Move over Hollywood, here comes Bollywood

Did you see the Hollywood sign up on the hills near LA recently? I swear I just looked and the H was starting to look more like a B! I wonder why? Could it have something to do with this breaking news:

Anil Ambani group, Spielberg to set up $1.5 billion studio 

India's Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group and celebrated filmmaker Steven Spielberg are setting up a new studio in Los Angeles under a $1.5-billion project that will make films for global audiences, sources familiar with the negotiations said Saturday.

The mega deal - which will help Spielberg break away from DreamWorks, now owned by Viacom's Paramount Pictures - will be funded by a mix of equity and debt, and also involve leading investment banker JP Morgan Chase, the sources added.

"The venture will reflect the new reality in today's world of cinema where box office collections for Hollywood movies are much larger outside, than in the US," said one source involved in the negotiations.

"This strategic pact is being keenly watched as it involves the coming together of an Indian company that has its own grand plans in the media and entertainment space, and one of the most decorated filmmakers in the world," the source added.

"This project goes beyond mere financials and gives the Indian group the rights across various platforms - theatres, home video, DVD."

The Mumbai-based industrial house remained tight-lipped. "At the moment, we have no comments to make over this issue," a spokesperson for the group told IANS from their headquarters.

Apart from Spielberg, winner of three Academy awards who has to his credit films like "Schindler's List", "Star Wars", "ET, The Extra Terrestrial" and "Jurassic Park", the new venture also ropes in his long-standing associate Stacey Snider, who was the chairperson of Universal Studios till 2006,

Snider, who had since been the chief executive of DreamWorks, has been involved in some acclaimed productions like "Erin Brockovich", "The Fast and the Furious", "The Mummy", "A Beautiful Mind", "American Pie" and "Brokebeck Mountain".

As a combination, Spielberg and Snider are regarded as the most successful filmmaking duo in history.

DreamWorks was formed with much fanfare in 1994. But after an uneven run, it was sold to Viacom'a Paramount in 2006 for $1.6 billion. Since then, Spielberg and his team were eager to part ways with Paramount.

According to sources, the Anil Ambani group and Spielberg decided to join hands both for the financial stability of their new venture and convergence of their ideas for the world of media and entertainment.

Ambani's Reliance Big Entertainment had announced in Cannes in May that it would make a major foray into Hollywood and develop projects in partnership with some best-known actors like Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey and George Clooney.

This marked the biggest foray of an Indian entity in Hollywood's motion picture industry. Thirty films are likely to emanate from Reliance's co-financing and 10 will go into production soon, company officials had said.

The entertainment business of the Anil Ambani group has interests in movies, FM radio, music, sports, gaming, Internet and mobile portals, direct-to-home TV, Internet TV and Mobile TV.

The group, which also has a major presence in mobile telecom, financial services and energy sectors, had acquired in 2005 Adlabs Films Ltd, one of India's the largest entertainment companies with interests in film processing, production, exhibition and digital cinema.

The group recently acquired 250 screens in US and 51 screens in Malaysia.

Paramount, meanwhile, said it will not delay matters for Spielberg and his team, including DreamWorks partner David Geffen and chief executive Snider, in forging the pact with the Indian group.

"To facilitate a timely and smooth transition, Paramount has waived certain provisions from the original deal to clear the way for the DreamWorks principals and their employees to join their new company without delay," the studio said.

"Steven is one of the world's great storytellers and a legend in the motion picture business. It has been an honour working closely with him and the DreamWorks team over the last three years," the studio added.

"We expect to continue our successful collaboration with Steven in the future," said the studio, while congratulating him and DreamWorks partner David Geffen and chief executive Stacey Snider in finalisng the pact with the Indian group.

Outsourced Wombs

This is troubling in a general sense - although I can't lay my finger on one specific thing that's troubling about this. I guess the question is how far are we willing to beyond the natural order of things because technology now enables us. And the answer is not simple; also it's often selfish.

