It’s time to ReOrient my life… again !
In 1989, I left India where I had spent my 19 first formative years to go study in the West
I was born as a French citizen. My father, who served in the French Navy, had to relinquish his Indian citizenship to become a French citizen (in the process, he changed his very typical Indian name Raju to Radjou, so the French can properly pronounce it !)
Growing up in India in the 70s and 80s, I had an acute sense — more than other children my age — of India’s Greatness
Although India’s economy was expanding in the 70s-80s at the anemic “Hindu rate of growth” (3–4%), I intuitively knew India’s millennia-old civilizational greatness can’t be measured solely by its GDP size
After I finished my studies at the French high school in Pondicherry, I really desired to pursue my higher education at an Indian university
But that wasn’t possible, as my French high school diploma wasn’t recognized by Indian universities (things are different today)
Hence, France was the only destination for my higher education
So, in 1989, I traveled West to study in France
But in 1995, right after finishing my studies in France, I “Re-Oriented” myself.
I went went to work in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Thailand) for 3 years as an independent IT consultant
I was eager to study and learn about the “East Asian Miracle” in the field
In the mid-90s, there was a growing awareness the 20th century will be the Asian Age — just as it has been for many centuries before
But the 1997 Asian financial crisis turned the (East) Asian Miracle into the Asian Mirage.
While I believed in the greatness of the East (Orient), I felt my own life purpose was to build bridges between East and West.
In 1999, I immigrated to the US with a H1B visa.
I didn’t choose to be an Indian (I happen to be born in India), nor a French (I was born with a French citizenship).
Hence, I consciously chose to become an American as an adult (I became a naturalized US citizen in 2016).
One of the first books I read upon arriving in the US is “ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age”, published by University of California Press in 1998.
Its author Andre Gunder Frank, a professor at University of Toronto, invited readers “to ReOrient our views away from Eurocentrism — to see the rise of the West as a mere blip in what was, and is again becoming, an Asia-centered world.”
For Frank, the current Western dominance in the world economy is not permanent.
For him, the rise of the West was “a blip in a larger historical arc”.
He predicted Asia will regain it past economic dominance and the center of the world economy will once again shift to the East.
As Frank’s book was published in 1998, just a year after the Asian economic debacle, it was received with skepticism — unlike Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (2005) and Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World: And the Rise of the Rest (2008).
25 years later, as I write this post living in India, I can “see” Asia is on the rise.
With Trump’s reelection, I want to ReOrient my life … once again !
