Alvin Toffler, Futurist

To business people who regard change as the only constant, the words 'shock' and 'wave' belong to Alvin Toffler, 75, a man who has captured popular notions of economic evolution through a series of books co-written with his spouse, Heidi. Toffler burst into fame in 1970, with Future Shock-all about the "shattering stress and disorientation" from too much change too fast. The book spoke of all sorts of technological wizardry to come. He gave his thoughts a millennial-span in his 1980 Third Wave-the transition from an agrarian to industrial and now to an information era. And then came his view on the real impact in his 1990 Power Shift-about how knowledge, not violence nor money, is becoming the essence of power.

Needless to say, Toffler has a cult following. On a recent visit to Delhi, the sort of questions he was asked revealed a near-desperation for India to ride his Third Wave of change wrought by the information age. The transition, as assumed, was being undertaken from the industrial Second Wave...

...and now suddenly, democracy has thrown agriculture-his 10,000-year-old First Wave of change-bang on to the country's centrestage. Some have had to pinch themselves; could this be happening? Just as India was talking about the finer points of how mass production, mass markets, mass media and mass everything else will need to adjust to mass customisation, 'prosumer' markets, sub-cults and digital everything, everyone needs to rewind.

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn," is among Toffler's most quoted quotes. Is it time to relearn something somewhere? Perhaps. Perhaps not. For one, the neat compartmentalisation of the three Waves is an explanatory generalisation that doesn't have to be taken simplistically; certainly not in the case of 'multi-wave' India. Also, why can't the next green revolution be Third Wave-powered? Nobody eats 0s and 1s.

Besides, Toffler doesn't speak of inevitabilities, and has his share of anxieties too: "Too many forecasters and trend extrapolators forget that conflict is the other face of change, that change does not occur without conflict." The good news is that 'conflict' need not be find violent expression, and can peacefully be resolved through that new source of power called knowledge. Who knows-the bending of minds might yet throw up the undreamt-of.