Wednesday, July 27, 2005

July 26th - The Day Bombay Overflowed



Nearly one-third of the Maharashtra state capital, Mumbai, is under water. The Water Drainage System in the City is 110 years old. The State Government had issued a notification just before the monsoons that it was ready to tackle any untoward happenning during the monsoons..



Here are some excerpts.

A:

"Most places in India don't receive this kind of rainfall in a year. This is the highest ever recorded in India's history," R.V. Sharma, director of the meteorological department in Mumbai, told The Associated Press.India's previous heaviest rainfall, recorded at Cherrapunji in Meghalaya state -- one of the rainiest places on Earth -- was 33 inches on July 12, 1910, Sharma said. "


At least 25 people drowned after being trapped in cars or crushed by falling walls, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, on Wednesday.

The deaths included seven children killed in a landslide in Andheri .

B:

Western and Central Railway trains were stopped at about 2:00 pm (IST) on Tuesday. The Meteorological Department has forecast heavy rainfall with gusty winds for Mumbai and suburbs.The Pune-Western Express Highway has been closed and all trains to Pune have been cancelled as railway tracks were submerged.


The All India Radio reported about 150,000 people were stranded in railway stations across Mumbai,

The Chhatrapati Shivaji domestic and Sahar international airports in , have been shut down since Tuesday evening, and all incoming flights were being diverted to New Delhi and other airports.

D:

My sister reached home safely at 11 am today after 19 hours. there was no
police, no navy but around 200 locals who saved their lives.
The story goes like this as told by my sister... people get stranded on buses, cars in kurla at around 4 pm, water reaches neck level in the single decker buses when locals rush to help them. they break some seats, get ropes so that people can hold it
and float from the single decker bus to double decker bus in neck deep water.
Passengers stay overnight in the bus, around 150 in the upper deck as the deck
below is completely submerged in water. The locals keep a watch on them the
whole night telling them not to get scared.

E:
As soon as I reached Central (6 pm), I saw that the water had
completely submerged the tracks and was only couple of inches away from reaching
the platforms. The station was very crowded and some people told me they were
standing there since 3 pm. There was a huge rush in railway stalls selling
eatables. I helped myself to a couple of vada pavs and some aloo bhujia. I knew
its going to be a long night. The vada pav guy probably sold more vada pavs
yesterday than he does in the whole month.


F:
I overheard a person describe a short circuit in his office and fire breaking out. I was in a bus next to a girl who hadnt eaten since breakfast and was near fainting since the bus had taken over two hours from Nariman Point to the Aquarium - a distance of five kilometers! In the same bus with an over full bladder, i was thinking of a toilet and consoling myself that there were people who had more serious issues to deal with as they were unable to reach their infants and had no way of communicating their situation to their family.


G:
I was worried for my daughter who has just stepped into college four days back after clearing her SSC. She took 5 hrs walk in knee deep water to reach home at Goregaon from Narsi Monjee. We were clue less as no phones were working during that period 3pm to 8 pm. I still (its 1.34 am) remain in office just to arrange the diesel for DG set as I am working for a call center which can not afford to have no power.

H:

When we wanted to order snacks from the nearby hotel, hotel decided to exploit the situation and pocket of the hungry people. Normal sandwich which does not cost more than Rs 15 was sold at Rs 85 without bill. Same rate was there for other snacks but soon they closed the kitchen as most of the food was sold out.

I:
My sister is stuck in Goregaon in Siddharth Hospital. She had a renal transplant. I would be glad if someone could provide her food or tell me the situation in Goregaon.

J:

A never before sight, near the Sahar domestic airport signal, what I witnessed was a river flowing with heavy currents. All vehicles are stranded, not moving an inch. People are offering help to passersby to cross the river from the main highway towards Nehru Road.

Many of my colleagues' children are in school, imagine the parents plight,
the kids plight. All this is not exciting, a few of us have been lucky and are somehow indoors, but for people who are drenching outside, stuck in cars, buses, pregnant women, hope help reaches everyone and everyone reaches home safely.

Thanks to the reclamation, greedy takeover of salt pans, garbage (thanks BMC). But who cares in Mumbai. Politicians, government officials all want their pockets to be filled, make as much money as possible. Thanks to that that the situation in Mumbai is this and we will blame it on the weather and high tide tomorrow, isn't it?


