World turned upside down
How does one categorise a decade which has been so convulsive that convulsions feared getting a complex? The events that gripped the globe after the millennium’s first rays of the sun kissed the silver beaches of Katchal in Andaman & Nicobar, astounded as much as they benumbed; overpowered as much as they overwhelmed; bewildered as much as they stupefied the world order.
From global terror to China, from artificial life being created in an American lab to the world’s best connectivity tool emerging from an unkempt college dorm, from the Lehman Brothers sending shivers down the world’s economic spine, to a former hacker bringing a superpower’s global duplicity to public domain — almost everything unthinkable that could have possibly happened, happened in this tumultuous decade.
As the Chinese would say, we lived in interesting times. But as the Indians would stress, we survived it all and to the best of our capabilities. Yes, the receding polar caps befogged us, violence benumbed us, polarisation bewildered us, religion blinded us, boundaries blurred, confusion confounded, technology dazzled, sports distracted and recession paralysed us for some time. But then, tomorrow continued to be yet another day, with yet another dawn adding yet another meaning to life.
And in this continuity lay the essence of existence from which emanated the moulders of the next decade. In that context, this decade told us how jeena isi ka naam hai, as opposed to mocking us with yeh jeena bhi koi jeena hai lallu.
To do a total recall, let’s go round the globe before stopping on India whose rise and rise on the global firmament was one of the biggest revolutions that the world recorded between 2000-2010.
Starting point: The United States of America. To put it in one line, Uncle Sam aged, went nuts and finally showed signs of senility. The free world of America came tumbling down all counts: The dramatically televised twin towers collapsing before a stunned global audience altered the DNA of global geopolitics for all times to come. The situation got aggravated by the paranoiac reaction of the Bush regime which went on a hot pursuit of the perpetrators only to return to the log room to record no big catch, huge American casualty and misadventures so big in Iraq that Vietnam looked emaciated in comparison.
Meanwhile, the superpower’s economic culture, sporting the goodies of liberalisation, ended up mortgaging the world’s future which had so wholesomely got linked to the dollar dreams that nothing could save it from destruction: An entire country, Iceland, declared itself bankrupt; jobs went out of the window; global infrastructural projects had to be put on life support; banks resembled desperados behind bars and money anarchy started looking bigger and more menacing than any creature Steven Spielberg could have conjured up for his special effects fans.
The bad part of all this was the indigenous chaos that the US engineered for itself, hit the rest of the world which it had so assiduously plugged into its main switch over the years.
So when America sneezed, the globe contracted flu. The symptoms and the manifestation were near fatal: Joblessness, stock market crashes, mass dislocation of working populations, shooting inflation, bankruptcies, suicides and populational depression defined mental and physical instability. The Great Depression of the Big Millennium, as some called it, showed how liberalisation should have been adopted with a large measure of native endeavour, desi industry and national growth tools, independent of the enticingly globalised world.
That’s what India’s diligent mix of indigenous economy with world economic alignment showed; that’s what a closed China’s in-built checks and balances taught. It was sheer American abandon that US so unthinkingly became the biggest debtor of China; And, it was equally sheer Indian intelligence that the nation grew in global imagination as it did on trans-national cheque books.
In that sense, the emerging economies were the biggest change-makers of this decade, India leading with example. Come to think of it, the Indians were everywhere — colonising jobs worldwide; capturing the outsourcing boom; hijacking dream merchants; buying of global corporate giants; coming in large numbers on the world billionaire lists; engineering an unprecedented medical tourism coup; becoming the clout point of cricket; buying up ailing football clubs in Europe; triggering a gentle cultural imperialism through alternative medicine and Yoga; butting into fashion; conquering world beauty pageants and, last but not the least, emerging as one of the most acquisitive countries of Asia, second perhaps only to China.
Yet, this global climb did not keep it away from domestic plummet — from scams to price rise, crime to pollution, floating populations to dwindling farm produce — everything bad that could have happened, happened to India — telling a story of stupefying paradoxes in which the only thing equal were overall gain and overall loss.
If India was one good thing in a bad, mad, sad world, there were other very good things which did very bad things to human mind. The list for conservatives here would be exhaustive even though the younger generation would scoff at concern. Youth carefreeness apart, isn’t it scary that the telecom revolution brought with it the incapability of remembering numbers? Or, for that matter, the computers came with a health hazard so varied (sedentary became a curse as much as stiff necks and screen glares did for eyes); the fast food revolution came embedded in diabetes, hypertension and heart epidemic, not to mention obesity; the IT boom was riddled in stress and mental imbalances, not to mention the advent of modernity itself felling all forms of social values and death of the family system.
If Mark Zuckerberg gave us a never-before friends connectivity platform and shrunk the world virtually to one-fourth its massive size, he also induced in GenX the virus of Facebook Addiction Disorder. If Jeff Besoz gave this generation an electronic reason to get back to books, the Kindle also contributed to abandonment of the playground. If Assange gave whistleblowing a new avatar, he plummeted diplomatic immunity to undiplomatic anarchy. If industrial development and exploitation of natural resources became the tools of human existence, natural disasters came in as the scariest protests organised by Nature in a long time. If America aged, China arrived — both unbridled enough to evoke global concern.
All said, the world turned upside down, almost went out of hand, put almost everything dear to humanity on life support and then showed signs of settling down. So, this decade was a twister which damaged but not annihilated.
Revolution No 1 India arrives
Nowhere has the boom been more evident than in India. Companies such as Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Hindalco and Bharti Telecom, among others, have made acquisitions in the past few years that have put them on the global map. These, and other transactions from Asia into Europe, have set benchmarks in their industries.
