The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India - the Emerging 21st-Century Power

53. The Davos Economy

THE ANNUAL GATHERING OF THE GREAT and the good at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has become a pilgrimage site for the twenty-first-century Indian. I was not able to attend in 2007, but saw a list of the Indian delegates who did. They're a “Who's Who” of the country's business and industry, with an impressive sprinkling of top politicians and bureaucrats alongside. Among the sixty-seven names on the list were enough movers and shakers to cause a small earthquake, and the number of zeroes in their collective net worth would probably fill the rest of this chapter. But impressive though that is, it's not the whole story of the Indian numbers at the World Economic Forum. I asked a prominent NRI businessman I know why he didn't go this year. “Oh, I did,” he said. “But since I'm based in London, I'm not included in the Indian list.”

The Indian presence in Davos is emblematic of a larger transformation in India, and in the way India is perceived internationally. It reflects the discovery of India by the world's financial markets. When I first went to Davos in the early 1990s Indians were present, of course, but they bore the faint whiff of the exotic minority, noticeable but hardly worth noticing. The annual Indian reception thrown by the Confederation of Indian Industry in those days was a semi-forlorn affair, overpopulated by official desis in bulging bandhgalas wolfing down samosas and scotch. Today it's the hottest ticket in the town of the Magic Mountain; the lines of well-heeled international businessmen queuing up to shake the hand of Finance Minister Chidambaram are reminiscent of those involving ticket-holders to the World Cup final. Indians are sought after because India, indubitably, matters to the world.

And why shouldn't it? India's gross domestic product is rising by 7.5 percent a year, which means that India is annually becoming richer by $200 billion, an increase in one year that exceeds the total GDP of Portugal or Norway. The level of investment in 2006–7 crossed 40 percent of GDP; just five years ago, it stood at 25 percent. If McKinsey is to be believed, some nine million jobs may be moved to India from the developed West in the next eight years. India's foreign reserves have exceeded $140 billion, enough to cover fif-teen months’ worth of imports; fifteen years ago, the country had to mortgage its gold in London because the foreign exchange coffers were dry. The speed of India's growth is so remarkable that the IMF this year even warned of the risks of the economy “overheating.” In Forbes magazine's published list of the world's billionaires, twenty-seven of the world's richest people are Indians, and even more surprising, only four of them live abroad: Indian wealth is staying in India, and it's growing.

Of course, a rather large portion of the world's poorest people live in India, too. Our country's poor live below a poverty line that seems to be drawn just this side of the funeral pyre. And yet, for all the tragic news of farmers committing suicide and the undeniably sad sight of human beings reduced to begging on our city sidewalks, there have been positive developments as well. In 1991, 36 percent of India's population (in those days, 846 million people), lived on less than one dollar a day, the World Bank's classic measure of absolute poverty. That added up to nearly 305 million people, giving India the dubious distinction of being home to the largest collection of poor people in the world. In 2001, our population had grown to 1.02 billion people, but after a decade of economic reforms, however fitful, the percentage of those living on less than a dollar a day had fallen to 26 percent, or some 267 million people. In other words, even though India had added 156 million more people to its population in the decade between those two censuses, the number of poor Indians had actually fallen by 37 million. The liberalized and liberated Indian economy had, in effect, lifted 94 million people out of absolute poverty in ten years — a feat on a scale that no country on earth, other than China, had ever accomplished. Today, five years later, estimates of people below the poverty level stand at 22 percent. Economic growth is steadily chipping away at poverty, and it is doing so far faster than in the first four decades of independence, when statist economic policies ruled the commanding heights in Delhi.

None of this is grounds for complacency. We still have a long way to go; 22 percent is still 250 million people living in conditions that are a blot on our individual and collective consciences. The necessary steps must be taken to ensure that every Indian is given the means to live a decent life, to feed his or her family, and to acquire the education that will enable him or her to fulfill their creative potential. As an Indian, I'm chuffed at India's prominence at Davos, but to me that's not the most important measure of the country's international standing. I'm much more proud that India has shown a willingness to use its newfound prosperity to benefit others: it's an article of pride, for instance, that the government has written off the debt owed to it for years by African countries. Let us celebrate, too, that India was quick to respond to the devastation that followed the tsunami and helped lead international relief efforts in Sri Lanka, even though Indian victims needed attention. India must show the world that it can go to Davos and stay true to its soul as well.

54. The Myth of the Indian Middle Class

WHENEVER I HEAR FOREIGNERS TALKING ABOUT the Indian “middle class,” I wonder what they mean. Much of the clamor about economic reforms has focused on this group, which may be sociological but is not entirely logical. The conventional wisdom is that this middle class is some 300 million strong — larger than the entire domestic market of the United states, say the marketing gurus — and, together with a very rich upper class, has both the purchasing power and the inclinations of the American middle class.

Today's economic mythology sees this new Indian middle class as ripe for international consumer goods. Our television channels and glossy magazines overflow with ads for foreign brand-name products, from Daewoo Cielo cars to Ray-Ban sunglasses. This is why Kellogg's rushed in with their corn flakes; Nike got our then cricket captain, Mohammed Azharuddin, to endorse their sports shoes (sparking off an unintended controversy since his name is also that of the Prophet and could not adorn an item so lowly as footwear); Mercedes-Benzes began rolling off the automotive production lines; and Johnny Walker Black Label scotch has become an Indian brand, not just one purveyed by smugglers. It was once said that more bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label were sold in India than were distilled in Scotland: now the joke may literally come true.

