The World and its Changing Colors
If you ever see the map of the world, you’ll see a distinct band of colors on it, each color representing a separate country and distinguishing it from the other. So, India’s painted in blue, the Gulf in green, Africa in red or Brazil in yellow- each highlighting one political boundary from the other.
This has been the way we’ve conceived our world to be. This has been the world in which our ancestors have come, lived and gone. Anything from beyond their understanding of known geographical boundaries was regarded as to be from ‘saat samundar paar’. Thus, our minds too ‘painted’ the world into shades of red, black and blue to distinguish ‘homelands’ from ‘phoren-lands’.
The colonial race and the industrial revolution helped magnify the concept of a politically and economically demarcated world all the more, thus making the shades on our world map a shade darker…and in our hearts too! So, now we even started to call our fellow ‘world-izens’ as whites, blacks, browns and yellows. Spectacular it would have looked from outer-space then to indeed see a
Planet with that multitude and spectrum of colors, a whole set of cutout blocks in a jigsaw puzzle.
But the picture of the world is much different today. Whether you see it from the space or being a part of it. The colors which seem to have looked so prominent and the countries that looked so far off are today in our own pockets…literally and imaginably. What you get to see is a world full of vernacular tastes blended with global cuisines. So you get to see a rickshaw puller in down-town Calcutta calling back home from his Nokia (Finland) cell phone, the son of a rich trader in Bihar listening to Bhojpuri music on his Sony (Japan) MP3 player, A 3 year old toddler from sub-urban Mumbai going every morning to the “American International School” and a family of a Punjabi farmer going to the McDonald’s (US) family restaurant on their FORD (US) tractor!
Internationalism is all around us. Look around and it becomes clearer that the 'world is flat' - indeed! Consider the increase in the number of air-travelers’ worldwide, the rising number of tourists to the third world and the ever-rising number going the opposite way, the statistics tell us all.
We today live in a world, which was un-thought of a couple of years ago. Be it the development of the world-wide-web or advancements in transport or our own urge to discover our world, we have come a long way. Many theories written by thinkers of yesteryears about nation-states and Statehood have now lost relevance; many wars fought in the history of times seem to be futile now…the world and its colors have undergone a paradigm shift. Its time we come up with a new copy of our world map.
If you ever see the map of the world, you’ll see a distinct band of colors on it, each color representing a separate country and distinguishing it from the other. So, India’s painted in blue, the Gulf in green, Africa in red or Brazil in yellow- each highlighting one political boundary from the other.
This has been the way we’ve conceived our world to be. This has been the world in which our ancestors have come, lived and gone. Anything from beyond their understanding of known geographical boundaries was regarded as to be from ‘saat samundar paar’. Thus, our minds too ‘painted’ the world into shades of red, black and blue to distinguish ‘homelands’ from ‘phoren-lands’.
The colonial race and the industrial revolution helped magnify the concept of a politically and economically demarcated world all the more, thus making the shades on our world map a shade darker…and in our hearts too! So, now we even started to call our fellow ‘world-izens’ as whites, blacks, browns and yellows. Spectacular it would have looked from outer-space then to indeed see a
Planet with that multitude and spectrum of colors, a whole set of cutout blocks in a jigsaw puzzle.
But the picture of the world is much different today. Whether you see it from the space or being a part of it. The colors which seem to have looked so prominent and the countries that looked so far off are today in our own pockets…literally and imaginably. What you get to see is a world full of vernacular tastes blended with global cuisines. So you get to see a rickshaw puller in down-town Calcutta calling back home from his Nokia (Finland) cell phone, the son of a rich trader in Bihar listening to Bhojpuri music on his Sony (Japan) MP3 player, A 3 year old toddler from sub-urban Mumbai going every morning to the “American International School” and a family of a Punjabi farmer going to the McDonald’s (US) family restaurant on their FORD (US) tractor!
Internationalism is all around us. Look around and it becomes clearer that the 'world is flat' - indeed! Consider the increase in the number of air-travelers’ worldwide, the rising number of tourists to the third world and the ever-rising number going the opposite way, the statistics tell us all.
We today live in a world, which was un-thought of a couple of years ago. Be it the development of the world-wide-web or advancements in transport or our own urge to discover our world, we have come a long way. Many theories written by thinkers of yesteryears about nation-states and Statehood have now lost relevance; many wars fought in the history of times seem to be futile now…the world and its colors have undergone a paradigm shift. Its time we come up with a new copy of our world map.
well written....provides the first hand experience on internships ... definitely of great help to young law students.
ReplyDeletebest wishes
Ivneet