Global literature

It used to be that the provenance of literature, especially that of the novel, was the nation.

I may sound a tad anachronistic, but I'd definitely buy into Ian Watt's (in his 1957 book, The Rise of the Novel) thesis that the novel "rose" along with the political strengthening of the nation and in some ways contributed to the myth of the nation.

But today the word transnational is sprouting like weed in our discourses of literary genre, as much as it is pervasive in the corporate parlance. We have the massive transnational corporations whose markets brook no national boundaries.

Novels too, or their provenance rather, are transcending nations in a global age. If the nation was the locus of power in the traditional novel, then what is the corresponding loci of power in global fiction? The world?

Perhaps. In a majority of 21st novels whose provenance spans the globe, one sees another major locus of power--technology. Global novels are typically starting to be concerned about the rise of technological power, a power that has no specific geographical habitus but has a borderless network.

Take for instance Dave Eggers' The Circle; the protagonist pits herself against the might of the global giant Google.

In Spark, John Twelve Hawks' hero is a global assassin and is cast in the mold of an artificial intelligence though he has a body and the form of a fully functional human being. He resembles AI in the sense that he is amoral. As the novel unfolds, the assassin begins to lose his amorality, which signals his return to humanity.

Increasingly, the provenance of the global novel then is technology and the hegemonic rule of the same.

Is the business of the 21st century novel primarily to challenge this hegemonic assertion?

The biggest loser

The queue to the first Mcdonalds that opened in 1990 in Moscow was phenomenal. However, such a queue was only expected right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a dissolution of Soviet-style Communism.

After all, a bright emblem of Capitalist consumerist modernity had just set up shop in the tattered halls of Communist economy.

Zoom forward to today: President Vladimir Putin is cracking down on Mcdonalds in Russia (there are 208 outlets in Moscow itself), to retaliate against U.S. sanctions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yet, McDonalds is no longer a shiny badge of American capitalism; if anything, it's an emblem of Capitalism with a capital C claiming no Cold War-era allegiance with a particular nation. In today's global economy, Capital reigns supreme and Capital will do just about anything to adjust to the conditions of the market in which it operates. It's sole interest is to thrive.

McDonalds, like other mega corporate entities, is highly transnational. The golden arch seeks not to impose anymore, but to blend in with the local.

So, the joke is on Putin, who being a sad relic of the Cold War, uses outmoded Cold War tactics to fight a battle which has no name except, perhaps, "a poor facsimile of the Cold War". Putin also resorts to Cold War propaganda, or a war of words conducted via Twitter, to distract and deceive global attention from his misdoings in Ukraine. the other day somebody wrote of how Putin has revived the culture of Orwellian newspeak/doublespeak, something that the other Vladimir, Vladimir Nabokov, made mincemeat of in his novels.

The Russian Mcdonalds is for all practical purposes very Russian, in that it caters to Russian taste and Russian appetite and most significantly, sources its meat and veggies from Russian farmers. As reported by Quartz, two Russian companies, Wimm-Bill-Dann and Barybino State Farm, have got so successful supplying lettuce and milk to McDonalds, that they registered in the New York Stock Exchange.

By cracking down on the Russian McDonalds, Putin has cracked down on his own. What might he be fighting against? Capital itself? Then there is no winning. In his insistence on wielding the Cold War lance Putin is getting to be the biggest loser.

What happens in the bush does not stay in the bush: notes on globalization

In London, Paris and New York City, among other global cities, what people eat in the remote villages of Guinea matters today.

The ebola virus, which so far has ravaged 700 lives in West Africa, is said to have originated in Guinea, the epicenter being the southern town of Gueckedou primarily because folks were eating bush meat contaminated with the virus. 

As The Guardian reports, bush meat or meat from wild animals have been banned in Guinean towns, the practice of eating said meat continues in the far flung villages, where residents refuse to give up on their traditional diet.

A favorite bush meat for the villagers of Nongoha, for instance, is fruit bat; unfortunately the ebola virus has chosen the fruit bat as one of its temporary habitats. The urgings of medical workers in these villages notwithstanding, Nongohans insist on eating fruit bat meat and see those who bring in modern scientific warnings against their traditional diet as evil witches wanting to upend a way of life.

A village spokesperson observed that inexplicable diseases and deaths are common in this part of the world, and the virus isn't perceived as a threat because it can't be seen. Had it been an airplane or a drone, the villagers would have shot it down as an enemy.

But should the rest of the world be imperiled on account of a way of life in a small village in Guinea? After all, we are not all living inside the head of Margaret Mead.

In a pre-globalized or less interconnected world, what the Nongohans ate wouldn't have mattered at all; the Western world could care less if they ate their way into death or disease. Now the (ill) effect of a Nongohan diet isn't confined to the Nongohans but can spread globally, especially to those Western enclaves where there is a significant African diaspora. Despite the efforts of authorities, ebola has been transmitted from bush meat to Guineans to Liberians to citizens of Sierra Leone. A few human bodies stand in the way of its transmission to London, New York or Paris. 

Either the Nongohans should stop eating bush meat or travelers from the continent of Africa ought to be carefully screened before they hop on a Westbound plane. 

The Western public discourse on ebola is, as expected, tainted with colonial-era xenophobia and racism, but how much rationalism and objectivity can be permitted when a deadly virus can go global at the drop of a hat?

While it's okay to chide the Western hysteria about the virus, it's also important to educate villagers of West Africa that it's no longer okay to risk death over "tradition", because the cost of eating a fruit bat salad ( a salad comprised of rodent and wild antelope meat) would be borne by many more than just those who chomp on these bush delicacies in the bushes. 

In globalization what happens in the bush does not stay in the bush anymore. Should the Nongohan's not become a little less local and a bit more global in the realm of responsibility?

Global Citizenship

There was a colorful din of Presentix-aided performances inside the classroom when I had asked my students to do an adult version of a show and tell: "Are You Global"? was the rubric under which each student was to do an engaging (and intellectually stimulating) multimedia presentation of whether or not they were global citizens and what did global citizenship mean to them.

The presentations had been reserved for the last two weeks of a class on the "paradoxes" of globalization. Most walked a fine balance between gravity and levity; concepts of citizenship were revisited, tweaked, defended, attacked, and one performance was particularly memorable because of its casual tossing aside of conventions; the young lady proudly claimed to be global, meaning that she has freed herself from shackles of parochial food habits that her mother, an immigrant from Serbia still clings to in their home in Northern New Jersey. "The smell of roasting pork nauseates me, and it's one reason why my dad, who's a native of the U.S. divorced my mom."

Looking back, I think, two things I wanted to highlight, were lost in the beautiful chaos. Borrowing from a wonderful term I had heard the well-known cultural critic, Gayatri Spivak (utter in her speech on the fate of an aesthetic education in the era of globalization), I had said that to become a global citizen one had to begin orienting one's most ethical of thoughts around the "Other". In the 21st century globalization of the self should ideally start by looking not Eastward, or Westward, inward or outward, but "Otherward." Most must have misheard the word as "[In] other words" and so turned glassy eyes toward me. A Glassy eye in my [pedagogical] experience means "I don't get it" with a dash of politeness.

The other thing I said was that the most global of citizens were not the students themselves, well-traveled, multilingual denizens of the privileged class, or I myself, or people like me, but the refugees, not the traditional immigrants, but the refugees, folks who resettle from their home countries to the United States (or elsewhere) out of a complex web of personal motives and historical factors.

This too went unregistered on the templates of their consciousness.

Welcome to India

Casualties of globalization

Dave Eggers has taken upon himself the task of chronicling the changing landscape of an emergent America in the global economy. In A Hologram for the King, we read about the erosion of the culture of manufacturing in this nation; a particular victim is Alan Clay, who has been edged out of the manufacturing competition and cornered into the slot, Eggers disdainfully refers to as "consulting". Consulting, in the eyes of Clay's father, a retired worker for a national railroad company, is a pansy occupation which has emasculated the American labor ethos.

Eggers pitches Clay as a representative American worker, shaped by traditional American middle-class ethos. However, he is still a fictionalized version of the American middle-class man whose entire way of life has been affected by economic globalization.

In Factory Man, veteran journalist Beth Macy, gets the saga of the aforementioned demographic straight from the horse's mouth. The book is a work of non-fiction with the same kind of sublimity achieved by the best works of fiction as Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Aman Sethi's A Free Man, among others.

For me, it's a must read, as I take a keen interest in work that records the histories of the lives of ordinary, sometimes poor, citizens of the globe who contribute toward the globe's changes yet remain invisible and unacknowledged.

A polycentric world

Poly is a word that connotes multiplicity, i.e. many.

There's polytheism and there is polyandry.

Writer Pico Iyer gives an eloquent snapshot of a polycentric world in his book The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home:

Everywhere is so made up of everywhere else--a polycentric anagram--that I hardly notice I'm sitting in a Parisian cafe just outside Chinatown (in San Francisco), talking to a Mexican American friend about biculturalism while a Haitian woman stops off to congratulate him on a piece he's just delivered on TV on St. Patrick's Day. "I know all about those Irish nuns," she says in a thick patois, as we sip our Earl Grey tea near signs that say, CITY OF HONG KONG, EMPRESS OF CHINA.  

A world of no more world wars

My immersion in the study of globalization, a vague term that as Thomas Friedman had said some time ago, can be used as a "theory of everything," has yielded at least one certainty: There is little likelihood of a Third World War, in the shadows of a First and a Second, in a globalized world, even if the reason is as simple as greater global desire for cooperation and peace.

Thus the Russian engineering of Crimea's secession from Ukraine's and Ukraine's resentment of Russia's of a 20th century style imperial muscle-flexing, isn't going to lead to a consortium of global powers starting a Third World War against Russia.

The above would have been possible in the 20th century. Not any more as veteran journalist, Roger Cohen observes:

It could not happen. Of course, it could not happen. The institutions and alliances of a connected world ensure the worst cannot happen again. The price would be too high, no less than nuclear annihilation. Civilization is strong, humanity wise, safeguards secure.

Cohen writes of the anger of an anonymous 19 year old Ukranian farm boy, who feels the same way about Russian imperialism today as the young Gavrillo Princip, the 19 year old Bosnian Serb Nationalist whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered off the First World War.

Today's angry teenagers would rather flock to a radical student circle and communicate their disenchantment with the political system through Social Media, than commit an act of violence to start a war.

In a globalized world everybody wants peace. Violence has dwindled from a public affair to being limited to privatized zones within smaller nations.

A paradox of Capitalism

Is the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin, calls a post-market economy, an economy that has near-zero cost of production and its driving paradigm is the "Internet of Things."

I'm yet to wrap my brain around the concept of the Internet of things, but have a blurb on the book's content here:

The capitalist era is passing - not quickly, but inevitably. Rising in its wake is a new global collaborative Commons that will fundamentally transform our way of life. Ironically, capitalism's demise is not coming at the hands of hostile external forces. Rather, The Zero Marginal Cost Society argues, capitalism is a victim of its own success. Intense competition across sectors of the economy is forcing the introduction of ever newer technologies. Bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin explains that this competition is boosting productivity to its optimal point where the marginal cost of producing additional units is nearly zero, which makes the product essentially free.
In turn, profits are drying up, property ownership is becoming meaningless, and an economy based on scarcity is giving way to an economy of abundance, changing the very nature of society. Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to global networked Commons.
"Prosumers" are producing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3-D printed products at nearly zero marginal cost, and sharing them via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, bartering networks, and cooperatives. Meanwhile, students are enrolling in massive open online courses (MOOCs) that also operate at near-zero marginal cost. And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses, crowdsourcing capital, and even creating alternative currencies in the new sharable economy.
As a result, "exchange value" in the marketplace - long the bedrock of our economy - is increasingly being replaced by "use value" on the collaborative Commons. In this new era, identity is less bound to what one owns and more to what one shares. Cooperation replaces self-interest, access trumps ownership, and networking drubs autonomy. Rifkin concludes that while capitalism will be with us for at least the next half century, albeit in an increasingly diminished role, it will no longer be the dominant paradigm. We are, Rifkin says, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together collaboratively and sustainably in an increasingly interdependent global Commons.

