; they want Latin American leaders and legalization proponents to explain which drugs would be legalized, over what time period, and how the likely consequences might be managed.

“We are open to listening,” the American official said. “We are willing to admit we don't have all the solutions.”

In the specific case of Uruguay, there are several reasons why the U.S. would be unlikely to get involved in trying to keep the legal ization proposal from becoming law. Part of it is simple geography: Uruguay is far from the United States, and the drugs that pass through there either stay around Montevideo, or go to London or Madrid, not Los Angeles or New York. There is not the same kind of vested interest in Uruguay as there is in, say, Honduras, where cocaine from the Andes often stops before heading north.

Uruguay is also tiny â€" just a few million people. That means that opening the market to legal marijuana would not necessarily have an enormous impact throughout the region or worldwide. Nor would letting Uruguay smoke up legally have much of an impact on American domestic politics, which is perhaps why some Americans in the drug enforcement business seem mostly curious about the proposal's prospects. For example, when I recently asked some American antidrug officials about it, their response amounted to: “Well, it´s a small enough country, maybe they can pull it off.”

The bigger c hallenge may be with the United Nations. Officials with the U.N. made clear to me that Uruguay's plan, if it became law, would be a clear violation of the 1961 Convention that made marijuana a level one substance deserving of prohibition. At the far end of the spectrum, U.N. officials said, that could open the country up to sanctions that would keep Uruguay from being allowed to distribute certain pharmaceutical drugs â€" legal opiates, for example. But this would require the 180-plus members that signed on to the convention to agree that such punishment was necessary, and given the changing attitude toward marijuana worldwide, that seems unlikely.

To avoid all that trouble, Uruguay could also just do what Ecuador has already done: leave the convention behind, removing itself from the list of signatories. For now though, Uruguayan officials just plan to ignore it. “Who cares about the UN convention?” said Sebastián Sabini, one of the lawmakers working on the legal ization proposal. “It's irrelevant.”

“The war failed. Treating it as an economic issue rather than a legal one could deal a fatal blow to the heart of the problem: Price. This would, in turn, dampen the violence associated with black market competition.” â€" Dan Johnson on Facebook

“The radical measures by Uruguay appear to stem from a sense of hopelessness and desperation. Before taking the leap it would be wise to learn and consult other countries that have legalized the substance and ascertain whether this would indeed arrest the scourge of drug-related crimes and this should also be balanced against the potential health, economic, political and social benefits.” â€" Samkelo UncleSam Mbali gontsi on Facebook

Seeing that the Netherlands legalized marijuana in the 1970s â€" is there any evidence that violence went down? Was there even violence before in the Netherlands?

The Netherlands did not actually legalize marijuana, it simply decided to depenalize and tolerate the purchase and sale of marijuana in coffee shops. But the question about the effects of that policy is a good one, and it is something that Uruguayan officials are closely watching because the Dutch model itself is evolving. It used to be the case that anyone who visited Amsterdam could enjoy the city's libertine approach to marijuana. Enter a coffee shop, choose between marijuana strains like Hindu Kush or Mellow Yellow, and smoke as much as you want. Crime was negligible, or at least nothing close to the crime levels associated with drugs in the United States during the '70s and '80s, for example.

Over time, however, the local marijuana industry â€" decriminalized f or personal consumption within the Netherlands â€" became a source of marijuana for people outside of the country. Germans crossed the border to buy and return home, bringing drug sales back to the streets in some cities, and then marijuana producers began to simply sell their product in other countries where prices were higher, in part because the drug was still illegal.

According to this interview with Max Daniel, the head of a police unit charged with investigating organized crime in the Netherlands, demand for Dutch marijuana outside the country now exceeds the amounts sold in coffee shops â€" about 80 percent of what is grown there ends up exported. As a result, legitimate marijuana growers for coffee shops have a strong incentive to sell to the illegal markets abroad.

Marijuana is still kept separate from hard drugs like cocaine and heroin, the goal of both Uruguay and the Netherlands, but the marijuana industry is no longer as small and controlled as Dutch officials intended, and that has led to crime. “We know there are shops that bring cannabis-growing equipment directly to people's homes,” Mr. Daniel said. “They then provide the names and addresses to criminal organizations, which come and steal the harvest. Today, cannabis is involved in nearly all major cases involving murder, weapons and drugs.”

