Dowd, Friedman and Kristof

MoDo, in “For Office Civility, Cherchez la Femme,” has a question:  Can a woman who made it in a man’s world go to a man’s world and make it safe for women?  She’s developed a schoolgirl crush on Christine Lagarde, who’s poised to take over running the IMF.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Pay Attention,” says the Egyptian revolution is not over. It is now in the utterly vital phase of deciding who gets to write the rules for the new government.  Mr. Kristof, in “Slums Into Malls,” says watch out, China: With its liberated news media and booming economy, India could nibble your lunch.  Here’s MoDo, all atwitter in Paris:

On the way up to Christine Lagarde’s office high above the Seine, you pass through a lobby filled with wall after wall of black-and-white photos of her predecessors as French finance minister: all men.

They include a former president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing; a current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a former favorite to be president, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

DSK, as he’s known here, is holding a pen, beaming with confidence.

His photo on the front page of Le Figaro on Lagarde’s coffee table looks far different: the humbled former International Monetary Fund chief flanked by two New York detectives at his house-arrest pad in TriBeCa, a $50,000-a-month apartment so “luxueuse,” as the paper says, that it is giving the Socialist Party “malaise.”

Another black-and-white expanse greets you when you enter Lagarde’s office: the zebra-patterned carpet she put in so she wouldn’t always be facing “men in gray suits on a gray rug.”

The attractive, 55-year-old Lagarde — 5-foot-10 and lithe with short silver hair and blue-green eyes — is gliding around on the zebra rug in her nude patent Christian Louboutin high heels. The woman has panache.

What else would you expect from someone who became a synchronized swimmer on the French national team after watching Esther Williams movies as a girl?

“She was a little bit plumpy, which was lovely,” Madame Minister says of the ’50s movie star, adding that she does a bit of her old practice, in addition to working on her rose garden and cooking, when she’s at her home in Normandy. “I love the sea. I think I must have been a dolphin in a previous life.”

Synchronized swimming taught her teamwork and how to hold her breath when world economies dived underwater.

She was, she says, “born independent.” When she was 4, she confides in her melodic low voice, her “totally irresponsible” parents would put her and her infant brother to bed and sneak out to the theater and concerts. One night they came back and found all the lights on. Christine was ensconced in a big chair in the living room, reading her book. “Next time,” she nonchalantly told her parents, “just let me know when you go.”

France’s first female finance minister got a boost in her bid to become the first female head of the I.M.F. at the G-8 meeting in Deauville when Sarkozy lobbied President Obama, Hillary Clinton offered a girl-power endorsement, and Dmitri Medvedev proclaimed a near-consensus. Lagarde asserts that après le DSK déluge, leadership skills count more for the world’s banker than “super-duper training and degrees in economics.”

She says she’s ready to personally go woo China, India and other countries angry over the prospect of yet another European getting a job that they feel should be the prize of a developing country. She heads to Brazil on Monday.

She feels deeply that “with an institution with so many different people with different backgrounds, there’s a need for respect and tolerance. I know what it’s like to walk into a room where you are just by yourself, and everybody else is wearing dark suits, and you feel for a few seconds slightly intimidated and not always welcome.”

She dismisses the charge that she overstepped to get a $408 million legal settlement for a Sarkozy pal, the controversial businessman Bernard Tapie, calling it “a politically driven initiative by the Socialist Party.”

France is soul-searching in the wake of DSK’s DNA stains, debating whether the press is too protective of predatory politicians, whether there are too many liaisons dangereuses between journalists and officials, and whether sexism is taken seriously enough.

Lagarde agrees with The Times’s veteran Paris correspondent Elaine Sciolino that this is an Anita Hill moment for France.

“I think there will be a pre-DSK and a post-DSK,” she says. “And things that may have been tolerated or generally accepted as O.K. will no longer be. I think women will take some confidence and pride out of whatever happens.”

Because the story came out “so brutally and without notice,” she says, the French had a hard time understanding “adversarial” American justice and went into “a huge denial.”

“Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people in the media and the establishment had assumed that he was not only persona grata, but that he was going to be the next president of France,” Lagarde says. “So they had taken him to the pinnacle and then suddenly he was down in the cellar, the gutter. In the denial phase, they had to go through that victimization of the man, while ignoring the real victim, and it led to unacceptable and disgusting comments by some of his friends. Male friends, of course.”

The journalist Jean-François Kahn said he was “practically certain” that DSK was not trying to rape the Sofitel maid, but was merely engaging in “troussage de domestique,” lifting the skirt of the servant. Jack Lang, a former government minister, cracked, “It’s not like anybody died.”

Lagarde has never been the darling of the French elite. When she became minister of finance, she says, “people were not particularly nice to me and the media was very keen to point at mistakes or being too blunt or not using the politically correct phrases. I did what I always do. I just gritted my teeth and smiled and got on with it.”

In 2007, she made a speech suggesting that her countrymen abandon their “old national habit” of over-intellectualizing. “Enough thinking, already!” she urged. “Roll up your sleeves.”

As she told me on Friday, “I said they’d done enough thinking to fill in shelves of libraries of the entire world. I said it was time they got on with action.”

Sciolino writes about the howling that followed in her new book, “La Seduction”: “For the men, here was a French woman brainwashed by too many years in America who was trying to castrate the intellectuals of France!”

The male elite hit back. Bernard-Henri Lévy (who has been vociferously defending his pal DSK) disdainfully noted: “This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much.”

Lagarde shrugs. “I have no regret,” she says. “I was bashed. But the messages got through, I would hope. I don’t mind too much a little Parisian circle that says: ‘Hmmph, she’s not part of us. She’s spent too much time on the other side.’ ”

Like her dynamic boss, Sarkozy, Lagarde is known as “L’Americaine” — not a compliment here. The divorced mother of two grown sons, who now dates a hunky Marseilles real estate developer, attended Holton-Arms high school in the Washington area in an exchange program and spent two decades as a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie in Chicago.

During the financial crisis, her much-criticized tendency to dispense with French protocol allowed her to soar. Her public response to the Lehman collapse was “Holy cow!” She was fast, blunt and able to speak English without a translator.

Even before DSK’s vertiginous fall, Lagarde, who has three younger brothers and who elbowed her way to the top male tier of the City of Broad Shoulders, had warned about the dangers of too much “hairy-chested” testosterone. In Chicago, she says, she had “boys on my team. And I could see them, especially when they were a little bit amongst themselves and I was just in the background, and it was about, ‘Oh, I can do better than you. I’ve got more of this and more of that. And I’ve got more billable hours.’ It’s complete nonsense.”

She noticed, when she worked on big termination packages after mergers, that men would feel their worlds were collapsing while women’s egos were “more diversely invested.”

She believes that women in the mix — “if they accept to just be themselves and not play boys’ games” — can “make it a bit more civilized, bring it back to normality.”

Lagarde’s role models were her mother, a professor of French, Latin and ancient Greek who was widowed when Christine was 16, and an older female partner at Baker & McKenzie, a “solid professional” who put on a little lipstick before seeing clients.

“Neither overplayed their femininity,” she says. “They did not try to charm or lift their skirt to show their knees. But they were women.”

Perhaps a woman who dominates without being domineering is just what is needed at the I.M.F., a macho island outside U.S. law with the sexual norms of a libidinous pirate ship.

The French are reconsidering the line between seduction and aggression. I asked Lagarde how she would delineate it.

“You know when you receive a big slap in the face,” she says, “or when someone says ‘No.’ ”

Has she ever felt sexually harassed?

“No, I’m too tall. I’ve been in sports for too long,” she says, smiling and flexing the muscle under her black Ann Taylor jacket.

“They know that I could just punch them.”

