RISHIKESH, INDIA // The daily flood of Indian families into the holy city of Rishikesh is PL Kothari’s boon – and part of a lifeline for a fading technology.

Mr Kothari sells the trademark yellow and green boxes of Kodak and Fuji film to pilgrims, who snap shots of ashrams and take family portraits on the iconic Lakshman Jula, a footbridge that crosses over the sacred Ganges as it flows down from the Himalayan foothills.

While he is seeing a trend towards more people using their mobile phones to take snapshots these days, purchases of film and film-based cameras at his store have remained constant, he said.

Nationally, demand in India for film is falling by roughly 30 to 35 per cent a year, according to Koji Wada, a marketing adviser at FujiFilm India, but that decline – mostly in urban centres – is not universal, he said. That is good news for Kodak and Fuji, who have seen demand for film plummet over the last decade with the advent of digital cameras. This week, Kodak retired Kodachrome, its first commercially successful colour film, after more than 70 years of production.

Some of the world’s most famous colour photos – including that of Sharbat Gula, the “Afghan Girl” whose photograph by Steve McCurry appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985 – as well as many family slide shows in the 1960s and 1970s have been printed on Kodachrome.

However, it was the only film in which the dyes that bring colour to the images had to be added during processing. “There’s this whole infrastructure around Kodachrome beyond just the film,” said Grant Steinle, the vice president of operations at Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the only lab in the world that processes the film. “You might have 20 different components … and you have to do ongoing analyses on the chemical constituents in the chemicals you’re using. Kodak is the only company that manufactures the dye set, and they’re discontinuing that as well.”

Of course the catalyst for all of this is digital. Kodak said it earns 70 per cent of its profit from digital. Worldwide, internet habits have played a large role in the move to digital. In the West and other parts of Asia, millions of people share their photos on social networking sites.

“Facebook is the largest depository, if you will, of digital images right now,” said Gary Pageau, of PMA, a US-based trade association for the photographic industry. “It’s the largest photo site there is.”

Despite the country’s strengths in information technology, less than five per cent of Indians have ever used the internet and only about four per cent actively go online, according to figures published in January by the internet and Mobile Association of India.

That is low compared to other countries, such as China, where more than 20 per cent of the total population uses the internet, according to government statistics. More than half of all Americans went online last month alone, according to figures from Nielsen Online.

In addition, the vast majority of Indian internet users live in cities, which may explain why rolls of Kodak and Fuji film are especially popular in the countryside.

Rama Malik, of Kodak India, said the decline her company sees in otherwise strong film sales is “primarily in the urban markets” – the same ones that she sees “transitioning to digital”.

Interestingly, there has been minimal decline in the demand for photographic paper, according to Fuji’s Mr Wada, which suggests that digital photographers in India may still regularly print out their pictures.

Mr Wada said the most popular type of photos in India – even at the village level – are of weddings and other special events, where the prints remain the purpose of the shot, whether the professional photographer uses a film or digital camera.

Although, as Mr Kothari, the shop owner in Rishikesh noticed, more people are using mobile phones for snapshots, the phones themselves cannot replace a good camera, Mr Wada said, based on his observations of both the Japanese and the Indian markets.

Phones can offer higher mega-pixels “but quality is not based only on that”, he added. “It is necessary to have a good lens and software to get better photos.”

Phones and cameras have different uses, said Ms Malik, of Koadk India: phones may capture spontaneous images, but people will always prefer cameras to photograph new babies or weddings.

There is little doubt that India will eventually go digital.

Mr Pageau, of the industry group, said it was just a matter of when.

“There comes a point – and in different countries it’s a different point – where the value of digital is far superior to that of analogue for most people in most cases, and then the market chooses,” he said. “There’s never been a chemical process that has survived the onslaught of a digital one.”

Mr Pageau still sees opportunity in film, but he does not see the technology sustaining itself worldwide over the next 20 years. Indeed, the retiring of Kodachrome may prove an early major step in the shift.

Mr Kothari would agree – although he is not worried about his customers going digital any time soon.

Rolls of film in India can cost anywhere from less than 100 rupees (Dh7.5) to more than 200 rupees, and Mr Kothari estimates that he sells about 10 a day. He also usually sells one or two 500-rupee film-based cameras.

