I don’t spend much time in blogosphere. It was purely by accident that I came across The Big Picture blog, where Chris Laudani has posted interesting predictions by the world’s leading economists in the 1920s.

I recently travelled to Indore, after a gap of exactly one year. It was fascinating to mark the changes that that have taken place in this Central Indian city in the last 365 days. There seems to be a boom in construction activity. The number and kind of cars on the roads seem to have undergone a change. There are hoardings aimed at young people for enrolling into courses aimed at the aviation, telecom, insurance and fashion industry. Some of these changes have resulted in the real estate prices in the city skyrocketing.

A few months ago, The Economist published a thoughtful leader comparing 21st century biology to 20th century physics. Until about a century ago, we were not aware of the atom and once we did, we thought that was it. Soon we discovered the neutron and the quark. The well-known British weekly argued that ‘the neutron moment’ of biology is yet to arrive but it might happen soon in the early part of this century.

The June split in Palestine and the subsequent hostile take over that occurred in the Gaza strip was a predictable and expected outcome if you were following recent events in the region. It seems as though efforts to sabotage the nascent alliance between Fatah and Hamas were rearing their ugly head right from the get go.

The Sweden based, Folke Bernadotte Academy, named after Count Folke Bernadotte who was the first UN official mediator has been committed to international peace and security since its inception. 

The fact that I am writing this column on a website is a small example of how I and you the reader are both beneficiaries of globalisation. In fact, for someone who has made it far enough in life to use a browser to reach this website, it would be impossible to imagine a world without internet, international trade, travel, foreign direct investment and financial transfers.

Pakistan has currently been taking up a lot of media space in the international arena. The publicity triggered by General Pervez Musharraf’s sacking of the Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhary escalated to the Karachi riots and the everlasting Jamia Hafza issue, creating a tight spot for Musharraf and is threatening to unseat him from his self-proclaimed political throne.

In May 2007 I met with academicians, local experts and researchers in the UAE. I hoped to gain an informed insight into the efforts being made in the region that would facilitate an Arab renaissance…Gitanjali Bakshi (Strategic Foresight Group)