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom, writing from Cairo:

I had some time to kill at the Cairo airport the other day so I rummaged through the “Egyptian Treasures” shop. I didn’t care much for the King Tut paper weights and ashtrays but was intrigued by a stuffed camel, which, if you squeezed its hump, emitted a camel honk. When I turned it over to see where it was manufactured, it read: “Made in China.” Now that they have decided to put former President Hosni Mubarak on trial, I hope Egyptians add to his indictment that he presided for 30 years over a country where nearly half the population lives on $2 day and 20 percent are unemployed while it is importing low-wage manufactured goods — a stuffed camel, no less — from China.

That’s an embarrassment for Mubarak and America, which has donated some $30 billion in aid to modernize Egypt’s economy over the last 30 years — and President Obama just promised a couple billion more. Egypt’s economy has nose-dived since the uprising, and the new government really does need the money to stay afloat. But I only hope that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton understand that right now — right this second — Egypt needs something more from Washington than money: quiet, behind-the-scenes engagement with Egypt’s ruling generals over how to complete the transition to democracy here.

Here’s why. After the ouster of Mubarak in February, his presidential powers were shifted to a military council, led by the defense minister. It’s an odd situation, or as the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany, author of “The Yacoubian Building,” put it to me: “We have had a revolution here that succeeded — but is not in power. So the goals of the revolution are being applied by an agent, the army, which I think is sincere in wanting to do the right things, but it is not by nature revolutionary.”

To their credit, the Egyptian generals moved swiftly to put in place a pathway to democracy: elections for a new Parliament were set for September; this Parliament will then oversee the writing of a new Constitution, and then a new civilian president will be elected.

Sounds great on paper, and it was endorsed by a referendum, but there’s one big problem: The Tahrir Square revolution was a largely spontaneous, bottom-up affair. It was not led by any particular party or leader. Parties are just now being formed. If elections for the Parliament are held in September, the only group in Egypt with a real party network ready to roll is the one that has been living underground and is now suddenly legal: the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

“Liberal people are feeling some concerns that they made the revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood can now take it. This is not true,” Esam el-Erian, one of the party’s leaders, insisted to me.

But that is exactly what the urban, secular moderates, who actually did spearhead the Tahrir revolt, fear. They are only now forming parties and trying to build networks that can reach the millions of traditional Egyptians living in the countryside and persuade them to vote for a reform agenda and not just: “Islam is the answer.”

“The liberal parties need more time to organize,” said Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire who’s heading the best organized of the liberal parties, and is urging all the liberal groups to run under a single banner and not divide their vote.

If elections happen in September and the Muslim Brotherhood wins a plurality it could have an inordinate impact on writing Egypt’s first truly free Constitution and could inject restrictions on women, alcohol, dress, and the relations between mosque and state. “You will have an unrepresentative Parliament writing an unrepresentative Constitution,” argued Mohamed ElBaradei, the former international atomic energy czar who is running for president on a reform platform.

“Because the Muslim Brotherhood is ready, they want elections first,” adds Osama Ghazali Harb, another reform party leader. “We as secular forces prefer to have some time to consolidate our parties. We must thank the army for the role it played. But it was our revolution, not a coup d’état. … If there are fair elections, the Muslim Brotherhood will only get 20 percent.”

Free elections are rare in the Arab world, so when they happen, everybody tries to vote — not only the residents of that country. You can be sure money will flow in here from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to support the Muslim Brotherhood.

America, though, cannot publicly intervene in the Egyptian election debate. It would only undermine the reformers, who have come so far, so fast, on their own and alienate the Egyptian generals. That said, though, it is important that senior U.S. officials engage quietly with the generals and encourage them to take heed of the many Egyptian voices that are raising legitimate concerns about a premature runoff.

In short, the Egyptian revolution is not over. It has left the dramatic street phase and is now in the seemingly boring but utterly vital phase of deciding who gets to write the rules for the new Egypt. And how Egypt evolves will impact the whole Arab world. I just hope the Obama team is paying attention. This is so much more important than Libya.