Rifkins writes about the shared commons here.

East West Global

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A new addition to the list of East/West duets?

In the beginning there were the Ravi Shankars and the George Harrisons, .... singing of global peace.

Then there was the Pussy domination of "Jai Ho"(e), the signature tune of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, a song and dance number in which A.R. Rahman appeared subordinated by the PussyCat Dolls. 

The song had a purely aesthetic value and was a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

The latest in the line of East West duet is Peter Gabriel and Atif Aslam's song from Mira Nair's 2012 movie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (based on the novel by Moshin Hamid).

The song is a beauty; the words sing of the individual's place in a world gone complex. It's a good place as long as the individual resists its commandeering by the forces that be.

As translated, the song is:

Speak, for your lips are yet free;
Speak, for your tongue is still your own;
Your lissom body yours alone;
Speak, your life is still your own.
Look into the blacksmith’s forge:
The flame blazes, the iron’s red;
Locks unfasten open-mouthed,
Every chain’s link springing wide.
Speak, a little time suffices
Before the tongue, the body die.
Speak, the truth is still alive;
Speak: say what you have to say.

Cold residues in a hot. flat world

Remember what Thomas Friedman, one of globalization's ardent evangelists, said of war in a flattening world?

In The World is Flat, Friedman had blithely observed that nations will not go to war if what's at stake is the disruption of the global supply chain within which nations were (profitably) ensconced.

While Russia and America didn't quite go to war over the disruption of a supply of the Greek Yogurt Chobani to American athletes in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, they went into a bit of a cold war.

Russia wouldn't allow Chobani to enter Russia because of a controversy over proper custom certifications of dairy products. America has relented and Chobani has decided to donate the yogurt intended for Olympics.

Two cardinal tenets of the flat world have been challenged in the Chobani-war: Nations do have power over corporations and old Cold War enemies fight on quietly against the backdrop of a hot, flat world and corporations are a site for the proxy war.

Blaming Mexicans mex (me) sic

Something in this particular narrative of heroin overdose-related deaths in American small towns (and I believe there is a narrative pattern), disturbed me.

The story presents a black and white picture of an innocent (the catch word is "unsuspecting") small, "tightly-knit" community in, all white and all cute, invaded by the dark forces of evil, embodied by Mexican drug dealers, who easily cross borders and through an informal global supply chain, and sell poison to little children at prices below the market rate (cheap).

The borderlessness, the easy access to outsiders, the contact between evil marauders and innocent white cherubs, puts a dampener on globalization. A fundamental tenet of globalization is the opening up of borders, literally and metaphorically and even metaphysically. But, as stories like these, evidence, with goods and capital, bad things too will flow as a result of the world gradually but surely integrates. 

When globalization benefits a community, then the credit goes to it and by default almost to the American faith in the beauty of the free-market economy. However, when globalization hurts a community, especially an American community, then the blame falls, not on the impersonal forces of globalization, but on the Mexico's, the China's and the Africa's. Many of the disease-producing agents are said to arrive because of more facile contact with Africa. The fish we consume, injects mercury into our blood stream because they come from China's highly polluted rivers. 

When American lives are destabilized by globalization, then globalization remains not so impersonal, but acquires specific names, faces and identities, calculated to produce, it seems the kind of xenophobia that we saw in the reaction to the Superbowl Coca Cola ad.

The reaction to the Coca Cola ad did not take place in a vacuum, but in the context of a shrill, jingoism-laden discourse that is churning at this moment in this nation, the most ardent of the champions of globalization when it happens elsewhere.

Regarding the death due to heroine overdose in the small towns of America: Shouldn't we first check out the correlation between the cultures and opportunities in these locales and the deaths? A vast majority of the victims of heroin overdose are young and white. Instead of correlating the heroin with the lives of those who are compelled to consume them, a neat correlation is made between heroin and its Mexican suppliers.

Why?

In connection with the death of 21 year old Alysa Ivy in Hudson, Wisconsin, it's said:

In the wake of the prescription painkiller epidemic, heroin, much of it Mexican, has wormed its way into unsuspecting communities far from the Southwestern border as a cheaper and often more easily obtained alternative.

