One of the joys of being marginally home employed is daytime television. I've managed to escape the clutches of the soaps and Oprah, but I still have the guilty pleasure of Charlie Rose in the middle of the afternoon (I'm watching the Daily Show when Charlie airs late at night). I have to admit that I did the same thing during the last period in my life like this. Back then Charlie was haranguing guests with the critical question of whether Bill Ciinton was the new John Kennedy (turns out that he wasn't, but you couldn't tell Charlie this). Now he's got the globalization jones (help us, Tom Friedman!).
A couple of weeks ago he went to India and did his "I interview the consequential people" thing on the Indian political and economic superstructure. He didn't seem to be spending much time with the poor, but then he never does. Of course, there's more of them there than here. But, we're working on this.
He did motivate me to send an email to him suggesting that he might have done something interesting in having an Indian who called himself "Charlie Rose" do the Indian interviews for him, thereby effectively reverse outsourcing himself (and saving PBS a whole lot of money). You know, just so he could get an idea of what it's like. After a couple of days, I got an email from his people saying that they would pass the suggestion on to Charlie.
I bet.