He has started selling digital memory cards, too, but for now, he says, only foreign tourists buy them.

WASHINGTON // When Brett and Amy Morrison began house hunting two months ago, they thought they were entering a buyers’ market. Four unsuccessful offers later, they started to question that.

“We would jump on something the first or second day that it was on the market, put in an offer … and then find out within half a day that the place had 10 offers already,” said Brett Morrison, a 28-year-old paralegal.

Property agents in Washington, DC say young buyers seeking to become first-time homeowners with the help of government tax breaks and other incentives are getting outbid by investors and even each other. A host of factors has ignited home sales in the area, according to buyers and sellers, whose anecdotal experiences would not show up in the official statistics for several months.

“This spring, the DC market is looking more and more like a boom-time seller market,” said Sheryl Barnes of Long & Foster Real Estate. Ms Barnes, who represented the Morrisons, described last year as “phenomenally horrible for most real estate agents”.

The government and the National Associations of Realtors (NAR) both recently reported a continued decline in home sales for the month of March, with the median home price down 12.4 per cent from a year ago, according to NAR. Nobody is declaring the downturn over, but NAR noted a rise in first-time home buyers, which accounted for 53 per cent of sales for the month.

Ms Barnes noted that more first-time buyers may be one reason why lower-priced housing seems especially competitive.

Some other reasons for the recent flurry of buying and selling are specific to Washington. Forbes magazine in January declared the US capital the best place in the world for property investment, based on rankings from the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate. The magazine said the city is sure to benefit from the US government’s economic stimulus spending and the stability of an apparently growing number of government jobs.

Other factors seem to be spurring property activity in other areas, as well, according to Rob McGarty of Redfin, an online property brokerage firm based in Seattle but active in most of the country’s major urban areas. “The banks are finally lowering the price on all these [foreclosed] properties, and it’s causing a ton of buyers to come out,” Mr McGarty said. “We’re seeing many, many, many multiple offers.”

Mr McGarty and his Washington-based Redfin colleague, Fernando Ferrufino, said non-bank sellers were also bringing their prices down.

But buyers like the Morrisons, lured into the market in part by reports of housing deals, have been surprised by all the other buyers. “It definitely did cross our minds, [that] maybe we’re behind the curve on this and maybe it would have been possible and easier two or three months ago,” Mr Morrison said.

Like many Americans, the Morrisons believed owning their own home was part of the “American dream”, but some academics are questioning whether this even makes sense anymore.

In the first three months of this year, 67.3 per cent of American households owned their own homes, and while that is down from a high of 69.1 per cent in 2005, it is significantly up from 43.6 per cent in 1940, according to the US Census Bureau.

Much of the rise has been possible because the government has supported home ownership over the decades for a variety of reasons. Lemar Wooley, of the US Housing and Urban Development Department, said the agency has generally found home ownership promotes family stability, provides financial security, stabilises neighbourhoods and generates jobs. But today’s labour market is not the same as it was 60 years ago, when jobs were for life.

“Owning a home … ties workers down,” Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate economist wrote last year in the New York Times. “Even in the best of times, the costs and hassle of selling one home and buying another … tend to make workers reluctant to go where the jobs are.”

Richard Florida, of the University of Toronto, says the two key pillars of the “American dream” – home ownership and economic opportunity – might now be in conflict.

“It used to be, in the old mass-production, suburban economy, that a single family home actually helped to support the economy. We had an economy where buying a house was a ticket to saving your money,” Mr Florida said. “Today the average American changes their job every three years. People can’t sell their house, so as the economy goes down, they can’t become mobile.”

And an immobile population cannot follow the jobs.

“In the United States, if we just keep trying to build a housing economy, that may be one of the reasons we fall behind,” he said.

Greg McBride of Bankrate.com, a personal finance website, said while home ownership is not for everyone, he still believes it makes sense for people who can afford it and who plan to stay put for several years.

“When home prices were going up 20 per cent a year, the prevailing mentality was that it was a can’t-miss investment,” Mr McBride said. “You now see more consideration being given to the idea that not everybody’s cut out to be a home owner, nor should everybody own a home. Home ownership is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It never was. It’s a long-term investment.”

Last week the Morrisons signed a contract on a small house in an emerging neighbourhood in downtown Washington, DC. It was the fifth home they bid on, and their offer of just under US$250,000 (Dh917,500) was accepted.

