Shaking up the world, globalisation is a word that is to be found on everyone’s lips these days, from politicians to businessmen world wide. As old as civilisation itself, it is nothing, but the new avatar of ancient trade that took place between the two halves of the globe i.e. East and West. Silks, cottons, spices, ivory, other arts and crafts and handicrafts found their way to western shores via the ancient land Silk and Spice Routes and more. Indian silks, ivory, spices made their way to Rome and other great empires through these very routes. Even more evidence of the ancient globalisation is to be found at Bagram in north-west Kabul, a city that lay on this ancient Silk Route, where a shop has been excavated with boxed Indian ivory dating back to between 1st century BC and 3rd century BC.

And, a hoard of 60,000 Roman coins belonging to the 1st century BC have been found along the Cauvery River, which again lies along the ancient Spice Route, strongly corroborating manuscriptal evidence that spices were the most valuable items of trade in the ancient and mediaeval world. With Ancient India right in the middle of global trade, archaelogical remains, particularly a seal excavated from the mouth of the Gomti River in the Gulf of Kutch (Gujrat, India) indicate that the region was a part of Lord Krishna’s Dwarka. While, at Elephanta Islands, 2,000 years old Roman pottery has been discovered indicating rich trade between the late Roman Empire between 4th century AD and 7th centruy AD. On the west coast at Chaul, Maharashtra, evidence of trade with Oman from 1st century AC to the 13th century AD has been found. Evidence of trade with Japan has been traced right up to Japan, from the West, as well as, the East Coast of India.

It is now evident that India right bang in the middle of global trade, had contacts all over the ancient world, right from the Red Sea in the west to South China Sea in the east and globalisation is nothing new. However, in its new avatar, it is undoubtedly a phenomena that is changing the world and to understand the impact it is having on the two divides of the globe i.e. East vs West, a minutely thorough examination is needed.

Moreover, there are few places in the world that have seen the dramatic effects of globalisation much more than Bangalore or Bengaluru, the Silicon Valley of India, which has experienced and is experiencing an unprecedented boom in Information Technology (IT), IT, responsible for transforming and continuing to change the prospects of the Indian economy.

While, there are those who blame the current trend of globalisation for the ills of the modern world, then there are those who praise it for bringing unprecedented prosperity. But, what may we ask ourselves, is globalisation, including what are the forces that are shaping it?

Toss The Coin! Is Globalisation - Good or Bad?

The question everyone is mulling over is, whether globalisation is benefiting everyone or not? The accelerating pace of globalisation is having a profound effect on the life of people, inhabiting rich and poor countries, alike. In just a generation, regions such as, Detroit, USA or Bangalore, India from have been transformed from boom to bust, and vice versa.

And, if economists are asked for their opionion, their categorical response will be that globalisation could well be the explanation for key trends transversing world economy, for example:

• A lowering of workers’ wages and higher profits, in Western economies.
• An influx of migrants to bigger cities in Third World countries.
• Low inflation and low interest rates, despite strong growth.

Undoubtedly, globalisation has played and continues to play a key role in spreading prosperity from rich, First World countries, such as, USA and Europe, to many formerly poor Asian countries, including China and India.

Defining Globalisation

In economic terms, globalisation can be defined as growing economic integration of the world, with trade, investment and money increasingly crossing international borders (with possible political or cultural implications).

However, globalisation is not relatively new. From global trading that took place between Rome, India, Egypt and China, it is also a product of the industrial revolution that swept Great Britain in the 19th century. Great Britain, who grew rich on it, and became the first global economic superpower, all because of its superior manufacturing technology and improved global communications, such as, steamships and railroads. Why do you think the British concentrated in criss-crossing India with a railway network, built with the sweat, blood and tears of Indians, and of course, Indian money! They built a wide network of Indian Railways for their own benefit, to speedily send cash crops, such as, Indian cotton to be woven into cloth to Manchester, Indian teak, mahogany, oak, sal, rosewood, sandalwood, coffee, tea, including opium to China (remember the Opium Wars between the Chinese and the British). And, globalisation helped Britain grow rich, helping to milk its colonies dry!

Meanwhile, years following World War II have seen the pace, scope and scale of globalisation accelerate dramatically, especially in the last 25-years, as information technology (IT) spreads rapidly and Internet changes the way companies organise production, and increasingly allow services, including manufacturing to be globalised.

Global IT Outsourcing Leader

As India and China open their economies to the world, they have doubled their global labour force overnight, thus serving as the main drivers behind globalisation. India, has gone on to become the global IT outsourcing leader, and from the look for things is fast turning into an R&D and manufacturing hub, as the world realises, while China excels in cheap, tacky quantity, it is India that offers both superior technical skills and quality.

Trade Roll (Role)

With world trade in manufactured goods increasing more than 100-times (from $95-billion to $12-trillion), in the past 50-years since 1955, it has acted as an engine for globalisation, growing faster than world economy, overall.

Export of manufactured goods, especially to rich countries has increased since 1960, due to the fact international agreements have lowered tariff and non-tariff barriers, thereby easing restrictions on global trade.

