Take a moment to view the earth from space. Try to identify a few countries you know; try your best to draw country and state lines in your mind as precisely as possible. If you can do this easily, kudos. If not, you're probably like me, geographically hazy.

According to Wikipedia, a country is defined as the political division of a geographical entity. For all quirky purposes, you can choose to have other types of divisions: technical divisions, economic divisions, social divisions, environmental divisions. Or you can simply choose to divvy up geography or populations in ways that catch your fancy. Wouldn't you agree?

Divvy up like what? you ask. Well, consider the Social Networks Republic. In this rapidly growing country there are 275 million people globally, more than the size of Indonesia and less than United States. Or consider the Kingdom of Indian Mobile Subscribers (K.I.M.S), a population of 261 million that procreates exponentially every month. Or even a Facebook group called Dora the Explorer is soo an Illegal Immigrant... -- this country has a population (213,096 people as of today) the size of Barbados. Or another outlandish Facebook group called Kids Who Hid In Dep't Store Clothing Racks While their Mom Was Shopping -- a healthy population of 164,982 about the size of Guam. Or the Territory of iPhone Users, which has as many people as do Libya or Sierra Leone and is likely to get to the size of Belgium by October 2008.

As usual I woke up confused this morning. It didn't help that the front page of The Economic Times screamed yet another article that was more about national fervor than economics. The news was about Daiichi Sankyo, a company based in Japan acquiring Ranbaxy, the largest pharmaceutical company in India for $8.5 billion. The article starts dramatically:

After three years of swallowing some of the biggest and brightest companies and brands across the world, it was role reversal with a vengeance. A marauding Corporate India watched in stunned disbelief that the promoters of Ranbaxy were actually selling out. It has virtually come as a shocker, more so at a time when Indian companies were getting used to the idea of being among the top dogs in the global corporate sweepstakes.

[At this point, I amused myself and imagined all of Corporate India sitting and brooding in a dimly-lit conference room watching the news on a TV hanging on the wall in disbelief. A thoughtful silence, then a vehement discussion on what's happening to those glorious Indian MNC dreams. Some dramatic music in the background coupled with close-up camera angles. Stoppp … ]

There's more in the article:

Mahindra & Mahindra’s vice-chairman Anand Mahindra sums up the sentiment of many in Corporate India: “It’s a landmark deal for the pharma industry. But I can’t help feeling a twinge of regret about an Indian MNC becoming a Japanese subsidiary.”

Ouch, India. A twinge for you. But I guess the media digs this kinda stuff.

I guess we can give Corporate India a little more credit for its business acumen than soap opera sentiment. For all practical purposes, the future will see a confused mixture of ownership in most companies at the top. For one, the buyer or seller (be it of a full company or a little portion of it) will not particularly care for the political boundaries of these companies. If they do then we really aren't talking business. If we are able to view Ranbaxy and the Dora group on Facebook through similar lenses, then we are grasping the inexorable reality of R=G.