But all these manufacturers, I hear, have been dismayed by the weak response of the market, for the Indian middle class is not quite what it's cracked up to be. A survey conducted between 1986 and 1994 by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in New Delhi had already found that India's consumers could be divided into five classes, not three: the very rich, of six million people (or one million households), the “consuming class” of some 150 million (half the conventional estimate), the “climbers” (a lower middle class of 275 million), the “aspirants” (another 275 million who in America or Europe would be classified as “poor”), and finally the destitute (210 million). The numbers have gone up by another 100 million or so in the decade since the survey was conducted, but the relative balance among these five classes, despite some progress in all of them, is unlikely to have changed dramatically.

Thomas Friedman's enthusiasm for a newly “flattened” world risks adding to the myth of the Indian middle class. The first misconception is the nature of the state itself, whose withering away Friedman posits with an almost Marxian glee. Yet the state is still indispensable to most people. It provides, or should provide, physical security, law and order, economic infrastructure, and basic services. For most people in the world, however, and certainly in many parts of India, the problem is that their state is not strong enough to deliver on those vital requirements. One can rejoice at the rising living standards of Indians working at call centers, tracing lost luggage, and reading CAT scans for Americans, but what is the condition of the country they return to? Friedman waxes lyrical about the Infosys campus outside Bangalore, an oasis I too have visited, which would not be out of place in the West, but the managers of Infosys have to organize their own electricity, their own “mass” transportation, their own health club, and so on, because these facilities are absent, unreliable, or dilapidated in the city itself.

The worst news for foreign consumer goods marketers is that it is only among the one million households of the very rich that there exists a sustainable interest in the products of Kellogg, Nike, Mercedes-Benz, or Johnny Walker. Of course, the others buy goods — but these are more basic, and cheaper, than multinational corporations produce. If you're selling tea or cooking oil, you have a vast Indian market, spanning all five classes; leather sandals and ready-made shirts reach half the population; rubber thongs and plastic buckets delve even deeper; but sports shoes that cost a chauffeur's monthly take-home pay? Forget all but the smallest group at the top.

Not that Indians aren't spending more and acquiring more: since the 1980s, there has been a veritable boom of buying. On my visits to rural southern India — Tamil Nadu and Kerala — I am increasingly struck by how many village houses are of pukka construction rather than mud or thatch, and even more by how many have some sort of vehicle parked outside — in most cases a bicycle, but there were also scooters, other two-wheelers, and in some cases cars. An astonishing number of roofs sprout television antennae, and a few houses even sport a satellite dish. This empirical, if unscientific, evidence is confirmed by the NCAER study: TV ownership is rising, and all but the most destitute own wristwatches, bicycles, and portable radios. Smaller but still significant numbers buy electric irons and kitchen equipment. But this is a far cry from preferring Macallan to Kingfisher, let alone buying a Mercedes-Benz.

Cumulatively, the NCAER survey concluded, India has a “consuming population” of 168 million to 504 million people. But what they consume, and how much they can afford to pay for it, is another matter altogether. One thing that is noticeably changing is our national indifference to global brand names, which is the legacy both of four thousand years of traditional civilization and nearly five decades of self-reliant protectionism. But change is still slow in global terms; and in any case, the items most Indians buy, from household detergents to hair oil, and from cigarettes to snack food, are those where Indian brands have an advantage in both familiarity and price.

All of which suggests that, though we do have a middle-class, in many respects it consumes fewer goods than the working class in the West. The economic transformation of India since liberalization is real, but it will be a while before the average middle-class Indian tosses her Lakmé aside for a Lancome, or trades in her handmade salwar kameez for a Ralph Lauren pantsuit. After all, why shouldn't globalization speak with an Indian accent?

55. Connecting to the Future

ONE OF MY FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHS ABOUT INDIA was from the last Kumbh mela, the great religious festival that takes place four times every twelve years and is thronged by millions of Indian pilgrims. It showed a sadhu right out of central casting — naked body, long matted hair and beard, ash-smeared forehead and all — chatting away on a mobile phone. The contrast says so much about the land of paradoxes that is today's India — a country that, as I wrote many years ago, manages to live in several centuries at the same time.

There are other photographs I have seen over the years that illustrate the same phenomenon — laborers carrying TV sets on their heads, a bullock-cart transporting rocket parts, a motorcar overtaking an elephant, and so on. But there's something particularly special about the sadhu and his cell phone. Because it is in communications that the transformation of India in recent years has been most dramatic. In recent months, for the first time, seven million Indians subscribed to new mobile phones. That's a world record. In September 2006, India overtook China for the first time in the number of new telephone subscribers per month. We're still way behind China in the total number of cell phone users (just over 140 million against their 450 million), but each month the gap is narrowing. By 2010, the Indian government tells us, there will be 500 million Indian telephone users. China will probably still be ahead, but on a per capita basis there will be little to choose between the two.