Legalization proponents will no doubt argue that none of this would be happening if the rest of Europe legalized marijuana as well, driving prices down to the levels of the Dutch coffee shops. But with that unlikely anytime soon, the Dutch are trying something else: earlier this year, they passed a new law banning the sale of marijuana to tourists. Officials have said they do not intend to shut down the coffee shops, but they do intend to try and rein in the market for drug tourism.

How much of an impact that will have on the crime associated with producing and trafficking marijuana to the rest of Europe rema ins to be seen. But this is very much on the minds of Latin American policy makers. Uruguayan officials plan to keep marijuana sales limited to Uruguayan residents with registration cards â€" Argentine lawmakers have already started calling to ask about how it would work â€" and other leaders in Latin America have said they are hesitating to move further and faster toward legalization in part because of the cross-border issues that could develop. Ultimately, this speaks to the challenge of marijuana legalization being done on a country-by-country basis. The question now is whether the new Dutch plan (which also includes registration cards and clubs) will succeed well enough to become a new model, or whether certain regions of Latin America â€" like Central America, or South America's southern cone â€" will decide to move together in a single direction.

Translation: What would happen…maybe consumption would but maybe it would end the corruption and money laundering!!

Translation: If marijuana is legalized in URY as a product the government can tax, other countries will reconsider their positions.

All of these comments on Twitter, along wit h many others, focus on the issue of money. Just how much revenue could Uruguay bring in by legalizing marijuana? How would other industries react, from the alcohol industry to pharmaceutical companies to banks? Many readers, smartly and correctly, recognized that the legalization of marijuana would not be just a question of law, but also one of commerce and economics.

Of course, as with any black market item, it is nearly impossible to get an accurate picture of just how much money is at stake, and how competitors â€" old ones in the black market and new ones in the legitimate market â€" might react. But this much is clear: Uruguay, even as a small country, stands to gain a small windfall. Julio Calzada, the country's top drug official, told me he had calculated that the country would need to grow at least 60,000 pounds of marijuana a year to satisfy its regular users. Call it 80,000 because legalization will probably increase consumption, at least initially. So assum ing that state-sanctioned production leads to prices that are slightly below black market prices â€" so around $200 a pound â€" marijuana legalization would create a $16 million annual industry.

That's a lot of green, but in the context of an economy with a G.D.P. of around $47 billion, it is really not that much. Would established industries like pharmaceutical companies and alcohol sellers bother to create a huge obstacle to the plan? We'll have to wait and see, but resistance so far from the business community has been limited.

And ultimately, the government, which has said it would not grow the marijuana itself but rather use established licensed farmers, would not get rich off the idea either. Taxes of 5 percent on 80,000 pounds would bring in $800,000, for a government's annual expenditures are around $14 million, according to the C.I.A. Factbook. It would be enough to help with treatment, the government has said, but not enough to drastically change the co urse of government.

Your article portrays most officials in Uruguay as seeking to separate the marijuana market from those of substances they acknowledge as truly destructive, such as cocaine paste etc. Even in Portugal, drug use has been decriminalized but the substances remain illegal. That would seem to indicate a commitment, in my opinion a smart one, in most or all of these countries to keeping those kinds of more damaging substances illegal to make and sell, even if users are treated better and in smarter ways than just locking them up.

Isn't this all a sign, then, not of a total rejection of the so-called U.S. position â€" that the damage that certain drugs cause means they should not be allowed to legally be sold â€" but of a tactical/strategic shift that still maintains that basic premise? Will we then realize that keeping drugs such as heroin, meth and cocaine illegal is not just an imperial American edict but global common sense?

Very astute ques tion. What I think we are seeing is a push for reform on two tracks: one is toward legalization of all drugs, which is a total rejection of the so-called U.S. position; and a move toward going soft on some drugs and hard on others, which is, as you note, more of a shift in emphasis. So in Brazil and Argentina, for example, some lawmakers have called for decriminalization of all drugs, along the lines of Portugal, which decriminalized everything in 2001, moving toward a model based on public health rather than law enforcement. But in Uruguay, officials are looking to get tougher on the sale and use of cocaine paste â€" possibly extending prison sentences for cocaine trafficking â€" even as they propose legalization of marijuana. They have said this is because of the violent crime associated with cocaine dealing and use. When I was in Montevideo, I met several young cocaine paste addicts at a treatment center who also said they supported policies that took a harder line with s tronger drugs.