Japan, Korea and now China and India are a few of the countries that have dramatically raised their standard of living, simply by enlarging their role in the world trading system, by targeting exports to rich countries. Post war years have seen more and more of global production carried out by big multi-national firms operating across borders, going increasingly global, as they locate their manufacturing plants overseas, all with a view to capitilise on cheap labour costs and market proximity.

And, as one-third of all trade is within companies e.g. Toyota ships car parts from Japan to the US for final assembly, this makes even harder to keep track of globalisation. More recently, we seer multinationals like Apple and Dell becoming ‘virtual firms’, in view of the fact, nearly all their production has been outsourced to mainly Asian firms.

Globalisation Of The Service Sector

Not only, is globalisation posing a threat to the Western manufacturing industry, but the services sector, including everything from hairdressers to education to accounting and software development, is increasingly impacted by globalisation.

Many global firms are shifting internal functions, simply to cut costs and turn some profits, and many service sector jobs are under serious threat from the outsourcing and off-shoring phenomena sweeping the world.

What China is to manufacturing, India has become to the new world of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), which covers a wide gamut of services, from everything to payroll to billing to IT support. As a consequence, every major international IT firm, now has a huge presence in India, even while planning to expand investments in the sub-continent.

The Bangalore Tigers

Thus, the off-shoring / outsourcing phenomena is giving birth to a number of Bangalore Tigers, with several dynamic new Indian firms beginning to challenge multinationals for global leadership. Bangalore Tigers that comprise of and include firms, such as, TCS, Infosys and WIPRO.

Attitudes and consumption habits of young Indians are undergoing major changes, as young IT workers find new found affluence and educated young people, unlike India’s previous generations , are for the first time able to afford luxuries, such as, motor cars and home ownership.

Anxiety Ridden West

The dizzying pace of change, unprecedented globalisation, a new world order has the West frightened and anxious at the changes and those to come. A recent poll by Deloitte Touche carried out in November 2006, confirms Britons are increasingly worried about the outsourcing of white collar jobs in the UK.

Those who consider globalisation to be a good thing have seen their numbers drop, from 29% in January 2006 to 13% in November, and 82% of the public says enough jobs had been sent overseas, as 32% want to force local firms into bringing them back to Britain.

As for USA, the Democratic victory in Congressional elections in November 2006 saw a focus mainly on the worrying impact globalisation was having on jobs and wages.

Increasing globalisation is seeing world governments finding it tough to keep national economic destiny in their own hands, as the speed and scale of economic change make sit increasingly difficult for them to agree to fair rules for a new global economic order.

International institutions, such as, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) face flack for not taking into account labour standards or the impact of trade on the environment, as all its efforts to break down global trade barriers falter. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, set up for running the international monetary system and co-ordinating aid flows to poor countries, are also severely criticised for refusing emerging market economies, such as, India and China, to play a bigger role.

With little international regulation of other globalisation aspects, it remains to be seen Who Runs The World! The key question to be answered is, whether increasing globalisation of the world economy will be echoed in a parallel increase in global regulations, including whether it will be beneficial or not so, for world economic growth and equality.

However, till such time an answer to those questions is found, the fact remains that India has got its spurs on and could well outrun US to become the second largest economy in the world after China. And, to that end it is helped in great part by the Bangalore Tigers, who have spurred India on, unleashing a latent potential that India and young Indians could not have conceived they possessed, so under the shadow of the West, both economically and psychologically, the damaging British Raj left generation after generation of Indians.

However, globalisation has helped them explode myth after myth of white supremacy, even as, the Myth of the Aryan Race stands exploded in the face of archaelogical and manuscriptal evidence.

While, Indian Tigers spring up all across the length and breadth of India, it is the Bangalore Tigers, who are mainly responsible for India’s transformation from Britain’s former dusty, colonial outpost, to a nation that stands tall, a nation that has seized the tiger by its tail, only to turn it globalisation to its own advantage, unlike when globalisation led to its ruin at the hands of the British!

Good or bad, it all depends on how it impacts one! Globalisation led to India’s ruin in its recent past, Today, it is helping put India back on its feet, as every Indian has begun to wear the Proud To Be Indian tag with pride!

As the Indian economy continues to grow and outstrip that of developed countries, slow growth and job scarcity in the West, has once again set the stage for the Great Game In Asia. Through bribes, diplomacy, and manipulation of weak native rulers, the British East India Company prospered in India, even as it drained her of all her wealth and natural resources. In a same kind of deja vu, just as company men came to India for the building of their fortunes, and in like manner every British family with a ‘thief, blackguard, scoundrel or black sheep’ in the cupboard, saw to it that they were shipped to India in double-quick time, to avoid further infamy brought on their illustrious family names, and, so too, the firangi invasion has started once again, with MNCs or little jump-start-me-ups trundling down under to make or recover their dwindling fortunes.

Looking back in time, one of the most remarkable spectacles in the history of British imperialism: the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first British governor general in India, for oppression, corruption, and gross abuse of power, with Hastings standing accused of nothing less than the Rape of India. And, it was a time when the violation of Bengali virgins and their mothers by rapacious tax collectors the British employed is described as: “they were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people…they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies.”

