Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon , looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day , and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India 's smartest engineers , trained at his country 's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day , was telling me that the world was flat , as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain .