Chindia Blog Comment

Response to: Defending India
More Terrorism or More Technology?

Like most of us, I too talked a lot about the bombings in Mumbai over the Thanksgiving holiday. The conversation was reversed however at my dinner table. My very liberal mother (hosting a vegan Thanksgiving mind you) had no doubt Mumbai remains a safe place to travel. I on the other hand had my hesitations and searched for logical justification for its safety. I needed facts to grasp onto as to why I wasn’t walking into a death trap.

For some strange reason, I fear natural disasters. I’m not sure if bombings qualify, but I think the common ground is uncontrollable and unpredictable situations. If fear and doubt are the opposite of love and trust, to reverse my fears, I’d need to trust India and the journey we will embark upon.

I checked the Wall Street Journal and New York Times updates from my iphone throughout the day—an amazing technology. That action sparked my thought process… and I remembered a piece of Zakaria’s The Post American World I had read:

“One reason for the mismatch between reality and our sense of it might be that, over these same decades, we have experienced a revolution in information technology that now brings us news from around the world instantly, vividly and continuously…

…It feels like a very dangerous world. But it isn’t. Your chances of dying as a consequence of organized violence of any kind are low and getting lower.”

Relative to other periods of time on planet earth, the times we live in are relatively calm; we are now simply better informed. Now I know Fareed Zakaria wrote this book before the bombings in Mumbai, but I would bet that fact remains true.

Countries (yes, even our own) seem to have a way of shielding or screening information from their citizens, like China’s Great Firewall. The media sways the opinions of people, consciously or not. We now have endless ways to acquire information… newspapers, TV, radio, cell phones, or what our Chindia speaker Lonnie Hodge made many references to: Twitter. Twitter has been known to carry news faster than news networks! People around the globe are linked and communicating. This in turn gives the media less power. Does it also ensure honesty?

So my question remains: is the world really an unsafe place, or have technological advances just made us more aware?