Q.Character 1: In this age of globalisation, the world is shrinking. We are living in a global village. Nations are irrelevant. Character 2: That's not the case. Nationalism is still relevant. You can see this when Indian team goes out to play cricket. Or when you discover that Indians living abroad still watch Bollywood films.
Both speakers capture part of the truth — globalisation has genuinely made the world more interconnected, but nationalism has not become irrelevant; it continues to shape people's sense of identity and belonging even amid growing global exchange.
The first speaker's point about a shrinking, interconnected 'global village' is real: goods, information, culture and people move across borders far more easily today than in the past. But this does not mean nations or nationalism have stopped mattering. The second speaker's examples make the case well — the surge of collective emotion when the Indian cricket team plays, and the fact that Indians living abroad continue to watch Bollywood films and stay culturally tied to India, both show that national identity continues to provide people with a felt, emotionally real sense of belonging that economic or cultural globalisation has not erased. States, citizenship, borders and laws also continue to structure people's everyday lives in very concrete ways, even as culture and commerce cross borders more freely than before. If anything, this exchange illustrates the very tension the chapter opens with — nationalism has always been able to unite people around a shared identity even as broader forces (in this case, globalisation) reshape the world around them; the two are not simply opposites, and the correct response is not to declare one of them irrelevant, but to recognise that both economic globalisation and enduring national loyalty exist side by side.
Neither view is fully right on its own: globalisation has genuinely shrunk economic and cultural distances, but nationalism remains very much alive — visible in the emotional pull of events like international cricket matches and in the continuing cultural loyalty of diaspora communities to things like Bollywood films — showing that national identity and globalisation coexist rather than one simply replacing the other.
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