The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.720; 488 pp In recent times no work of non-fiction has dominated the New York Times bestseller lists as consistently as journalist Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalised World in the 21st Century. That’s because it makes a determined and spirited attempt to explain a new borderless world- the astonishing and bewildering technological and social changes which during the past decade in particular, have forever transformed the world as we knew it. Friedman’s insightful book advances the argument that massive breakthroughs in computer and telecommunication technologies have obliterated national boundaries and created a level playing field for entrepreneurs and businessmen worldwide. Thanks to the invention of the internet and the worldwide web, a businessman in India manufacturing, say automobiles, can source the cheapest inputs and materials from component manufacturers worldwide within a matter of minutes, import them and using cheap Indian labour, produce highly competitive automobiles, as indeed Tata Motors is in the process of doing. Likewise as we are only too well aware, a foreign tourist lost in the streets of Manchester, UK, is likely to be put on the right track by a call centre worker in Bangalore or Gurgaon equipped with a street map of Manchester and a crash-course faux British accent which may occasionally slip. These telecom-driven changes in business management and processes are particularly astonishing for people in India who for almost half a century had been cut off from mainstream science and technology advancements by an isolationist, autarkic economic development model designed by a Soviet-style Planning Commission based in Delhi and staffed by textbook economists driven by punitive notions of austerity and self-reliance. In particular the wiseacres of the Planning Commission who, I hate to say this, included incumbent prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh now widely credited as the author of India’s economic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of 1991, harboured an irrational prejudice against the telecommunication industry. Astonishingly the eminent economists, many of them educated in the US and Britain, who staffed the commission, regarded the telephone which was essentially designed to speed up business transactions, as an elitist luxury. Right upto 1995 obtaining a telephone connection was a herculean and expensive task for most citizens. For example the main telephone line of EducationWorld installed in 1995 required running the gauntlet of a string of rude managers of the public sector Bangalore Telephones, until a connection was magnanimously granted under the tatkal or fast-track scheme on payment of Rs. 30,000. But since then the telephone has become a ubiquitous instrument in contemporary India with the number of mobile telephones at 10 million and counting, exceeding the number of traditional landline connections. Nor is it a coincidence that since then the Indian economy has been experiencing annual GDP growth rates of 6-7 percent and has broken the shackles of the so-called Hindu annual growth rate of 3.5 percent which persisted for over three decades. Surprisingly, Friedman’s epiphanic awareness of the new reality of a flat borderless world…