Now, to anyone who grew up in pre-liberalization India, that's astonishing. Bureaucratic statism committed a long list of sins against the Indian people, but communications was high up on the list; the woeful state of India's telephones right up to the 1990s, with only eight million connections and a further twenty million on waiting lists, would have been a joke if it wasn't also a tragedy — and a man made one at that. India had possibly the worst telephone penetration rates in the world. The government's indifferent attitude to the need to improve India's communications infrastructure was epitomized by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's communications minister, C. M. Stephen, who declared in Parliament, in response to questions decrying the rampant telephone breakdowns in the country, that telephones were a luxury, not a right, and that any Indian who was not satisfied with his telephone service could return his phone — since there was an eight-year waiting list of people seeking this supposedly inadequate product.

Mr. Stephen's statement captured perfectly everything that was wrong about the government's attitude. It was ignorant (he clearly had no idea of the colossal socioeconomic losses caused by poor communications), wrongheaded (he saw a practical problem only as an opportunity to score a political point), unconstructive (responding to complaints by seeking a solution apparently did not occur to him), self-righteous (the socialist cant about telephones being a luxury, not a right), complacent (taking pride in a waiting list that should have been a source of shame, since its existence pointed to the poor performance of his own ministry in putting up telephone lines and manufacturing equipment), unresponsive (feeling no obligation to provide a service in return for the patience, and the fees, of the country's telephone subscribers), and insulting (asking long-suffering telephone subscribers to return their instruments instead of doing anything about their complaints). It was altogether typical of an approach to governance in the economic arena that assumed the government knew what was good for the country, felt no obligation to prove it by actual performance, and didn't, in any case, care what anyone else thought.

So the cell phone revolution in India is exciting not only as a sign of India's economic transformation into a twenty-first-century success story, but as a symptom of something far more important, a change in the attitude of our ruling classes. The government is marginal to this success story, since we don't need it to lay telephone lines across the country anymore, and the private sector telecom companies develop their own connectivity. Perhaps the key contribution of the government has lain in getting out of the way — in cutting license fees and streamlining tariffs, easing the overly complex regulations and restrictions that discouraged investors from coming into the Indian market, and allowing foreign firms to own up to 74 percent of their Indian subsidiary companies. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has also been a model of its kind, a regulatory agency that saw its role as facilitating the growth of the business it was regulating, rather than stifling it with rules and restrictions.

All this is to the good. But I am not merely celebrating a triumph for the capitalists of India. What is truly wonderful about the “mobile miracle” (and I'm not embarrassed to call it that) is that it has accomplished something socialist policies talked about but did little to achieve — it has empowered the less fortunate. The beneficiaries of the new mobile telephones are not just the affluent, but people who in the old days would not even have dreamt of joining those twenty-year-long waiting lists.

It's a source of constant delight to me to find cell phones in the hands of the unlikeliest of my fellow citizens: taxi drivers, paanwallahs, farmers, fisher folk. As long as our tax policies keep telecommunications costs low and it's cheap for people to call on their cell phones, the greatest growth in the use of mobile phones will be in this sector. Communications, in the new India, is the great leveler. Pity Mr. Stephen is no longer around to see how wrong he was.

56. The Strange Rise of Planet India

ONE NEW INDICATION OF THE MOUNTING INTERNATIONAL interest in India can be found in foreign bookstores, where books about our country are proliferating like bougainvillea. Edward Luce's excellent In Spite of the Gods (a superb portrait of contemporary India, marred only by its awful title) attracted a great deal of well-deserved attention in 2006 and 2007. Hot on its heels comes Mira Kamdar's Planet India, whose subtitle runs, How the Fastest-Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World.

“India,” Winston Churchill once barked, “is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.” Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does. Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India. I once jokingly observed that “anything you can say about India, the opposite is also true.”

And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. How does one come to grips with a land of such bewildering contrasts? The world's largest democracy that is also the home of the ageless caste system; a land steeped in superstition and spirituality that is a world leader in information technology; the nation of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolence, that is convulsed by periodic bloodletting — the paradoxes abound. The country's national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is “Satyameva Jayaté”—Truth Alone Triumphs. The question remains, however: Whose truth?

Edward Luce, a British journalist who headed the Financial Times bureau in Delhi at the cusp of the new century, ventures an answer in his insightful and engaging book. In the sharp-witted prose of a keenly observant journalist, Luce brings India to life with insight and irreverence (“If Gandhi had not been cremated, he would be turning in his grave”). His writing is richly evocative of place and mood, and sparkles with the kind of telling detail that illuminates an anecdote and lifts it above mere reportage. Almost the only thing not worth admiring in this book is its title, which suggests a nation struggling against the heavens, a thesis that has nothing to do with Luce's sophisticated and sympathetic narrative.

Advised early on that in India it is not enough to meet the “right people,” Luce travels through the country meeting the “wrong people” as well. He explores economic development from the ground up while never losing sight of the big picture (a “booming service economy in a sea of indifferent farmland”), punctures the myths surrounding India's IT explosion (which he correctly argues will not solve India's fundamental employment problems), and depicts the continuing allure of the secure and corruption-laden “government job.” Few foreigners have written with as much understanding of the skills and limitations of India's senior government bureaucrats, of their idealism and inefficiency, of the vested interests impeding growth and progress, as well as the extraordinary triumphs of India despite these obstacles.

On my annual visits home, I discover that India is anything but the unchanging land of cliché. There is an extraordinary degree of change and ferment. Dramatic transformations are taking place that amount to little short of a revolution — in politics, economics, society, and culture. In politics, single-party governance has given way to an era of multiparty coalitions. In economics, India has leapt from protectionism to liberalization, even if it is with the hesitancy of governments looking over their electoral shoulders. In caste and social relations, India has witnessed convulsive changes. And yet all this, which would have rent a lesser country asunder, has been managed through an accommodative and pluralist democracy. Luce tells this story remarkably well.

There is a gently sympathetic portrait of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the ruling Congress Party, for whom “the political is very personal.” Luce, who is married to an Indian, clearly admires much of India's culture: “If world trade were to be conducted purely in cultural products,” he writes, “then India would have a thumping annual surplus.” He answers the famous question of why Indian Muslims don't join al-Qaeda: “the political system under which they live” guarantees them “freedom of speech, expression, worship, and movement.” But Luce is a far from uncritical admirer. He is unsparing on the corruption that infests Indian politics and society, on the ersatz Westernization that has seen sonograms used to facilitate female feticide, on the “unimpressive politicians” who run India's “impressive democracy.”

No one speaks seriously anymore of the dangers of disintegration that, for years, India was said to be facing. Luce demonstrates credibly that, for all its flaws, India's democratic experiment has worked. Though there have been caste conflicts, linguistic clashes, interreligious riots, and threats to the nation from separatist groups, political democracy has helped to defuse each of these. The explosive potential of caste division has also been channeled through the ballot box. Most strikingly, the power of electoral numbers has given high office to the lowest of India's low. Who could have imagined, for three thousand years, that an “untouchable” woman would rule as chief minister of India's most populous state? Yet that has happened three times, most recently in mid-2007.

In 2004, in an event unprecedented in human history, a nation of a billion people, after the planet's largest exercise in free elections, saw a Roman Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) make way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) — in a country 81 percent Hindu. Luce is right to list the many problems the country faces, the poor quality of much of its political leadership, the rampant corruption, the criminalization of politics. But I'd like to have read a little more about the strengths of India's vibrant civil society: Nongovernmental organizations actively defend human rights, promoting environmentalism, fighting injustice. The press is free, lively, irreverent, disdainful of sacred cows. India is the only country in the English-speaking world where the print media is expanding rather than contracting, and the country supports the world's largest number of all-news TV channels. Luce disappointingly tells us nothing of this.

But these are minor cavils. Luce clearly loves the country he writes about — an essential attribute for a book like this — but he is tough-minded, and his judgment is invariably sound. Luce quotes a colleague as telling him, “In India, things are never as good or as bad as they seem.” If you want to understand how that might be, read his wonderful book.

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As her subtitle suggests, and despite her Indian name, Mira Kamdar, whose mother was Danish, is an American writing for American readers. But her book is all the more interesting to Indians for that, because it helps answer an intriguing question: What does a sensitive, engaged American writer (“I wrote this book because I believe that India matters as never before to the future of a world in crisis”) feel her compatriots need to know about India? Planet India is a thoroughly researched depiction, warts and all, of today's India. Kamdar has visited the country frequently since her childhood and sprinkles her narrative with personal anecdotes and references to her father's family there, but she has also put in a great deal of research, and her book bristles with statistics. She traveled extensively through the country in the course of a year, conducted wide-ranging interviews and conversations with an astonishing array of Indians, and has taken pains to cover all the key topics that a comprehensive examination of the country demands. It's all here — the IT boom, the television explosion, nuclear weapons, biotech research — and no booster of “India Shining” can have reason to complain: Kamdar even quotes a young NRI filmmaker in New York, Smriti Mundhra, saying, “Who needs the American audience? There are only three hundred million people here.” (What's the Hindi equivalent of chutzpah?)

But to Kamdar's credit, she doesn't stop with the good news. Planet India is also unsparing in its portrayal of rural poverty, fetid slums, throat-searing pollution, inadequate health care, crippling water shortages, cities choking on themselves. And as a writer of Gujarati descent, her own despair about the pogrom overseen by Narendra Modi and the Gujarat police in 2002 is painfully evident. Not everything is rosy on Planet India, and Kamdar is realistic about the desperation of many people's lives and the scale of the challenge facing India's rulers and policymakers. She could have said more about corruption (which Luce tackled more fully) and about the sterling work of social activists combating communalism, like Harsh Mander, Teesta Setalvad, or Shabnam Hashmi.

Planet India is a worthy addition to the burgeoning shelf of serious books about twenty-first-century India. Despite seeing all the tragedies and limitations, Kamdar comes down firmly on the side of the optimists about India. “One day soon,” she writes, “when a critical mass of the talent, the money, and the market is in Asia, a tipping point will be reached, and India will move from joining the game, or even winning the game, to inventing new rules for new games.”

It's a striking thought. And the last word should probably belong to an Indian, the man behind the success of Ambootia Tea, Sanjay Bhansal, who lends Kamdar a laptop so that she can take notes more efficiently during their interview. After describing his work and his plans, Bhansal remarks pithily, “So this is what is happening in India. My father could not have dreamt of what I am planning to do.” In that simple statement lies a world of hope for our country and our people.

