we are living today, was going to be like. The scientists included virtually every big name you can think of. Thinkers included people who had thought about the future systematically and creatively for years. If I remember correctly, nearly 100 thinkers, scientists, technocrats and other public figures were invited to guess major changes that would come about in the 20th century.
It is remarkable that virtually all the predictions proved to be either totally wrong or hopelessly conservative, including the predictions of scientists and technologists. They included such predictions as, like the television can never be a part of everyday life, air travel would be rare, the automobile could not aspire to be an individual transport, and so on. Even the greatest minds can make mistakes; that is not important here.
The important point is that these mistakes were made because these great minds predicted from the point of view of the 19th century what the 20th century was going to be like.
And the future is never a linear projection of the present.
There is invariably a disjunction, a break between the future and the present. The errors in prediction warn us that in this respect even the experts can wrong. In fact the visionaries who thought of the future, including writers of science fiction who dared "imagine" the future, sometimes have done better than the scientists, the economists and the historians, because future studies is an exercise in imagination.
The second limitation involves a certain break with the immediate past that has to take place when we think creatively about the future. Let me spell this out with the help of an example. When the age of moderning began to take shape around the 17th century in Europe, there were wide-ranging efforts in virtually every sphere of human activity to draw a sharp line between the middle ages and modernity. As if those who spoke for the modern age deliberately wanted to maintain a distance between them and what was the immediate past. That did not mean that there were to continuities. Thus, histories of modern science suggest that modern medicine grew out of medieval traditions of science. Scholars have now rediscovered individuals like Paracelsus who mediated between the two ages -- between medieval and modern medicine -- and they now recognize that the middle ages were not as dark as we once believed; they supplied many of the elements on which modern medicine is built. Yet, when modern science first entered the global intellectual scene, most historians and philosophers of modern science tried to draw a sharp line between the modern science and medieval science. Indeed, such historians and philosophers usually went back to the Greeks to show that many elements in the modern times we are continuous with the Hellenic times, but not with the middle ages.
I am afraid, the future generations will also try to establish a sharp break between the way we look at the world and their worldview. They would rather go back to the ages which preceded ours than come to us. It is a necessary disjunction and probably a part of human nature. A major civilizational change invites such disjunctions.
I make these two points to return, in a round about way, to an issue which Professor Nisuke Ando raised yesterday. Namely, apart from the economic institutions and political institutions, there are also individual human beings in the global scene. There is something called citizenship. In the future, we might have to re-conceptualize our idea of citizenship to be able to negotiate the new world we are going to enter. My suspicion is that the future international order -- and the future Asian order, if it is conceivable -- will certainly involve a redefinition of the idea of citizenship. And we might learn something useful about the future of citizenship by looking not at the concepts of citizenship that obtain not in present time, but at our cultures and civilizations in precolonial times. This is not, I repeat, an effort to time travel to the past. This is not an effort to glorify the past and think of it as a golden age of Asian civilizations and cultures. It is an attempt to look at the resources that are scattered around us today, resources on which we might be able to build something.
The rest of my presentation will centre on two examples. A couple of years ago, we became interested in a few cities in the south-west coast of the Indian peninsula. These cities -- Surat, Mangalore, Cochin, Colombo and Calicut -- were, in the precolonial times, the meeting places of cultures and civilizations. These cities were cosmopolitan before some of the better known cities of the world today became well known as cosmopolitan centres. We became interested in them because, while two of them have seen ethnic and religious strife, Colombo and Surat, the others have, till now, a remarkable record of ethnic and communal amity. They have a record of being able to live together with different kinds Of people, not Only from different casts, class, religions and sex, but also from different countries, cultures and language groups. Ultimately, we chose Cochin to study. It is a small city by Indian standards and looks like a sleepy town with an active harbor. But it has a rich history. At one time, it served as the meeting point of China, South-East Asia,