In the first year of this decade, outbound Indian M&A was around $5 billion. Things picked up in the second half of the decade with close to $85 billion worth of deals announced in the past five years -- making India one of the most acquisitive countries in Asia.
As India has emerged during the decade, more and more international funds have been looking to invest in equity or debt instruments from the country. Companies, keen to raise capital to support growth, have provided ample supply.
By 2005 issuance from India had topped $28 billion -- hitting 10% of total Asia-Pacific supply. In 2010 already, issuance from India is in excess of $33 billion with a share of 12.5%. This capital will be used to support growth and the expected further increase in outbound M&A from the country.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, December 26, 2010
From global terror to China, from artificial life being created in an American lab to the world’s best connectivity tool emerging from an unkempt college dorm, from the Lehman Brothers sending shivers down the world’s economic spine, to a former hacker bringing a superpower’s global duplicity to public domain — almost everything unthinkable that could have possibly happened, happened in this tumultuous decade.
As the Chinese would say, we lived in interesting times. But as the Indians would stress, we survived it all and to the best of our capabilities. Yes, the receding polar caps befogged us, violence benumbed us, polarisation bewildered us, religion blinded us, boundaries blurred, confusion confounded, technology dazzled, sports distracted and recession paralysed us for some time. But then, tomorrow continued to be yet another day, with yet another dawn adding yet another meaning to life.
And in this continuity lay the essence of existence from which emanated the moulders of the next decade. In that context, this decade told us how jeena isi ka naam hai, as opposed to mocking us with yeh jeena bhi koi jeena hai lallu.
To do a total recall, let’s go round the globe before stopping on India whose rise and rise on the global firmament was one of the biggest revolutions that the world recorded between 2000-2010.
Starting point: The United States of America. To put it in one line, Uncle Sam aged, went nuts and finally showed signs of senility. The free world of America came tumbling down all counts: The dramatically televised twin towers collapsing before a stunned global audience altered the DNA of global geopolitics for all times to come. The situation got aggravated by the paranoiac reaction of the Bush regime which went on a hot pursuit of the perpetrators only to return to the log room to record no big catch, huge American casualty and misadventures so big in Iraq that Vietnam looked emaciated in comparison.
Meanwhile, the superpower’s economic culture, sporting the goodies of liberalisation, ended up mortgaging the world’s future which had so wholesomely got linked to the dollar dreams that nothing could save it from destruction: An entire country, Iceland, declared itself bankrupt; jobs went out of the window; global infrastructural projects had to be put on life support; banks resembled desperados behind bars and money anarchy started looking bigger and more menacing than any creature Steven Spielberg could have conjured up for his special effects fans.
The bad part of all this was the indigenous chaos that the US engineered for itself, hit the rest of the world which it had so assiduously plugged into its main switch over the years.
So when America sneezed, the globe contracted flu. The symptoms and the manifestation were near fatal: Joblessness, stock market crashes, mass dislocation of working populations, shooting inflation, bankruptcies, suicides and populational depression defined mental and physical instability. The Great Depression of the Big Millennium, as some called it, showed how liberalisation should have been adopted with a large measure of native endeavour, desi industry and national growth tools, independent of the enticingly globalised world.
That’s what India’s diligent mix of indigenous economy with world economic alignment showed; that’s what a closed China’s in-built checks and balances taught. It was sheer American abandon that US so unthinkingly became the biggest debtor of China; And, it was equally sheer Indian intelligence that the nation grew in global imagination as it did on trans-national cheque books.
In that sense, the emerging economies were the biggest change-makers of this decade, India leading with example. Come to think of it, the Indians were everywhere — colonising jobs worldwide; capturing the outsourcing boom; hijacking dream merchants; buying of global corporate giants; coming in large numbers on the world billionaire lists; engineering an unprecedented medical tourism coup; becoming the clout point of cricket; buying up ailing football clubs in Europe; triggering a gentle cultural imperialism through alternative medicine and Yoga; butting into fashion; conquering world beauty pageants and, last but not the least, emerging as one of the most acquisitive countries of Asia, second perhaps only to China.
Yet, this global climb did not keep it away from domestic plummet — from scams to price rise, crime to pollution, floating populations to dwindling farm produce — everything bad that could have happened, happened to India — telling a story of stupefying paradoxes in which the only thing equal were overall gain and overall loss.
If India was one good thing in a bad, mad, sad world, there were other very good things which did very bad things to human mind. The list for conservatives here would be exhaustive even though the younger generation would scoff at concern. Youth carefreeness apart, isn’t it scary that the telecom revolution brought with it the incapability of remembering numbers? Or, for that matter, the computers came with a health hazard so varied (sedentary became a curse as much as stiff necks and screen glares did for eyes); the fast food revolution came embedded in diabetes, hypertension and heart epidemic, not to mention obesity; the IT boom was riddled in stress and mental imbalances, not to mention the advent of modernity itself felling all forms of social values and death of the family system.
If Mark Zuckerberg gave us a never-before friends connectivity platform and shrunk the world virtually to one-fourth its massive size, he also induced in GenX the virus of Facebook Addiction Disorder. If Jeff Besoz gave this generation an electronic reason to get back to books, the Kindle also contributed to abandonment of the playground. If Assange gave whistleblowing a new avatar, he plummeted diplomatic immunity to undiplomatic anarchy. If industrial development and exploitation of natural resources became the tools of human existence, natural disasters came in as the scariest protests organised by Nature in a long time. If America aged, China arrived — both unbridled enough to evoke global concern.
All said, the world turned upside down, almost went out of hand, put almost everything dear to humanity on life support and then showed signs of settling down. So, this decade was a twister which damaged but not annihilated.
Revolution No 1 India arrives
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