"Unsuspecting communities"? Were the unsuspecting and innocent of the world folks of these communities deceived into taking heroin when they thought they were consuming kale?

The new imperialist in town

China!

And the new imperialist has no civilizing mission at stake unlike previous colonizers from Europe, and their American progenies. China only lends capital, invests and buys up, without imposing values of democracy or freedom or human rights.

While the emperor wears new clothes, the victims of imperialism pretty much remains the same--Africa.

Napoleon explains globalization to Pocahontas on the moon

Only in an Xtranormal story of globalization can we imagine Pocahontas meeting Napoleon on the moon, not to get married so Poca can become the ghost of Napoleon's umpteenth global empress, but to get lessons of globalization from him.

Incidentally both Pocahontas and Napoleon could be said to be two representative figures of globalization, if we define globalization as a complex web of forces and factors that bring people, economic activities and cultures together (not always a "happy" contact, but a contact nonetheless).

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Napoleon sought to integrate the world along the Enlightenment values of equality, fraternity and liberty espoused by the Revolution, but of course Napoleon's bent was primarily toward accumulation of world power based on conquest through military might:-) 

Poca herself was a victim or a beneficiary (depending on what side of the fence one is) of globalization: Born in a native-American tribe, Poca was kidnapped by the English during an English-Indian skirmish of around 1613. Poca was converted to Christianity and acquired the name of Rebecca while in English captivity. When it was time for her to return to her tribe, Poca chose to stay back with the English and married John Rolfe, an English tobacco planter in 1617. The Rolfe marriage is American history's earliest recorded example of an interracial marriage. Pocahontas or Rebecca Rolfe became a token symbol of the "civilized savage" and was shown off as such by Rolfe in London. 

Pocahontas may have been a female counterpart of the Thomas Babington Macaulay's 19th century human project of the "brown sahib", the Bengali administrative unit that Macaulay bragged to have created by infusing a "white soul" into the "brown" bodies of Bengali men. 

In the 21st century an aspiring globalizer of the 17th century stands face to face with a hybrid-identity endowed, "globalized" historical figure, on the surface of the moon, in and of itself an extra-geographical terrain that is a site of global competition in the world today.

The possibilities are immense.

China Shining

Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrence in "The Shining" 

You can't forget the scene in Stanley Kubrick's psychological thriller, The Shining. Jack Torrence would stick his face from behind drawn curtains and utter, "Heerrrrr's Johnny!" to scare the brains out of his son Danny.

Imagine Jack in a different setting, let's say an abstract global setting, perched atop a vantage point somewhere between the global North and the South and announcing "Heerrrrr's China! !" Would he spook people out?

Contending powers like America, might be nervous to know that China is indeed "here", as a superpower, as is evidenced by this blurb of its influence in the world today:

To fuel its export engine China, has scoured the world to acquire energy, minerals and other natural resources and has emerged as the biggest donor of aid to Africa. By 2035, China will be consuming a fifth of all global energy; it already buys 22 percent of Australian raw material exports, 12 percent of Brazil's and 10 percent of South Africa's exports. China’s own export clout has been translated to a record reserve of 3 trillion dollars, some 900 billion dollars of which consists of US debt. A wealthy China has emerged as a helper in a financial crisis. Chinese purchase of Greek government bonds helped to diffuse the country’s recent crisis. If additional proof was needed for China’s rise as a global economic superpower it came in December 2010 when Portuguese officials traveled to China to seek its help in averting a Greek-style default.

New cosmopolitanism

Ask Martha Nussbaum, the noted Princeton Humanist (rather, read her books) about cosmopolitanism, and she will tell you that it's a love for the planet.

It used to be that a cosmopolitan would identify her primary affiliation with the globe, or humanity at large, instead of with narrow ethnicities or nations.

Today's cosmopolitans have no national boundaries either, but according to the Dissent Magazine, they pitch their tents in brand-name goods and expensive experiences that can be bought in such global cities as Zurich, New York, (posher parts of) London, Dubai, Shanghai, not in any modicum of shared humanity.

A dismal cosmopolitanism it is.

