World is small indeed...

I work for a software services company in Bangalore, India. We undertake contract with many major product companies in the United States to manage their software product release cycles either completely or partially. During this process, we work very closely with the team in the US by way of regular emails, text and voice chat sessions, phone conferences etc. Every week, on an average, every single member of the team here interacts with our counterparts in the US, 3-4 hours only through phone or chat sessions. Emails communications happen in plenty and much more frequently. There are also occasional visits from either side to the other, for reasons like knowledge transfer and such things. All this has led us to understand each other better. Together we work on building the expertise on technology. While doing this, we rarely constrain ourselves thinking that benefits of technology should/will reach only the companies that we work for, or be localized to any specific part of the world. As a matter of fact, all of us are parties to this and all of us equally benefit from the technology we develop as a team, and ultimately will bring us even more closer and bridge the gaps that was perceived to be there, between us and them for long years.

I started to think about this more, and then I began to appreciate how much the world has become a much smaller place to live in than it was when I was a kid. During those times, I never had imagined that I will work for a software firm in the United States, and I will ever interact with a team over there and that we will ever meet somebody over there, who will prove to have such a significant impact on our lives. We were completely blind during those times, with my parents having heard about America only in the local radio news, seen it only in the pictures (there were absolutely no videos in those times) that appear occasionally in the newspapers, when some once-in-a-bluemoon international event happened, absolutely not seen an American guy in ‘flesh and blood’ in their whole lives. Imagine, having lived up all our childhood in high reverence of the people of America who gave our unlit houses, the much needed electricity (and lot more), it indeed is a great feeling now to reach this stage. Now, not only we work together closely and know each other a lot, we also get sincere appreciations from those people for what we do for them. I feel great! World has indeed become small, and with growing times, I hope it will continue to get smaller, before it becomes one big (or small?) village…

Sometimes, I even day-dream of such a global village, where all of us including the Indians, the Americans, the Russians, the British etc live in unity, helping each other with only love pervading our lives. Over the next few decades, or maybe centuries later, I believe, this will become possible. Even if that doesn’t happen, at least, all of us will be closer, much closer than today. The only thing that saddens me is I may not be around, to see it all happen…