Monday, July 25, 2005

"Home is where the Bengali is" - By Bachi Karkaria

Dont know how many of the readers would understand the Bong lingo .. and the food terminology.. its nevertheless a hilarious read .. Bachi at her best..

"Bongdom is just not about a community. It’s a state of mind" , says Bachi Karkaria

“There is some corner of a foreign field which is forever Bengali.” Ki nonsense kotha. It’s not a corner, it’s the whole blaady expanse. Ours is an eenbhasion, a coup. From which the attackee will never recoupaarate, I might add.


It’s true. Suddenly the Bengalis are everywhere.

So many, taking over so much, in so many places that I wonder if there are any left in Kolkata. Formerly, you saw Bengalis outside Bengal only when you went on holiday. There they were, the men in Fair Isle sweaters knitted lovingly by their mothers, their wives in blue cardigans, the baachcha in monkey cap. Wherever you went, they were always there, a swagger to their step and boxy camera around their neck along with the matching “maaflar”. Whether you were in Kashmir or Kanyakumari, in Nepal or Neyvelli, in Sri Lanka or Sariska, you always found one Bombay Photo Studio, one Madras CafĂ©, one Tibetan curio shop, and one Bengali family.

When Hilary and Tenzing climbed Everest, did they find a mysterious mishti syrup stain on the snow, irrefutable evidence that The Bengali Was Here? When Jacques Cousteau plumbed the icy deep, did he find a trace of maastard oil on Antarctic ocean-bed and telltale signs of a neatlypicked rohu skeleton? When Armstrong floated on the lunar surface, had Neel-da already taken one small step for Bongkind in his trusty Bata sandals? I am prepared to bet on it, whatever may be the conspiracy of silence which has prevented the inveterate Bengali traveller from being given his due (LTA already collected, thank you).


When I began to venture abroad, they would be there not just as tourists, but as NRBs. Keep your motel, Mr Patel, Shri Banerjee has spread himself wider, higher, deeper across the globe. In the suburban Cardiff of the early 70s, there wasn’t anything non-Welsh for miles around. Anything except Mr Palit. He was the husband of one of the secretaries of our Thomson Foundation and, taking pity on us for having to face the bland hostel fare, she invited us for dinner. We expected a tastier version of our usual cod and chips. But what a spread we got: course upon course of authentic Bangla Ranna, whose aromas wafted out of the chintzy windows and unleashed all manner of uncharacteristic urges in the staid neighbourhood of Penarth. Three decades on, I can still recall that we had a chochchori of very English vegetables, ghoogni, chingdi malai curry, even chaatni. True, it wasn’t today’s beeay-bari favourite, the “plastic” variety. Procuring aamshatto anywhere in Wales in those pre-Curry Colonialism days would have defeated even the enterprising Palit-babu but the tomato version he dished up was properly spiked with raisins and suited us fine. There was a fiery fish which could pass off for rui. And we rounded it off with homemade shandesh. It was amazing. Was it a waking dream, we wondered as we were driven back, gently burping all the way.

Then, of course, came the rising Diaspora, so dominated by brilliant Bengalis that it came to be called the Daspora. It occasioned no surprise to encounter them all over the States, deep in the mid-West or on the farthest Hawaiian island. Somewhere, somehow, one caught the whiff of begun bhaja in the air. “Is that a narkel bora I see before me, glistening through the Minnesota mist? It is. It is the Mistress of Spices at her magic. And should something go awry, the other Bengali, the Interpreter of Maladies, will Jhumpa up to set it right.


Yes, Bengalis are certainly no slouches, either, in all the English-language fiction that has stewed in Indian creative juices. Slouches? They’re winning both the marathon and the 100-metre dash in the race to literary glory.

