Pompous futurist Thomas Friedman -- he of "what I like to call 'outsourcing'" -- has been taken for a ride by Indian scam-artist Ramalinga Raju, whose outsourcing firm Satyam now stands revealed as a fraud of epic proportions. Here's Friedman in an interview last year:
...something I got from my friend Ramalinga Raju from Satyam, the Indian company. We decided that the greatest economic competition in the world going forward is not going to be between countries and countries. And it's not going to be between companies and companies. The greatest economic competition going forward is going to be between you and your own imagination. Your ability to act on your imagination is going to be so decisive in driving your future and the standard of living in your country. So the school, the state, the country that empowers, nurtures, enables imagination among its students and citizens, that's who's going to be the winner.
As the New York Magazine blog says,
Competition between you and your own imagination? The old, round head boggles. Maybe it's something like imagining that you have 53.6 billion rupees in assets when you actually have 3.2 billion, an experience Raju (who could teach Friedman a thing or two about metaphors that actually make sense) describes as "like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten."
That's what I like to call "embarrassing."