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Indianexpress: As globalisation spreads and India enters into this new phase of development, we are responsible for an economically and environmentally sustainable and equitable future.

Much of the effects of development will be felt in cities and this will be all the more relevant for those that are emerging as the mega cities. Pune stands on this precarious threshold. As the surrounding municipality of Pimpri-Chinchwad, the cantonments of Kirkee, Dehu Road and the industrialised sectors along link roads to Mumbai, Satara, Aurangabad, Nashik become urbanised, the environmental pressures on this gigantic urban complex will grow manifold, unless we do something.

And if we don’t, our quality of life will only get worse. We are already experiencing the deterioration in air quality, reduced access to resources such as water, and services such as health care, emergency medicine, housing, electricity, garbage management and public transport facilities.

The city has lost and continues to lose its ancient tree cover.

We are increasing the disparity in housing between people who live in luxurious apartments as against the most rudimentary slum dwellings.

The lower economic strata does not even have adequate toilet facilities and still have to go to a public open space.Their household waste water and garbage floats down the once clean waters of what is now the Mula Mutha sewer

Indianexpress: With the software revolution hitting Pune, it will soon have to don the mantle of a global city. Of course, it requires a whole gamut of improvements of the local infrastructure like transport, power supply, availability of water, clean air, etc. If the local authorities are activated from their stupor to achieve the necessary improvements, so much the better! However, the main change will have to be in the mindset of the city. It has to learn to think big, to think global, to think beyond its limited horizons.

Thinking global does not mean having shopping malls and fast food joints, with pop concert replacing the venerated Sawai-Gandharva Festival. It does not mean ladies abandoning sarees and salwar-kmeez for bell-bottoms and blouses or gents opting for shorts and T-shirts. Nor does it mean having local soap operas to mimic the western variety. This is the wrong way for thinking global.

Thinking global means preparing to meet the global competition. It means honouring commitments made, even if it involves making night into day and vice-versa. It means coming forward to face challenges, rather than avoiding them. It requires spirit of entrepreneurship, of adventure, of achieving what has not been done before.

Pune has seen and displayed this spirit before. It had Chhatrapati Shivaji aspiring to do what others thought impossible, and actually doing it. It had Bajirao the First who extended the Maratha influence all the way to Delhi. On educational front it had teachers who had shone at Oxbridge, like Wranglers Paranjpye and Mahajani, who attracted aspiring students from all over India. Pune had, through Agarkar, Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule, Dhondo Keshav Karve and others, led a crusade for social uplift, rising above the purely parochial issues. On the political front Lokmanya Tilak raised the call for Swarajya against the British.

IndianExpress: Pune has truly arrived – on the global map of IT and business process outsourcing. Thanks to the efforts of the chieftains of manufacturing and IT and the support of the powers that be in the government, at city as well as state level, the city has become one of the most talked about destinations for the knowledge industry. And as one worthy American President once said, “you aint seen nothing yet!”

With the right vision and robust implementation, the best is yet to come. The industry after lagging behind superstar destinations like Bangalore, Cyberabad and Gurgaon for a decade has discovered its true destiny in the last few years. Exports revenues clocked in excess of a billion dollars last year and every player worth the name from IBM, Symantec and Accenture to Wipro, Infosys and Satyam and WNS, Zensar and HSBC have set up or doubled their capacity in the city. The morphing of a provincial regional town to a bustling multicultural city with education, entertainment and cultural diversity that compares with the best in the world is nearly complete and with the manufacturing industry now keeping pace with IT, this city can look forward to many years of stupendous growth.

If that’s the good news, urban planners would do well to look at the issues that plague the city as well, not just to continue the growth story but even to sustain the success that we have already attained. The three major ills are infrastructure, education and vision. The clogging of roads, the pathetic state of public transportation and the delays at the airport are well publicised, but are we fooling ourselves that we are a major education centre? The quality of much of the engineering and fine arts output is so appalling that for companies like Zensar over 60 per cent of the fresh talent and 80 per cent of the lateral hiring has to come from outside the city and even the state. A major overhaul of curriculum, content and pedagogy and rapid replication of the industry-academia partnerships that institutions like Vishwakarma , Symbiosis and Sinhagad have embraced, is essential to provide the talent pool the industry needs.

