The Chronicles of India: Multiplying by Zero - Part I

It is a given and understood rule of nature that growth in its very nature means loss of the old and arrival of the new. Yet each time this metamorphosis happens in any system, it always faces inertia – it is as if the dead hand of Newton (remember his law of inertia) is dealing the cards!

In my last post, I spoke about my experiences during my stay in India. This post too, is about those experiences, but from a whole different perspective. Now that I look back upon it, as I returned to India this year, there was one significant difference than my previous visits. It was that I was going back after working in the United States for a year. What I mean by this is that I had had time to think about certain concepts and my outlook towards life, society and ethics had undergone a change. After experiencing India for about a month, I now realize that it has undergone a change as well. The reality was different than my expectation. I do not wish to say that the reality was bad, but that it was unexpected. It wasn’t sad but it was, nevertheless, disconcerting.

Let me go back a little in time. In the summer of 1991, India achieved one important milestone. Many people of my age, who were just 9-10 year old children, may have missed the full import of it, but it was the biggest revolution that happened in India after independence - an economic revolution. After the political independence in 1947, we got economic independence in 1991 when the government decentralized several economic sectors, thus opening up the market to free enterprise and growth.

Luckily for India, around this time, the global economic trend moved towards information and knowledge technology sectors, something that India was strong in and eager to deliver. With that turn of fortune, India prospered – and prospered like nothing we had seen before. Within a few years, India’s very own Silicon Valley sprung up. The young 22-something generation was getting lapped up by these IT companies like hot cakes. Salaries shot through the roof. A plethora of products from FMCGs to cars flooded the market. You could literally smell the perfume of ‘free growth’ in the Indian air. Trade, manufacturing, marketing, services, entertainment, and tourism – the whole gamut of a nation’s activities had found a thus far unseen space for expansion.

We are not the first country to undergo the present phase of growth. Before us, all the developed countries of our time have gone through it. America underwent this phase at the beginning of the industrial revolution. You’d be surprised to know how conservative and traditional America once was. However, as its economy grew and its society became modern, the American society changed. As the industrial revolution unfolded in America, hundreds of factories, manufacturing units and companies of all sorts sprung up all across the length and breadth of the country. Young men and women started finding jobs anywhere across the country. Families who had hitherto lived together in one family house were now faced with the prospect of seeing their next generation leave that home for a job which was hundreds of miles away. It was a career move for the children of the house, and family ties couldn’t hold them back anymore. It quickly became the norm that the children of the house would leave the old family home after education and go far and away due to their jobs. Later, as the universities opened up all across the nation, children got admissions in universities anywhere across the country, and in a few years, it became the norm to send your child out of the house at 18 years of age to a university, after which, they would get jobs once again away from home.

Now replace the word ‘America’ by ‘India’ in the above paragraph and you will have read the present and future course of the Indian society. In our case, it’s the IT revolution instead of the industrial one in America and Europe. Today we see graduates leaving home soon after graduation to work in a company hundreds of miles away from home. Just as it was in the turn-of-the-century America, it has now become the norm in India to leave the family home for a job. The already diminished Indian family is now becoming truly nuclear. The children now work so far away from home and have become so involved in their own world that they see their own parents only occasionally and at times a visit to their homes is only during Diwali. In present day America too, it’s the same. This is the first price that India is paying to continue on the journey of growth. I do not wish to say that this is bad, but only wish to remark that this is a consequence.

Ever since independence, Indians have shown a high appetite for modernism. Even in the early dawn of our independence, you could see the people in the cities trying to hastily imbibe modern way of life. Village folk who moved into cities shed their dhotis for trousers and rock and roll gained popularity. This is a good trend. With growth and independence, a nation must unshackle itself from the regulations and institutions of the past and look for opportunities to become modern. With this aforementioned ‘economic deliverance’ however, this appetite reached a tempo like none other.

With all the gusto for growth, a new concept had come in through the door. It is called “disposable income”. It was a totally new concept to a nation where billions were (and still are) below poverty line for four decades after independence. Till now, the term ‘income’ had meant a means for survival and something to be zealously saved in our father’s generation. Our parents saved and saved so that their children could attain higher education. It was the primary factor in explaining why our generation had the highest percentage of a middle class than ever before.

And now, we had disposable income - income that the youth did not know what to do with. And this according to me was a big departure from the past. Now that the young men and women in India do not live with their families, the degree of freedom that they have is very large. With the money that they earn, they do not have to take care of the family expenses. And this money is finding its way into the pool labeled ‘disposable income’.