Letter Never Sent

Yesterday, after swimming and sunning like an iguana at Barton Springs pool my roommate and his girlfriend intercepted me on my walk home. They were on their way to Star of India for buffet and invited me along. There I found a copy of this free magazine, Little India (Apparently, “the largest circulated Indian publication in the USA”). Anyway, in it there were a few interesting things, interviews with assorted Indian Americans and Indian expatriots. There was this particular interview with Dr. Jagdish Sheth who’s evidently a marketing guru of sorts. His rags to riches and reknown story was interesting, but what was more interesting were his predictions as to where the world would be in the next 20-30 years. I took the liberty of scanning it in for you:

Which one of your predictions have come true and is there one that you wish you had not made?

I had predicted in the late 80s and early 90s that India will have no choice but
to align with America and that has come true though I had expected the two
countries to have an economic alignment first followed by a military alignment, but it happened the other way round.

I had also projected in the early 90s that China will become the biggest
economic and military super power by 2020 and that is coming true. In the short
term, the Europeans will be distancing themselves from America and they will align with Russia and Russia will become a major force in northern Europe, which will exclude Spain and Britain.

Britain any way does not belong in
Europe, since the French and Germans will
align. Britain may feel unwanted so there
will be interesting economic battles.

The one prediction that did not come
true was that in the 1970s I was very
hopeful that there would be a permanent
solution for Palestine, but then first Anwar
Sadat and then Rabin were assassinated.
Now I am saying there will be a permanent
distance between the Middle East and
America, and the Middle East will align
more and more with Europe.

So where are we headed post war?

I have slightly different views on that
than most people. I think we will win the
battle of Baghdad but we will not win the
war. There will be a next phase of peace in
the Middle East, orchestrated by the
creation of the state of Palestine, something
George Bush Sr. had strived for. The real
tension will be between America and the
European nations and Asia simultaneously.
The French-German coalition with
Russians will create more economic and
political problems for America and I had
predicted that NATO will cease and that
Japan has given up on America and will
align with China.

What role will the Indian American
community play in the mainstream?

After independence, India decided to
invest in medicine and engineering. Now
they feel its more lucrative to invest in
management and information technology.
Many Indian multinational firms will
groom top managers of Indian origin, and
many of these multinational firms will
enter the world market.

Because of the military and economic
alignment, American govt. will allow more
Indians to settle in America and vice versa
and free labor mobility will increase the
Indian population much more than the
Chinese population here. Indians will
definitely go into politics since more and
more Indian Americans are going to law
school which is a natural progression for
them to enter politics later. So we will have
very powerful Indian American lobby,
surpassing even the Jewish lobby.

So what is in the works?

A book on repositioning of India in
the new millennium.

1. Obvious implications of the so-called war on terror being felt: Russian general say “war on terror” used as pretext for global dominance:
   “It is one thing when a country is fighting terrorism on its own territory, and some other countries assist them,” the Interfax-AVN military news agency quoted Kvashnin an officers’ graduation ceremony in Moscow.

   “But it is quite another thing when, under the guise of fighting international terror, some countries are in fact trying to get involved in the internal affairs of the nation they are meant to be helping,” said Kvashnin.

   He urged the graduating officers to keep this in mind as they “carefully analyze what is happening in the world.”

2. India might be dangling the issue of Indian troop deployment in Iraq for an advantage at the expense of rival Pakistan: Indian Deputy PM, Advani, says US unlikely to release F-16s for Pakistan
3. Space junk renders missions dangerous

1. Humor and it’s power to restore perspective, promote cultural understanding, and emotional balance: Did You Hear the One About the Suicide Bomber?
2. Show Highlights ‘Outlaw Comic’ Bill Hicks
3. The banality of the good:
   In the Cafe Orange on the Oranienburgerstrasse, in the now trendy heart of what used to be East Berlin, I talk to a guy dressed in T-shirt, sandals and designer sunglasses. An old ’68er, he is sharply critical of the current policies of the Bush administration. At one point he leans forward and says, teasingly: “Don’t you think we need a new Boston tea party?” Surely, he jokes, the Boston tea party was good for relations between Britain and America – in the long term. When he gets up to leave, I notice that he puts on a black baseball cap advertising “American Eagle”. “Ja,” he says, “das habe ich in Boston gekauft.” (“I bought it in Boston.”)

   Yes, there is some serious power politics, too. It is dangerous for the world to have only one hyperpower. It is dangerous for America itself to be that only hyperpower. As the guy in the Cafe Orange in Berlin argued, one reason European-American relations are so bad is that Europe is weak. The US needs a stronger partner, and Europe badly needs Britain in order to become that stronger partner. Dead right. And that’s what the real Europe can help us do.

   Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention the name of the guy in the Cafe Orange. It was Joschka Fischer. Yes, that Joschka Fischer: the one who’s Germany’s Green foreign minister, and may soon be Europe’s first foreign minister.