A telling piece of information on how my brain works.  Whenever I am a
tourist in a city, the very first thing that I want to do is find the
highest place—monument, skyscraper, hill—climb it, and look down at
the city from above.  If I go to a city for a week and never find such
a vantage point, I will leave that city at the end and still not really
grok it.  I’m a top-down guy, and only when I see the big picture will
all of the details begin to have meaning.

When I went to India, I had very little idea what to expect.  I had seen pictures and heard anecdotal impressions of the country, but my brain had nothing to grab hold of.  I had seen pictures of poor slums without running water but had no idea what percentage of Indians lived in slums.  I had seen pictures of rice fields but didn’t know how many Indians farmed as their primary occupation.  I knew that pollution was a problem but had never personally been to an area with extremely choked air.

India is a place unlike any other I have ever been to, and when I was there I felt like my mind was wandering around at street level without any way to see how things fit together.  It was larger than just seeing the layout of a city—I was trying to understand a new culture, new ways of doing business, new religions, everything.  Fortunately I had a lot of places to turn to since Rameez had made many friends and family in the area, and I spent hours quizzing them on things.  I was lucky to have that connection; as a tourist on my own I would have gotten very little out of my visit.

I recently came across a tool for people like me.  Gapminder is the best online data visualization tool I’ve ever seen.  I won’t waste words describing it, better for you just to follow the link.

Gapminder’s creator, Hans Rosling, gave a presentation on Gapminder at the 2007 TED conference in which he demonstrated the use of the tool.  What started as a quirky and interesting presentation quickly became profound.  He was able to clearly show the standard developmental trajectory in terms of carbon emissions or health and the graphs clearly displayed how similar each country is in its path along this standard trajectory.  As soon as you make this parallel you can begin to compare countries on a common developmental scale which has the interesting impact of bringing us all together.  If, developmentally, Ghana today resembles Sweden in 1891, that helps me visualize what life is like there.  This, in turn, helps me to identify with Ghanaians.

Understanding breeds familiarity and dissipates fear.

When my family learned that I was going to travel to India, somewhere that none of them had ever been, they were all somewhat worried.  They knew I’d be OK, but they were a little bit uncomfortable with me going to a place that they had really no knowledge of.  Gapminder is the type of tool that will break down those knowledge barriers and bring our global economy a little closer to a global community.