I love book excerpts. Like film trailers, they offer up the juiciest bits from potentially marginal titles. Here’s a good one from NYT columnist Tom Friedman’s latest, The World is Flat. Hedge (fund) hog and sound bite artiste Dinakar Singh compares minds to perishable inventory in dockside godowns:
”India had no resources and no infrastructure… 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.”
”… 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.” …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 Friedman’s butterfly formulation, the Global Crossing bankruptcy let IIT kids enjoy both cash and kachoris. It’s the global version of ‘work in your pajamas’: enjoying family, festivals and food at home.
Afternoon TV is so funky sometimes. Today, the Christian channel was not showing a silver-haired white guy with expansive hand gestures, clad in a shiny double-breasted suit. Instead, it was showing a desi couple, the guy with those huge uncle glasses, singing a ghazal in Hindi, interleaved with clips of folk dancing.
Pardon my parochialness, but I’ve never seen this before. Fusion? Talvin and Karsh got nothin’ on the church. Similarly, I’ve always been fascinated by how omnivorously religious many Hindus are. They practice it like metareligion where other ‘one-and-only’ deities are merely slotted into the pantheon. I often see Bollywood philms where a Hindu protagonist’s idea of the holy trinity is to pray at a temple, a church and a gurudwara all in the same day. And many Punjabi Hindus attend their local gurudwara instead of temple. I’d imagine it all drives hardcore monotheists crazy.