It’s the same closer to home. There are so many Bengalis occupying pole positions where I work that, if you don’t speak the language, you might as well take the golden handshake. Being an Hon Bong, I scrape into the club by the skin of my teeth. When I left Kolkata — when it was still Calcutta and Jyotibabu was not yet CM — to join The Times of India as a trainee, Sumitbabu, my journalism professor at Cal U gave an introductory call to his in-laws who lived in Mumbai. At least one Sunday a month, I took the bus to their terrace flat in Parel where, to the gentle flap of drying Dhonekhali saris, I would savour posto, papad and payesh and dispel the homesickness. In later Mumbai years, the Bengali population spread like waterhyacinth in a Beliaghata pukur, so much so that there were almost as many Pujo pandals as Ganapati ones and any market worth the name boasted a sweet-water fishmonger — Anwar, Bishuda, Chanchalbabu — right down the alphabet. The Sunday crowd thronging his stall was there as much for the community camaraderie as for the golda chingri. So it didn’t really matter if it was “Bombay bekti” or if the ilish did not come from the Podda, but from the Narmada in nearer Bharuch.

Moving to Delhi, of course, I was in clover and kashundi to my heart’s content. Chitto Park is a microcosm — and not a very micro one at that — of para-Kolkata. Oh bliss it was in that den to be eating shinghara, and to be there in Pujo time was very heaven. Boudis in lal-paars, dhakis, bhog, Bijoli Grill’s kobiraji caat-let, Nizam’s kathi rolls. And crowds to rival Gariahat on Mahashtami night. Bhaba jaye na. If you can’t be in Kolkata, Delhi is the next best thing.


Generally speaking, if you want to survive into the future you’d better cross over. Learn the language, buy a Dhakai, get a Bengali son-inlaw. Me? I’m changing my name to Bagchi.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Pope, Liverpool and Charles !! :)

This one is pretty hilarious !


Year 1981
=========

1. Prince Charles got married
2. Liverpool crowned Champions of Europe
3. Pope Died.


Year 2005
=========

1. Prince Charles got married (again)
2. Liverpool crowned Champions of Europe (again)
3. Pope Died.


*** In The Future, if Charles wants to re-marry and Liverpool needs another crown ..... POOR POPE....!!!!!! ***

Monday, July 11, 2005

Mukhtaran Mai and Imrana - The Muslim woman's plight in South East Asia

This article is by Irfan Husain, one of the columnists of the Dawn, Pakistan..


Dancing with the Taliban - By Irfan Husain

"
IF we thought what happened to Mukhtaran Mai was bad, look at what Imrana is going through in India.

In the former case, the state victimized the victim by placing her on the ECL and taking away her passport. In the latter, the poor woman was not only raped by her father-in-law, but has been told by the mufti of the Darul Uloom at Deoband that she cannot now live with her husband, and must marry her rapist.

According to Yawar Baig, an Indian scholar, the fatwa is based on a ruling by Imam Abu Haneefa, the founder of the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence. But nobody can believe that it could have been the eminent jurist’s intention to so cruelly punish the victim. Clearly, the Deoband mufti has ignored the spirit of Islamic law.

Indian human rights activists are understandably furious over this fatwa: not only is the rapist getting away scot free, but is being rewarded. In fact, the whole business of having Muslims being governed under special religious dispensation based on family laws leaves Muslim women specially vulnerable. Time and again, they have been short-changed in divorce proceedings, for instance, and denied child support and alimony.

This whole travesty began with the famous Shahbano case which went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ever since, Indian Muslim women have been denied the protection guaranteed by the Indian constitution. In this controversial case, it was the secular Congress Party under Rajiv Gandhi that took the line of least resistance in order to woo the Muslim vote.

But if Indian politicians do not have the moral fibre to end this anomaly, it is backward Muslim men who take advantage of it to repress their women. By seeking such archaic and clearly misguided interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence, the Indian ulema are demonstrating their refusal to change with the times. Worse, they are making a mockery of the holy texts they are supposed to uphold.

Indeed, in recent years, Muslims have seldom missed a chance to show their faith in the worst possible light. Take the wretched Taliban as an example. After the public mistreatment of their women, they banned music, kite-flying and even chess. In effect, they were saying to the world that Islam forbids its followers to have fun. Then to top it all, they destroyed the priceless giant statues of the Buddha in Bamian, thus not only offending the millions of Buddhists in Asia, but also all those concerned with our cultural heritage. By the time the Americans attacked Afghanistan, the Taliban had forfeited all sympathy and support. Even three years after their country’s occupation, the Taliban resistance is seen as a ragtag band of stone-age rabble who want to drag Afghanistan back to pre-history. They are not perceived as the heroic figures the Mujahideen were while fighting the Soviets.

