by George Black, reposted from OnEarth Magazine
It was New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who made Bangalore famous. This city of seven million is the Silicon Valley of India, its technology parks and outsourcing services the driving force behind the country’s remarkable recent boom. For Friedman, Bangalore was the key to understanding the new global economy, and he came up with a snappy catchphrase to describe it, which in turn became the title of a best-selling book: The World is Flat. In this flat new world, India’s “knowledge economy” would rescue millions from rural poverty and usher them into a world of eight percent growth rates and abundant clean energy.
I came to Bangalore last month in search of this new energy economy, whose success or failure will be critical in determining the fate of the planet. But what I found was very different from what Friedman had in mind. In many ways it was more exciting; but it was also much more challenging. There’s no doubting India’s sincerity about shifting, over time, to a low-carbon future, but the vision of that future that I found in Bangalore will demand a radical change in the mindset of the government and of those who have done most to create Friedman’s Flat World.
Arriving here, as I did, from the teeming chaos of Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s most impoverished states, is an extreme form of culture shock. From the gleaming airport, my cab whisked me into the city along a divided highway (soon to be an expressway), flanked by tall concrete pillars (soon to be the metro to the airport). There was hardly a rickshaw or a sari in sight. Instead there were giant billboards advertising financial services, skiing vacations in Switzerland, and luxury prestige residences with golf course views. Were we really in India?
Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol begins with the destruction of the Kremlin. But there really is no better cinematic encapsulation of the post-Cold War era than a scene that comes towards the end of the movie, when a middle-aged Russian and a middle-aged American batter each other with increasing slowness around a hypermodern Indian parking garage. We still have a lot of money. We still have a lot of very dangerous toys. In this semi-unipolar world, the U.S. may be number one for the moment, but that doesn’t mean we’re the future. It’s a pattern that persists throughout the movie: the details of plot and the means by which it’s resolved may be utterly ludicrous, but they’re rooted in itchy geopolitical truths.
During my trip to New Haven last week, I was fortunate enough to spend a morning at “
And even when they weren’t creating art for the purpose of cultural exchange in Indian, British artists constantly wrote themselves into the images of India — and some of those portraits may have been more revealing than they were intended to be. In Thomas Danielle’s painting of Sir Charles Ware signing a treaty in 1770 with the Maratha Empire, British officers are seated on the floor of a palace in the style of their hosts, displaying attitudes that range from ease, to extreme dignity, to wondrous excitement at the circumstances. Painter James Wales wrote that Charles Warre Malet told him of his 40-day journey to see the Taj Mahal that “at first sight how well his journey was justified.” It makes sense that the British would want to see their efforts, even a more than a month-long site-seeing schlep, as worth the work, no matter how strenuous. Bathazar Solvyns, a Belgian who wrote a dubious anthropological survey of India, revealed as much about himself and his gaze as he did about his subjects when he wrote of dancing girls he observed that “their movements are confined, being either extremely rapid or solemnly slow, and their attitudes or gestures, which are sometimes graceful, are almost always indecent, there therefore disgusting; their general object is to excite desire, and where they succeed, there are not to be found much to envy.” In Arthur William Devis’ “Portrait of a Gentleman,” lawyer William Hickey both smokes a hookah and handles a letter of business — has he corrupted himself by going native? Or are the temptations of India no match for England’s energy in commerce? 
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met for annual meetings Tuesday in Washington, and while most of their talks likely centered on economic problems facing Europe and the United States, a delegation of activists from India called on the World Bank to follow through on proposed rules to cut funding for coal-burning power plants. And over the rest of the week, the Indian activists will travel to West Virginia to meet with activists who have fought coal plants and protested the use of mountaintop removal mining.