This call for more punishment is the case for the same reason that drug laws in the United States became increasingly harsh in the 1980s: fear. Many Uruguayans, especially after a series of violent crimes this spring, have come to see drugs and drug addiction as a scourge that makes the entire country less secure. Even if putting more and more people in jail is expensive, people in Uruguay say they are hopeful that the police will put the right people behind bars: those who are violent, and those who are dealing the drugs.

“The ‘drug war' has not worked. Wonderful that those countries affected by the USA lust for drugs are innovative in seeking solutions and to end the violence in their countries.” â€" Thomas Bungalow Turner on Facebook

Damien Cave is taking your questions on this Lede post or on Twitter using the hashtag #NYTWorldChat.



The Diesel Generator: India\'s Trusty Power Source

By HEATHER TIMMONS

NEW DELHI - They are smelly, noisy, polluting and expensive - and increasingly, they are what keep India running.

The massive electrical grid failures that India experienced on Monday and Tuesday would have been catastrophic in many other countries, leaving hospitals without crucial power for lifesaving machines, airports paralyzed and businesses shuttered.

But in some parts of India, particularly urban areas, office parks and wealthier neighborhoods, the failures were barely noticed. State-run electricity is already so unreliable that residents and businesses long ago resorted to buying private diesel generators to produce their own.

In Lucknow, for example, the Vivekananda Polyclinic and Institute of Medical Sciences, a private hospital, was using three generators Tuesday to keep dialysis machines running and air-conditioning on in the wards, said Sachendra Raj, the hospital's manager.

Six hours after t he blackout started on Tuesday, Dr. Raj said he was unfazed. “It's part and parcel of our daily
 life,” he said. The situation in his state, Uttar Pradesh, may get worrying once residents' smaller generators run out of power, he said, but his hospital's industrial-size generators will last longer.

Entire industries and neighborhoods rely on diesel power, including India's massive call center and outsourcing campuses, private apartment buildings and small shops. The city of Gurgaon, south of New Delhi, has been heavily dependent on diesel for years. Even the most utilitarian things, like the telecom towers that help power India's much-vaunted mobile phone revolution, are often powered by diesel.

Estimating how much diesel Indian consumers use to make up for the state's energy shortages, or how many people own such generators, is difficult. More than two billion liters, or 5.3 million gallons, of diesel are used every year just to keep India's rural and urban digital communication network running, according to one 2010 report.

Diesel fuel in India is subsidized by about 13 rupees (about 23 cents) per liter, about a  third of the sale price, and when the cost of these subsidies is taken into account, diesel is more expensive, on a per-kilowatt-hour basis, then even the most expensive renewable energy in India, a 2010 World Bank report said.

An extremely hot summer and the recent power failures have meant a booming business for diesel generator sales. “This is a good year for us,” said Irfan Ali of Sunshine Diesel Engineers, a rental and sales shop in Noida, a suburb of New Delhi. “Power cuts have been more frequent.”

After reports of power failures began on Monday, calls to Mr. Ali's shop doubled, he said. Some customers are renting generators, while others are buying a second one, he said.

Sruthi Gottipati and Niharika Mandhana contributed reporting.



In India, Travelers Stuck, Villages Dark and Security Fears Rise

By RAKSHA KUMAR, ANURADHA SHARMA and HARI KUMAR

India's massive grid failure Tuesday stranded travelers, shut down water supplies, snarled commutes and left residents sweltering in the heat. An estimated 600 million people were affected around the country. Here are a few of their tales:

Arindam Saha, 45, an employee with a credit-rating agency in Kolkata:

I usually take the metro rail to commute between my home in Dumdum [in the north], and my Theater Road office [in the south]. Today I left the office at 6.30 p.m. and by the time I reached home, it was well past 10 p.m. Generally, the journey takes only about 40 minutes.

What I saw out on the streets was something I had never seen before. There was utter chaos. People were out on the streets in huge numbers trying to get home, trying to hop into the next available transport. Not only were buses filed to the brim, people were hanging from all sides. I just could not manage to get into a bus.