Anyway, check out Judith Warner's piece on NYTimes http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/

and the program from NPR here:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/12/27/surrogate_mothers/

Outsourcing Your Parents

Here's this story on the latest trend in healthcare outsourcing making the rounds on the WWW. What do you think about it - do answer my poll in the sidebar.

"Some families finding cheaper care for elderly relatives overseas

By LAURIE GOERING - Chicago Tribune

PONDICHERRY, India — After three years of caring for his increasingly frail mother and father in their Florida retirement home, Steve Herzfeld was exhausted and faced with spending his family’s last resources to put the couple in a cheap nursing home.

So he made what he saw as the only sensible decision: He outsourced his parents to India.

Today his 89-year-old mother, Frances, who suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease, gets daily massages, physical therapy and 24-hour help getting to the bathroom, all for about $15 a day. His father, Ernest, 93, an Alzheimer’s patient, has a full-time personal assistant and a cook who has won him over to a healthy vegetarian diet — so that he longer needs his cholesterol medication.

Best of all, the many drugs the couple require cost less than 20 percent of what they do at home, and salaries for their six-person staff are so cheap that the pair now bank $1,000 a month of their $3,000 Social Security payment.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a solution for everybody, but I consider it the best solution to our problem,” said Herzfeld, 56, a management expert. He made the move to India with his parents, and now, as “care manager rather than the actual worker” has time for things like bike rides to the grocery store and strolls in the botanical gardens with his father.

With the cost of nursing homes, home nurses and medications painfully high in the United States, the elderly and their caregivers have long looked abroad for better solutions. Many families now drive regularly to Mexico or Canada to buy cheaper drugs, or hire recent immigrants to help them look after frail parents.

A growing number of aging couples have bought retirement homes in Mexico, where help is cheap and Medicare-funded health care just a quick drive across the border.

Herzfeld never thought he’d be headed abroad, too. When his mother broke a hip in 2004, he drove down to their home in Pompano Beach from his home in North Carolina, figuring he’d stay a while and help his parents get back on their feet.

But like so many other caregivers, three years later he found himself still on the couch in his parents’ spare bedroom.

Herzfeld began investigating nursing homes, but found that the $6,600-a-month cost at the cheapest one he could find near family members would quickly bankrupt his parents. He also was worried about the quality of life they would have in a nursing home.

So when a friend one day suggested that Herzfeld consider a move to India, “I said right away, ‘There’s an idea!’” he said.

Herzfeld, who is single and a longtime follower of transcendental meditation, had previously spent five years in India. He quickly realized that the graceful town of Pondicherry — a haven for aging hippies from around the world — might just work.

They still are working out some details. India, where life expectancy hovers around 60, lacks physicians who specialize in aging. The family keeps in touch with friends and family by e-mail and videophone, but hasn’t persuaded anyone to visit.

Yet when Herzfeld looks at the bills — less than $2,000 a month for food, rent, utilities, medications, phones and 24-hour staffing — he feels he has done the right thing for his parents and himself.

“It can be done,” he said. “This is working.”"

Sensitive data dumped at recycling center by Indian Consulate in San Francisco

As if the incident itself was not bad enough, the consulate officials went on to put their proverbial feet in their mouths with quotations like:

- "As we see it, the documents are not confidential," said B.S. Prakash, the consul general. "We would see something as confidential if it has a Social Security number or a credit card number, not a passport number."

- At the Indian Consulate, Consul General Prakash said there may be a cultural dimension to the level of outrage related to the incident among Western visa applicants.
"In India, I would not be alarmed," he said. "We have grown up giving such information in many, many places. We would not be so worried if someone had our passport number."

- Deputy Consul General Sircar said that in other countries, Indian officials are able to go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they're no longer able to store.
"In America, you cannot do that," he said.

At a time when Indian IT and BPO companies are going out of their way to assure their customers that their intellectual property, customer data and other confidential information is secure with them, this will come as quite a shock.

But to blame it on Indian culture is outright dumb. We expect much better judgment from our foreign service officials.