Atal Behari Vajpayee spoke to Britain’s FINANCIAL TIMES and the paper immediately spotlighted two moments: ‘‘Justice will be seen to be done’’ in Gujarat, India’s Prime Minister told the FT. He also ‘‘vehemently’’ rejected any suggestion that the economic reform process has been too slow in India or that democracy should be blamed for its slowness. The FT report claimed that Vajpayee’s remarks on last year’s violence are his ‘‘strongest condemnation so far’’. It predicted they are likely to be decoded as a ‘‘strong signal of support for India’s Supreme Court’’ which has put the Gujarat government in the dock. They will also be read as a sign that ‘‘he intends to avoid an overt use of the ‘communal card’ at the next general election’’. The FT report was less interpretive about Vajpayee’s remarks on economic reform. Here, the prime minister rejected the unfavourable comparisons with China and pointed out that reforms in a democracy are more sustainable. He commended coalition governments for ‘‘balancing divergent views and accommodating regional and sectoral interests more effectively’’. He emphasised the focus on infrastructure development in rural areas ‘‘so that the correlation between our economic growth and the monsoon can be reduced further’’. He told the FT his government was finalising legislation to permit the creation of special economic zones. On the economic front, it seems, the FT didn’t need any persuading in the first place. In an editorial this week, the paper was hugely complimentary about India’s economic performance. It declared that the country may be making a ‘‘comeback’’ after years of staying in China’s shadow. ‘‘India, it is whispered, may at last have what it takes to start catching up with its larger neighbour’’. Cancun trio This week, the NEW YORK TIMES spelt out the ‘‘new global trade line-up’’: Haves, Have-nots, Have-Somes. The clarifying moment, the NYT recalled, came at Cancun in September when the talks broke down amid accusations of bad faith. Away from the blamegames, there was the ‘‘striking new development’’: the emergence of a coalition of nations that no longer fits the profile of either have or have-not. The Group of 20-plus, conceived by Brazil and India to bring together large resource-rich nations of the ‘‘South’’. Countries that have the clout to demand greater access to the markets of industrialised nations because together they add up to more than half the world’s population — and that also boast of substantial manufacturing centres of their own. But, said the NYT, there are cracks within the Group of 20-plus and a gulf between the Group of 20-plus and the rest of what is known as the developing world. The danger, now, it quoted Jagdish Bhagwati, is that trade talks will be transformed in a ‘‘spaghetti bowl’’ of bilateral and regional agreements. This is dangerous because ‘‘poor countries are singularly unequipped to cope with the chaotic regime’’. In Marquez’s den In the week that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Living to Tell the Tale arrived to bookshelves in India in its English translation, a very affectionate tribute to the patriarch in the NEW YORK TIMES. Writer Francisco Goldman remembered that moment when he first came upon the words ‘‘magic realism’’ and realised the power of the dictum that ‘‘nothing but the marvellous is beautiful’’. Goldman wrote about the Marquez he had heard about. The man who is like an excited youth at his first job at editorial meetings of Cambio, a Mexican weekly magazine. The man of legendary charm and powers of persuasion. He wrote about the Marquez who could be imagined from his writings. Those writings, without which it is now difficult to imagine Latin America, or indeed the novel. Those novels which have made the world look at the backwaters in a new way. ‘‘Before, Columbian novelists had usually described such places with anthropological or political earnestness. Garcia Marquez. narrated phantasmal and radiant inner lives and childhood memories as if they were more concrete than their surroundings. He found a place for the tropical village at the heart of world literature’’. Readers the world over, said Goldman, now find themselves remembering ‘‘that distant afternoon’’ when they were taken by their father ‘‘‘to discover ice’’. In a story by the exiled Iraqi writer Najem Wali, a character rediscovers his city of Basra in Macondo. Goldman railed against the stereotype that magic realism is the authentic and predominant Latin American form of literary expression. It was uniquely Garcia Marquez’s manner of transforming life into fiction, he said. And then he wrote about meeting the writer in flesh and blood on a hot Sunday afternoon. When, sitting in Marquez’s den, his voice vanished. And he could only nod mutely when Marquez leaned forward and said that only good journalists can save the world. P.S.: Even a playwright couldn’t imagine such a tale, he wrote. Last week in the GUARDIAN, playwright Neil LaBrute was watching the 9/11 toll go down. Until now, the number of dead was 2,792. Now strike that number from your mind and replace it with 2,752. ‘‘Just like that’’ the NEW YORK TIMES exclaimed. But of course, there is a reason why forty names must be removed from official death tallies. These people could not be properly identified. In some instances, their very existence was in question and several cases involved fraud. After September 11, LaBrute had written a play ‘The Mercy Seat’ about a man using this moment in history for personal gain: he uses the cataclysmic day to gain a certain amount of personal freedom for himself and his mistress. Last week, as the toll dipped, the playwright wrote with a wry sadness about reality imitating his imagination.
