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Discovering the World is Flat© 2008 Max Lent Thomas L. Friedman said in his book, The World is Flat, that he asked everyone he interviewed where they were when they discovered the world was flat. The following would have been my answer to his question. The year was 1998. The place was Katmandu, Nepal. My wife and I were walking through Durbar Square at sunset. The square is in the old section of the city where there were no street lights. The square was bordered on one side with ancient pagoda-like temples and on the others with antique and other stores. In the middle of the square were dozens and dozens of merchants who spread their goods on woven carpets. They sold various metal and stone statues, prayer wheels, jewelry, and hundreds of other goods that could easily have passed for antiques. The sellers were mostly dressed in traditional costume. As we walked around, the sunset turned to night. In the blackness, the merchants began lighting oil and kerosene lanterns to continue to display their goods. Pools of yellow light illuminated the old rugs displaying merchandise. Tourists walking between the vendors created mysterious shadows. The smells were of old wool carpets, incense, and fuel from the lamps. The sounds were mostly voices of Nepalese merchants calling out to each other and the hissing of the lamps. The scene was so primitive and so excluded from the outside world that if a tribe of horseback riding warriors from ancient China would have charged into the square we would not have been surprised. It was an awesome moment in a far away land that created a sensation of traveling back in time a thousand or more years. Like many moments of supreme ecstasy, it was all too short. We were getting hungry and the medication I was taking for virus I picked up on the flight to India was wearing off. It was time to return to our hotel. On our way back to the hotel we stopped off at an Internet access shop and sent email messages describing what we had just seen to friends and colleagues in the U.S. The juxtaposing of ancient and Internet culture within a few blocks of each other was dazzling. Nearly every town we visited in India and Nepal displayed signs over storefronts on nearly every block offering Internet access, email, and letter writing services. This was surprising to us. We like many Americans, wrongfully thought of India as backward, primitive, and a country of snake charmers and elephants before our visit. What we found everywhere we went was English speaking intelligent, educated, and charming people with a insatiable desire to better themselves. Because of difficulties in arranging our departure from Katmandu we were stranded in Nepal for several days. To creatively use our time we arranged for a two day trip to a Tiger preserve. On the drive down to the lowlands from the Himalayas we passed through many poverty stricken villages. Some of these villages were so poor that the major employment was making gravel, by hand. Men and women could be seen from the road breaking softball sized rocks into smaller rocks with hammers. The smaller rocks were passed on to the next person in a line of workers who would break the rocks into every smaller bits until, at the end of the line, gravel was produced. These workers lived on mud huts with doorways, but no doors. The huts had windows, but no window covering. Inside the huts there was little or no furniture. The stove was made of mud and about a foot square. Twigs were used to heat the cooking pot. The people slept on mats on the floor. This was poverty unlike any I had ever seen. Out of these huts, as we passed by them in the early morning, emerged children in British style school uniforms. Perfectly white shirts, dark blue pants or skirts and a dark blue blazer with polished shoes adorned the children. Many carried backpacks or briefcases. Some had books tied together with rope. We asked our driver about the children and about how the parents could afford such uniforms. We were told that the parents of every child we saw wanted their child to grow up and become the next Bill Gates. He explained that the parents would make any sacrifice to ensure that their children were educated. Education was seen as the means of ensuring that their children would never have to make gravel by hand. On this trip, I wrote all of my travel notes on a PDA with a detachable keyboard. Everywhere I traveled in India, people would come up to me and demand a demonstration of the technology I was using. At the end of the demonstration they requested specific details on how they could obtain such a PDA. When I returned to my job at Global Crossing, I expressed to my managers that fabulous opportunities existed for our company in India. Their telecommunications infrastructure was primitive, but being used in every technological way imaginable. I described the thirst for technology that I observed. I expressed the benefits of doing business with an English speaking people who were educated and entrepreneurial. I also said that if our company didn't exploit this situation, other companies would. I had no knowledge of Indian government or politics, but I knew from speaking with its people that they were a force that had to be recognized and would be no matter what we did or did not do. I was fortunate to have managers who would listen to my stories from the other side of the world. Unfortunately, Global Crossing was at that time being artificially fattened by an investment banker for sale to the highest bidder. My observations were appreciated, but nothing came of them. What Global Crossing was doing at that time was laying fiber optic cable across the planet. The work that I was doing for the company was helping to pave the way for globalization. Soon India would have access to more and better high speed Internet access. India was in the process of privatizing its telecommunications infrastructure and moving, as described in Friedman's book, toward becoming a world technology power. Between 1998 and now, I had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that the Internet was changing the world in ways not yet described by authors. Friedman has proved that my feelings were warranted. There's still more to be discovered about the effects of the Internet on the World. Friedman discovered the effect of the Internet on economics and the effect that the changed economics had on everything else. I feel that something even more important is going on as the people of the world can answer almost any basic question through the Web. I believe that this access to information is changing our intellect in ways that we do not yet understand. Sometime around 2000 the Internet became the answer to more questions than the world had to ask. It is not unimaginable to think that education in the future will not be based on memorizing facts, but on asking unique and creative questions. What is wonderful is that the children growing up in Nepal, India, China, and the rest of the world will access to the answers.
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©1995- 2008 Max Lent
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