1/21 – The dcadent decade driven by a binary eco system

The first decade of the  21 st century is over and a new decade is ushered in with hopes ,  fears , and boundless opportunities .  Rewind to midnight December 31 , 1999 . I distinctly remember climbing on top of the 10 storeyed HITEC City building at Hyderabad with a colleague armed with a satellite phone trying to establish a connection with our HQ at Irvine,CA in the US  to   facilitate Business Continuity in case the Y2K Bug strikes – perils of the Internet age. At the end, the fears turned out to be a great opportunity for the Indian software engineers  and the IT exports from India got ramped up manifold. The next 10 years followed a growth path but with attended pains during the dot com boom turned burst which soon followed . The binary driven population in India graduated from cobol coding to system integration and software development work moving up the value chain. The IT enabled services in India started with medical transcription and slowly matured into payroll services , accounts management and now to Legal process and Knowledge process  outsourcing. Today, the captive BPO’s are everywhere in the Indian metros.

When Mr John Chambers of CISCO visited India in early 2000 , he suggested India move straight into wireless platform instead of improving  the  reach of the land based communication networks in the villages. Ten years later, mobile phones and various value added services on this platform are ubiquitous  all around in India .

The market melt down of 2008 in the US and Europe caused largely by the Sub Prime crisis was a great dampener for the global economy. Greed and Corporate brinkmanship forced governments to step in with stimulus packages to revive the economy at a great cost to all the tax payers.

Another great shock during the decade was the vulnerability of developed nations to international terrorism which showed its ugly face on 9/11/2001 at the World Trade Center in New York . In spite of Barack Obama getting elected as US President, the global policeman’s role of the US continues in Afghanistan and Iraq .  The UN as an international institution continues to face identity crisis. The contribution of binary in facilitating or identifying terrorism anywhere in the world is significant.

Another great binary contribution is in the advent of social networks which has transformed the concept of “Virtual Reality” into a”Real Virtuality”.Twitter decides an election outcome in Iran , global warming and green hose emissions are discussed heatedly in Facebook and other social digital platforms. Above all,the way we spend our leisure has now digital signature and architecture.

What does the second decade hold for us ?.Will the breakthrough research in Genes transform our personal life space? Will  the BRIC [Brazil, Russia,India and China] take over the mantle from the US,UK and Germany ?.Will the RMB replace the Dollar as the global currency?  Can there be  a lasting peace in the Middle east? . When will Water replace Oil as a portent weapon for the next World War?  We need another book by Alvin Toffler now titled “Future Shock Version 2.0. to fathom the waves of change coming over in the world.