Why Bush is avoiding Bangalore

Ever thought why American Presidents don't come to Bangalore, instead go to Hyderabad?

With so many American companies indebted to Bangalore for providing them outsourcing opportunities and thereby boosting company profits, wasn't it only natural that their president should come to the IT capital?

Bangalore contributed the word "Bangalored" to the English language, to refer to someone who lost his / her job because of outsourcing. US presidential poll runner-up in 2000 John Kerry, who once spoke of "wired Bangalore" himself went to Hyderabad rather than Bangalore.

In the run-up to Bill Clinton's 2000 visit, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh had IT-savvy CMs -- S M Krishna and Chandrababu Naidu. At that time, Krishna did make very serious efforts to get Bangalore included in Clinton's itinerary. And, when Bangalore lost out, there was no hiding the disappointment. This time, it seems, there has been no effort at all.

So, why do American Presidents go to Hyderabad, skipping Bangalore? Any takes on that?

The February 28 issue of New York Times has an edit on Bush's upcoming India visit. It argues against the nuclear deal Bush is trying sign with India. It says he is trying to get friendly with India to keep China in check, and if the deal is signed, it will only encourage other countries to develop nuclear weapons capability.

But interestingly, the NYT edit also offers us two reasons on why Bush has chosen Hyderabad over Bangalore.

"The president is planning the obligatory trip to a center of high technology, although White House strategists, mindful of election-year fears in the United States about call centers and outsourcing, chose the more diversified city of Hyderabad instead of the call-center capital, Bangalore. Hyderabad has a big Muslim population, so it is also a chance for Mr. Bush to try to counter some of the damage done lately to relations between Muslims and the West."

Skip Bangalore and impress his Bangalored Americans. Visit Hyderabad and impress Muslims. Bizarre logic. But there has to be some reason. Given the way of American strategists, could be true, who knows. Do they know that huge protests are being planned in Hyderabad against the Bush visit?

US, India, China and the Dollar

One may like or loathe America. But we all have to accept one fact -- that the USA is one nation that puts its interest uppermost, come what may. Rules of the game, propriety; ethical, social or environmental concerns just don't matter. Everything is fine as long as America is fine.

It's a country that practises the "Theory of enlightened self-interest" to the last detail. When there is a conflict between your principle and self-interest, which one will you sacrifice? America doesn't sacrifice either; it merely changes the principle to suit the new self-interest!

See, how America gets professionals from all over the world, and makes them work for their country! America is a country that is run by the best people from around the world.

America never liked India for two reasons (in spite of sharing almost all values systems that America itself practises): one, we were close to its Cold War enemy, Soviet Union; and two, more importantly, America never had access to India's huge market.

Ever since India began opening up its economy in the early 1990s (not because we wanted to, but we didn't have an option), the West in general, and the US in particular, have become interested in India. There are umpteen illustrations of that.

The fact that George Bush will come calling on March 1 is another indication of their interest. His will be only the fifth visit to India by a US President. Earlier ones were by Dwight Eisenhower (1959), Richard Nixon (1969), Jimmy Carter (1978) and Bill Clinton (2000).

And, in the runup to his India visit, Bush granted interviews to two Indian newspapers, The Times of India (English) and Dainik Bhaskar (Hindi). Not surprisingly, he has lavished praise on his would-be hosts.

One point stands out. In the interview he talks of how India's middleclass population is far greater than the population of entire America. "..... 300 million middle-class citizens in India. That's larger than the population of the United States. And so we shouldn't fear relations with India -- matter of fact, we ought to welcome them and work on ways to strengthen them. That's really what the purpose of the trip is."

We shouldn't feel bad that Bush is taking care of his country. Only that he is very candid about it. What we need to ask is "Do our politicians take a similar interest in our own country?" Sadly NO; at least not to the extent a country like China does.

China is one country -- yes, the only country in the world -- which can stand up to the US. To put it bluntly, America crawls when China asks them to merely bend. Why? America's self-interest is at stake. American dollar after all comes from China!

China is such a fascinating country -- politically Communist, economically Capitalist. Nobody has been able to get that combination as effective as China has.

Remember how China intercepted and forced an American spy plane to land in its island of Hainan, after it collided with a Chinese fighter in April 2001? China refused to let Americans even come anywhere near the plane. China wanted an apology from the US for the collision, in which a Chinese pilot went missing. The US was finally made to apologise. But by then China had literally dismantled the entire aircraft. The US had to piece them together and take it back in utter humiliation. Read the entire sequence of events here.

No other country in the world could have done something even close to what China did.

There is a lesson here, which India can adapt in its own way. Open the market, entice America with dollars (that is a trap America will willingly fall in); and make them play the game with our set of rules.

See the influx of foreign companies to Bangalore. While they have gained by opening shop here (outsourcing has saved many of them from closing down back in the US), how much have we gained, other than many Indians getting jobs? How well have we capitalised on the interest the West has shown for our city and our country?

Some points there to ponder over as, arguably, the world's most powerful man gets ready to visit India.

Whither blogging

The Financial Times Magazine, London, has carried a well-written and comprehensive article by Trevor Butterworth, a writer based in Washington DC, on blogging. It discusses how the nascent medium has grown, where it stands vis-à-vis conventional journalism, and the economics of the medium. A unique thing the magazine did was it opened a blog to where readers could post their comments on the article.

Some salient points of the article:

** Even in the US, the blogosphere’s superpower, most internet users -- 62 per cent according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project -- aren’t exactly sure what a blog is.

** At the close of 2002, there were some 15,000 blogs. By 2005, 56 new blogs were starting every minute. As I type this sentence, there are, according to technorati.com, 27.2 million blogs. By the time you read this sentence, there surely will be many more.

** One of the conventions that happened to work in blogging’s favour was the way the media take a new trend and describes it as a revolution.

** That established journalists were blogging gave the revolution a dose of credibility that it might not have had if it were in the hands of true outsiders. And then, just before the presidential election in 2004, blogging had its Battleship Potemkin moment, when swarms of partisan bloggers rose up to sink CBS’s iron-jawed leviathan Dan Rather for peddling supposedly fake memos about Bush’s national guard service.

** Isn’t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers?

** Some experiments have gone awry. When the Los Angeles Times decided to try letting readers insert their own ideas into its editorials online last year, the trial ended within days after obscene pictures were posted on its site.

** Blogging will no doubt always have a place as an underground medium in closed societies; but for those in the west trying to blog their way into viable businesses, the economics are daunting.

** If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.

** “Mere potboiling,” wrote Engels of the more than 500 articles he and Marx wrote for The New York Daily Tribune, “It doesn’t matter if they are never read again.”
And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence.

A wonderful article. Go ahead and read it here.