Saturday, December 10, 2005

Q&A with Amy Waldman


Amy Waldman, the India reporter for the New York Times, did a long four-part series built around the common theme of the Golden Quadrilateral, the ambitious highways program that is being implemented now.

Links to all the four stories are available in a previous post.

She answers some of the questions posed by the readers (of this particular series) here. The questions range from the particular (the working conditions in the diamond cutting industry in Surat) to the general (cultural and linguistic homogenization).

I found the multimedia associated with the series to be brilliant. If you just want the impressions conveyed by Waldman (without the rich details in the written version), this short presentation is probably worth a look.

Both Amardeep Singh and Reuben seem to like this series. Bradford DeLong, on the other hand, doesn't like at least one of the stories (the second one, that talked about the auto boom in India). His post had a general point about how terrible the MSM news outlets have become in the US (including NYTimes and the Washington Post), and picked Waldman's story at random, and went on to trash it. Quite a few readers, including me, pointed out that it was a part of a longer series, but he hasn't budged (so far). Some of the comments there give links to several other stories that NYTimes and other newspapers have done in the recent past on India.

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