A blog for discussions on media, political and cultural issues of South Asian and international significance

Monday, June 12, 2006

Visualizing Development

Google has brought out a new tool which allows you to look at how countries of the world perform on various development indices. It's available here. Once you're done fiddling around with the software (and I'm guaranteeing that you will mess about with it, it's very cool), do a comparative analysis of India, Mexico, South Africa, China and Brazil. Note that on almost all of the indices of development (except economic growth, where it's second, and life expectancy, second last after South Africa) India performs pathetically compared to these nations with whom we are supposedly similarly positioned.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Caste in the Indian Media

Siddharth Varadarajan writes about the upper caste bias in Indian English language media here. It tells a sad story, but I had two reservations (no pun intended) about the piece -

a. It limits its analysis to the English language press. It would be interesting to see if this is a pan-Indian media problem, or limited only to this segment of the journalistic community. While still unfortunate and deplorable, it would not strike me as surprising that the English language media reflected the biases of the majority of their viewers (urban, upper middle-class etc)

b. The bias in reportage could also be explained by the real fear of the media's hiring policies being affected by the government moves on private sector reservation. As it would seem hypocritical to protest against reservations in the private sector, yet represent voices in favour of reservations in education, a broad policy of representing anti-reservation views seems to make sense purely from a selfish perspective.

Go read the piece anyway, it makes a vitally interesting argument.

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