Review of 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Freidman

 
Indians (I guess its universal) have a tendency. We are very interested to know what foreigners think of our country than what we do ourselves. I am no exception. So when I read that a NY Times columnist wrote a book on India, (with globalization thrown around it!) you bet I was interested to know more.  
 
So I did. Thomas Friedman is a three-time Pulitzer prize winner and one of the best American columnists(My top slot goes to Paul Krugman). And the first thing that strikes you is the amount of effort that went into his book. Authors worldwide have this tendency to use a lot of anecdotes and less of sound research into their columns/books (Yours truly sure has). Not Tom. He has traversed Bangalore in India to Dalian in china to Taiwan to what else. And the quality is manifest in the book.
 
This book is about history of globalization in the twenty first century (History? an awfully short period at that!). Tom identifies ten major happenings that leveled the playing field.
 
Some of them are damn interesting- Netscape IPO is one of them. He argues the free distribution of the first browser has flattened the information field. Organizations could no longer have a monopoly over them.
 
Blogging has a mention. He argues that people no longer have to yell at their televisions to get heard. They got a medium. Also the proliferation of online journalism means the reach of journalists is no longer the function of  the size of their daily, but purely the quality of research they put- sooner or later they get a big audience.
 
There are thousand other things I could write (some of them like outsourcing is too clichéd!), but reader, get yourself a copy today. You can have a tab on this world even if you have just woken up from a long slumber, as long as 5 years!