Thank you, readers, for your support, and thanks to all the young professionals who have taken the time to interview with us and let us profile them.

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1. New York City
2. San Francisco
3. Atlanta
4. Los Angeles
5. Washington, D.C.
6. Boston
7. Seattle
8. Minneapolis
9. Philadelphia
10. Denver

So what differentiates the two blogs and makes each unique in its own way? Well, here’s a summary:

Cultural niche. The CulturalConnect links young people to others in their own cultural, ethnic, and/or immigrant communities—people who may share similar challenges, backgrounds, outlooks, and business, charitable, or artistic interests.

Video. Young People Who Rock has a live video interview each Friday on CNN Pipeline. Alas, The CulturalConnect doesn’t yet have that capability.

ConnectionPoint. At the end of each CulturalConnect interview, we offer a ConnectionPoint service that lets readers send an e-mail to profilees to ask questions, offer kudos, and just plain network. As most young professionals eventually find out, achieving one’s goals requires reaching out and expanding one’s network of contacts.

Interview format. The CulturalConnect’s Web site features interviews in which profilees answer questions about themselves and their business, nonprofit organization, or artistic career. The Young People Who Rock blog has short descriptions—about three paragraphs long—of its profilees. I don’t have access to the CNN Pipeline video stream, but I presume the interviews on it go into greater depth on the profilees than the corresponding blog entries do.

We’ve all heard about Unilever’s Fair & Lovely whitening cream. It promises to take a young woman from paper-bag brown to oatmeal-colored beige, ensuring her career success and a handsome husband. Now the aforementioned cosmetics and skin-care companies are expanding into India by offering their own skin-lightening products.

Being an independent woman is about having choice and control over your life, and these lightening products seem to offer it in the form of choice and control over skin color. Advertisements also carry a “grrrl power” message. Fair & Lovely’s ads traditionally focused on how a dark-skinned woman could find romance by using the cream. Now the focus of the ads has shifted: The product can help a swarthy woman get a traditionally male job, such as cricket match announcer. Talk about being a liberated woman! Who needs a husband when you can be a cricket match announcer?

Yes, there is the controversy about the ideal of light skin, which I blogged about in March with my “Looking Right Is Looking White” post. When it comes to being outraged at the light skin ideal, though, that’s “a very Western Way of looking at the world,” says Ashok Venkatramani of Hindustan Lever, the Indian subsidiary of Unilever. “The definition of beauty in the Western world is linked to anti-aging. In Asia, it’s all about being two shades lighter.”

He has a point. In the United States, we don’t hear about how Botox propagates prejudice against the elderly. For the longest time, we didn’t hear much about how skinny models propagated prejudice against heavy people. Girls just got anorexic instead. White teeth are an ideal. So why not white skin? And if white women can aspire for darker skin by using products such as Coppertone’s sunless tanning lotions, then what’s so wrong with brown women aspiring for lighter skin by using products such as Fair & Lovely? The grass is always greener on the other side.

Of course, as I wrote back in March, Coppertone doesn’t market its product by saying that white women need it to land a good husband or a good job. And in the Western world, being pale doesn’t carry anywhere near the social burden that being dark does in India.

In a capitalist world, businesses provide what consumers want, so there’s no point in getting mad at the companies that produce these skin-lightening products. If you want to change the fair-skinned ideal, you’ve got to change societal attitudes, which of course is no easy task. And Fair & Lovely certainly showed that it can change with the times when it shifted its ads’ focus from success in romance to success in a career.

Ironically, Unilever not only makes Fair & Lovely, but it also makes Dove products and promotes them in the Western world with its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which encourages women to celebrate their curves. So while it tells women in the West to accept their bodies as they are, it tells women in India to, basically, be white. It’s hypocrisy, but it’s also a response to two distinct sets of consumer aspirations.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Ebony magazine, which targets the African-American market, used to carry ads for skin whitening creams. Today, it no longer does. Similarly, fair skin may empower Indian women today. Let’s just hope it’s not needed for empowerment tomorrow.

Dubbawallas of Mumbai. As the Indian economy grows at a dizzying pace, the subcontinent is experiencing rapid social change, but some traditions are standing the test of time. One of them is the dubbawallas — the men who deliver tiffins (those metal canisters) of home-cooked hot lunches to office workers all around Mumbai. Forget office cafeterias and fast-food chains. Workers in Mumbai still enjoy the warm lunches lovingly prepared by their wives, mothers, and grandmothers. The dubbawallas—whose business has been growing 5 to 10 percent annually—have an elaborate system of picking up tens of thousands of tiffins from homes each day, taking them to a central train station, sorting them by destination, and then getting them to the proper offices just in time for lunch. The entire process then works in reverse to get the empty tiffins back home. Rarely is a mistake ever made. As one dubbawalla says, “There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours—but they don’t deliver lunch.”