57. Calls from the Center

IT HAS BECOME FASHIONABLE OF LATE, among our bien-pensant classes, to sneer at the success of India's business process outsourcing industry — the call centers and the like that have become the visible face of globalization in our formerly protectionist land. Some seven hundred thousand Indians work in the BPO business, which contributes an estimated $17 billion to the burgeoning Indian economy. The call center has become the symbol of India's newly globalized workforce: while traditional India sleeps, a dynamic young cohort of highly skilled, articulate professionals works through the night, functioning on U.S. time under made-up American aliases, pretending familiarity with a culture and climate they've never actually experienced, earning salaries that were un-dreamt of by their elders (but a fraction of what an American would make), and enjoying a lifestyle that's a cocktail of premature affluence and Westernization transplanted to an Indian setting.

It's been a major breakthrough for India and Indians, one that Anglophone countries in Africa, like Ghana and Kenya, are striving to emulate. But many in India see the call centers as soul-destroying sweatshops soaking up the talents and energies of young Indians who could and should be doing better for themselves and their country. Chetan Bhagat's best seller, One Night @ the Call Center, for instance, inveighs against young Indians wasting their time catering to the unreasonable and petty demands of American customers — customers so stupid, in Bhagat's telling, that an instructor teaches call center trainees the formula 10 = 35: “Remember, a thirty-five-year-old American's brain and IQ is the same as a ten-year-old Indian's.” As one of Bhagat's protagonists puts it in the novel's climactic scene: “An entire generation up all night, providing crutches for the white morons to run their lives… while bad bosses and stupid Americans suck the lifeblood out of our country's most productive generation.” One elitist friend of mine put it even more pithily: “All we're doing is providing coolie labor — carrying the excess baggage of globalization that's too clunky for the West to bother to lift.”

It's a harsh judgment, one that's genuinely unfair to the talent, dedication, and creativity of the young people who make the call centers work. But it's also out of date. If what India is doing is providing coolie labor, then today the coolies are scheduling the trains.

The evidence is striking. The business processes that are being outsourced are no longer just the airline reservations or customer billing or even minor technical troubleshooting that earlier made up the bulk of the call centers’ work. Today Indians are reading MRIs for American hospitals, running consulting services for global U.S. firms, handling actuarial work for British insurance companies, analyzing U.S. and European company stocks for Western institutional investors, and writing software that will prevent Boeing and Airbus planes from colliding in midair. Hardly menial tasks.

And there's more. When the U.S. pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly discovered a molecule recently that it needed to shepherd through extensive clinical research and human trials before it could be placed on the market, it gave the task to an Indian firm, Nicholas Piramal. Anand Giridharadas, who reported this in the New York Times, added that Infosys is designing part of the wing of the Airbus A380, Tata Consultancy Services is building the software for the cockpits, and a third Indian firm is designing the plane's doors. This is not just back-office work; it's the sort of fundamental responsibility that Western firms traditionally carried out in their national HQs, on the assumption that that was the only way they could guarantee quality. Today, they see India as a country that can provide the same quality — and a lot more cheaply.

The employment figures of multinational corporations in India tell their own story. By December 2007, Accenture should have more employees in India than in the United States, its headquarters. In the last fifteen years, IBM has increased its Indian workforce by 52,000 while reducing its American employees by 31,000. When Citigroup recently announced major job cuts in the States, its 22,000 Indian staff were unaffected, and if anything are likely to increase. The proportion of these companies’ workforces in India as a percentage of their global labor pool is going up steadily. As technology advances, there's almost no limit to the kind of work that can be outsourced, and India is in the prime position to pick up the offerings. Today, as long as you have the fiber-optic cables and the bandwidth to communicate with the other side of the globe, geography is merely a circumstance, not a determining factor.

This is a welcome development, but we shouldn't be content with it. The next stage must be for Indians to develop such services for our own market. Doing outsourced work for the United States and Europe is all very well, but there's a lot more we could be doing for India and Indians, too. The skills we are able to market for foreign employers can also be turned toward improving the prospects of our fellow citizens — finding solutions for the problems of Indians and not just Americans or Brits. Perhaps the next level of outsourcing will come when smart scientists in Bangalore farm out processes to young engineers in Dharwar to cater to the needs of consumers in Hubli.

58. Looking to the Future with Brand IIT

FEW SUBJECTS WARRANT AS OPTIMISTIC A LOOK TO THE FUTURE as Indian science and technology. Living as I am these days in the United States, I have had the particular pleasure of seeing some of the prospects firsthand, having been asked to address a global gathering of IIT alumni in Mumbai just before Christmas 2006.

Demographic projections suggest that the next U.S. census will find more Indian Americans than American Indians. When I was admitted to an American graduate school in 1975, not too many history majors were making the journey to America. Already, though, our counterparts at India's elite technological universities and engineering colleges — especially those from the Indian Institutes of Technology or IITs — had begun to snap up the fellowships that American munificence provided. They went on to form the creative backbone of the global information revolution with their quick minds and developed crucial innovations that changed the way Americans live.

