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How the World Became Flat

::::: ONE
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, tothe 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 Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in an effort
to discover a shorter, more direct route toIndia 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 he 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
discover)' only with my wife, and only in a whisper.
"Honey," I confided, "I think the world is flat."
How did I come to this conclusion? I guess you could say it all started in Nandan
Nilekani's conference room at Infosys Technologies Limited. Infosys is one of the
jewels of the Indian information technology world, and Nilekani, the company's CEO,
is one of the most thoughtful and respected captains of Indian industry. I drove with
the Discovery Times crew out to the Infosys campus, about forty minutes from the heart
of Bangalore, to tour the facility and interview Nilekani. The Infosys campus is
reached by a pockmarked road, with sacred cows, horse-drawn carts, and motorized
rickshaws all jostling alongside our vans. Once you enter the gates of Infosys, though,
you are in a different world. A massive resort-size swimming pool nestles amid
boulders and manicured lawns, adjacent to a huge putting green. There are multiple
restaurants and a fabulous health club. Glass-and-steel buildings seem to sprout up
like weeds each week. In some of those buildings, Infosys employees are writing
specific software programs for American or European companies; in others, they are
running the back rooms of major