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In first-world countries, you would expect everything connected, information flowing back and forth across continents, and all kinds of transactions happening round the clock. The world is not supposed to be sleeping in a connected flat world.

Well, Tom Friedman (of New York Times, and the author of The World is Flat) almost convinced me that the world has gotten flatter and that it is becoming a level playing field with increased efficiency, faster turn-around, and lower cost. It turns out that a vast majority of the world is far from being flat.

Over the past several weeks, I learned that things like original signed documents, manual verifications, application forms filled by hand in triplicate (haven’t used this word in a while) do infact exist. Such things are quite common in a third-world country like India. No, I’m not talking about India. I’m talking about first-world countries like US and Ireland.

I was planning to attend a four-day long meeting in Dublin, and I when I started the visa process, I discovered that these third-world concepts do still exist in the first-world.

Well, I can look at this positively. There is more room for flattening. More things to integrate, more infrastrcture to be built, and more opportunities for both first-world and third-world workforce. But the downside is that, I still don’t know whether I will be able to atted this meething. My flight leaves tomorrow.