This inflexible refusal to recognize that the world is changing has placed Muslims on the defensive around the world. In dress, public appearance and customs, the majority of Muslims refuse to integrate into the mainstream wherever they are. They have thus consigned themselves to the periphery of society, viewed with perplexity and fear. In their turn, they generally despise those in whose midst they live and work.

Had this suspicion and resentment been limited to individuals, things wouldn’t have been as bad as they are actually becoming. But the rest of the world is coming to a consensus that Muslims are generally backward people, prone to supporting violence against those of other faiths. This has serious consequences, especially for those who choose to make a life for themselves in non-Muslim societies.

For instance, Muslim women who insist on wearing the hijab in the West are unlikely to be employed as receptionists, or in any job where public dealing is required. Ditto if you have a long, unkempt beard. Businessmen are concerned that customers might be put off by this public display of faith in secular societies. And employers often do not want to hire somebody who demands time off during the working day to go off and pray.

While we may deplore such attitudes, they are a reality. When economic reasons drive people to emigrate, logic demands that they remain open to change in order to better their lives. And yet, survey after survey in the UK have shown that Pakistanis, Arabs and Bangladeshis are doing considerably worse than other migrant groups.

Many Muslims in Pakistan support the application of Muslim family laws to their co-ists in India. And yet in Pakistan, the minorities seldom have such preferential treatment. We deplore the decline of Urdu in India, and yet are unconcerned about the state of Hindi in our country. These examples of double standards can be multiplied endlessly. In short, we expect and demand far greater respect for our faith and its followers than we are willing to accord this to others.

Why are we our own worst enemies? Part of the answer lies in the past. Until relatively recently, Muslim nations were powerful and thus respected. But with colonization and the long decline of the Ottoman Empire came a sullen apathy and a denial of reality. Now even though Muslim countries are nominally free, they lack the will to change the status quo because this requires introspection and a major change in attitude. Rulers exploit this state of mind to perpetuate their illegitimate grip on power by blaming the West for all our ills.

As Imrana’s case so painfully illustrates, we remain wedded to the most retrogressive interpretation of our faith, and thus ensure that we remain backward. After partition, many Indian Muslims opted out of the educational system because most state schools in North India taught in Hindi. Thus disadvantaged, these Muslims then complained of bias against them when they applied for jobs.

I am sure there is prejudice in India, just as there is in the West. But we can hardly accuse others when there is so much discrimination against non-Muslims in Pakistan. The way to overcome barriers is to assimilate, not stand aloof and complain from the sidelines. I certainly am not suggesting that we give up our cultural identity. Far from it. But we do need to shed some of our rigid attitudes if we are not all to be lumped together with the Taliban.

"

Thursday, July 07, 2005

"The World is Flat " - Thomas Friedman's article.

Since I first read Thomas Friedman's book on globalization , "The Lexus and the Olive tree" , I have been a devout fan of this Pulitzer prize winning New York Times Op Ed columnsit. I had intially that his writings had veered on the American view, the American mindset of what and how globalization as a process is shaping up over the years, but I think for most of his columns, the adventures, the examples, the situations he brings forth is simply amazing..

Here is a man who has travelled most of the world. and knows more than perhaps any other of his peer on what are the pushes and pulls of any economy.. be it in the middle east, the european, the poor African , South American or even the Chinese and the Indian contexts.

The following is an article based on the excerpts of this recent book "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st century."

I love this article to bits.. Its very long, but I urge the reader to go through it once still.. Have a look at his examples, his quotes his data, his analysis and his conclusions. And also his humor.



' It's a Flat World, After All '
- By Thomas L. Friedman - April 3, 2005

"
In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his king andqueen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper:''The world is flat.''

And therein lies a tale of technology and geo-economics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, whichis why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world,because others already are, and there is no time to waste.

I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world quite by accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore, Working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing.In short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the more upset I became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to thecampus of Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. Theclocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained.
''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all thosethings.'' At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all ofthese things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed,produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''

At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced along the potholed road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''
''What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''

Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made our world flat!