Finally I managed to get a taxi, which I, too, shared with someone going in the same route. There were traffic snarls everywhere in the city and after a struggle of over three and half hours, I managed to reach home.

Kirti Shrivastava, 49, a housewife in Patna, Bihar:

There is no water, and no idea when electricity will return. We are really tense, even the shops have now closed… after all, until when will they run on inverters [batteries]? Now, we hope it is not an invitation to the criminals!

Shakeela Bano, 68, a housewife in Deoria City, Uttar Pradesh:

We don't have water due to the power shortage! Since our cold storage is dysfunctional in our village, the prices of vegetables are skyrocketing. Adding insult to injury, there is a rumor that there will not be any electricity for a long time.

People are collected in groups in front of their houses, to gain comfort in crowds.

Mukteshwar Prasad Sinha, 62, from Dhanbad, Jharkhand:

[There is a] water problem because of no electricity. [There is] no tension because of security yet. If the blackout continues we might face security threats.

Jaswant Kaur, 62, who boarded a train from Ludhiana to New Delhi this morning, and missed her connecting train to Nagpur, and spent an additional 1,000 Indian rupees (about $18) to reach New Delhi:

Now my pocket is empty. I am hungry. I am tired. The government is responsible for all the hardship to me today. The government should compensate me for the loss.

India's Ministry of Power announced Tuesday evening that the electricity had been largely restored in Delhi and the Northeast. Yet outages remained common in eastern India and elsewhere in the north, leaving millions of people in the dark.


How did India's power failure affect you? Please leave us details of your experience Tuesday in the comments below.



India\'s Long Struggle for Power

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

India's power outages this week were the nation's largest, but they reflect a long-standing national problem.

“India has long struggled to provide enough electricity to light its homes and power its industry around the clock,” Vikas Bajaj wrote this April. “In recent years, the government and private sector sought to change that by building scores of new power plants,” he wrote, but that campaign “is now running into difficulties because the country cannot get enough fuel - principally coal - to run the plants.”

Clumsy policies, poor management and environmental concerns have kept fuel production low, he wrote, and the power's sector's problems have “substantially contributed to a second year of slowing economic growth in India, to an estimated 7 percent this year, from nearly 10 percent in 2010.”

Before this week's massive outages that covered several state, one city in particular already had severe problems this year. “In northern India, where the mercury crossed 40 degrees Celsius - 104 degrees Fahrenheit - every day for the last month, Gurgaon, an outsourcing megacity that is home to more than 1.5 million people, is facing an acute power crisis,” Pamposh Raina wrote in July. The reason: five of the six plants that supply Gurgaon weren't experiencing technical malfunctions, and the sixth was out of coal, power officials said.

A number of new initiatives have been tried across India over the years to address the power shortage:

Even after the nuclear disaster in Japan last year, Indian officials said they would move ahead with ambitious nuclear plans, Heather Timmons and Vikas Bajaj wrote in March of 2011. “India, with 20 nuclear reactors already in operation, plans to spend an estimated $150 billion adding dozens of new ones around the country. Its forecast calls for nuclear power to supply about a quarter of the country's electricity needs by 2050, a tenfold increase from now,” they wrote.

Later in 2011, Mr. Bajaj wrote about “India's ambitious plan to use solar energy to help modernize its notoriously underpowered national electricity grid, and reduce its dependence on coal-fired power plants.” The plans include huge solar farms in western India, where dozens of developers, “because of aggressive government subsidies and a large drop in the global price of solar panels, are covering India's northwestern plains - including this village of 2,000 people - with gleaming solar panels.”

So-called “husk power,” or electricity from methane gas released by rice husks, could also hold hope for rural India,
Andrew Revkin wrote in 2009.

Electricity innovators were aimed at India as early as the 1950s, according to this article that ran in The New York Times in July of 1958. It introduced an American-designed device that “may revolutionize the live of ru ral India.” The invention? An “electric generator and pumped, powered by bullocks.”



Image of the Day: July 31

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

India\'s Power Guzzlers to the North

By NIHARIKA MANDHANA

India's fundamental shortage of energy has been well-documented: the country does not generate enough power to meet the fast-growing demand for electricity from factories, institutions like hospitals and subway systems and private homes.

