Summary
Let us take an admittedly crude and simplistic swing round some key parts of the globe. The past is represented by Europe (including Britain). The present is the US. The future is represented by India and China. It has become a convention that India and, in particular, China are set to enjoy spectacular economic growth. But most us, and I include myself here, are woefully ignorant of the social and cultural implications of this. I recently heard an awesome statistic: the average American consumes 20 times as much oil in a year as the average Chinese person. Well, such a disparity in the use of a precious and finite resource is grotesque, and a correction, or even redress, is surely coming. But can this process be achieved without pain or even cataclysm? I doubt it.
In Jonathan Franzen's provocative novel, The Twenty-seventh City, he starts with an unlikely scenario. The police commissioners of St Louis, Missouri, appoint a young Indian woman, one S Jammu, from Bombay, as it was still called when Franzen was writing the novel, as their new chief of police. He describes an Indian take-over of the city, with the new power-brokers from the sub- continent displaying all the cynical corruption of urban America at its worst. The novel is, among other things, an extended metaphor on a future Indian economic and social conquest of the west.See the full content of this document
Extract
It's in Our Own Interests to Embrace the Unknown East
Franzen's novel was published in 1988 and yet, 16 years on, we in the west still don't appear to have woken up to the way the world may well be going. Our complacency is predicated on our current prosperity, which is, in turn, based on our appropriation, with scandal...
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