Beirut to Bangalore

(In an earlier piece, he extravagantly credited India’s IT industry with restraining the Indian government from going to nuclear war with Pakistan. It was General Electric, not General Powell, he said, that did the trick).

Friedman was as unsparing about Pakistan as he was euphoric about India. Fifty years of failed democracy, military coups and imposed religiosity, he said, have produced 30,000 madrassas there, churning out youth ‘‘who only know the Koran and hostility towards non-Muslims’’.

On the Beaten Track

For its special issue, TIME magazine climbed aboard Asia’s trains, from Pakistan to the Pacific. In the Pakistan-India section, the travelogue mostly chugged from one stereotype to another. There were the tribesmen, pilgrims and ascetics with ‘‘a beautifully untamed dignity’’ on their faces.

The Shatabdi Express, which ‘‘like the Bomb’’, is ‘‘a symbol of modernity and progress’’. Snakecharmers. A countryside that has ‘‘remained unchanged for millennia…’’

There were also the little giveaways. On board Pakistan’s Quetta Express, TIME’s traveller carried a book titled Mechanics of Doomsday and Life After Death. With bedside reading like that, you don’t need reality checks.

Now Showing: 9/11

The US media has begun the countdown to September 11. A prominent theme is: the US’s image problem abroad.

A recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations said that many nations view the US as ‘‘arrogant, self-indulgent and hypocritical.’’

NEWSWEEK took the problem to someone who is in the image business, filmmaker Barry Levinson.

Levinson made the political satire Wag the Dog which showed how a president manipulated public opinion and avoided the fallout from a sex scandal by hiring Hollywood to stage a fake war in Albania. So how would Levinson sell the US overseas?

‘‘We’re not charming enough, we’re not disarming enough,’’ said Levinson. The US, he said, is like the character in the movie that’s in your face, all the time. It needs some ‘clever mystery’. Like Clint Eastwood and Humphrey Bogart.

Like Osama bin Laden. In the movies, Levinson certified, Osama is a good character. ‘‘Great characters in movies are understated, and it adds to their mystique and their power’’.

Our EC, Their EC

In a week when all eyes in this country were on the Election Commission, Britain’s Electoral Commission made news too.

The Commission said the general election after next could be ‘e-enabled’, allowing voters to dump the ballot box in favour of the mail box or the Internet.

But many commentators wondered whether changing voting methods will increase turnouts. How people vote, warned the GUARDIAN, has nothing to do with their increasingly strong desire not to do so.