Whether or not this shortage had any direct impact on the power outages Monday and Tuesday is still being determined by central government authorities.

But one thing is certain: some individual states, particularly in India's north, have been drawing much more power than expected. When this happens, state authorities are warned by various regional authorities about the excess usage, and penalties may be imposed. Still, the supply of power often continues uninterrupted, sometimes straining the system.

On Monday, the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission in New Delhi reprimanded electricity authorities in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Har yana and Uttarakhand. Officers have been summoned to a hearing, scheduled to be held in two weeks.

Uttar Pradesh tops the states in power overdraws, according to the latest report from the National Load Dispatch Center, which monitors national power use. In June, Uttar Pradesh drew 750 million units more of power than it had scheduled, or 25 percent more than expected.

Punjab and Haryana also surpassed their limits by significant margins, about 7 percent and 13.5 percent, respectively. West India has shown great discipline, led by Gujarat, which drew about 30 percent less power than the state's assigned quota. The eastern region, which also suffered a grid collapse Tuesday, consumed 7.5 percent less power last month than was expected.

“I want to inform the states not to draw more power that your quota allotted,” India's minister for power, Sushil Kumar Shinde, said at a news conference in Delhi on Tuesday. “If you do that, it will create a problem for the nation.”



India Hosts World\'s Largest Blackout

By SRUTHI GOTTIPATI

The colossal power failure that swept through half of India early Tuesday afternoon, causing disruptions in the lives of hundreds of millions of people, has earned India a new and dubious distinction: Host of the World's Largest Blackout.

Some 600 million people were estimated to be affected after power was halted in 11 states in northern and eastern India and in the country's capital of 16 million people. Imagine most of Europe without power, or more people powerless than the populations of the United States, Mexico and Central America combined.

While the numbers are colossal, disruptions in many peoples daily lives were kept to a minimum. After all, India, a nation of 1.2 billion people, sees frequent local power cuts that last several hours a day in some parts of the country. So when Tuesday's unplanned power failure occurred, following on the heels of another power failure the previ ous day, the usual backup of generators and inverters that households and businesses privately own kicked in.

Here some other memorable blackouts, listed in chronological order:

Canada and northeastern United States, 1965: Toronto and New York were plunged into darkness as a blackout strikes Ontario and the northeastern United States, affecting 30 million people.

New York, 1977: The familiar shapes of the world's most famous skyline were all blotted out by darkness on the night of July 13. The blackout lasted alittle more than 24 hours, a period in which 1,000 fires were reported, 1,600 stores were damaged in looting and rioting and 3,700 people were arrested.

United States, 2003: A surge of electricity to western New York and Canada touched off a series of power failures and blackouts that left parts of at least eight states in the Northeast and the Midwest without electricity.

Italy, 2003: One of the worst blackouts in Italy's history left mos t of the country without electricity for hours, interrupting rail and air traffic, jamming emergency operator phone lines and forcing thousands of Romans into makeshift refuges in subway stations. The power loss left nearly 57 million people in the dark.

Indonesia, 2005: About 100 million people, about half of Indonesia's population, were affected by a power outage, which affected residences and businesses and snarled traffic in Jakarta, the capital.



Over Half a Billion Without Power in India as Grids Fail

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“About 600 million people lost power in India on Tuesday when the country's northern and eastern electricity grids failed, crippling the country for a second consecutive day,” Heather Timmons and Sruthi Gottipati wrote in The New York Times.

“The outage stopped hundreds of trains in their tracks, darkened traffic lights, shuttered the Delhi Metro and left everyone from the police to water utilities to private businesses and citizens without electricity. About half of India's population of 1.2 billion people was without power.”

Manoranjan Kumar, an economic advisor with the Ministry of Power, said in a telephone interview that the grids had failed and that the ministry was working to figure out the source of the problem. The northern and eastern grids cover 11 states and the capital city of Delhi, stretching from India's northern tip in Kashmir to Rajasthan to West Bengal's capital of Kolkata.

The failure happened without warning just after 1:00 p.m., electric company officials said.

