Coca-colonialism and Tata-colonialism

One of the finest writings that I have recently read is by Swaminathan Aiyar, who writes editorials in Times Of India. Swaminathan's breadth and depth of knowledge about the economic and social subjects around the world, and his special commentary about India's economic growth in the last 5 weeks has been amazing.

I am reproducing a recent article in TOI:

"Consider IBM. For decades it was castigated as a monopolist and epitome of neo-colonialism. IBM was the pioneer of the personal computer, but eventually got beaten so badly by Asian rivals that it sold its entire PC business to Lenovo of China. To survive, IBM became mainly an IT services company.

Leftists may still see that as a new way for IBM to colonise the world, through domination of IT services. But listen to the latest news. IBM sees its future survival as dependent on Indian expertise. Its Indian employees have skyrocketed in number from 4,000 in the early 2000s to 53,000 today.

A document circulated by IBM to its Indian employees projects a workforce of hold your breath 120,000 in India by 2008. IBM is becoming Indian rather than American in terms of employment.


Can this be called IBM's conquest of India? Or is it better called India's conquest of IBM? Should the R&D of Indian scientists in IBM be called American research or Indian research?"