World was never flat

I get somewhat amused every time I hear people talking about world becoming flatter and people shunning the boundaries that separate them. The more I think about that, the more dubious the evidences appear. The world certainly seems to be better than at the Cold War. During those times, our media was so biased that we would hear extreme opposite coverage of the same incidents when reported by West and East blocks. The Gulf war or even the post-911 war-mongering was probably not nearly as bad as how things were during Cold war. The sentiments against each other were so deep that the most intellectual pursuits failed to overcome them. On one hand, the Eastern block had scientists commanded by the dictator of proletariat while on the other scientific communities were shying away giving Nobel prizes to intellectuals from the East. At one point, the peace Nobel prizes seemed to be a prerogative of previous US Cold War is over, but the institutional propaganda and our conscious ignorance are still a part of our lives. My last few observations have been the about the way East is covered in the West (I am clearly more likely to observe them than most of others). The fact that we get filtered information about the world in US is very well established. One thought that I wanted elaborate was how media has successfully been able to engineer into most of our minds that India is a rising power, and that to a large extent, outsourcing is responsible for it. presidents. Both of these claims are inaccurate. That India is rising as a competitor to West, is itself a myth. A country with such extreme poverty and malnutrition clearly doesn’t have enough resources and institutions to sustain its own people. Poverty is not an unfortunate side-effect of growth in India. Poverty in India is incomparably widespread and a part of life. The little progress and growth that account for 8% GDP growth rate, is largely due to foreign investments in India and is limited into Western establishments localized into metropolitan areas.

But that is not to suggest that India by itself is incapable of doing much. Of course, the investments in India are not out of charity. They are market holdings in an economy capable of clear growth. But that is not what we learn from our media.We are made to believe that most of India is coming out of poverty because of American intervention - a combination of foreign aid and monetary investment. India's growth is indeed tied to the growth of US, but the relationship is not out of charity or a cold-war era agreement. It is largely due to the way world is changing. The impact of the kind of fear built against imaginary monsters like India and China are long lasting and extremely susceptible to political manipulation. One example is how Americans are made to fear about Iran’s possession of nuclear power; the American media chose not to mention the pact between India and America, which was not liked by the most of European countries as it gave undue advantage to India despite it’s refusal to sign the test-ban treaty. People are made to fear the outsourcing (something that apparently jeopardizes American interests but is widely accepted in the corporate world) and the nuclear proliferation (in India’s case it was favored by the corporate America) at the same time, yet it is institutions in the US itself that are are responsible for these developments in the East. Media doesn't offer any transparency in those matters. It offers us contradictory yet comfortable truths that we want to believe in.