Wal-Mart And bin Laden

The title itself, as Friedman explains, grew out of a remark by Nandan Nilekani of Infosys to the effect that globalisation is levelling the playing field for business across the world. Friedman recounts "what he is saying I thought is that the plain field is being flattened...he is telling me that the world is flat". Indeed, few books on globalisation have devoted so many pages to Indians and to India as this one does, although for most parts this is about information technology, call centres, or returned nris. However, what Friedman finds marvellous is not only the ways in which Indians have connected to the world after dumping Socialism, but also how India, with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, has by and large been unaffected by Al Qaeda.

Globalisation, according to Friedman, has had three epochs: The first from Columbus’ journey to America in 1492 to 1800, when the world shrunk from large to medium because of discovery of new lands; from 1800 to 2000 when industrialisation and hegemony of the multinationals made the world small; and the new flat tiny world of the present millennium where the creation of a global fibreoptic network has made us all next-door-neighbours. This is a categorisation unlikely to find much academic support either among historians, political scientists or economists. Yet, journeys, hegemony, multinationals and technology are what this book is all about—as indeed were Friedman’s earlier books. His other obsession—why militant Islam is such a threat to America—is also woven in. The new World Wide Web is a technology that not only allows Wal-Mart but also bin Laden to perfect supply chains.

For a book whose main theme is the shrinking of the world because of information technology, Friedman has done an awful lot of old-fashioned travel and conducted many old-fashioned interviews. Indeed, this rambling book would have been unreadable had it not been for the many details of personal encounters with well-known people and of little pieces of information that make abstract ideas real. The journalist in Friedman has a big "I", but it is precisely this personal tone that makes him readable.

The Guardian reviewer may have exaggerated the shallowness of the intellectual content of the book. But the idea that the integration of China and India into the global economy is an important event is surely nothing new. As Joseph Stiglitz notes, Friedman underplays the new opportunities for monopolisation, especially in the field of intellectual property and focuses only on winners, not the losers. Also, some of what Friedman glorifies—how computers track employees on trucks to different Wal-Mart stores, for instance—could almost be Orwellian.

This is a book whose size deters but it contains some nuggets. In a characteristic burst of self- obsession, Friedman describes what he found out about the life history of his personal laptop. The Dell supply chain that he describes is truly global. But for me, the real information was that India didn’t figure in this except possibly in the power cable. Much of the action discussed here is to do with the dotcom bubble of the late ’90s. The bubble allowed the world to get wired because of money from gullible investors, and when the bubble burst, companies everywhere had to cut spending and the solution was outsourcing. Viewed thus, Friedman’s tome is really about a shorter span than his "brief" history claims. The two dates which recur continuously are 11.9.89 when the Berlin Wall fell and 9/11 when the World Trade Centre was flattened. These two events also focus how America figures in this flat world. After all, it is the hegemonic and it still leads in technology and, like Friedman, cannot help viewing the rest of the world without putting itself in the centre.