Finalist for the Livingston Award in International Reporting

A couple days ago learned that I have been selected as a finalist for the Livingston Award in International Reporting for my piece in WIRED titled "The Bone Factory: India's Underground Trade in Human Remains."[link] Every year 50 young journalists are selected as finalists by a star committee of veteran media players. The wikipedia entry on the competition says that "the Livingston Awards are among the most competitive and prestigious reporting prizes in American journalism."

My name on the list of finalists is wedged between two reporters for the New York Times and shares space with some of the best up and coming journalists in America. So, I know it's cliché, but it's an honor just to be nominated. The winner gets a $10,000 cash award, and a trip to New York to mingle with the panel of judges. The awards will be announced on June 6th.

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Also, just in case you missed it. I had another story on NPR a few weeks ago, but didn't end up posting about it on this blog. It is about a new transgender talk show host here in Chennai who is stirring up the community with provocative questions about sex and marriage. Check it out here: "Transgender Talk Show Host Tackles Taboos in India."

The Bone Factory: India's Underground Trade in Human Remains

Manoj Pal: Dom and Cadaver Deflesher

It is pitch black and raining when I first meet Manoj Pal: a man who makes his living defleshing rotting cadavers. I am a hundred kilometers outside of Calcutta in a small village called Purbasthali where police confiscated more than 100 bright white human skeletons. The bones they found were on their way along a two hundred year old pipeline for human remains. The smugglers route begins on the banks of Indian rivers and ends in the sacred halls of medicine in Western countries. The skeletons Pal prepared could have fetch as much as $70,000 on the black market.

Manoj Pal is grunt labor for the industry. As part of the dom, or grave tending, caste his job is the most grim. Day and night he recovers bodies from a nearby cremation ghat. He binds the corpses in mosquito netting and soaks them in the river for a week. When the bodies are waterlogged and mostly consumed by fish and stray dogs he scrubs off the remaining flesh, dumps the bodies in a boiling solution of caustic chemicals and lets them dry in the sun.

Before he was arrested Pal's boss, Mukthi Biswas would sell bones to a medical supply company in Calcutta called Young Brothers for a few thousand rupees. From there the bones were wired together into free hanging skeletons and sold both domestically and abroad.

I spent three months piecing together the path that human bones take from Calcutta to the Western world for WIRED magazine. I found suppliers and buyers in well respected companies and universities across the United States. When I brought this to the attention of police in Calcutta they told me that they do not view grave robing as a serious crime. On the rare occasions that the police catch a grave robber, they mostly just let them off with a slap on the wrist.

The bone business dates back to colonial times when British doctors needed a steady supply of human skeletons to stock anatomy classes in England. Before they had set up a reliable system for preparing human skeletons on a mass scale there was an extreme shortage of bones available for study. It drove some British doctors to rob graves in their own neighborhoods. Some cemeteries were so notorious for skulduggery that there were frequent fist fights between grieving families and shovel-carrying medical students.

A bag of leg bones confiscated on the Bhutan Border

But with the advent of colonialism doctors began to look to Calcutta for fresh body supplies. By the mid 1800's Calcutta Medical College was sending hundred of bodies abroad every year. The trade continued to flourish until the 1980s. At its peak every aspiring doctor in the world bought a box of bones along with their first year's medical textbooks for about $300. Calcutta was exporting more than 60,000 skeletons a year making it a multi million dollar business.

But it couldn't last forever. In 1985 rumors began to surface that the bone dealers had run out of skeletons in Calcutta's graveyards and were killing children for their skeletons. Child skeletons are rarer than adult skeletons and fetched a higher price on the market. A man was arrested for exporting more than 1,500 child skeletons. A member of the legislature accused him of murder and put the nail in the coffin for the legal industry. By 1986 exports had all but stopped. The 13 original bone exporters all seemingly shut their doors. Medical schools in the West began relying on model skeletons for their anatomy instruction needs.

What no one knew was that at least one company was still exporting human bones. They had rekindled factories across West Bengal and had clients all over the world.

The most active bone exporter is Young Brothers. It's a medical supply company that sits between one of Calcutta's most active morgues and its largest cemetery. In 2001 neighbors complained that the warehouse stank like the dead. Some people reported seeing bones drying on the roof. When the health department chief Javed Ahmed Khan heard the reports he raided the facility and found bones boiling away in cauldrons and export invoices for orders all over the world. It was proof that the business was violating the export ban. But when Khan took the case to the police the owner of Young Brothers, Vinesh Aron, only spent one night in jail. The case was thrown own over a jurisdictional dispute and the business given a subtle nod that it could continue.