“We seem to have plunged into another power failure, and the reasons why are not at all clear,” said Gopal K. Saxena, the chief executive of BSES, an electric company that services South Delhi, in a telephone interview. It may take a long time to restore power to north India, he said, because the eastern grid has also failed, and alternate power sources in Bhutan and the Indian state of Sikkim flow into the east first.

About two hours after the grid failure, power ministry authorities said some alternate arrangements had been made. “We are taking hydro power from Bhakhra Nangal Dam,” in northern India, said Sushil Kumar Shinde, the power minister, in a televised interview.

Read the full article.



Life Imprisonment for 21 in Gujarat Riots Case

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“An Indian court on Monday sentenced 21 Hindus to life imprisonment in the deaths of 11 members of a Muslim family during some of the country's worst sectarian violence 10 years ago,” an Associated Press report said.

More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed by Hindu mobs in Gujarat after a train fire, allegedly started by Muslims, killed 60 Hindus in 2002.

“The verdict on Monday was the second in nine cases of rioting and murder pending against hundreds of Hindu hard-liners,” the report said. Verdicts on the remaining cases are expected to be issued within a year, as per the orders of the Supreme Court, the highest court in India. The report noted that India's courts were notorious for long delays.

Read the full report.



Bangalore\'s Seniors Head to Work as \'Traditional Indian Family\' Dissolves

By SARITHA RAI

Sheela Rao, 67, has never written a résumé, attended a job interview or used a computer in her life. She has not ever worked in an office. Yet on a recent Saturday, Ms. Rao, a sari-clad, bindi-wearing homemaker, jostled with 1,000 other elders like her, some in their 80s, at a job fair named “Jobs 60+” in Bangalore.She can cook, sew and teach music, Ms. Rao told anybody who would give her a listen. She is healthy and can work hard, she said. “I desperately need a job and a steady income,” she pleaded with prospective employers.

A job fair for seniors is a paradox in a “young” city where multinational employers from Silicon Valley's hottest social media firms and top Wall Street banks throng colleges to sign up those in their 20s even before they graduate.

The weekend gathering offered a glimpse into the social upheaval in Bangalore and other large cities where older Indians are buffeted by rising living and health care costs on the one side and fading support from their ambitious, globally mobile children.

Adding to the complexity, many Indians retire at the mandated age of 58 or 60, and social security covers only a sliver of the population.

This generation on the cusp of great change has not programmed their retirement finances properly, said Dr. Radha Murthy, an elder care pioneer and medical practitioner, whose nonprofit Nightingales Medical Trust organized the job fair. It is the first age band wedged between the traditional and the rapidly westernizing.

Ms. Rao has five children, all married, and lives in the home of her oldest daughter, a bank employee. There, Ms. Rao has gradually become confined to two rooms at the back of the house, she said. She cooks for herself and has very little independence. For instance, to listen to music she must wear headphones so as to not disturb the family.

Ms. Rao knows many others in the same boat. Across the street is an older neighbor who pines for the affections of her son who works in the United States.

“Young people these days are arrogant because they earn big money. They are only interested in themselves,” rued Ms. Rao.

The 3,000-rupee ($54) monthly pension she receives after her banker husband's death is barely enough to survive on, so she makes pickles and snacks to sell in the neighborhood. The income from such exertions too is patchy, so Ms. Rao went to the job fair to look for a steady job and a regular income.

There were dozens of companies looking for accountants, administrators, teachers and insurance salesmen. But, alas, nobody had a job for an elderly homemaker.

The large Indian family has all but disappeared, and the pressures of urban living are being felt in nuclear families, says Ashok Dey, chief executive of an upscale retirement community called Suvidha in the suburbs of Bangalore.

The elderly who expected to be cared for in their old age, as in the generations preceding them, are finding that their busy children are chasing their own careers and ambitions and have no time, inclination or money for them, said Mr. Dey, who said he and his affluent neighbors in the Suvidha community were not in that situation.

Dr. Murthy said, “It is an India where kids no longer want to spend the summer with the grandparents; they would rather spend it at Disneyland.”

At the senior job fair, a dozen young employees from a large multinational bank were volunteers, and they highlighted the age and wage contrast. One of them, Krutika Kuppuraj, 23, an analyst, was overwhelmed by the tales of despair around her. The Indian value system emphasized respect for elders, but that is eroding fast, said Ms. Kuppuraj.

