Last week, Morgan Spurlock's show 30 Days featured the story of an American IT worker whose job was outsourced to Bangalore. (the show is on the same premise as Spurlock's Documentary, "Super Size Me" - what if you did <uncomfortable thing> for 30 days?) The IT worker in question moved to Bangalore for 30 days to see what kind of job he could get. He got a job not as a programmer but as an operator in a call center.
The show is, in general, very well done and also highly original and thought provoking.
Today, GigaOm has an interesting note about Bangalore wanting to be the next city with a wifi cloud. Last week's episode of 30 Days showed that there are still many many extremely poor areas of Bangalore, that the city is prone to riots and violence- not every day, but if the city can be held hostage by violent mobs when a movie star dies, things are not swell and dandy...
It seems to me that Bangalore has two very different sets of issues requiring attention: creating a nexus of competitive advantage to serve the world's economies highly efficiently, and the jagged divide between its own middle class and the ultra-poor citizens living nearby.
I'm not usually one to proselytize about poverty, but it used to be pollution that we were exporting. Now it's jobs and the stratification of societies?