This has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets andlabor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that givesit its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only differs from the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world andin how it is empowering individuals. It is also different in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and American companies and countries. But going forward, this will be less and less true.

Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse -- non-Western, nonwhite -- group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part. ''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''


Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0 and the flattening of the world: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We've tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mentionthe work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.
When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.
How did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast?
It was a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000. Let me go through them briefly. The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space.''The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,'' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a globalcomputer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.


The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which did two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different places in more different ways than ever before.


No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. ''India had no resources and no infrastructure,'' said Dinakar Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the University of Delhi before emigrating to America. ''It produced people with quality and by quantity.But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now you can plug into the world from India. You don't have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.'' India could never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech America, so American shareholders paid for it. Yes, crazy overinvestment can be good. The overinvestment in railroads turned out to bea great boon for the American economy. ''But the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too, were the benefits,'' Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads, ''it was the foreigners who benefited.'' India got a free ride.


The first time this became apparent was when thousands of Indian engineers were enlisted to fix the Y2K -- the year 2000 -- computer bugs for companies from all over the world. (Y2K should be a national holiday in India. Call it ''Indian Interdependence Day,'' says Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy analyst at Johns Hopkins.) The fact that the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call ''workflow.'' Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and electronic transmission pipes, like middleware,that connected all those computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment connected people to people like never before, what the workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers like never before.


Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity produced, in short order, six more flatteners -- six new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge. One was ''outsourcing.'' When my software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from accounting to software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China. The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next operating system, Linux, using engineers collaboratingtogether online and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.'' I let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my goods to repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no idea what UPS really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was ''supply-chaining.''


This is Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allowanyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves. So the first three flatteners created the new platform for collaboration, and the next six are the new forms of collaboration that flattened the world even more. The 10th flattener I call ''the steroids,'' and these are wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroidsdo is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device.

The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' said Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.


No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it in history. Wherever you look today -- whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft; or the world of business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and working with some of the most advanced Western multinationals -- hierarchies are being flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between companies and among individuals.

Do you recall ''the IT revolution'' that the business press has been pushing for the last 20 years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was just the prologue. The last 20 years were about forging, sharpening and distributing all the new tools to collaborate and connect. Now the real information revolution is about to begin as all the complementarities among thesecollaborative tools start to converge. One of those who first called this moment by its real name was Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just ''the end of the beginning.'' The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been ''the warm-up act.'' Now we aregoing into the main event, she said, ''and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of life.''

As if this flattening wasn't enough, another convergence coincidentally occurred during the 1990's that was equally important. Some three billion people who were out of the game walked, and often ran, onto the playing field. I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and politicalsystems all opened up during the course of the 1990's so that their people were increasingly free to join the free market. And when did these three billion people converge with the new playing field and the new business processes? Right when it was being flattened, right when millions of them could compete and collaborate more equally, more horizontally and withcheaper and more readily available tools. Indeed, thanks to the flattening of the world, many of these new entrants didn't even have to leave home to participate. Thanks to the 10 flatteners, the playing field came to them!

It is this convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes for horizontal collaboration -- that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early 21st century. Sure, not all three billion can collaborate and compete. In fact, for most people the world is not yet flat at all. But even if we're talking about only 10 percent, that's 300 million people -- about twice the size of the American work force. And be advised: the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. What China's leaders really want is that the next generation of underwear and airplane wings not just be ''made in China'' but also be ''designed in China.'' And that is where things are heading. So in 30 years we will have gone from ''sold in China'' to ''made in China'' to ''designed in China'' to ''dreamed up in China'' -- or from China as collaborator with the worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost, high-quality, hyperefficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on everything. Ditto India. Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ''You don't bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies'' -- like India, China and Russia -- ''with rich educational heritages.''

That is why there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western Europeans will continue leading the way. These new players are stepping onto the playing field legacy free, meaning that many of them were so far behind that they can leap right into the new technologies without having to worry about all the sunken costs of old systems. It means that they can move very fast to adopt new, state-of-the-art technologies, which is why there are already more cellphones in use in China today than there are people in America.
If you want to appreciate the sort of challenge we are facing, let me share with you two conversations. One was with some of the Microsoft officials who were involved in setting up Microsoft's research center in Beijing, Microsoft Research Asia, which opened in 1998 -- after Microsoft sent teams to Chinese universities to administer I.Q. tests in order to recruit the best brains from China's 1.3 billion people. Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science students tested, Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at Microsoft: ''Remember, in China, when youare one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.''

