The World is Flat - A Brief History of the 21st Century

Author: Thomas Friedman
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-11-01
Features:
Your Highness, as a devout Catholic, you love and are eager to spread our sacred faith, and you firmly oppose idolatry and other heresies. Therefore, you decide to send me—Christopher Columbus—to the states of India to meet the princes and people there, to experience the mountains, rivers, culture, customs, and folk traditions, in order to find the right way to lead them to embrace our sacred faith. You also instruct me not to follow the usual land route to the East but to choose a westward route that no one has yet taken. —Excerpt from Christopher Columbus’s 1492
No one has ever given me directions on a golf course like this: “Aim for Microsoft or IBM.” I am standing at the tee box of the KGA Golf Course in the center of Bangalore, southern India. My partner told me to aim for Microsoft or IBM, and he was referring to the two brilliant glass-steel buildings after the distant hole. At the time, the Goldman Sachs building was not yet completed, otherwise he would surely have used it as a landmark to direct me. The office buildings of HP and Texas Instruments are in the direction of the back nine holes, while the tenth hole is in the opposite direction.
The interesting part doesn’t stop there. The scorekeeper at the tee box is from Epson, and one of our caddies is wearing a hat from 3M in the United States. The traffic signs outside the course are sponsored by Texas Instruments, and a Pizza Hut billboard on the roadside advertises steaming hot pizza with the headline: “Absolutely Delicious!”
This isn’t Kansas in the United States, but it doesn’t quite feel like India either. Is this the New World, the Old World, or the next world?
I came to India’s “Silicon Valley”——Bangalore—like Columbus on his voyage. To find a shortcut to India, Columbus didn’t follow the Portuguese explorers of the time, who went southeast around Africa, but instead led his Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria westward across the Atlantic, through an unknown sea, and finally reached the islands he believed to be the East Indies. At the time, India and the Spice Islands were renowned for their gold, pearls, gems, and silk, and they held unimaginable wealth. The Islamic world at the time blocked land routes to India, so finding a sea shortcut would undoubtedly have allowed Columbus and his Spanish sponsors to quickly accumulate wealth and power.
Columbus clearly believed the Earth was round when he set sail, so he was certain that sailing west would lead him to India. However, he miscalculated the distance—he thought the Earth was much smaller. He also didn’t expect to encounter a vast continent before reaching the East Indies. He called the indigenous people he met in the New World “Indians.” But even if he didn’t reach the true India, he could still tell the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who supported him that he had proven “the Earth is indeed round.”
To reach India, I left the United States and flew eastward via Frankfurt. Sitting in Lufthansa’s business class, the screen that popped out from the armrest showed me my location via GPS.