Just 150 years ago, when our people crossed the oceans , the kala pani as it was called then, the voyagers were given up as dead since there was little hope of any information ever reaching back to their native villages. If you want to know how it feels like, you can read Amitabh Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies where he so beautifully recreates the story of the first NRIs from Bihar and Eastern UP being sent off to the Mauritius as indentured laborers.

The ostracisation of those who crossed the seas was largely to discourage people from moving out into the unknown in an era where communication was poor and one could expect littler no information to ever reach back to their native villages. The connection was irretrievably broken. Today when I observe the descendants of these indentured laborers’ in many parts of the world trying to trace out their ancestral village and often with little success, I realize how true those fears were. Funeral rites were performed in those days for people who proceeded on pilgrimages those days, for the journey was long and arduous and there was no assurance that those who set out would ever come back. Every year, at the Pravasi Bharatia Divas, numerous NRIs carry out a reverse pilgrimage to the villages and hamlets that their fore fathers came from originally

We have moved along a long way since then of course. Events in Vienna can spark riots and shut down Punjab for days, victims of racialism in Australia are given wide spread television coverage across the counry .technology has ensured that news reaches us from across the world within hours if not earlier, but there does not seem that our minds have evolved at a sufficient pace to be able to process this information coherently.

Our response to global skirmishes often look like knee jerk reactions to local village brawls. How else can one explain violence and arson in Punjab in response to an act of murder in distant Vienna? This puts a lot of pressure on the media on what to report and how to report it. After all, the typical Sikh in Jalandhar or Phagwara has never been to Vienna nor is he likely to go there. The only way, they came to know about the incidents in Vienna was through the media

We all like to glamorize about how technology and particularly the internet has shrunk the world and made us part of a global village and generally the picture that is painted is a rather glamorous one with all sorts of virtues alone being pictured. And all these virtues are indeed true.

But what we do not hear much about is the demonization of our world as conflicts arise between the technological advances in our external world and our bigotry and prejudice ridden minds which still inhabit another century. From a law and order perspective, these developments present a new challenge as the current intelligence machinery is largely geared to local police informers tipping off their handlers about local disturbances and their possible local implications. Along with global terrorism, other global disturbances are it in Austria or Australia and their possible cascading effect are the new faces of conflict in a shrinking world.