Since then Young Brothers has been more discreet about its business affairs, but it hasn't exactly shuttered his doors. In October I met Aron's in law in yet another medical supply company in Chennai. He told me that Vinesh Aron is the only man in the family with "guts". To prove it he pulled a fetal skull off the shelf and offered to sell it to me for $400.

In the meanwhile bones are still being smuggled though illegal channels in Singapore and Paris. I found a reseller in Canada who says that he still sells Indian bones across North America.

For more about the global trade in human bones check out this month's issue of WIRED magazine in a story called "Inside India's Underground Trade in Human Remains". I have also produced a shorter radio segment for NPR titled "Into the Heart of India's Underground Bone Trade".

For more photos of the bone cache check out these two galleries: mine and NPR's

The Rickshaw 1000

Get it while it's hot. The new issue of WIRED (January 2007) has a fun description of a tiny part of the auto-rickshaw race that my team Curry in a Hurry took part in across Tamil Nadu. If enough people are interested I might post another version of this story on my blog that runs about five times as long and includes lots of other juicy details. Sadly, we had to pear the final version down for the print edition.

The Rickshaw 1000

A SLEDGEHAMMER ISN'T THE IDEAL tool for fixing a motor vehicle, but sometimes there's no better option. Kabali Balakrishnan rolls up his shirt sleeves, hefts the 10-pound hammer, and drives it into the spot where the metal is bent nearly into a V. Several precisely aimed whacks later, the piece has regained a semblance of its former shape. The tire will rub against the wheel well, the mechanic warns, but as long as the driver keeps the air pressure low, moves slowly, and avoids ramming any more boulders head-on, he ought to reach the finish line before his ride catches fire.

Balakrishnan is the official mechanic of the Indian Autorickshaw Challenge, a contest intended to transform his country's back-alley drag racing craze into an internationally recognized sport (or, more likely, spectacle). Auto-rickshaws – motorized, small-wheeled tricycles with room for a driver and two passengers – serve as taxis throughout India. With a high center of gravity and a tendency to roll, though, they aren't known for safety, and police are cracking down on racers who risk their lives – and those of bystanders – by whizzing down gullies and drainage ditches in a quest for recognition and gold-necklace prizes.

But as the authorities work to eliminate rickshaw racing, one of the sport's most avid fans aims to legitimize it. Aravind Bremanandam, an amiable Tamil entrepreneur, spent the past year setting up the first-ever official rickshaw competition. Advertising on the Internet, he signed up 43 drivers from around the world, many of whom had never even ridden in a rickshaw, to undertake an eight-day rally over nearly 1,000 kilometers of bad road, from the bustling metropolis of Chennai to the holy city of Kanyakumari.

So, on a clear, late-summer morning, 16 brightly painted rickshaws line up along the Chennai beach, revving their two-stroke engines like buzzing locusts. Bremanandam's own buggy looks more like a mobile home than a rickshaw. The rear holds a love seat, a small refrigerator, and a sound system.

With minutes to go before starting time, the entrepreneur offers a brief reminder of the rules. "The roads are too dangerous for inexperienced drivers," he says, so instead of vying for the best time, teams will gather points by completing tasks along the way – for instance, stopping at a temple to be blessed by a sacred elephant.

A local dignitary lowers a checkered flag and barely manages to jump out of the way as the rickshaws lurch forward.

After three days, half the vehicles bear deep gashes; a couple are so badly damaged that Balakrishnan has had to replace their engines. Day seven is marked by a near-fatal accident. On the final day, the rickshaws putter across the finish line in various states of disrepair. Although a Hungarian team arrives first, a British husband-and-wife duo has racked up the most points. At an award ceremony held in a field near the finish line, Bremanandam presents them with the modest prize: a chrome-plated fender bearing the Indian Autorickshaw Challenge logo, rendered in Sanskrit.

One team had brought a set of Euro-made tools to fix their own rig but never used them because Balakrishnan was always ready when trouble arose. They present the stalwart mechanic with the tools, which are of far better quality than anything available in India. The barrel-chested mechanic grins. He looks as though he's about to cry.

After a night of celebration, Balakrishnan walks to his mobile workshop in the back of a white minivan. He fondles a wrench that broke while removing a frozen bolt, then replaces it with the shiny European spanner. He rummages around for a ballpoint pen and a stained notebook and starts writing invoices for the repairs he made over the past week. He pulls the van's door shut. It slams with the sound of a sledgehammer striking an axle.

Find this article in this month's issue of WIRED.