IITians dominate what Americans call the “honor roll.” Arun Netravali, former president of Bell Laboratories, received the Presidential Medal of Technology for pioneering the technology that enabled high-definition television, HDTV, and Internet streaming videos. Raj and Neera Singh, an entrepreneurial couple, pioneered the use of cell phone and pager technology in forty countries. Mohamed Zaidi, as president of Alcoa in Germany, pioneered the first aluminum-based automobiles for various models of Audi, Mercedes, Jaguar, Volvo, and Porsche. Dr. Mani Bhaumik invented the cold laser technique, which is used for laser eye-surgery machines and has benefited over fifteen million patients worldwide. Padma Warrior as CTO of Motorola is creating more affordable mobile phones for the Indian rural markets. (These stars and many more—101 global IITians in all — are featured in a book by IIT alumnus Ranjan Pant, published in 2007.)

The success of these IITians and several thousand more transformed the image of their homeland and its people. To the American mind, the stereotypical Indian is no longer a snake charmer but a software guru. Today an Indian student with decent grades has a better than ever chance of admission to an American university of his or her choice, with a substantial scholarship. This blossoming of the Indian diaspora has happened because of seeds sown decades ago by the founders of great institutions like the IITs.

When I wrote my short biography of Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru: The Invention of India), I became conscious of the extent to which we have taken for granted one vital legacy of his: the creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for India today.

Men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai constructed the platform for Indian accomplishments in the fields of atomic energy and space research. They and their successors have given India a scientific establishment without peer in the developing world.

Nehru's establishment of the IITs (and the spur they provided to other institutions like Birla Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management) have produced many of the finest minds in America's Silicon Valley and Fortune 500 corporations. Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the United States as one from MIT or Caltech. The next step is for IITians in India and IITians abroad to strengthen their bonds and combine their intellectual talents, resources, and skills to help each other expand into one another's markets.

One can imagine IIT alumni abroad enhancing opportunities for their businesses by partnering with Indian companies led by IITians, and vice versa. Such “IIT alumni to IIT alumni trade” could apply to many industries and even to higher education, where IIT alumni professors from Indian institutions and those attending from abroad can plan to exchange students and faculty and collaborate across borders on research.

India's extraordinary emergence in new industries — software, information technology, and business process outsourcing — is the indirect result of Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in scientific education. Nehru left India with the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel outside the developed West.

His legacy is not one we can afford to be complacent about. After all, the roots of Indian science and technology go far deeper than Nehru. The Rig Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together twenty-four centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head. The Vedic civilization subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth at a time when everyone else, even the Greeks, assumed the earth was flat.

And yet we lost the global lead in science and technology for over a millennium. It is time to resolve that we will never allow ourselves to slip behind again. That will require resources — serious money for research, world-class lab facilities. But above all, it will require one commodity India is not short of — brains (and the determination to use them).

“Brand IIT” has shown the way. We must start to scale this up to the point where one day “Brand India” becomes synonymous not with cheap products or services but with the highest standards of scientific and technological excellence.

59. India and Soft Power

POWER,” WROTE HARVARD'S JOSEPH NYE, “is the ability to alter the behavior of others to get what you want, and there are three ways to do that: coercion (sticks), payments (carrots), and attraction (soft power). If you are able to attract others, you can economize on the sticks and carrots.”

It is increasingly axiomatic today that the old calculations of “hard power” are no longer sufficient to guide a country's conduct in world affairs. Informed knowledge about external threats to the nation, the fight against terrorism, a country's strategic outreach, its geopolitically derived sense of its national interest, and the way in which it articulates and projects its presence on the international stage, are all intertwined, and are also conjoined with its internal dynamics. There can no longer be a foolproof separation of information management from policymaking, of external intelligence and internal reality, of foreign policy and domestic culture. A country's role on the world stage is seen more and more as a reflection of its society.

At the same time, states operate in an era of competition with others, seeking to promote their security by leveraging their assets. And this is where “soft power” comes in. “The soft power of a country,” Nye explained, “rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority).”

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As an Indian, I am a little concerned about those who speak of our country as a future “world leader” or even as “the next superpower.” Many Indian thinkers and writers I respect have spoken of India's geostrategic advantages, its economic dynamism, political stability, proven military capabilities, its nuclear, space, and missile programs, the entrepreneurial energy of our people, and the country's growing pool of young and skilled manpower as assuring India “great power” status as a “world leader” in the new century.

The notion of “world leadership” is a curiously archaic one; the very phrase is redolent of Kipling ballads and James Bondian adventures. What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, in which case India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world's most populous country by 2050? Is it military strength (India's is already the world's fourth-largest army) or nuclear capacity (India's status having been made clear, if not formally recognized, in 1998)? Is it economic development? There, India has made extraordinary strides in recent years; it is already the world's fifth-largest economy in PPP (purchasing-power parity) terms and continues to climb, though too many of its people still live in destitution, amid despair and disrepair. Or could it be a combination of all these, allied to something altogether more difficult to define — the power of example?

In answering this question, India must determine where its strengths lie as it seeks to make the twenty-first century its own. Much of the conventional analyses of India's stature in the world relies on the all-too-familiar indices of GDP, impressive economic growth rates (7 percent a year over the last five years, and talk of even 10 percent in the next five), and our undoubted military power. But if there is one attribute of independent India to which increasing attention is now being paid around the globe, it is the quality that we would do well to cherish and develop in today's world: our soft power.