IndianExpress: At the outset I would like to state that there is nothing in Pune currently that makes it global in the field of films. Barring one studio at the film institute, there is no proper facility available for shooting. Similarly, there are no post-production facilities either. Whenever I start a film, I start hoping against hope that I can do the post-production in Pune itself, but that has never happened and I have to invariably rush to Mumbai for the job. Then the noise pollution in Pune makes it very difficult to have sync sound. I did it for Quest, but it was a very difficult task. Finally, the chaotic traffic that makes commuting so difficult also takes away global impression from the city.

I would also like to highlight many pluses that give Pune the potential to turn into a global city for films. The city has a wealth of monuments, old buildings that make it perfect for shooting period films, but again this needs to be preserved and enhanced. Plus the city has good manpower for films. From the younger lot of actors to good technicians to a host of students studying in one of its many media institutes — there is no dearth of talent and these youngsters are always ready to help out and participate in the process of film making. But all these advantages need to be nurtured if we want Pune to become a global hub for films. We need to have the infrastructure and technical know-how that would facilitate film-making. I would like to compare Pune to any small European city that hosts film festivals, like say Budapest or Prague or even New Zealand and Australia that do so much to promote films and this includes providing film-maker with the infrastructure

BetaNews: After a daring programmer evidently seeking notoriety posted a relatively convincing looking homemade video to YouTube on Wednesday, purportedly showing an HD DVD video disc with AACS copy protection being cracked on a Windows-based system, a spokesperson for the AACS Licensing Authority told Reuters this morning it is seriously investigating the legitimacy of the claim.

It was the AACS LA that released last February - after production of high-definition disc components had already begun - interim specifications for how high-definition content must be formatted and organized to enable protection from components that will utilize AACS copy protection. The first wave of HD DVD and Blu-ray disc players did not implement AACS in full; most notably, they omitted the Internet-oriented clearing house scheme for mandatory managed copy (MMC), which AACS LA now says is optional.

But the key component of AACS is an advanced disc encryption scheme whose relative impermeability has actually been overstated more by those who would seek to crack the scheme rather than protect it. Over the past year, AACS LA has presented a surprisingly pragmatic viewpoint about the possibility, if not the inevitability, of the encryption scheme being cracked.

Yet AACS is a more complex scheme than its CSS predecessor for DVD, in that it enables new encryption mechanisms to be adopted and even retrofitted to existing firmware, if and when existing mechanisms are cracked. So one unexplored question in the wake of news that a fellow calling himself “Muslix64″ has cracked the encryption mechanism on at least one, perhaps two, HD DVD discs, is whether the “self-healing” nature of the broader AACS scheme will minimize the damage from this crack, as it was originally designed to do.

BetaNews: After AT&T’s offer late yesterday of expanded concessions, including some that would guarantee neutrality in its network and routing pricing arrangements, the US Federal Communications Commission voted to approve the merger of AT&T Inc. and BellSouth, the former Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) that was spun off from AT&T Corp. in 1984.

As a result of this merger, none of the RBOC entities formed after the original AT&T Corp. breakup remain in their post-breakup form. The names Pacific Telesis, US West, Southwestern Bell, Ameritech, NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, and soon BellSouth will be relegated to history.

FCC commissioners were apparently impressed enough by AT&T’s promise this morning that the merged entity would provide broadband Internet service to 100% of the current BellSouth service region during 2007, including a promise within twelve months of the merger’s close (which could be next spring) to provide ADSL service at up to 768 Kbps (though many might not consider that “broadband”) as a stand-alone, non-bundled offering to the BellSouth region for $19.95 per month. No word on whether such prices will be extended to the former Ameritech, SBC, or PacTel service areas.

Another effect of the merger is that Cingular Wireless will now be a wholly-owned subsidiary of a single company, now that its two joint founders will be one.