The other is a conversation I had with Rajesh Rao, a young Indian entrepreneur who started an electronic-game company from Bangalore, which today owns the rights to Charlie Chaplin's image for mobile computer games. ''We can't relax,'' Rao said. ''I think in the case of the United States that is what happened a bit. Please look at me: I am from India. We have been at a very different level before in terms of technology and business. But once we saw we had an infrastructure that made the world a small place, we promptly tried to make the best use of it. We saw there were so many things we could do. We went ahead, and today what we are seeing is a result of that. There is no time to rest. That is gone. There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing you are doing, and they are trying to do it better. It is like water in a tray: you shake it, and it will find the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to so many jobs -- they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most opportunity. If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will getwork if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running. And if you are able to demonstrate your work, using the same infrastructure, and if people are comfortable giving work to you and if you are diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in business.''

Instead of complaining about outsourcing, Rao said, Americans and Western Europeans would ''be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing something better. Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century. Americans whining -- we have never seen that before.''
Rao is right. And it is time we got focused. As a person who grew up during the cold war, I'll always remember driving down the highway and listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a grim-voiced announcer would come on the air and say: ''This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.'' And then there would be a20-second high-pitched siren sound. Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the cold war when the announcer came on and said, ''This is a not a test.''
That, however, is exactly what I want to say here: ''This is not a test.''

The long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the world puts before the United States are profound. Therefore, our ability to get by doing things the way we've been doing them -- which is to say not always enriching our secret sauce -- will not suffice any more. ''For a country as wealthy we are, it is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness,'' says Dinakar Singh, the Indian-American hedge-fund manager. ''We are in a world that has a system that now allows convergence among many billions of people, and we had better step back and figure out what it means. It would be a nice coincidence if all the things that were true before were still true now, but there are quite a few things you actually need to do differently. You need to have a much more thoughtful national discussion.''

If this moment has any parallel in recent American history, it is the height of the cold war, around 1957, when the Soviet Union leapt ahead of America in the space race by putting up the Sputnik satellite. The main challenge then came from those who wanted to put up walls; the main challenge to America today comes from the fact that all the walls are being taken downand many other people can now compete and collaborate with us much more directly. The main challenge in that world was from those practicing extreme Communism, namely Russia, China and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing extreme capitalism, namely China, India and South Korea. The main objective in that era was building a strongstate, and the main objective in this era is building strong individuals.

Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a president who can summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more young women and men to science and engineering and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help everyAmerican become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.

We have been slow to rise to the challenge of flatism, in contrast to Communism, maybe because flatism doesn't involve ICBM missiles aimed at our cities. Indeed, the hot line, which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the help line, which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end of the hot linemight have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in ''From Russia With Love.'' No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: ''Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?''

No, Rajiv, actually you can't.

When it comes to responding to the challenges of the flat world, there is no help line we can call. We have to dig into ourselves. We in America have all the basic economic and educational tools to do that. But we have not been improving those tools as much as we should. That is why we are in what Shirley Ann Jackson, the 2004 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, calls a ''quiet crisis'' -- one that is slowly eating away at America's scientific and engineering base.

''If left unchecked,'' said Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T., ''this could challenge our pre-eminence and capacity to innovate.'' And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services and companies that has been the source of America's horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. This quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition gap.'' Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, ''The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.'' Second, we have a serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and scientists. We used to make up for that by importing them from India and China, but in a flat world, where people can now stay home and compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the world for exaggerated security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap. That's a key reason companies are looking abroad. The numbers are not here. And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.


These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are amongthe top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did.China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.''

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''
I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ''A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.''

"

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

The Sound of Silence .. Absolutely love this song..

Absolutely love this song to bits..

''
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains Within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'Neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night And touched the sound of silence.


And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare Disturb the sound of silence.


"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed In the wells of silence


And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written
on the subway walls And tenement halls."
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence.

"


- Paul Simon, 1964,
Paul Simon , Art Garfunkel ( Simon and Garfunkel)