My father was born in 1933 in a tiny fishing village in southern India. He told me how as a kid he had just one set of good clothes and how getting to school required swimming some distance. Water surrounds his village, so this story must be real.

Last Christmas, I took my son and daughter to visit the village where he was born. They were amazed at how primitive life still is there. For example, they loved seeing a well that people use to draw water with a rope and a bucket.

However, when we went in to visit some relatives, you could see that life has changed. And there’s a generation that is leading this change around the world…

When we went inside my relatives’ houses, we could see that technology has utterly transformed their lives, even in my father’s old fishing village.

People in his village have access to Internet lines and cellphones. And even from this tiny village, they are learning programming, learning English and watching cricket with this new technology. They are also writing programs, collecting data, analyzing the data and creating information — all of which they are selling as services around the world.

And the generation of people doing these things in India is the same as those doing these same things in the United States — millennials.

A Generation Powerhouse

In the United States alone, the millennial generation is an estimated 91 million strong, making them the largest generation ever in U.S. history.

However, the millennial phenomenon is a global one. By that, I mean that the habits of a U.S.-born millennial are similar in many ways to that of an upper- to middle-class millennial born in India, China, France, Turkey or Australia.

All of them have had technology such as the Internet, cellphones and smartphones at their fingertips for most of their lives. They have witnessed the globalization of business and economic activity, where information and data are the critical factors.