The notion of “soft power” is relatively new in international discourse. The term was coined by Nye to describe the extraordinary strengths of the United States that went well beyond American military dominance. Traditionally, Nye explains, power in world politics was seen in terms of military power: the side with the larger army was likely to win. But even in the past, this wasn't enough; after all, the United States lost the Vietnam War, and the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan. Enter soft power.

For Nye, the United States is the archetypal exponent of soft power. The United States is the home of Boeing and Intel, GM and the iPod, Microsoft and MTV, Hollywood and Disneyland, McDonald's and Starbucks — in short, home of most of the major products that dominate daily life around our globe. The attractiveness of these assets, and of the American lifestyle of which they are emblematic, is that they permit the United States to maximize what Nye called its soft power — the ability to attract and persuade others to adopt the U.S. agenda, rather than relying purely on the dissuasive or coercive hard power of military force. Its subtly deployed soft power is therefore as important to the United States as — perhaps more so — than its well-established hard power.

In his book The Paradox of American Power Nye took the analysis of soft power beyond the United States; other nations, too, he suggested, could acquire it. In today's information era, he wrote, three types of countries are likely to gain soft power and so succeed: “those whose dominant cultures and ideals are closer to prevailing global norms (which now emphasize liberalism, pluralism, autonomy); those with the most access to multiple channels of communication and thus more influence over how issues are framed; and those whose credibility is enhanced by their domestic and international performance.”

At first glance this seems to be a prescription for reaffirming today's reality of U.S. dominance, since it is clear that no country scores more highly on all three categories than the United States. But Nye himself admits this is not so: soft power has been pursued with success by other countries over the years. When France lost the war of 1870 to Prussia, one of its most important steps to rebuild the nation's shattered morale and enhance its prestige was to create the Alliance Française to promote French language and literature throughout the world. French culture has remained a major selling point for French diplomacy ever since. The U.K. has the British Council, the Swiss have Pro Helvetia, and Germany, Spain, Italy, and Portugal have, respectively, institutes named for Goethe, Cervantes, Dante Alighieri, and Camoës. Today, China has started establishing “Confucius institutes” to promote Chinese culture internationally. But soft power does not rely merely on governmental action: Hollywood and MTV have done more to promote the idea of America as a desirable and admirable society than the Voice of America or the Fulbright scholarships. “Soft power,” Nye says, “is created partly by governments and partly in spite of them.”

What does this mean for India? It means giving attention, encouragement, and active support to the aspects and products of our society that the world would find attractive — not in order to directly persuade others to support India, but rather to enhance our country's intangible standing in their eyes. Bollywood is already doing this by bringing its brand of glitzy entertainment not just to the Indian diaspora in the U.S. or U.K. but to the screens of Syrians and Senegalese — who may not understand the Hindi dialogue but catch the spirit of the films, and look at India with stars in their eyes as a result. (An Indian diplomat friend in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only publicly displayed portraits that were as big as those of then president Hafez al-Assad were those of Amitabh Bachchan.) Indian art, classical music, and dance have the same effect. So does the work of Indian fashion designers, which not long ago dominated the show windows of New York's chic Lord and Taylor department store. Indian cuisine, spreading around the world, raises our culture higher in people's reckoning; the way to foreigners’ hearts is through their palates.

When India's cricket team triumphs or its tennis players claim grand slams; when a bhangra beat is infused into a Western pop record or an Indian choreographer invents a fusion of kathak and ballet; when Indian women sweep the Miss World and Miss Universe contests, or when Monsoon Wedding wows the critics and Lagaan claims an Oscar nomination; when Indian writers win the Booker or Pulitzer Prizes; when each of these things happens, our country's soft power is enhanced. (Ask yourself how many Chinese novelists the typical literate American reader can name. Indeed, how many non-Western countries can claim a presence in the Occidental mind comparable to India's?) And when Americans speak of the IITs with the same reverence they used to accord to MIT or Caltech, and the Indianness of engineers and software developers is taken as synonymous with mathematical and scientific excellence, it is India that gains in respect.

In the information age, Joseph Nye has argued, it is often the side that has the better story that wins. India must remain the “land of the better story.” As a society with a free press and a thriving mass media, with a people whose creative energies are daily encouraged to express themselves in a variety of appealing ways, India has an extraordinary ability to tell stories that are more persuasive and attractive than those of its rivals. This is not about propaganda; indeed, it will not work if it is directed from above, least of all by government. But its impact, though intangible, can be huge.

To take one example: Afghanistan is clearly a crucial country for our national security. Our foreign policy mandarins have their work cut out for them there, and I would be surprised if Afghanistan isn't a priority for the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). But the most interesting asset for India in Afghanistan doesn't come out of one of our famous consulates in the border regions. It comes, instead, from one simple fact: don't try to telephone an Afghan at 8:30 in the evening. That's when the Indian TV soap opera Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, dubbed into Dari, is telecast on Tolo TV, and no one wishes to miss it. It's the most popular television show in Afghan history, considered directly responsible for a spike in the sale of generator sets and even for absences from religious functions that clash with its broadcast times. Saas has so thoroughly captured the public imagination in Afghanistan that, in this deeply conservative Islamic country where family problems are usually hidden behind the veil, it's an Indian TV show that has come to dominate society's discussion of family issues. I have read reports of wedding banquets being interrupted so that the guests could huddle around the television for half an hour, and even of an increase in crime at 8:30 p.m. because watchmen are sneaking a look at the TV rather than minding the store. One Reuters dispatch recounted how robbers in Mazar-i-Sharif stripped a vehicle of its wheels and mirrors recently during the telecast time and wrote on the car, in an allusion to the show's heroine, “Thanks, Tulsi.” That's soft power, and India does not have to thank the government or charge the taxpayer for its exercise. Instead, Indians too can simply say, “Thanks, Tulsi.”

