India Calling by Anand Giridharadas

Author:Anand Giridharadas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

HYDERABAD ON ITS WAY TO BECOMING CYBERABAD

A proactive government, efficient bureaucracy, enthusiastic entrepreneurs, bourgeoning training facilities, a huge talent pool, and an information technology culture are providing a potent mix for IT majors to eye Hyderabad with new interest. It is the packaging that matters. No doubt, global information technology giants have started accepting the signals.

Microsoft Corporation’s plan to set up a software development centre in Hyderabad, its first such outfit outside the US, speaks of the attractions the city holds out to prospective investors.…

But then, experts say this is only the whimper. The bang is yet to come.

There was nothing unusual in this article. Its breathless vocabulary—proactive, efficient, packaging, whimper, bang: the vocabulary of business journalists who learn to mimic their business sources—was now standard in India’s English-language press. There was only one strange feature of the article, although its significance would have been lost on most readers. It was written by Venugopal himself.

I knew from several fleeting mentions that Venugopal had worked as a journalist. I knew that he had his own opinion column in a Telugu newspaper, because he had taken a short pause from our conversation to file it by e-mail. What I didn’t realize after our first meeting was that most of the articles under his name were not print versions of his radical propositions, but rather gushing tributes to the new economy, under headlines such as these: “ ‘Small’ Is What Makes Microsoft Go”; “IBM’s Latest Offers Road to Infinity”; “Car PC Is Technology of the Future”; “Get Ready to Surf the Net Through Your Television.”

The nature of this work came up early in our second meeting, when I asked Venugopal about his journalistic endeavors. He told me that he had written for the ET in the past, and he explained it this way: “To earn a livelihood, I have to do something, because I’m not a whole-timer for revolution.”

It was my first brush with the idea of part-time revolution.

“In a twenty-four-hour day, I have to sell myself for at least four hours or six hours or eight hours, so that the rest of the sixteen hours can be spent on Naxalism,” he explained. He conceded that this arrangement was at war with itself. “On one side, you are fighting a state, you are fighting a system, you are going and preaching against the system, you are writing against the system,” he said. “But you are working inside the system. This is a contradiction. But I think the basic necessity of a person to be able to do whatever he wants to do, to see whatever he wants to see, even for his freedom of expression—first, he has to live. For living, nobody is going to give free lunches, as they say; so for that I have to earn my lunch.”

He had begun with a Telugu newspaper, after editing a Maoist underground journal for a short time. He used to write articles from morning to night and plot the revolution by moonlight. When that

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