‘Bangalore crumbling’

The Economist revisited Bangalore last week and framed the predicament: the city’s IT industry urgently needs a helping hand from the g...

The Economist revisited Bangalore last week and framed the predicament: the city’s IT industry urgently needs a helping hand from the government it has done so well to keep at arm’s length. ‘‘India’s IT industry has thrived in part because, unlike most other sectors of the economy, it has largely kept the government out of its business. That period is coming to an end’’.

The magazine spotlighted the bleak signs of neglect which, as it acknowledged, were spotlighted by the series ‘Bangalore crumbling’ in the Indian Express in December last year. India’s IT boom town that has firmly lodged itself in the world’s imagination as the most favoured workplace away from home is becoming a city of unavoidable traffic jams, idling building sites, water shortages, unpredictable power supply, an airport which refuses to take off. And a government that doesn’t seem to really care.

In the end, the Economist concluded that Bangalore may not become a serious constraint on its own growth. This is because of the sheer range of work now drawn into the IT and BPO industries, its enormous potential for further expansion, and India’s large and high-quality talent pool. Said the magazine, ‘‘India’s advantages are so great that, however bad its aim, it will be hard pressed to shoot itself in the foot.’’ But the question weighing down the optimism came out sharp and clear: Will Bangalore’s strengths be forced to leapfrog over its wilting infrastructure? Or will the government step in to help the city?

Very public faith

An Op-Ed article in the New York Times last month still ripples in the American media. John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator and UN ambassador who is also a minister, wrote in some despair: ‘‘By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians.’’ He cited the advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research, Republican frenzy on Terri Schiavo. The article has been widely quoted by papers both in the US and Britain.

Last week, the NYT recounted Danforth’s warning about the divisiveness of a politics fused with religion. The paper saw the ongoing battle over George Bush’s judicial nominations, in which the Conservatives are loudly trying to subdue the judiciary, as part of a larger pattern.

The NYT described a ‘‘censorious climate’’, in which pharmacists increasingly refuse to dispense emergency contraception and prescribe birth control pills for moral reasons, public schools refrain from teaching evolution and science museums reject science documentaries for fear of offending Christian fundamentalists.

Survivor Blair

Iraq has steadily receded from front pages across the western media though the daily attacks in that country go on. But it staged a theatrical comeback in the British media in the run-up to polls.

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The Guardian published excerpts of the attorney general’s advice to the prime minister on the legality of the war. For a while, there was a hush: Could this be the ‘‘smoking gun’’ the US Democrats tried and failed to find in their own country? Could the expose of what columnist Jonathan Freedland called the ‘‘surreal circularity’’ of the reasoning that took Britain to war, after the ‘‘stripping out of the caveats’’, lay Blair low? But in the days since, commentators appear to have concluded that the revelations would only make those who were already angry about Iraq, angry all over again. And then, the Tories had supported the war too.

Tony Blair is expected to pull it off again on May 5 — even The Sun owned by Rupert Murdoch endorsed Blair last week — because of the adroitness with which New Labour has won the argument in the size-of-government debate.

And because of its skill in nudging the Tories to the nasty fringe — by itself moving constantly to the right — in rows over the ‘‘drawbridge’’ issues like immigration.

The last paper!

Rupert Murdoch’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors recently set the controversy among the journalists. ‘‘I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers… (who) don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important and they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.’’

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Last week, the Economist announced that ‘‘the speech — astonishing not so much for what it said as for who said it — may go down in history as the day that the stodgy newspaper business officially woke up to new realities of the Internet age.’’ The magazine pointed to a seemingly inexorable trend: according to the World Association of Newspapers, in 1995-2003 circulation declined by five per cent in America, three per cent in Europe, two per cent in Japan. So is the last newspaper reader with his final paper copy an approaching apparition? Will the web portals and the blogs push out the paper and become the site of a global conversation? We may be looking at the big question of the future.