Internationalism has always been a vital part of our national DNA. Even at that midnight hour when, in Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s memorable words, India awoke to life and freedom, our country was deeply conscious of its international obligations. In his historic speech about India’s “tryst with destiny”, Nehru, speaking of his

country’s dreams, said: “Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments”. It was typical of that great nationalist that a time when the fires of Partition were blazing across the land, he thought not only of India, but of the world.
In those six decades, the world has become even more closely knit together than Nehru foresaw. Indeed, today it is fair to say that even those countries that once felt insulated from external dangers — by wealth or strength or distance — now fully realise that the safety of people everywhere depends not only on local security forces, but also on guarding against terrorism; warding off the global spread of pollution, of diseases, of illegal drugs and of weapons of mass destruction; and on promoting democracy and development.
Jobs everywhere, too, depend not only on local firms and factories, but on faraway markets for products and services, on licences and access from foreign governments, on an international environment that allows the free movement of goods and persons, and on international institutions that ensure stability — in short, on the international system that sustains our globalised world.
Today, whether you are a resident of Delhi or Dili, Bengaluru or Bangor — whether you are from Chennai or China! — it is simply not realistic to think only in terms of your own country. Global forces press in from every conceivable direction. People, goods and ideas cross borders and cover vast distances with ever greater frequency, speed and ease. We are increasingly connected through travel, trade, the Internet; what we watch, what we eat and even the games we play.
These benign forces are matched by more malign ones that are equally global. In my time at the UN, I learned that the world is full of “problems without passports” — problems that cross all frontiers uninvited, problems of terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common environment, of contagious disease and chronic starvation, of human rights and human wrongs, of mass illiteracy and massive displacement. Such problems also require solutions that cross all frontiers, since no one country or group of countries can solve them alone.
Let us not forget that 9/11 made clear the old cliché about our global village — for it showed that a fire that starts in a remote thatched hut or dusty tent in one corner of that village can melt the steel girders of the tallest skyscrapers at the other end of our global village.
In such a world, issues that once seemed very far away are very much in your backyard. What happens in North America or South Africa — from protectionist politics to deforestation and desertification to the fight against AIDS — can affect your lives wherever you live, in north or south India. And your choices here — what you buy, how you vote — can resound far away. As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream. We are all interconnected, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not thinking about the rest of the planet in anything we do.
To my younger readers, let me say that you are likely to spend a lot of your adult lives interacting with people who don’t look, sound, dress or eat like you; that you might work for an internationally-oriented company with clients, colleagues or investors from around the globe; and that you are likely to take your holidays in far-flung destinations. The world into which you will grow will be full of such opportunities. But along with such opportunities, you may also find yourself vulnerable to threats from beyond our borders: terrorism, of course, but also transnational crime syndicates, counterfeiters of currency, drug smugglers, child traffickers, Internet spammers, credit-card crooks and even imported illnesses like swine flu.
Wouldn’t you want your government to devise policies to deal with such challenges that would affect your, and one day your children’s lives? Should such policies, in an ever more interdependent world, even be called foreign? One of the reasons that foreign policy matters today is that foreign policy is no longer foreign: it affects you right here where you live. You want your government to seize the opportunities that the 21st century world provides, while managing the risks and protecting you from the threats that this world has also opened you up to.
Indians, therefore, have a growing stake in international developments. To put it another way, the food we grow and eat, the air we breathe, and our health, security, prosperity and quality of life are increasingly affected by what happens beyond our borders. And that means we can simply no longer afford to be indifferent about our neighbours, however distant they may appear. Ignorance is not a shield; it is not even, any longer, an excuse. This is the spirit in which I hope to approach this column in the fortnights to come.

Shashi Tharoor is a member of Parliament from Kerela’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency