Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times‘ three-time Pulitzer Prize winning foreign affairs columnist, speaking at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.
“Rural India and rural China are primed to join the flat world. The technology is there. The IT revolution has arrived in many ways. What hasn’t come is the ET revolution: the Energy Technology revolution, where we can get clean, green distributed power. What you are going to see is the flattening of the world extend at incredible clip to every rural village in India, China, Brazil. The world will truly become flat when IT meets ET.”
Also read: ‘If the Tatas desire to make India better…’
churumuri 
The ELM and others like NRN were asking us to discard our native languages. They were citing China as an example, as if China abandoned teaching Mandarin and Cantonese and accepted English as their medium. We will remain a Nation of Imitators as long as this attitude remains.
LikeLike
Friedman has uncanny ability to explain complex ideas in a very very easy, understandable way for everybody. His columns on glolization, islamic terrorism shd be read by everybody.
Truth From Facts : We need both- mother tongue as well as English in India. We may be using English to earn, but lets spend energy, time, effort, money for promoting mother tongue . That’s the way I see it.
LikeLike
Friedman’s thoughts on globalization is a “center shock” in most average American mouths, unlike the “center fresh” in the Indian and developing world.
The selling proposition of the book “The world Is Flat” in itself explains the unsung concept of our times: globalization “the beast and the beauty“.
The whole of the average western world was awakened to the rude shock the book subjected them to, while developing world embraced it with awe. One felt they were seeing their demise, as the others saw their rise. Perhaps no other one-single business concept had come this close to mean two different things to two different average people of the same time–who knows what else to the third, the fourth and the rest. And that duality guaranteed (and will guarantee for some sometime) a cult like success to Friedman and his likes.
What is affront of him now is the whole western world trying to find a solution to fix their seemingly arriving demise. And of course the whole developing world trying to attain certain “status” quickly. Though he is not the only one offering solutions, he is definitely in the profession of doing it vividly and with brevity.
His solution like bringing IT & ET together is the rather complex one he puts for the above-average mind, while for the average he talks about humanization.
How better to talk about humanization than with humans? He tells an old american joke in our new context of globalization: An american traveller, who was speaking loudly and slowly in english with a person who did not understand english, had to be reassured that no matter how slow and loud he tried it just wouldnt help the other to understand!
Friedman’s argument is just that: America has thought to itself time and again that it invented globalization and the world will toe the line inevitably. Though true in most sense that all of us will be americans eventually one day, but not necessarily following American footsteps ,but in what I call a very metaphorical way of “wearing America branded shoe“.
Footstep is Indian and the shoes would be american is a thought that the americans need to learn equally (coming to terms with their bloated ego of being the founders of globalization) well as much as Indians or any other developing world (coming to reckon that local ways of doing things is still a long way to being obsolete).
That is what Friedman packs it off as global, local, glocal and, important of all, human.
(Of course he convinces the above average rather less powerfully than the average)
LikeLike