The plunder of Bengal and other Indian states by the British led, exactly 150 years ago, on 14th September 1857, to the Great Uprising or Mutiny against the British in India. The time saw British forces attacking Delhi, and entering the besieged city through a breach in the walls near the Kashmiri Gate, they proceeded to massacre not just the combatants ranged against them i.e. their own rebellious infantrymen (or sepoys), who were supported by freelance Muslim jihadis armed with battle-axes, but also ordinary defenseless citizens of the old Mughal capital. In one muhalla (neighbourhood) alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400-unarmed citizens of Delhi were cut down. “The orders went out to shoot every soul,” recorded Edward Vibart, and those city dwellers to survive the killing were driven out into the countryside to fend for themselves, leaving Delhi, a sophisticated city of maybe half a million souls, an empty ruin.

Though the Mughal imperial family surrendered peacefully, most of the Emperor’s sixteen sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first given up their arms, then told to strip and hand over their jewels. As for the Emperor himself, Bahadur Shah II, known by his pen name, Zafar. the last Mughal emperor, and the direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Timur, of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, was put on trial in his own palace and prosecuted as a rebel and traitor, despite the fact that the company had long acknowledged, even on its own seal, its legal status as the Emperor’s vassal. The court sentenced him to be banished to Burma. There he died and was buried in an unmarked grave, the Emperor, a noted poet, lamenteing in one of his last lyrics:

Most terrible of all was the plunder of Bengal following its conquest by the British in 1757, which saw the British commander Robert Clive returned to Britain with a huge fortune of Pounds 300,000, which made him one of the richest self-made men in Europe; just after one single battle – Battle of Plassey - he transferred no less than British Pounds 2.5 million to the company treasury, a sum he seized from the defeated Nawab of Bengal. The conquered province was left devastated by war and high taxation, and stricken by the famine of 1769. Its wealth rapidly drained into British bank accounts, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced ‘like so many slaves’ by their new British masters, and the markets were flooded with British products. As the contemporary historian Alexander Dow put it:

At that time, Bengal was one of the richest, most populous and best cultivated kingdoms in the world…. We may date the commencement of decline from the day on which Bengal fell under the dominion of foreigners.

In the same kind of deja vu, it seems to be happening all over again as, cutting their teeth in fast growing and highly challenging markets, such as, India and the Asia Pacific region is fast becoming a vital shortcut for ambitious managers of trans-national firms. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg, as most expatriate managers, who initially planned a one or two year stint in India, end up staying on much longer, given the richly rewarding experience of setting up a subsidiary from scratch and seeing it grow at an enviably clipping pace

Think General Electric’s Scott Bayman, who retires this month, thus bringing to an end a 15-year stint in India, or Kwang-Ro Kim, former Managing Director of LG Electronics India, whose ten years in India have seen him go on to become one of LG’s top five executives, and who has made the company a leader in almost every consumer durable category. There are mid to senior level managers, who less than a decade ago, took an enormous risk by coming to a little known market, but who now wield considerable clout in their parent firms, simply because of a penchant for living life on the edge.

Case in point, Thierry Cros, Managing Director - Seco Tools India, a firm that manufactures carbide cutting tools. Cros, a Frenchman, who came to India as Vice President - Marketing, seven years ago, and from a Joint Venture, his firm now stands as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Swedish firm - Seco Tools AB. So much so, Cros has decided to stay on as Head of the firm. “If, I had chosen to stay back in France, I’d have had to slog as a VP for at least four years before getting a crack at the top spot. And, I would have had to change firms,” affirms Cros.

Further, he says many current and former colleagues, with stagnating careers or those in the doldrums are taking a leaf out of his book, by actively seeking postings to markets, such as, India.

As in the past, so too in the present, the reasons are only too obvious. With most of the developed economies growing at a snail’s pace, salaries in India are rising and how, and the choice ‘to come or not to come to India’ is not so difficult, anymore. “You haven’t really arrived until you have had a stint in India or China. Large multi-nationals are all looking at India, as practically their second global headquarters, after the US. They have hand-picked teams to set up big units here and once these executives go back, they will be serious contenders for more senior-level or top positions,” says Rohit Kumar, Joint MD of Ikan Relocations, a Delhi-based relocation and immigration management firm.

Then there is Belgian, Arnold Camelbeke, Managing Director of Bekaert India, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Belgian major, NV Bekaert SA that is worth over Euro 2-billion, and a manufacturer of steel cord for radial tyres, who has been in India for 11-years, where he is beginning to feel more at home than ever.

So, what is it about India that makes the expatriate executives feel so comfortable and very much at home? No doubt, it is the fact that in India they end up on top of the heap, unlike in their own countries where they have to struggle hard bottom up. In India they count for somebody, but in their own country they are Nobodies. Then too, India offers them the opportunity to live in sprawlingly swanky bungalows in ritzy neighbourhoods reeking of ‘High Ton’, whereas in their own countries a small one or two-bedroomed apartment home in a middle-class area would be called home. And, back home, they would be hard pressed to afford a couple of maids, a cook, a chauffeur, a gardener, someone to wash and iron their clothes, a sweeper and more. Of course, back home they would be doing everything themselves, right do