While I Was Sleeping
Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians, and princes who love and promote the holy
Christian faith, and are enemies of the doctrine of Mahomet, and of all idolatry and heresy,
determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the above-mentioned countries of India,
to see the said princes, people, and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper
method of converting them to our holy faith; and furthermore directed that I should not
proceed by land to the East, as is customary, but by a Westerly route, in which direction
we have hitherto no certain evidence that anyone has gone.
-Entry from the journal of Christopher Columbus on his voyage of 1492
No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: “Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.” I was
standing on the first tee at the KGA Golf Club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing
partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green. The
Goldman Sachs building wasn’t done yet; otherwise he could have pointed that out as well and made it a
threesome. HP and Texas Instruments had their offices on the back nine, along the tenth hole. That wasn’t
all. The tee markers were from Epson, the printer company, and one of our caddies was wearing a hat from
3M. Outside, some of the traffic signs were also sponsored by Texas Instruments, and the Pizza Hut
billboard on the way over showed a steaming pizza, under the headline “Gigabites of Taste!”
No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas. It didn’t even seem like India. Was this the New World, the Old World, or
the Next World?
I had come to Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, on my own Columbus-like journey of exploration. Columbus
sailed with the ñ, the Pinta, and the Santa María in an effort to discover a shorter, more
direct route to India by heading west, across the Atlantic, on what he presumed to be an open sea route to the East
Indies-rather than going south and east around Africa, as Portuguese explorers of his day were trying to
do. India and the magical Spice Islands of the East were famed at the time for their gold, pearls, gems, and
silk-a source of untold riches. Finding this shortcut by sea to India, at a time when the Muslim powers of
the day had blocked the overland routes from Europe, was a way for both Columbus and the Spanish
monarchy to become wealthy and powerful. When Columbus set sail, he apparently assumed the Earth was
round, which was why he was convinced that he could get to India by going west. He miscalculated the
distance, though. He thought the Earth was a smaller sphere than it is. He also did not anticipate running
into a landmass before he reached the East Indies. Nevertheless, he called the aboriginal peoples he
encountered in the new world “Indians.” Returning home, though, Columbus was able to tell his patrons,
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, that although he never did find India, he could confirm that the world
was indeed round.
I set out for India by going due east, via Frankfurt. I had Lufthansa business class. I knew exactly which
direction I was going thanks to the GPS map displayed on the screen that popped out of the armrest of my
airline seat. I landed safely and on schedule. I too encountered people called Indians. I too was searching
for the source of India’s riches. Columbus was searching for hardware-precious metals, silk, and spices-the
source of wealth in his day. I was searching for software, brainpower, complex algorithms, knowledge
workers, call centers, transmission protocols, breakthroughs in optical engineering-the sources of wealth in
our day. Columbus was happy to make the Indians her met his slaves, a pool of free manual labor.
I just wanted to understand why the Indians I met were taking our work, why they had become such an
important pool for the outsourcing of service and information technology work from America and other
industrialized countries. Columbus had more than one hundred men on his three ships; I had a small crew
from the Discovery Times channel that fit comfortably into two banged-up vans, with Indian drivers who
drove barefoot. When I set sail, so to speak, I too assumed that the world was round, but what I
encountered in the real India profoundly shook my faith in that notion. Columbus accidentally ran into
America but thought he had discovered part of India. I actually found India and thought many of the people
I met there were Americans. Some had actually taken American names, and others were doing great
imitations of American accents at call centers and American business techniques at software labs.
Columbus reported to his king and queen that the world was round, and he went down in history as the
man who first made this discovery. I returned home and shared my discovery only with my wife, and only in
a whisper.
“Honey,” I confided, “I think the world is flat.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from THE WORLD IS FLAT
by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Copyright © 2005 by Thomas L. Friedman.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2005
Thomas L. Friedman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-374-29288-4
