Same word, but different meanings.

The Indian media is cheering the Prime Minister's speech at the annual jamboree at Davos in Switzerland, in which he presented India as a promising place for new investments. He emphasised terrorism, global warming and protectionism. "Many countries are becoming inward focused and globalisation is shrinking and such tendencies can't be considered lesser risk than terrorism and climate change," he said, taking a swipe at the US President Donald Trump, who is also in Davos and is expected to reiterate his "America first" policy. Trump has been consistent in repeating his belief in putting America first, first at the United Nations General Assembly in September, and then during his tour of East Asia in November. Not everyone was impressed with Modi's speech. This was India's moment to grab leadership of the world on climate change and free trade, wrote M Sharma, but he failed to unveil any new ideas, repeating tired old claims of diversity and Pakistani perfidy. Angela Merkel of Germany bitterly condemned right wing populism as "poison". That is because a fourth term for her is looking increasingly unlikely as she has been unable to find coalition partners to form a government after election in September. Completely without any shame she mentioned the bailout of Greece, forgetting to mention that it was her iron-fisted austerity that impoverished the people of Greece, as Y Varoufakis wrote. "We believe isolationism won't take us forward. We believe that we must cooperate. that protectionism is not the answer," she said. Of course she did. At 8.3% of GDP Germany had the largest current account surplus of $285 billion in 2017, which was described as "very bad" by Trump. "You can defend and protect your citizens, your workers, your companies, but we live in a framework given by trade agreements...," said Italian Prime Minister Gentiloni, probably also angered by Germany's selfishness but unable to say so. Chinese billionaire Jack Ma of Alibaba said that there will be war if globalisation stops. We do not know if this was a message from the Chinese government but his version of globalisation means that Alibaba can operate in any country but Amazon has been shut out in China. The Chinese have been blatantly stealing intellectual properties of other countries by force and are angry that the US is objecting to their theft. So Germany and China are gaining hugely from globalisation but why is India jumping up and down when we export basic commodities and have virtually no manufacturing. Our trade deficit has jumped with countries with which we have signed free trade agreements, because we have reduced duties on manufactured products while they blocked our services industries, wrote A Ranade. Slogans are good, only if you benefit.