The East is a career

I first came upon the statement, "The East is a career," in an epigraph to one of the chapters in Edward Said's Orientalism. 

It's a quote from the 1847 novel, Tancred, by then British premier and writer of novels of social realism, Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli was presiding over the British Empire, that had reached a dizzying height in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's a complex quote, and as unraveled by Said, it suggests that the East at that time in the Western imperial imagination existed as a springboard from which a promising young English lad could launch his career in the Imperial civil or military services, or could launch his career as an entrepreneur as well.

The East, in short, was a passive market to be exploited by and for the benefit of the imperial West.

The East is still a career, I think, and I articulate this position in response to an online discussion on the subject matter of the Study Abroad Program, a program that is becoming a silent imperative for American high schoolers and College students today.

The East is a career for many in the contemporary American military-Industrial complex, especially in two of its more obliquely occupied territories like Iraq and Afghanistan (though I can't imagine a career being launched in the terrains of Afghanistan known for hosting missile launches). 

In Dave Eggers novel, A Hologram For The King, a failed American entrepreneur migrates to the land of an Arab despot somewhere in Jeddah, to reignite his economic dreams. 

The Study Abroad Program was conceived to reignite, not the economic, but the cultural part of a young American's being in the world. 

The Program is premised on the ideal that to adapt and adjust to an increasingly globalizing world (though I can't for the world of me fathom how the world can globalize), young Americans need to experience that world first hand, and the best way to achieve that is to live for a brief period of time in a foreign country.

I think the ideal is an empty one; in real terms it's pure balderdash. Young Americans who do the Study Abroad Program do it as a stepping stone toward a fruitful career. In a global economy everything, including culture, is translatable into money if one knows how to.

How many of the sons and daughters of America's underserved can afford to partake in this most expensive of acculturation programs? The mantle of "global citizenship" can be worn, as it were, only by the children of America's privileged class.

A stint in a foreign country is good for the resume, just as a stint with the Peace Core is. Also, an "immersion" in a foreign culture and language (add to that the value system), sits well with prospective employers in American multinationals who prize multilingual employees anyway. But not all multilingualism is equally valued; Mandarin, for instance, is valued over Hindi, in the corporate corridors of transnational corporations. 

China is a career for many young Americans today as a large number of transnational corporations (they are really American in one form or the other) eye China as a magical market in the way Aladin eyed the magic carpet.

Pirates of global capitalism

British filmmaker Paul Greengrass's movie, Captain Phillips, has been marked by film critics, including Manhola Darghis, as a story of "global capitalism" more than as a story of a virtuous captain attacked by villainous Somali darkies.

It's the forces of global capitalism that make outlaws out of the Somalis and the American Captain Phillips, a temporary hostage. Both are pawns in a "warfare" that's impossible to define in terms of a conventional warfare, but one can tell that the Somalis are emaciated, underfed, yet armed with stolen automatic weapons, and are interested in laying their hands on a jackpot of food that is ironically on its way to Somalia. The pirates have no affiliation with a nation; they want to seize this opportunity to pull off a heist.

The forces that bring the Somalis and Captain Phillips, who has roots in white and liberal Vermont, in the same space, need to be talked about, hints reviewer Darghis.

The bringing together of such disparate members of the global community also raises a poignant question of responsibility: In what ways, big or small, direct or indirect, are the likes of Captain Phillips responsible for the famine and war in Somalia?

I am reminded of Teju Cole's call for "constellational thinking" in order to respond to the question of responsibility. To understand Captain Phillips' role the dots in the landscape of global capitalism, of which the fugitive Somalis and the white liberal Phillips are residents, have to be connected.

The U.S. Marine rescues the ship and its crew members as we all know from the incident and Darghis says how the film ends with no David in sight, only Goliaths, meaning the muscular security men who are the keepers of the new world order.

Yet globalization had once upon a time promised the emergence of a multipolar world. The title of the film omits naming any one of the pirates as agents of the primary action, but that is to be expected; the world of Western entertainment media is largely unipolar. But Greengrass has made some room for the pirates in the movie, and humanized them somewhat.