A few of the volunteers were all too aware that the meager monthly pension that some seniors received is the equivalent of what they routinely spend at a cafe o n a casual outing.

The massive turnout at Jobs 60+ may have revealed only the tip of the problem because India's middle class is adept at keeping up social appearances. “Many middle-class Indians will not tell on their kids or let the ‘all-is-well' facade slip,” said Dr. Murthy.

Until he retired recently, V. Mohan, 64, worked for three decades for a single employer, a university. That day at the fair, Mr. Mohan was not looking for a white-collar job. He was willing to settle for any type of work, he said.

His 6,000-rupee rent ($108) is eating into his 10,000-rupee ($180) pension, and that has made him desperate.

Of Mr. Mohan's two children, one daughter has recently married and lives with her husband. He is supporting the other as she finishes up her Ph.D. Mr. Mohan insists that he does not want her money when she starts working.

Another recent retiree, Chandrajayanthi Mala, 60, a former medical counselor, was at the job fair because she w as already gazing into the future. Her husband is on the verge of retiring. She knows many older people have been dumped by their kids who are in “sophisticated jobs.”

“The future is scary as there is no dignity for elders in the family, no importance to their ideas,” she said.

Her son will soon be married, and she prays that he and his future wife will take care of them. Not willing to totally rely on prayers, however, she decided to join the lines at the fair.

Unfortunately, a cruel outcome awaited many elderly job seekers who did not have any computer or other marketable skills.

In Bangalore, a job market long associated with young, fickle, itinerant workers, the fair's organizers thought they had a unique proposition: the loyalty, experience and cost effectiveness of older employees.

Yet neither Ms. Rao nor Mr. Mohan made the cut.

Saritha Rai sometimes feels she is the only person living in Bangalore who was actually raised her e. There's never a dull moment in her mercurial metropolis. Reach her on Twitter @SarithaRai.



Views on Gun Laws Unchanged After Shooting, Poll Finds

By JENNIFER PRESTON

The July 20 mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater that left 12 people dead and 58 injured has not significantly changed the way Americans view gun regulation, according to a national poll published Monday by the Pew Research Center.

The poll showed that 47 percent of the people surveyed said that regulating gun ownership was more important than gun rights, compared with 45 percent of those who said that protecting the ability of Americans to own guns was more important.

The findings of the poll, which surveyed 1,010 people July 26-29, were similar to those of a poll in April. In that survey, 45 percent said they would make gun control a priority, compared with 49 percent who said they would favor gun rights.

Other recent mass shootings also did not shift public opinion on gun regulation. The research center noted that there was no significant change in the balance of opinion about gun rights and gun control after six people were killed and 10 wounded in January 2011 in Arizona, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head.

“Nor was there a spike in support for gun control following the shooting at Virginia Tech University, in April 2007, ” the center's report said.

On Monday, James E. Holmes, the suspect in the Colorado shooting who is said to have used three guns in the deadly rampage, made his second court appearance. My colleagues Jack Healy and Dan Frosch reported that Mr. Holmes did not show any emotion as he learned during the hearing that he faces 142 criminal charges and the possibility of the death penalty.

In Denver, gun store owners saw a surge in people wanting to buy guns immediately after the shooting. The Denver Post reported that there was a 43 percent increase in the number of people seeking background checks for gun purchases in the three days after the shooting compared with the p revious weekend.

Public opinion on gun control has been deeply divided since 2009, said the Pew Center, which has been conducting polls on this issue since 1993. Until then, the center said that people had consistently ranked regulating guns higher than protecting rights of gun owners.

Gallop has been asking about handgun bans since 1956. It published a graph showing a steady decline over the years in support for a handgun ban, reaching a record low of 26 percent in October 2011. That same Gallop poll also found that 53 percent of those polled said they favored a ban on assault weapons.

The most recent Pew Center survey showed that positions on gun control follow the partisan divide, with Democrats favoring more gun regulation 72 percent to 21 percent while Republicans support gun rights 71 percent to 26 percent. There is also a gender divide, with more men than women favoring gun rights over gun regulation.

The poll, conducted using landlines and ce llphones nationwide, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

What are your thoughts on gun regulation?



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