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Ye duniya

 The title is a Hindi (language) expression meaning 'this world of ours'.

Famously sung in poetry by erstwhile poets and today a topic of consternation for the global leaders when it comes to its state and its imminent future.

It is today inhabited by the highest order of organic beings which is us humans (I know right?) and we seem to have lost our way in minding its ongoing stability and health.  Home to 8 billion of our kind it is largely occupied above an imaginary line called the equator with some 90% of our species occupying a land mass that is merely twice as big as in the southern part of the globe.

So clearly it is crowded up here. We can handle the crowds but when it comes to geo political stability and well being it is quite a harsh story.  While overall metrics for life expectancy and education and wealth across the planet have gone up over time the distribution among sapiens is far from perfect.

Most world order post WWII concluded that the collaboration between nations reeling from war's side effects would be better served to sign treaties and pacts that bring relative peace and calm to its citizens while letting micro landscape of economic decisions drive their futures.

NAFTA, NATO, ASEAN and other kinds of human decisions while imperfect ensured no one got greedy beyond certain thresholds and made for trade relations that brought varying levels of prosperity to nations. Of course under the guise of liberal capitalism as pundits like to call it, some nations saw an asymmetric benefit while others languished. However, it also brought access to markets for once forgotten farmers, commerce to small businesses, not to mention (aided by new tech) the foot traffic of all those instagrammers into unknown regions of our planet.

Today the picture has once again started to get bleak. Countries across the world have started questioning this arrangement where they feel they are subsidizing other nations not pulling their weight and are demanding they get paid in some form. Global immigration which was a driving force of bringing untapped talent to do their best work and reap the rewards for themselves and the society they operated in are being viewed as opportunist vultures; threatening the very foundation of what made certain parts of the world flourish like never before.

Inward not outward, nationalist not international and in some case expansionist not content attitudes have started to rear their ugly head. The pendulum does swing in international politic as it does on a time keeping device and the latter will tell if the bell tolls for thee!

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