The concept of globalisation

The book opens with three people to show what globalisation looks like in daily life:

• Janardhan works in a call centre, answering customers in another country: services moving across borders.
• Ramdhari buys a cheap Chinese-made cycle: goods (commodities) moving across borders.
• Sarika gets a new kind of job and freedom, because new ideas and opportunities have arrived.

Globalisation can also hurt: farmers who fell into debt after buying costly seeds from multinational companies, some of whom took their own lives; small shopkeepers who fear big retail chains.

At its heart, globalisation is about flows:

• ideas moving from one part of the world to another;
• capital (money for investment);
• commodities (goods);
• people, looking for work and a better life.

The crucial point is that these flows are continuous, producing worldwide interconnectedness: what happens in one place affects people far away.

Two common mistakes about globalisation:

• It is not only economic. It is political (what governments can and cannot do), economic, and cultural (what we eat, wear and think): it is multi-dimensional.
• Influence does not always run from rich countries to poor ones. Indian films, yoga and food travel the world too.

Its effects are uneven: some countries, and some people within each country, gain a great deal, while others lose. That is why globalisation is debated so fiercely.