The UB Post-Leading English News

IT is as well to begin with a confession. I went to see the international photographic exhibition – which had by then moved to the main hall of the Children’s Book Palace from its first two days in Sukhbaatar Square � with some misgiving. Reading about it in a report, where the actual title of the exhibition, Tales from a Globalizing World, was wrongly given as The World is Globalizing – with the implicit, to me, assertion that everything is thus hunky-dory - had left me with the feeling that it was one of those self-congratulatory celebrations of the present-day economic order where I certainly would not belong.

I did wonder what the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), a respected name in development aid, was doing promoting the universal gains of globalization. I am now very glad I went, for what the SDC has put together in this travelling gallery makes people pause and re-think if the path the world is treading is indeed the right way. I am not blind to the many opportunities unlocked by globalization, but I cannot also overlook the many cul de sacs coming up. It is not enough to say that the new order of things is irreversible or that it is everything and its opposite at the same time. Maybe it is helping the small fry swim faster but it is also making the sharks hungrier. The photographs scream at us not to forget the limitations of the fish in our admiration for the guile of the shark.

The possibly more than 100 photographs are international in many ways, not the least because of the eclecticism of most of the ten who took them. I mention some of them. Andreas Seibert went to China to record how migrant workers from the rural hinterland find their dream of the big city with roads paved with gold turn sour. Thomas Kern moves across the USA to Mexico, capturing images of how “the notions of freedom did not apply equally to all nations�, how, seeking a “better� life, people find themselves turned into robots on huge factory floors.

Cristina Nu�ez finds how borders are blurred between sweatshops and high fashion in the Italian haute couture world, Shehzad Noorani documents how the “vibrant economies� of Nepal, India and his native Bangladesh have managed to rob so many children of their childhood and, indeed, of their basic human dignity. Ziyo Gafic documents the disappearance of the Bosnian culture of ethnic coexistence.

Tim Hetherington reports from four African nations long torn by civil war how sports are being used to heal the scars of former child soldiers, “pawns of competing warlords who are pawns of wealthy nations�. In a piece of irony reflecting how personal experience emends received values, a football XI changes its name from Power from Heaven to Millennium Stars.
Bertien van Manen from Holland goes to the Paris suburbs to see how immigrants and exiles reconstruct “homes� in a foreign land. Philip Jones Griffiths finds that in Vietnam, as the country opens up economically, doors are being closed on traditional cultural norms.

It would be unfair to blame globalization for all that plagues society now, and maybe the organizers overdid things a little by attributing personal loneliness in all forms to economic marginalization. However, the overwhelming impression left by the photographs spanning continents is that there has to be something inherently unwieldy about a world that is being knit together ever tighter by technology and markets, at the same time splitting apart wider and wider socially and economically. If what we inhabit is indeed a global village, then the boundaries of our responsibility should automatically extend. The underprivileged and the dispossessed have to be accepted as our neighbours even if they are far away. Is this happening in any meaningful way?

It has been said that other systems have shown their capacity to distribute and divide income more efficiently and equitably, but they are abject failures in generating income efficiently and this is why free market capitalism is mankind’s only hope. This is cold comfort to the millions everywhere who are doomed to watch and wonder where they fit in. Capital roams everywhere, but labor is denied that luxury of free movement and the result of that is captured in what the exhibition offers to its viewers in its passage across countries.

Some entries from Mongolian photographers for a competition on the theme of globalization were also shown at the exhibition. Their efforts were not overtly cerebral, except maybe in one of a forest of cut-off trunks of trees, with a child next to it, oblivious of the stunting of chances to grow if you do not meet goals set by others. Mostly they tried to capture the conflict between tradition and modernity as the main feature of globalization. The first prize went to a picture of two horsemen in the midst of cars, while there were others of wedding couples traditionally garbed clearly for the occasion, of monks with cameras, and one of men passing by unconcerned as a child lies by the roadside.ÂÂ

There is a clear link between these. As one norm of culture, values, economics, technology, lifestyle gets ensconced worldwide, social cohesion is lost. There may be no apparent deliberate imposition, as we eagerly agree to shed our distinctiveness to claim the ticket to the bandwagon, but the result nevertheless is that people look vainly for the protective fabric of communal life once unrestrained globalization has uprooted cultures and environments.
I do not know how many went to see the pictures and how many of them will ponder what they saw. But common people in Mongolia, as everywhere else, particularly the young whose life depends on choices others make, must join in the imperative of formulating a new coherent universal ideological reaction to globalization that can both truly soften the brutality of capitalism and still produce steadily rising standards of living.

The accompanying picture is what we have now, gains and losses together, smiles and tears sharing the space. In speeding our newfangled plough we break down a multitude of molehills, with no time to wonder how desirable and irreproachable was the life of the moles, at least to themselves. I hope I do not make mountains of molehills when I see these tales from a globalizing world as more tragedy than fun.