Certainly one of those present in the meeting voiced such a concern

Certainly one of those present in the meeting voiced such a concern. Wasn’t it all window-dressing? asked the Hindu, Dr Vandona Shiva.
“You’ve smashed all our windows,” was the devastating reply from Wolfensohn who went on to acknowledge that the Banks’ Structural Adjustment Programmes had not always been sufficiently conscious of the need to protect the Third World’s poorest people The rest of us knew this. Too often, also, its medium-term policies were in conflict with the short-term exigencies of the approach of the International Monetary Fund. Too often, in addition, its grandiose schemes for dams and power stations further enriched the wealthy caste in poor countries, or increased trade or GDP, but did nothing to help the really poor.Now here it was repenting, in private, before the world’s religions. What was going on? “We used to arrive and look at a country purely economically,” said one Bank official privately. “We ignored the cultural capital of the society: how the family works, how apprenticeships work, what is the role of the mosque. Our attitude to cultural traditions was only that these were museum fodder for tourism.

We failed to understand the role these play in making a society work. In the absence of the social and the cultural we were promoting a lobotomised development.”There was, admittedly, something venal about the conversion “Look around,” said the official. “Everyone in this room can mobilise millions of people.” The faiths had three strengths denied to the powerful self-consciously secular Bank. “They have the moral authority to stand in the public square and denounce corruption. They have detailed knowledge of what goes on at the grass roots.

And they have effective organisations and delivery systems.” As if to prove the point at that moment a diminutive figure in bright orange robes padded by “Have you seen the Aga Kahn?” he asked. He was Swami Vibudhesha Teertha, one of India’s most senior Hindu monks. His fiat determines the economic, transport and education policies in 1,250 villages and towns and hundreds of primary and secondary schools.Even so there are many back at the World Bank who regard Wolfensohn’s latest idea as “flakey”. They took a similarly dim view of his insistence, after he took over in 1995, that the top 400 of its 10,000 employees each had to go and live in a Third World slum for one week That was why the concluding statement was so bland.

“We wanted nothing too emotional or laden with the vocabulary of faith which those back in Washington could dismiss,” said one of the drafters.The plan now is too set up a number of joint Bank-Faith action groups alongside exemplary practical projects. The Bank wants to finance the training of Buddhist monks in reconciliation skills in Cambodia. In Anandpur, where the Sikh brotherhood was founded in 1699, a project is to be encouraged to control the growth of the town in a way which embodies Sikh values, using solar power and recycled waste as energy sources, developing alternative transport mechanisms and setting up 5,000 light industrial units which only produce environmentally-sustainable goods.”This is a post-Enlightenment world, not a post-religious one,” said one senior Bank official. “As governments have lost their legitimacy so people have turned to faith and the social contract has been renegotiated. It is the religions which stand between the state and the market – both of which people don’t fully trust – as communities which are trusted, which link the macro and the micro, and which protect the interests of the poor. Give us a year and we’ll show you something new.” The risk, of course, is that the religions may find themselves being used merely to add respectability to an unpopular secular agenda But, just perhaps, something worthwhile might emerge It is a risk worth taking.. In 1824 construction began on a pleasure dome on a site between Albany Street and Cambridge Terrace, on the fringes of Regent’s Park.

It was eventually to be called the Colosseum and it was conceived on a suitably grand scale. Designed by a young architect called Decimus Burton, its central feature was a rotunda with a dome 30 feet wider than St Paul’s and 112 feet high at its apex

There was no controversy about what it would contain. It had been specifically constructed to house what was then the largest panorama ever painted – a 134 foot diameter depiction of the view from the very pinnacle of St Paul’s (the painter, a topographical artist called Thomas Hornor, had actually constructed a hut above the cross and ball of Wren’s cathedral, mounted on precarious looking scaffolding). No less than 46,000 square feet of canvas were to be covered with a meticulous representation of every street, facade and rooftop visible from that vantage point.
By contrast with the Millennium Dome, of course, the Colosseum was a relatively modest enterprise – its expanses of daubed canvas a mere pocket- handkerchief alongside the prairie of Teflon-coated fabric which will soon be hoisted into position south of the Thames. But if the architectural dimensions (not to mention the building costs) show evidence of inflationary pressure there is still a kind of kinship between Horner’s enterprise and Mr Mandelson’s great adventure.When the contents of the Millennium Dome were unveiled last week, to the accompaniment of a bracing sermon from the Prime Minister on the virtues of positive thinking and the vice of cynicism, it was striking to see how traditional they were. The carapace of the exhibits might look futuristic and the inner-workings might be technologically advanced but the essential spirit – that of improving spectacle – strikes a much more venerable note.