Which companies are receiving H1-B visas? H1-B work visas were intended to help U.S. companies hire skilled workers from abroad when they can’t find Americans to fill job openings. Ironically, though, non-U.S. companies—namely Indian outsourcing firms—have been using the visas. Yes, that’s right. Outsourcing companies are staffing their U.S. offices with foreign workers on H1-B visas. BusinessWeek magazine recently compiled a list of the top 25 recipients of H1-B visas in the 2006 fiscal year. The Indian outsourcing firms Infosys and Wipro came in first and second, respectively. In all, 16 of the top 25, whether U.S. or non-U.S. companies, had significant outsourcing operations. For more details, check out the slide show of the list here.

Shift Happens. Did you know that the top 28 percent of the population in India with the highest IQs is greater than the entire population of North America? This slide show presents some startling statistics about our rapidly changing world. China and India are competing more strongly than ever with the United States. Technology is connecting us and transforming our society in ways never imagined. Change is part of the human condition, and this slide show reminds us that, well, shift happens.

PaniPuri. For those of you who love eating pani puri, this slide show will have your mouth watering. It celebrates all the virtues of this popular Indian food and concludes that it’s a “true World 2.0 Product.”

The whole incident is indicative of how India is undergoing its own sexual revolution right now, just as the United States did in the 1960s and 1970s. (Remember, there was once a time in the United States when TV shows depicted husband and wife sleeping in separate beds.) The norms of Indian society are rapidly changing, and Indians are divided between those who are moving with the times and those who hold steadfast to tradition. The Indians at the AIDS awareness event seemed to be laughing at the kissing episode. They didn’t seem to have a problem with it. On the other hand, the more conservative elements in society were infuriated. Gere had it right when he said on The Daily Show:

“There is a very small right-wing, very conservative political party in India and they are the moral police in India … they do this kind of thing quite often.”

And speaking of right-wing conservatives, when I saw the Gere-Shetty kissing incident, I couldn’t help thinking of the “massage” that U.S. President George W. Bush’s gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel last summer at the G8 conference. Just like Merkel, Shetty was taken by surprise—she had a startled expression on her face and she lost her balance. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that boorish frat-boy antics, whether from Bush, Gere or any other man, don’t go over very well.

For my classes, I read endless graphically appealing reports put out by the World Bank and other development agencies. They used lofty language and feel-good terms like “country ownership,” “local participation,” and “accountability.” These agencies weren’t about exploiting the poor, as protestors claimed! But the reports also said poor countries need to do “x,” they need to do “y,” they need to do “z” … on and on. How could some developing country run by an undertrained, inexperienced, oftentimes corrupt, bureaucracy really manage to execute such a laundry list of reforms, all while harmoniously coordinating with an array of “stakeholders” — citizens, NGOs, donor agencies, local governments, etc.?

I came to the belief that ultimately, only the people themselves in a country can help themselves. Rich country donors can have a secondary, auxiliary role, but ultimately, the initiative and effort must come from the people themselves. Countries that have been pulling themselves out of poverty, such as China and India, have had some of the least outside help/interference.

Today, with all these new epiphanies, I think the idea that the United States could go into Iraq and bring about a stable democracy was a profoundly naive one. The world hasn’t been able to build stable democracies and eliminate absolute poverty in many developing countries. Billions of dollars have been thrown at Africa, and there is relatively little to show for it. It’s difficult enough to accomplish anything in a stable country. How can the United States pull it all off in a country full of insurgents and ethnic cleavages?

But I would like to be proven wrong. I want democracy to succeed in Iraq. I would rather be wrong and have a functioning Iraq than be right and have a deteriorating Iraq.

And while I’m currently disillusioned by the current state of affairs in the arena of international development, I’m not about to abandon my commitment to it. There are some powerful voices out there who are clearing the air and advocating for much-needed reform. One voice is that of Thomas Dichter, who wrote the aptly titled book Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed. Another is that of William Easterly, who wrote The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good. (He also wrote a great op-ed for April 22’s Washington Post.)

The United States has undertaken a grand, utopian social engineering project in Iraq. It took the United States nearly 200 years from independence to get to a point where women could vote and the races had equal rights. The country had its own separatist movement and civil war in the 1860s. Descendents of Europeans decimated the Native Amerian populations in the United States’ own version of sectarian strife. The American experiment with democracy unfolded organically over centuries. Now the United States thinks it can orchestrate it all again with the wave of a magic wand in a distant country with a different historical trajectory.

