Last spring, while travelling through the US, my husband and I stopped in Pensacola, Florida, where he had lived for a few years as an exchange student from Italy. The city had been gentrified since he had been there in the mid-80s, but you could still play cornhole in certain establishments, residents spoke of their guns as if they were pets and the political vibe was distinctly Trumpian. It’s where I first came across the word “prepper” – people who opt to live off the grid, stocked with supplies, oftentimes armed, preparing for the end of the world. Not all preppers are doomsday conspiracy theorists; some are merely Hurricane Katrina survivors, learning to work the land and committed to a more sustainable way of life.

I realised then that my husband and I had been quasi-preppers for four years. We live on a remote beach in Tamil Nadu between two fishing villages, not in anticipation of the end of the world – although in the last 15 years our coast has seen a tsunami, cyclones, floods and an oil spill – but because the cost of living is cheap, the air is clean, and as writers we can handle the isolation. We constantly talk about growing our own vegetables, getting a cow and installing solar panels, and, while we aren’t living off the land yet, we are far removed from urban India. We receive no post, have no television, must sit on a particular part of the bed to get 3G, and leave the compound only when we run out of food.

My husband complains. He would like to see the local life, engage in philosophical conversations with fishermen, make documentaries about the syncretic religions of the area. “This is not a Sardinian village,” I tell him. “We can’t just walk into the centro and chat with the baker. There is no baker.”

The truth is, we probably could find someone like the baker. But I didn’t want to be saddled with translator duty. Even though I’ve spent most of my life in Tamil Nadu, Tamil isn’t my mother tongue; I prefer when locals think I’m a vellekari (white woman) with a terrific talent for language. I also didn’t want to get embroiled in village politics. We had already had one bad incident with the villagers – they poisoned five of our dogs because they claimed (probably correctly) the animals had been eating their chickens at night. I wasn’t about to converse with dog-killers.

The real reason I was uncomfortable about making local forays, though, was because I’m uncomfortable with inequality. “How is it going to work?” I ask. “We go over to their thatched hut for a chai, then invite them over to our villa for mocktails?” Like many Indians, I deal with disparities by constructing a kind of inner wall so as to be able to get on with life.

Before Britain voted to leave the EU, I still believed in the idea of globalisation. As the child of a Welsh mother and Gujarati father, coming of age in the conservative southern Indian city of Madras, I had struggled with being a casteless, godless, mixed-race nothing. With globalisation I could embrace my multiculturalism with all the exuberance of a Benetton ad. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent economic liberalisation policies of India in the 90s created an opening, the kind my mother described when she talked of the 60s. She grew up in a village in north Wales in 50s postwar gloom with the same meal on the table every day. For her, listening to the Beatles in a dancehall in Mold – before they got big – heralded change: “Something was happening, everyone could feel it.”

If we think of history not as an ascending spiral of human advance, but an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human needs, where freedom is recurrently won and lost in an alternation that includes long periods of anarchy and tyranny, as political philosopher John Gray suggests, then we could say that something is happening now that is the opposite of an opening up. The dream of free borders, free trade and free movement is in decline. There is a shift towards inwardness and isolation.

The beach at Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu with its shore temple in view. Photograph: Alamy

It would be facile after the 2008 financial crisis, and more recently the Brexit vote and Trump, to maintain that globalisation has not had serious failings. It would be a kind of liberal madness to invoke Diogenes and insist on calling ourselves cosmopolitans when there are more than 10 million stateless people in the world, when governments are building walls to keep refugees out. We can’t talk about being global citizens without admitting that those with golden passports can travel freely, while many millions cannot. For all the bonhomie and brotherhood that globalisation promised, it has not been able to prevent the rise of an extreme and divisive kind of politics in countries across the world.

What does this mean for those of us who still believe in hybridisation and the immigrant’s dream, who delight in being able to tell a stranger on the bus the story of our life, or who want to be the stranger on the bus? How can we continue to feel part of a global project that has excluded so many?

For some, it has involved taking action on behalf of a wider group: organising rallies and marches of solidarity, writing in newspapers, challenging local governments to uphold hard-won rights. For others it has been about saving themselves. Since Donald Trump was elected, there has been a spike in the sales of survivalist gear. The new breed of preppers aren’t the rightwing, beef-jerky variety of the past. These are Silicon Valley honchos and wealthy hedge-fund managers who are buying up chunks of New Zealand real estate, stocking up on Bitcoin and investing in underground, nuclear-resistant condos in case the US economy collapses – or war breaks out.

In my fishing village in Tamil Nadu, I realise the irony of writing about the idea of everywhere from the middle of nowhere. But as someone who is used to isolation, I know the dangers well. Walls are polarising – they exaggerate dangers to selfhood. I’ve said to my friends that when ugly, cookie-cutter holiday homes sprout along the beach, and the proposed coal plant gets its clearance further down the coast, I will build a bamboo fence so I won’t have to see. But a fence won’t stop the toxic fumes, the rivers of plastic, the erosion of beach.

So while some of us might want to hunker down and mark our territory, to forget that the local connects us to the larger world would be an act of historical blindness. If we accept that these are times of discomfort – that in a way, it is always a time of discomfort – then the thing to do might be to walk outside the parameters we have created for ourselves and talk to someone we normally wouldn’t. Extend a hand.