Left field
The Reuters global sports blog
from India Insight:
Going global in India’s chaotic way
India is globalising, but not the way much of the world wants.
That rather contradictory thought nagged at me one morning during the chaotic Commonwealth Games here in New Delhi.
On the road to the media venue's gate, I trudged past a squatter's family living in a tarpaulin. The mother was helping her son pee on my left. Rubbish, the smelly, sickly kind, lay to my right. My shoes sunk in mud from an unfinished pavement.
Hardly the stuff of a showcase international event meant to rival China. But after four years in India, the scene appeared normal. So was news during the Games that stocks had hit a near three-year high and that the Economist had predicted India's economy would soon outpace China.
For the umpteenth time, a centuries-old history bubbled under the surface of this emerging global power, a pressure cooker of India's own eccentricities and ills that seem to avoid blowing up, despite straining at the seams.
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Resident Left Field Expert
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