'Flat'man Thomas Friedman returns, and quotes his grandmother.
Thomas Friedman is in the building. The dense hum of eager voices radiating from the upper level of the Tata Theatre at the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) gives that away. The NCPA is hosting the Tata Literature Live festival and everyone's milling around the doors of the auditorium waiting to go in and hear the man, who in 2005 pronounced the world flat.
No, Friedman is not a Terry Pratchett fanatic. Maybe he is. That's not the point. By the word 'flat', Friedman meant the process whereby the forces of globalisation powered by innovative technology levelled the playing field for everybody. This, in 2011, when the inequalities, the 'unflatness' if you will, of the globalised world has been exposed so graphically, it's a tricky proposition to defend.
Indeed R Jagannathan, editor of Firstpost and event moderator, wastes no time in firing the opening salvo. "Is the world really flat? Did you get it right?"
"No. I got it wrong. The world is so much flatter," comes the answer. Maybe its hubris, maybe denial, but Friedman has a bunch of these practised one-liners locked and loaded. "When I wrote The World is Flat, a cloud was in the sky. Twitter was silent. LinkedIn was a prison. And Skype for most people was still a typo," he shoots, before launching into a hackneyed spiel about how social networking played a key role in the Arab Spring.
Rama Bijapurkar, "a dominant voice on India's consumer economy", as the MC introduced her, isn't having any of it. "Technology achieves freer movement of capital, not people," she says, clearly steering the discussion towards the apocalyptic financial crisis in the West
Isn't the levelling happening only for an elite group? For the 1% vilified in all the posters at Occupy Wall Street protests? Friedman is put under the cosh a bit. He concedes that the technological advances were not accompanied by changes in the legal and regulatory systems, and that the political system got corrupted. But the famed ideologue of the free market wouldn't place an ounce of blame on the banks and corporations that perpetrated the whole financial mess. It was, as always, the government's fault.
At the end of the session, a man from the back-rows of the auditorium asks Friedman whether China will win the next century. Friedman responds by saying, "I'll tell you what my grandmother told me when I was a little boy. She said 'Tommy, never cede the century to a country that bans Google.'" It's classic Friedman. Funny, trite and full of himself.
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