Like I said earlier, I want to be proven wrong.

Sometimes in life, however, problems aren’t as complex as they might seem. I’ve recently come across two pieces of evidence that suggest that part of the gender gap in school attendance is simply a matter of feminine hygiene — or lack of it. With more maxi-pads and more toilets, more adolescent girls could be back in school.

Piece of Evidence #1 (Source: Thomas Friedman’s April 18, 2007, column)

Naisiae Tobiko, a 28-year-old Kenyan woman, noticed that when she was a child, girls from families poorer than hers often came to school, but as they grew older, they missed four days of school each month. Many even ended up dropping out because of missed school days. She asked them what was going on, and they said they could not attend school when they were menstruating because their families could not afford maxi-pads.

“How can I come to a place when I am bleeding?” asked the girls, some of whom were using rags or mud. 

Today, it’s Tobiko to the rescue. In partnership with the Girl Child Network and other NGOs, she distributes free menstrual products to girls. So far she’s reached 189,000 girls out of a target of 500,000. More maxi-pads equals more educated young women, which equals more informed moms, which equals healthier, happier children in the next generation.

Piece of Evidence #2 (Source: Page 378 of William Easterly’s hardcover book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good and Nov. 29, 2004’s BusinessWeek article “The eBay Way“)

GlobalGiving is a “matchmaking” organization that pairs development projects with funders. In 2002, some teachers in Coimbatore, India, noticed that many girls were leaving school once they reached puberty. The teachers posted a project on GlobalGiving. The project ad was titled “New Toilet Block for School. $5,000.” Four U.S. donors, including a writer from New York City, funded the project. Three months later, the girls had their own toilet block. It turns out that girls had been dropping out en masse because lack of private toilets made them feel embarrassed when they were menstruating. Two years after the toilet block was constructed, 100 girls had stayed in school. GlobalGiving estimates that by 2012, 440 girls will have stayed through graduation — that’s $11.36 per girl to keep her in school.

Sometimes, it’s the small things that make all the difference.

I have been closely following the current debate in the U.S. Congress over government programs that have been assisting farmers in America for years. If you watch C-Span sometimes, then you probably have been too.

Here are some facts:

The U.S. government’s farm subsidy program (i.e. financial support to farmers in America) in effect deny millions of people in poor countries a chance to survive in the global economy. U.S. farm policies have been around since the Depression era when farmers really did need the help. But due to sheer government negligence in upgrading policies for changing times, as well as due to the power of some fierce agricultural lobbies, these subsidies have remained to this day.

So how do they affect people in poor countries?

When subsidies are given to U.S. farmers, they are able to produce more rice, sugar, cotton or wheat than they would normally be able to produce given the regular prices of inputs. As a result, over-production takes place, and the world prices of these commodities are artificially lowered (remember that as supply goes up, prices goes down!), which means that farmers in poor countries like Mali, Laos or Cambodia are not able to get a fair price for these same products when they are sold on the world market.

Quite obviously, the governments of these puny countries also don’t have the same-sized war chest as the U.S. government that would enable them to help their own farmers with subsidies. As a result, farmers in poor countries suffer, or even get priced out of the market.

The primary justification given by the U.S. government for providing support to farmers is that it is necessary to protect small-holder farming families which are unable to deal with the high costs of inputs, such as tractors, pesticides etc.

However, the facts show that subsidies overwhelmingly go to the largest farmers and agribusinesses in the United States. According to the Environmental Working Group, between 1995 and 2005, the largest 4 percent of farms garnered half of farm subsidy payments, while the largest 10 percent pulled in 73 percent.

Important note: these large farmers are also important contributors to the political campaigns of elected officials from farm states.

Although the domestic rice market in the United States is saturated, the U.S. government continues to subsidize rice that the U.S. sells in the world market. Rice producers are among the biggest beneficiaries of the U.S. farm program.

Meanwhile, rice is a staple in the diets of half the world, in countries like Cambodia, Bangladesh and other countries, and an important symbol of rural self-sufficiency and national identity. Subsidized rice provides a deathblow to farmers in Asia that don’t stand a chance against the mighty U.S. Treasury.

Also of note: As if these massive rice subsidies weren’t enough, recently the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office granted a Texas company a patent for basmati rice, which Indians been eating for hundreds of years. After a long and painful battle the patent was finally revoked.

There is also some hope of ending the subsidies. A few loud and diverse groups, under the banner of Alliance for Sensible Agricultural Policies (ASAP), including fiscal conservatives, anti-poverty activities and nutritionists, are fighting to get rid of the subsidies that distort the market once and for all. I hope they win.