THE world has not only gone mad but has become increasingly smaller, for sure. This can be seen from some of the mind-blowing events of the week, including the mayhem in Mumbai and Bangkok.

The terror strikes in Mumbai, as with many other such insane acts before them, have shown that random killings anywhere in the world would inevitably also have an international dimension.

The carnage involves not just those from the locality or country involved but also, in this instance, from Malaysia, America, Israel, France, Australia, Thailand, Singapore and Japan.

It was the same with the 9/11 attacks in New York seven years ago, the Bali bombings a year later and the London terror strikes in 2005.

Even the origins of the attackers somehow always seem to suggest an international flavour including, in the case of Mumbai, the possibility that some of them might have had a Malaysian connection, with the discovery on them of credit cards and travel documents seemingly issued in this country.
It shows most definitely how small this world has become. International borders do not mean much any more as people are constantly and all too often on the move, on business, holiday or for something else.

The immense progress in communications has hastened the virtual dismantling of boundaries as seen from the effects of the siege on Bangkok's main airports by anti-government protesters.

The closure of Suvarnabhumi and Don Muang airports, the main international gateways to the Thai capital, left thousands of travellers stranded.

And it was the seamless international communications available that allowed many of them to find alternative ways out of Bangkok. The logistical problems that arose were merely incidental. Malaysian carriers and land transport operators benefited quite substantially from the overflow of travellers coming this way out of Thailand (though some may hold this view to be perverse resulting as it does from the misfortune of a neighbour).

On a lighter note, the events unfolding in Bangkok and the travel complications arising thereof once again serve as a cautionary reminder to some of our more adventurous Malaysians who tend to make discreet visits across the border for leisure.

Even the news headline "Malaysians stuck in Thailand" seemed a little spine-chilling (in a peculiar way).

A group of friends said the other day that one of the worst nightmares would be to find oneself in a grave problem in a foreign country "where nobody is supposed to know you are in". I think I got the meaning.

Perhaps the best indication that the world is much smaller was the amazing discounts offered by an airline for flight tickets to London.

AirAsia came up last week with an almost unbelievable RM499 fare to London via Stansted airport, for bookings between Nov 26 and 30 and travel between March 11 and Oct 24.

Fantastic, I thought, unmindful that millions of others might have had the same feeling and intentions. So what a shock it was to discover that all those cheap tickets had been snapped up (yes, all 30,000 of them) by the time I logged in barely 24 hours after it opened.

By Friday (48 hours after), the price of the cheapest tickets had risen to more than RM800 each and by Sunday, to more than RM1,000.

Though the quoted fares were for one-way passage, it would still have been a fantastic bargain to have got the RM499 deal: the cost of getting to London and back by plane for a group of five would then come to only about RM7,000 (plus tax and charges). That's less than one-third the fare you would have to cough up for normal return tickets on another airline.

By Sunday, the amount one would have to pay for one return London ticket was already reaching RM2,300 (plus taxes). All my plans lay in tatters by then, as good as abandoned. And I had thought planning four months in advance would be adequate.

One more sign that the world is getting smaller is that cars are coming back on the road in Kuala Lumpur with a vengeance, after a slight hiatus when the prices of petrol went up several months ago.

Over the past couple of weeks, there were definitely more cars on the streets of the federal capital than ever before, in the face of official figures released recently that vehicle sales in Malaysia were down nearly 25 per cent in October from the previous month.

Those figures are hard to believe when the situation out there does not reflect the statistics.

And then there was the big sign I saw straddling a major thoroughfare in Kuala Lumpur the other day for a particular imported model of car: "Big Chinese New Year offer -- no down payment, easy loans and fast delivery".