It's all well and good that Tom Friedman's planet is flat, but the one I live on is quite round.
In today's Op Ed at the NY Times, he describes his recent trip to Mumbai where he attended the yearly meeting of India's high tech association, Nasscom. He left the Oberoi (average room price US$249.) pretty early yesterday, and hopped into the waiting car, bid good morning to his driver, and quickly dialed home on his cell. The eleven and a half hour time difference made finding a time to talk with his wife and daughters back in the States a little tricky. Catching up on his kids' news, he was oblivious to the incredibly horrendous traffic, as well as the large dhobi ghat near the train station. There are several of these scattered around town, and at this one there are about 200 families running their individual laundry businesses. Clothes are washed by hand, pounded on stones, rinsed, hung out to dry and then neatly ironed. These businesses are hereditary, and often customer and laundry relationships last for generations. It's an amazing site, and you can see the photo here.
Tom got onto the lush campus where the conference was being held and jumped right in. He learned that the education of too many Indian and Chinese students was tilted too heavily science and math, and speculated that "we're at the start of a global convergence in education: China and India will try to inspire more creativity in their students. America will get more rigorous in math and science.... It's a win-win."
You can see that the world is really getting flat as a pancake (more like a crepe actually). I'm convinced!
But try convincing the Dhobi and his children. Or the 40% of India that is illiterate. If Tom spends 11 days at the Oberoi, his hotel room alone will be greater than the per capita GDP in India. On his next trip from N.Y. to Beijing, Tom will spend 50% more on his business class American Airlines Flight than the per capita GDP in China.
In 2005 there were an estimated 2.4 million Africans flattened by Aids. They died of it.Yesterday 58 people were killed in Iraq. And of course, we are all waiting to hear whether or not our friends in Afghanistan hang a man for becoming a Christian.
During George "Not on My Watch" Bush's watch 400,000 are dead in Darfur. And it is estimated that 18,000 Americans died last year because they had no health insurance.
We knew that George Bush had neither interest in nor knowledge of any foreign cultures when we elected him. We knew that despite his "devotion" to Christ,he had only disdain for the poor and the sick.
But Tom Friedman is paid to be smart and to inform us of the world - supposedly the whole world. Not just the world which bemoans the lack of PhD candidates in the study of Sanskrit in India, as his utterly useless column did today.
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