Taking Sides

This all started with an idea. Somewhere, on the road or in the shower or just befefore falling asleep.

The idea was to have a long street in a big city, that is all restaurants. And every restaurant from a different country. What are you in the mood for: Vietnamese food, Micronesian, Costa Rican, Canadian (whatever traditional canadian food is - but that's the point), Estonian, Kyrgyzstanian, Omanian, Polish, etc.

Part of the grand idea was to go to each and every country, and harvest people there with a brilliant knowledge of local cuisine, music, decoration, ambience and cutlery. And in the process, further the journey to globalisation. I'm always very pro-globalisation because I believe that borders don't really exist, and the illusion must be broken down. It works in a 'ideal world' mentality. We can try.

When my brilliant brother was shown away from a job interview with the words "You are perfect for the job, but you're too white and too male, and you don't fit our colour quotas", I was even arguing for the opposition. The tendency is to import engineers from India, because they're not white and therefore the right colour, thus leaving the qualified caucasian engineers with computer-shop jobs dreaming about bigger challenges. But it's globalisation, baby!

So I did a bit of reading up on the topic. And I think that I'll have to review my opinion. Globalisation brings with it the cigar-smoking fat cats that retrench qualified workers because there are starving slaves who'd do exactly the same job for a quarter of the pay. There will always be money driven power monkeys who screw up something as possibly unifying as globalisation. Makes it kinda hard to be optimistic.

I'll keep on focussing on breaking down borders.