Question: What do Sachin Tendulkar and the SENSEX have in common?

Answer: If you guessed that they are both based in Bombay (now Mumbai), you’re spot on. But, there’s more…… 

I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ; Feb. 7, pg. c14), that Bombay’s SENSEX (sensitive index) had crossed the 10,000 mark. This is a first in the country’s history. Of late, India has been on the lips and minds of many a western politician and newspaper, and for good reason. With a booming economy (growing at 7.5%), and a massive and widespread NRI (non-resident Indian) diaspora, it is beginning to gain the sort of attention it deserves. Last February the National Geographic magazine contained an eighteen page article on Bollywood (written by Suketu Mehta, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his “Maximum City.”). In early December of 2005, the New York Times ran a week-long special online section of India’s rapid development juxtaposed against the backdrop of rural poverty. More recently, the Wall Street Journal ran a cover article in their “Pursuits” section (Feb. 4-5 weekend edition) with the headline, “A Passage to India’s Future.” And, in the latest Newsweek (Feb. 27), prolific foreign affairs writer Fareed Zakaria called India “a rising and responsible global power” while discussing the agenda ahead of George Bush’s imminent visit to New Delhi. 

So what’s the fuss all about? I sit here, now into a decade since having left my home country, thinking back nostalgically of my youth in Bombay. In fact, just last summer vacation I was walking around Nariman Point, the southern tip of Bombay’s Marine Drive, searching for a travel agency with the Bombay Stock Exchange edifice hovering above.  And now the Sensex has crossed 10,000. That WSJ article has caught me reflecting. We’re a passionate people. We lose one cricket match and everything comes crashing down. It’s gloom and doom all over again. We wear this extreme sense of patriotism on our sleeves and it applies to everything, including our assessment of our country. But on reflection I realize that India is perhaps a very young country still, and especially so when compared to the powerful United States. It has only been 60-odd years since she has been an independent country and when taking a bird’s eye-view, that’s actually a very small amount of time on a historical scale. In that time, India has done pretty well actually. So many times I’ve sat and lamented about India not being up to international standards in so many ways. But, I forget to include her short history in my perspective.

The British brought us many gains with respect to infrastructure and a democratic form of government, parliament et al. But since our independence in 1947, according to my venerable older compatriots, apparently we haven’t made much progress.  I am young still, and my ability to reflect on India’s history post-independence will never match that of my parents, or grandparents better still. But I’ll go out on a limb anyway. Surely we have made progress, especially only in 60 years! And these years were peppered with wars against our neighbors, China and Pakistan, in the 60’s and 70’s. Through the 80’s and early 90’s Rajiv Gandhi took up the baton and started an economic reform process in the country that hasn’t stopped since. Interestingly, our current prime minister.

Manmohan Singh, was the architect of those economic reforms back then. As the then finance minister, he was instrumental in steering India out of an economic crisis by dismantling barriers to foreign and private investment. And now we find him at the helm.  Atal Behari Bajpayee, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also played his part, and India advertised to the world (not for the first time) her intentions to join the world’s superpowers by emphatically performing a nuclear weapon test.

Nowadays, the domestic market is booming. Maruti Udyog pulls out one new car model after another (back in my day, just a decade ago, we only chose between the Maruti “800” and the “1,000”). Move over Indian Airlines, there are more domestic airline companies than one can count on one’s fingers. I recall settling in every Friday night after dinner to watch Prannoy Roy re-cap the week’s top stories on “The World This Week.” No more. Twenty-four hour news channels abound amidst more than a hundred available TV channels. Even the old war-horse Doordarshan has had a major makeover to keep abreast of the competition. Meanwhile, the Golden Quadrilateral is making way to replace the old Grand Trunk Road and connect the four big cities of the four corners of India as the most impressive highway system in our country’s history. In addition, the Metropolitan Transport Corporation of Madras (now Chennai) has taken a step further as evident by a massive half-page advertisement in the WSJ (Jan. 12, pg. a4) seeking bids from contractors to help the state build an expansive monorail system for mass-rapid transit in the southern city. But Madras is not the only southern city attracting attention, with SemIndia and Advanced Micro Device’s latest plans to invest $3 billion in Hyderabad’s Fab City project making headlines in many journals, notwithstanding the world-renowned Information Technology hub of Bangalore. Finally, today’s thriving Bollywood produces more movies per year than its American counterpart Hollywood, and as such, is the largest film industry in the world. While still works in progress, surely these, and more, are remarkable developments in only 60 years.

All this, of course, is not to say that England’s colonization of India was a good thing. Nor is India free of problems. A staggering population of over 1 billion people fills the country’s seams and blankets its ability to progress at a faster rate. Widespread poverty, lack of education, and as a result inequality, are natural by-products then. But every country has its set of maladies, no matter what shape or form they come in. If I were allowed the liberty to classify a ‘generation’ as 20 years, then in three generations since her independence, India has come a long way despite her maladies, and we should be proud. In fact, it is this youngest of the three generations, my own younger relatives, that have that promising air of optimism reminiscent of Yuvraj Singh’s nonchalant swats to the mid-wicket fence, or Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s audaciously confident lofts to long-on.  The ‘cell-phone kids’ of today’s India have everything in their own backyards. No longer are they desperate to pack their bags and head west in search of a “better life.” India’s economic surge owes mainly to the increasing wealth of its middle class who have been poised for many years to break the shackles of economic mediocrity and come out in hordes to spend and consume. But for every crouching tiger there is a hidden dragon, and some credit must go to China’s massive economic advance for drawing the world’s attention eastwards. Watch out Japan, China and India are here to stay as Asia’s new top-dogs. But while China stands firm on the yuan and the west continues to harbor anti-communist fears, India’s star can rise undiminished. Of course, these are rosy times to write rosy opinions about India’s economy. Or perhaps, it is because I am beginning to share that unrelenting optimism with today’s youngest generation. As the Sensex rallies past the 10,000 mark, another Bombay star, the Little Master, will soon look to increase his own tally of over 10,000 runs. The race is on!   Ironically enough, he will look to do so against the English! Ultimately though, perhaps Andrew Holland, executive V.P. of research at DSP Merrill Lynch in Bombay, summarizes it best: “The stock market is the barometer for the economy, the market and companies’ earnings potential, and the Sensex is showing how strong and robust the Indian economy is. It shows that India has finally arrived.”

Mera Bhaarat Mahaan!  

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