“On the one hand, I feel like we’re fortunate that we didn’t try to do this two years ago [when prices were at their peak],” Mr Morrison said. “On the other hand, maybe we should have started a couple months sooner.”
* The National

WASHINGTON // Jim Warlick, 56, could retire right now, thanks to Barack Obama, the US president-elect.

Mr Warlick sells political memorabilia – including buttons, coins and T-shirts – at Political Americana, his store in Washington, DC.

Since Mr Obama won the race for the White House on Nov 4, related merchandise has been snapped up so quickly that Mr Warlick opened a second shop last month. He is also planning to open another five temporary stores in the weeks surrounding Mr Obama’s inauguration on Jan 20, an event that could draw several million people.

Mr Warlick is not alone. Mr Obama’s image has boosted merchandise sales for producers, suppliers and even inspired mom-and-pop shops to enter the world of politics for the first time.

“I’ve been in the business 28 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mr Warlick said.

While he has thought about an easy retirement in the tropical Virgin Islands funded by Obama-driven sales, he said he loves the work too much to quit now.

In fact, thanks to the next president’s popularity overseas, Mr Warlick is even considering opening another store in Germany. At his Washington stores, he estimates foreigners buy about 20 per cent of his Obama merchandise, compared to five or 10 per cent for other US politicians. Once popular George W Bush merchandise, commemorating the outgoing US president, was already out of style by the time Mr Obama proved himself a serious contender for the presidency and started driving up Political Americana sales in the fall of 2007.

“For a couple of years we’ve been selling more anti-Bush items than pro-Bush,” Mr Warlick said.

These days, people who buy pro-Bush buttons put them in their pocket, while people who buy anti-Bush buttons often pin them on their jacket right away, he said.

Mr Warlick has about 50,000 pro-Bush buttons in storage along with other leftover Bush merchandise.

“Maybe one day down the road collectors will buy it. Or maybe when he opens the Bush library we can sell it to them … or we may just give it to them.”

Political Americana has a tradition of predicting presidential elections based on button sales, and “Obama stuff has just been off the charts”, Mr Warlick said, noting that Obama merchandise outsold McCain memorabilia 10 to one.

“He’s already having a positive impact on the economy,” he said of Mr Obama. “We love that man.”

One of Mr Warlick’s suppliers, Tigereye Design in rural Greenville, Ohio, also got an early stimulus from the next US president. The company was contracted to make some official Obama campaign merchandise and also sold the branded items through its website, DemocraticStuff.com.

“Before we started working with the Obama campaign, we had 30 employees,” Justin Hemminger of Tigereye said. “At the peak during the election, we were up to just under 500 employees. The Obama merchandise put a lot of people to work in our part of Ohio.”

While the firm is now back down to about 50 employees, the sales continue. In the two months since the election, Tigereye has sold more than two million buttons. The company’s top-selling products, buttons, go for US$1 apiece or less if bought in quantity. Mr Hemminger noted an increase in customers buying thousands of Obama buttons at a time.

Unlike Political Americana, Tigereye is a partisan company that produces political goods for Democratic candidates only. In 2008, the company sold political goods in three categories: generic Democratic merchandise, anti-Bush merchandise and Obama items, which outsold the other two groups 20 to one, Mr Hemminger said. “Demand for [Obama goods] has been through the roof. It’s unlike any candidate we’ve ever seen before.”

The unprecedented popularity of Obama merchandise has created smaller scale economic boosts as well.

After nearly two decades in business, the February family’s corner store in the northern tip of Washington, DC, was having a tough time. Then Quacy February, 33, who runs the store with his Jamaican-American parents, began making his own Obama merchandise.

“The idea came into my head about a year and a half ago,” Mr February said. “It first started as a way of promoting Obama.”

Mr February bought a press and began printing Obama images and messages on T-shirts, scarves and hats. The 4th Street Market’s customers are primarily black, and most of the store’s other sales are consumables, but when Mr Obama beat Hillary Clinton last June to become the first African-American presidential candidate on a major ticket, the February family’s sales took off – thanks to the Obama goods.

Mr February does not expect the boom to last long after the inauguration. “We’ll just have to find something else,” he said. “You have to have a little diversity to be around for so many years.”

* The National