When I was in school days, foreign direct investments, free trade, globalization etc were all alien words in India. We only used to have public sector companies and very few private sector jobs, which were largely owned by local entrepreneurs.
Things started to change slowly around late 90s when govt opened up the market for FDI. We started seeing many MNCs setting up their offices locally and marketing their products in local media. Suddenly, many of young talented engineers, doctors and professionals who were engaged in small jobs with mundane tasks started receiving lucrative offers from these MNCs. Many private companies were hunting best of the minds from all parts of the country and deploying them in their offices in Bangalore.
I grew up in a small town close to Bangalore and saw how this change transformed Bangalore's population, image and overall health.
Bangalore was once known as Garden City of India and it was well known for having many public sector companies such as HAL, NAL, BEL, BEML, ITI, BHEL, DRDO, ISRO etc. The population largely composed of locals speaking Kannada or Tamil. There were few trains going outside the state from Bangalore. The HAL airport hardly saw any air traffic.
With the Information Technology making inroads in to city during mid 90s, many MNCs setup their offices in Bangalore and were bringing in employees from all parts of the world. The sight of foreigners, people from other states, religion and languages became common. Slowly, the supporting service industries such as restaurants (McDonald's, north Indian and Chinese cuisines), English/ Hindi movie theaters, new style of garment came up to cater to the needs of non-local population. I started liking jeans, eating pizzas, north Indian dishes and watched English movies in theaters.
These companies were creating lots of jobs and were a good source of tax income for the local govt, so the govt was very co-operative while allotting land for office spaces, building infrastructure such as airport, roads etc. The existing roads became insufficient to accommodate the traffic making flyover imperative which also meant uprooting many trees in the city.
Since at that time, Karnataka had more engineering colleges than many states in northern India, students from all over country flocked to state for studies.
The availability of large pool of talent locally attracted more and more companies to the city. Just like ancient frog in a well story, the local students now had to compete with students from other parts of country to secure better grades. This raised the bar of academic competition in schools and colleges. Some of the city's engineering colleges started churning out best of the best talent and were rated among top engineering colleges in India.
There was a sudden increase in cultural exchange and people to people contacts.
Today, Bangalore has train services to almost every big cities of India. HAL Airport couldn't withstand the traffic overflow paving the way for construction of new international airport.There was big boom in all industrial sectors such as construction and civil engineering, automobiles and transportation, Health care, Food etc. The unemployment rate reduced sharply.
India is a culturally rich and diverse country having more than 1652 different languages, and hundreds of different religions (as per 1991 Census).
Today, Bangalore has people from every religion, language and states of India living with each other peacefully.
Though the culture is different, people tend to build relationship and make connections with their neighbors around the house, friends in schools/colleges and colleagues in office because we all need each other in some way or other. People appreciate each other's culture and are open to learning and adopting any best practices if they find in the lifestyle of others. There are increased cases of love marriages, inter-caste marriages that is a major shift from traditional orthodox culture of India. Today, one in every four weddings in urban India is love marriage and almost all of them are inter-caste.
When I was in US, I could see there are lots of Indians, Chinese, Mexicans and people from many other nations living together harmoniously. It is said that if you stand in Times Square (New York) for about 5 minutes, you are sure to see people from at least 9 different nations around you. I could see names of places such as china town, little Italy, little India in New York. USA is a country formed by immigrants from all over the world. The best ones from around the world in search of better opportunity ended up in US. This is one of the reasons why US is a super power today.
For a nation to be stronger and leader in this world, first it has to be internally stable and peaceful.
I believe some of the root cause of global issues such as racism, terrorism, ethnic violence, and civil wars is poverty, unemployment and lack of people to people contact. Globalization is certainly helping to reduce these social issues in a small but significant way.
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