India, Aug. 22 -- In 1972, S Rajaratnam, Singapore's first minister of foreign affairs, delivered a prescient speech entitled "Singapore: Global City". Drawing on Arnold Toynbee's Cities on the Move (1970), Rajaratnam underlined that a "new form of human organization and settlement" was emerging - the global city. For millennia, cities had been "the creators and sustainers of civilization, culture, technology, and wealth", he observed. But while cities like ancient Rome or Renaissance-era Florence had been "centers of local civilization", changes in technology, which were "annihilating time and distance", were now permitting cities like New York, London, and Tokyo to become the epicentres of enterprise and capital on a scale never seen be...