Truly Flat

The world is no longer round but is flat says New York Times journalist, Thomas L Friedman in his book “The World is Flat”. Friedman propounds that the playing field has been leveled due to technology. In his book, he explains the various forces that flattened the world which all started with the Fall of the Berlin wall and how there has been a paradigm shift in the thought process of people from “Me and my computer” in the late 80’s, to “Me and others” in the 90’s envisaged by the internet and instant messaging to the present scenario of seamless integration between “My application and their application”.

As I was reading the book, I thought about some of my own experiences, which reaffirmed my faith in the notion that the World is flat. I had been to Chicago in December 2005 for a project. It was wintertime and it was really cold. Chicago is often termed as a windy city and the cold was biting and unbearable for a person like me who never had to withstand such cold in the past. I was all alone in this windy city and knew no one out there. I was least inclined to move out also because of the extreme cold. Since I landed there on a weekend, for 2 days I was there in my hotel room just like Sanjay Dutt in Zinda absolutely alone and the only person whom I talked to in person was the black lady who used to get me shredded bits of plastic (read cornflakes) and milk for my breakfast. I called up home and literally broke down saying that I was all alone, that there was no one to talk to and that I could not go out because of the cold. After the initial outburst, I just started settling down and lent my ear to dad’s stoic philosophy and its underling principle that Survival is an art.

As soon as I put down the receiver, I got a ring from the front desk saying that a laptop has been shipped to me and that I should go down to collect it. I was a bit delighted but didn’t quite know the reason. I brought the laptop to my room and got it charged. What next? I was at a loss. I wasn’t the sort of tech savvy person and never in my life had I a yahoo account and never had I used the instant messaging system. I remembered Shyam Mohan, a friend of mine who used to eat, drink and sleep on yahoo and who used to relentlessly chat with his ladylove who was located just 10 houses down the lane of his house so much so that if he screamed she could hear it. I got on setting up a yahoo account for myself, the first of its kind other than my company id and went on to set up the instant messaging system. I added some of my friends’ ids and waited for them with my eyes glued to the laptop screen. For a while no one seemed to come online.

I went back to the fantasy world created by Jhumpa Lahiri when suddenly I heard a knocking sound. It wasn’t the black lady but it was my friend Preethi, about whom I was thinking a while ago, pinging me on instant messaging. I was delighted. It was as though somebody had brought her and made to stand in front of me. I was getting ecstatic as a few minutes of chat made me exuberant and the life which I was cribbing as insipid was suddenly turning out to be exhilarating one. I was just beginning to wonder at the amazing ability of the Internet to change things. It was giving something, which a Jhumpa Lahiri or an Arundathi Roy book couldn’t give. She was sitting there in Mumbai at the other side of the world and was chatting with me as though she was with me in the same room. Amazing. She went on to show some of the photos she had taken in their recently concluded fresher party at her college. Soon another friend of mine, Reghu, came online. He shared with me the photos of Ganga Snan and the Ram and Lakshman joola at Haridwar. I couldn’t just control the excitement. Here I was in Chicago and I am seeing the photos of Haridwar, a beautiful serene religious place in Uttaranchal, shown to me by a friend sitting at Delhi. The way digitized information such as files, photos, data, music etc could be sent over the Internet was suddenly appearing to me amazing though for the past two years I had been sending out emails and reports to my onsite coordinator who again was sitting miles away from me but which had never got my attention to this extend that I started wowing at the power of the Internet.

Technology has gone far more than instant messaging and emails. Blogging, of which I became aware, quite recently is absolutely wonderful. It gives us a space of our own and makes us a part of the Internet fraternity. It allows us to write and publish information on the net and makes it available not only to the ones we know but also to the unknown. It has given us a platform to express our ideas, thoughts and share them with many like us. Amazing, Isn’t it?
What more, it has even provided to many amongst us a vent to our creative energies. Anyone aspiring to be a reporter or a journalist need not get into any News company but just needs to have an arsenal that includes a tape recorder, a mobile that can take snaps and access to internet. Here you have your own channel, your own means to publish news and make it available to a large section of society. My God, am going crazy.
There hasn’t been anything that has flattened the world so much as the Internet. Truly, the world is flat. I am sure Christopher Columbus might be spinning in his grave after hearing so many of us yelling, “ The world is Flat”.