And now here’s Mr. Kristof, who’s in Kolkata, India:

I first visited Kolkata, better known as Calcutta, in 1982 as a backpacking law student. I stayed at a hostel in the Howrah slums and regretted that my camera could record only images, not the equally memorable stench.

In my visits over the next 25 years, Kolkata — and much of India — seemed little changed. China, where the national bird was jokingly said to be the crane, would be transformed every year or two, while Kolkata was always the same: a decrepit city where barefoot men pulled rickshaws beside fetid canals.

That’s why India has been a bit of an embarrassment for those of us who believe in democracy, especially when compared with China. The Communist Party in China did a much better job fighting poverty than democratically elected Indian governments. India tolerated dissent, but it also tolerated inefficiency, disease and illiteracy.

But after my trips to India and China this year, I think all that may be changing. Despite the global economic slowdown, India’s economy is now hurtling along at more than 8 percent per year. Yep, India is now a “tiger economy.”

The technology zones around Bangalore in southern India have been booming for years, but what is changing is that the rise is gaining traction across the country — even here in Kolkata. It’s stunning to see the new high-rise towers in Kolkata, new air-conditioned shopping malls, new infrastructure projects, new businesses.

In elections this month, the longtime Communist Party government here in the state of West Bengal was ousted, and the new chief minister is a woman and a dynamo, Mamata Banerjee. After the latest elections, she’s part of a broader trend of charismatic female politicians: one-third of India’s people are now ruled by chief ministers who are women.

The northern state of Bihar used to be even more of an embarrassment. For many years, gangsters played a major role in government there, and nothing worked. I once visited a health clinic in Bihar where employees dumped medicines in a pit in the ground, so they wouldn’t have to dispense them. I visited a school in Bihar where teachers never bothered to show up. I visited villages where gangsters raped, robbed and ruled at their pleasure. Businesses fled, kidnapping became rampant, and Bihar seemed hopeless.

Yet Bihar has, wondrously, turned around since 2005, when a reformer named Nitish Kumar took over as chief minister. There are still enormous inefficiencies, but crime has been suppressed, corruption has diminished, and the local economy is booming at double-digit rates. And if Bihar can turn around, any Indian region can.

Look, India still lags far behind China, it faces risks of Pakistani extremism, it needs further economic reforms, and it too readily accepts inefficiency as the natural order of the universe. India’s education and health system is a disgrace, especially in rural areas; Bangladesh does a much better job, despite being poorer. But change is in the air in India. Infant mortality is dropping, voters are pushing for better governance, and I think India has three advantages over China in their economic rivalry in the coming decades.

First, India’s independent news media and grass-roots civic organizations — sectors that barely exist in China — are becoming watchdogs against corruption and inefficiency. My hunch is that kleptocracy reached its apogee and is now waning in India, while in China it continues to get worse. I’ve written scathingly about India’s human trafficking and oppression of women, but it’s also true that civil society is addressing these issues.

Second, China’s economy may be slowed by the aging of its population, while India’s younger population will lead to a “demographic dividend” in coming decades. (Indian overpopulation is still a problem, but the average woman now has 2.6 children, and the figure is dropping.) Likewise, China already reaped the economic advantages of empowering its women, while India is just beginning to usher the female half of its population into the formal labor force.

Third, India has managed religious and ethnic tensions pretty well, aside from the disgraceful anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in 2002. The Sikh challenge in the Punjab has dissipated. Muslims have been president of India three times, and are prominent in business and the movie industry; perhaps as a result, India has the world’s third-largest Muslim population (after Indonesia and Pakistan) but few jihadis. And while India has sometimes behaved brutally in Kashmir, civil society watchdogs are pressing for better behavior there. In China, by contrast, tensions with ethnic Tibetans and Uighurs are worsening.

China’s autocrats are extraordinarily competent, in a way that India’s democrats are not. But traveling in India these days is a heartening experience: my hunch is that the world’s largest democracy increasingly will be a source not of embarrassment but of pride.