Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Not just tragedies and poverty ...

When I moved to the US (in 1994), one would be hard-pressed to find an article on India appearing in the Western press, unless (as St. Liz remarked below), it dealt with death, disease or destruction.

Well, the death-disease-destruction trope still remains, but there's also the lustre of lucre. It's all about the economy. The unleashed (kinda) Indian tiger.

Outsourcers in India fight for skilled labor, in an industry with high attrition and turnover (International Herald Tribune)

A fantastic special report from the Economist, on the challenges facing India's reforms. From those darned Commies. :) Democracy's drawbacks. (Nope, not part of subscriber-only content)

Hopes that the earthquake and the easing of tensions might improve bilateral trade between India and Pakistan (Bloomberg)

And then, this: the rising success of internet based matrimonials. So much for globalization bringing only a dull homogeneity.

1 comment:

assiniboine said...

"When I moved to the US (in 1994), one would be hard-pressed to find an article on India appearing in the Western press, unless...it dealt with death, disease or destruction."

Oh come on. Ashrams; hippies in Goa; kooky New Age sprituality gurus; the Dalai Lama (not of, but in India); George Harrison; Ravi Shankar (and Yehudi Menuhin); the Black Pagoda; Khajaraho -- and for that matter, "The Perfumed Garden" and the Kama Sutra; Jackie Kennedy having died in 1994, her friends the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur and indeed everything else about her visit with the Galbraiths in 1962, illustrated with the famous photo of herself and Lee Radziwill atop an elephant at Amber; Salman Rushdie and the Fatwah (OK, well I guess that's death and destruction); assorted Booker Prize contests and movies based on the winners and runners up; "A Suitable Boy"; lots of Merchant-Ivory and Deepa Mehta movies; the death of Richard Nixon and attendant editorial retrospectives of his career including the hoo-haw over his "tilt" towards Pakistan in 1971; the loves of Zubin Mehta; the enduring popular-poet status of Rabindranath Tagore; the only-now-starting-to-wane fascination with the Raj, with attendant movies and TV serials about British India, both documentaries and pure entertainment; the revived interest in the Indian Independence era sparked by movies about Margaret Bourke-White; the enduring interest in Gandhi-at-one-remove via the life and work of Martin Luther King; and that's just what springs immediately to mind as what surely even our most parochial American friends would have been exposed to in their news media, and quite exclusive of anything that I myself might have learned having visited India, having the odd Indian friend, having lived in Amritsar-west aka Vancouver (Hongcouver, it's often called, but Punjcouver would be equally a propos).