GEOPOLITICAL MEMOIRS - QUARTER CENTURY IN PERSPECTIVE

Those days it seemed that the Sun would start rising from the west.

  

The man who started dismantling an empire, and apparently made the world a safer and freer place, came into power in 1985; something which went unnoticed by me born on the same year. This was not the only event that that I missed out. For about five consecutive years, all the significant events happening in the old Heartland was hopelessly beyond the reach of my senses. Then came the landmark year of 1989. The great wall was opened up at one end of the globe and closed shut at the other. Events unfolded in a chain reaction within the next two years, requiring a redrawing of world map, once again out of my range of perception.

The closest that I could recollect without much clarity is the one which happened the same year –some images of troops storming the deserts in Iraq. Soon, names of countries came to settle into my head, and maps followed. I still remember drawing them on the sand, which would resemble more the globe well before the continents attained their present shape. Within a year or two, I improvised the art of cartography, and details of most of the nations. Meanwhile, images of a drastically transformed world in chaos kept flowing in.

The earliest, most vivid images that had been archived in my memory is that of the Afghan civil war, the massacres of the Balkans and Central Africa, the poverty stricken near-human shapes of the African Horn, conflicts in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and of course, the most famous faces of those times – Bill Clinton, Yitshak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussain, Boris Yeltsin, Slobodan Milosovic, Paul Kagame and Jiang Zemin, among others. Slowly, as years passed by and as I went on through the mid-phase of my schooling, it felt more and more inescapable from the influence of one big force – the West. Its effect was all pervasive and to me, personified by the most powerful man in the world, and of course, Hollywood. The new American dream lured all, including myself.

Then, a series of newspaper reports in 1997 required me to do a radical reconstruction in thinking and attitude towards the globe. It was about a threat so grave that it made me curse at that time the great explorers who set out to the West almost five centuries back. The reports were on global warming, in the wake of the Kyoto Protocol. Anti-globalization, or to be more correct, anti-Amerianization became the corner stone of my first real global perspective. It was further strengthened on getting an exposure in the media and real life on the destruction of sustainable environments, native cultures and wisdom. The increasing awareness about the hegemon’s support to despotic, exploitative regimes in the Middle East and Latin America since its rise reinforced this stance. But after being tele-witness to the shocking 9/11, the jammed global war on terror and the hard hitting recession, the feeling that a sunset is inevitable in the West after almost a decade (in effect) is sinking in now.

My next transformation in attitude came with the philosophy of realism enlightening on the nuances of morality in geopolitics, as I stepped into the shoes of a scholar. Geopolitics has never been the same since; especially, in the context of a tectonic shift taking place in the geopolitical structure. The sun is starting to rise again in the east as it has now started offering and delivering promises for billions - a new opportunity to transform lives. This eastern promise even seems to deliver for anyone attempting to comprehend the inner workings of this rising power.

Now, the future does seem promising from this new sunrise in the east.