As I understand, global capitalism has created a world of enormous economic disparities and the doors to opportunities of participation in the economy of global capitalism has gotten smaller and smaller. The Somali pirates in no way can lay hands on material resources by following the law. Captain Phillips alone makes twice the amount as a merchant navy captain, as a messenger, that is, than all of the Somalis who invade the ship taken together in a year.

Greengrass has globalized the book A Captain's Duty, in which Captain Richard Phillips gives an account of the Maersk Alabama saga.

This acephalous world

What is common to Riken Patel, British/Canadian social entrepreneur, and Sharbat Gula, the Afghani girl, the photograph of whose face on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, launched a thousand emotions in the breast of the Western world?

Nothing barring the color of their eyes.

But something like globalization is common to them as well, though Sharbat has zero notion of globalization and hence can't take advantage of it, while Riken is awash in the art of making it big in the global world.

Globalization separates Sharbat and Riken by an infinite bandwidth of power, placing the Afghani girl in tatters at the receiving and the Western millionaire with a conscience at the giving ends of the bandwidth. 

Patel is the founder of Avaaz, an International human rights advocacy group that harnesses the power and reach of technology to help "organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want." 

Awaaz is the world's fastest growing (till date it has 25 million subscribers, though it was launched as recently as 2005) online activism forum. It's most likely to help women like Gula if they are the receiving end of the injustice spectrum.

I had a tough time tracing the organization back to its founder, and that's one of the other aspects of a global entity like Awaaz. 

I chanced upon the organization's name in a NY Times Op-Ed column by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who writes of the prospects of genocide looming large on the African horizon. The name struck me as non-Western and I surmised that the founders must be of South Asian origin.

These days, it's not easy to find out who the face behind the .org is, and I was reminded of the description of the networks of power within the circuitry of globalization as "acephalous" or headless. 

From whom does the fountain of grief originate? If somebody were to ask this of the ancient Greek world, the answer would be a pat, "Niobe," as we all know precisely which peg to hang the inconsolable tears that flowed in gushing currents as a result of the deaths of sons and grandsons in the Trojan war, on: the almost eyeball-less eyes of the maternal Niobe.

But were one to ask from whom the fountain of empathy and activism originates in the case of an organization like Awaaz, the answer would be hard to get to fast.

It took me a series of searches online to link Awaaz to Riken Patel.

Globalizing a narrative

On September 11 2013 something (minor) happened: I understood what it means to "globalize" and why it's important to globalize stories.

The term globalization, despite having degenerated to a one-size-fits-all word that is used loosely in academic and non-academic circles, fundamentally refers to a dynamic process of integration--of the world.

So does its verb form "globalize"; to "globalize" would mean to include those that had been previously excluded, especially in stories.

On the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, prime time Television did its level best to remind us that the story of the event hasn't been fully globalized yet.

I realized this in the course of a conversation I had with my mother, who was watching an NBC-produced recreation, a sort of a documentary, if you will, of the attacks.

I observed the repetitiousness of it all and wished there were some fresh interpretations.

My mother said, "but this really happened; they're showing actually what happened that day."

She was referring to the twin stories of heroism on the part of the ordinary American citizens who were on board American Airlines flight 11 and United flight 93, respectively.

"There is more to the story," I said, than just the attack and the act of valiance on the part of the victims.

What more can be said, my mother pondered.

Why, what about the perspective of the attackers?

My mother was taken a bit aback; how can attackers have a story? They are just attackers.

I launched into a mini-spiel on how an event, especially historical one's have many actors and to give a realistic picture of the event, all perspectives need to be included and maybe then the event will look less like a sentimental and one-sided leaf out of a mythology of saints and sinners and more like what it is--a historical event that is the culmination of a complex chain of causes and effects.

My mother gamely listened to my spiel and was half in accord with me.

To "globalize" the story of 9/11 is to make room for the perspectives and voices of those whose perspectives and voices have been excised, i.e. those of the "attackers."

By extension, to globalize any narrative would be to extend the courtesy of this accommodation, to integrate as it were, stuff that had been left out when they were constructed in a unipolar world.

The multipolar world order demands nothing short of globalized stories; stories told the same way sound jarring and parochial.