Thomas L Friedman: It's morning in India

NEW DELHI: This week’s award for not knowing what world you’re living in surely goes to the French
high school and college students who blockaded their campuses, and snarled rail traffic, in a nationwide
strike against the French government’s decision to raise its pension retirement age from 60 to 62.

If those students understood the hypercompetitive and economically integrated world they were living in
today, they would have taken to the streets to demand smaller classes, better teaching, more opportunities
for entrepreneurship and more foreign private investment in France – so they could have the sorts of good
private sector jobs that would enable them to finance retirement at age 62. France already discovered that
a 35-hour workweek was impossible in a world where Indian engineers were trying to work a 35-hour day
– and so, too, are pension levels not sustained by a vibrant private sector.

What is most striking to me being in India this week, though, is how many Indians, young and old,
expressed their concerns that America also seems at times to be running away from the world it invented
and that India is adopting.

With President Barack Obama scheduled to come here next week, at a time when more than a few U.S.
politicians are loudly denouncing immigration reforms, free trade expansion and outsourcing, more than a
few Indian business leaders want to ask the president: “What’s up with that?” Didn’t America export to
the world all the technologies and free market dogmas that created this increasingly flat, global economic
playing field – and now you’re turning against them?

“It is the Silicon Valley revolution which enabled the massive rise in tradable services and the U.S.-built
telecommunication networks that allowed creation of the virtual office,” Nayan Chanda, the editor of
YaleGlobal Online, wrote in the Indian magazine Businessworld this week. “But the U.S. seems sadly
unprepared to take advantage of the revolution it has spawned. The country’s worn-out infrastructure,
failing education system and lack of political consensus have prevented it from riding a new wave to
prosperity.” Ouch.

Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder of the National Association of Software and Service Companies in India,
explained that for the first 40 years of Indian independence, entrepreneurs here were looked down upon.
India had lost confidence in its ability to compete, so it opted for protectionism. But when the '90s rolled
around, and India’s government was almost bankrupt, India’s technology industry was able to get the
government to open up the economy, in part

by citing the example of America and Silicon Valley. India has flourished ever since.

“America,” said Srivastava, “was the one who said to us: ‘You have to go for meritocracy. You don’t
have to produce everything yourselves. Go for free trade and open markets.' This has been the American
national anthem, and we pushed our government to tune in to it. And just when they’re beginning to learn
how to hum it, you’re changing the anthem... Our industry was the one pushing our government to open
our markets for American imports, 100 percent foreign ownership of companies and tough copyright laws
when it wasn’t fashionable.”
If America turns away from these values, he added, the socialist/protectionists among India’s bureaucrats
will use it to slow down any further opening of the Indian markets to U.S. exporters.