Of course, official government policy can also play a role. Pavan Varma, the current head of the Indian Council on Cultural Relations (ICCR), has argued that “culturally India is a superpower” and that cultural diplomacy must be pursued for political ends, “keeping in mind our priorities on a global scale.” A casual glance at the 2006 calendar shows how India is consciously seeking to leverage its soft power in Europe. India dominated discussions of the “creative imperative” at Davos in January 2006, was “partner country” for the Hanover Trade Fair in May, then “theme country” at the Bonn Biennale, a cultural festival for theater lovers. It starred at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2006, where it was the guest and country of honor, before November saw the Festival of India attract throngs in Brussels. The Festival of India was an interesting example of what India is consciously trying to showcase, incorporating as it did a classic exhibition called Tejas (or effulgence) highlighting early images of iconic Indian art from the last 1,500 years, somewhat more recent fare featuring exquisite paintings in the Kangra style, to contemporary photographic expositions on Satyajit Ray, performances by some of India's world-renowned artists in music, dance, and theater, a food festival, a fashion show — and, inevitably, a section on business opportunities in India.

That's all very well, and kudos to the ICCR for organizing it. But I would argue that soft power is not just what we can deliberately and consciously exhibit or put on display; it is rather how others see what we are, whether or not we are trying to show it to the world.

So it is not just material accomplishments that enhances our soft power. Even more important are the values and principles for which India stands. After all, Mahatma Gandhi won us our independence through the use of soft power — because nonviolence and satyagraha were indeed classic uses of soft power before the term was even coined. Pandit Nehru was also a skilled exponent of soft power: he developed a role for India in the world based entirely on its civilizational history and its moral standing, making India the voice of the oppressed and the marginalized against the big power hegemons of the day. This gave the country enormous standing and prestige across the world for some years, and strengthened our own self-respect as we stood, proud and independent, on the world stage. But the great flaw in Nehru's approach was that his soft power was unrelated to any acquisition of hard power; as the humiliation of 1962 demonstrated, soft power has crippling limitations. Instead of Theodore Roosevelt's maxim “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” we spoke loudly but had no stick at all. Soft power becomes credible when there is hard power behind it; that is why the United States has been able to make so much of its soft power. Let us be clear: soft power by itself is no guarantee of security.

As Joseph Nye himself has admitted, “Drinking Coke or watching a Bollywood film does not automatically convey power for the U.S. or India. Whether the possession of soft power resources actually produces favorable outcomes depends upon the context.” That context is often one of hard geopolitics. Soft power is one arrow in a nation's security quiver. It is not an all-purpose panacea.

So I have little patience for those who would naively suggest that soft power can solve all our security challenges. That is absurd: a jihadi who enjoys a Bollywood movie will still have no compunction about setting off a bomb in Mumbai, and the United States has already learned that the perpetrators of 9/11 ate their last dinner at a McDonald's. To counter the terrorist threat there is no substitute for hard power. But there can be a complement to it. Where soft power works is in attracting enough goodwill from ordinary people to reduce the sources of support and succor that the terrorists enjoy, and without which they cannot function.

But this means we also need to solve our internal problems. When Joseph Nye wrote of the prospects for India developing its soft power, he observed that our country “still faces challenges of poverty with 260 million people surviving on less than one dollar a day, inequality tied to a caste system, and corruption and inefficiency in the provision of public services.” In other words, until we can tackle and eliminate such problems, the negative perceptions they generate will continue to undermine our appeal.

So as we speak of leveraging our soft power, we must also look within. We must ensure that we do enough to keep our people healthy, well fed, and secure not just from jihadi terrorism but from the daily terror of poverty, hunger, and ill health. Progress is being made: we can take satisfaction from India's success in carrying out three kinds of revolutions in feeding our people — the “green revolution” in food grains, the “white revolution” in milk production, and, at least to some degree, a “blue revolution” in the development of our fisheries. But the benefits of these revolutions have not yet reached the third of our population still living below the poverty line. We must ensure they do, or our soft power will ring hollow, at home and abroad.

At the same time, if we want to be a source of attraction to others, it is not enough to attend to these basic needs. We must preserve the precious pluralism that is such a civilizational asset in our globalizing world. Our democracy, our thriving free media, our contentious NGOs, our energetic human rights groups, and the repeated spectacle of our remarkable general elections, have all made of India a rare example of the successful management of diversity in the developing world. But every time there is a Babri Masjid or a pogrom like the savagery in Gujarat in 2002, India suffers a huge setback to our soft power. Those who condoned the killings in Gujarat have done more damage to India's national security than they can even begin to realize. India must reclaim its true heritage in the eyes of the world.

India's civilizational ethos has been an immeasurable asset for our country. Let us not allow the specter of religious intolerance and political opportunism to undermine the soft power that is India's greatest asset in the world of the twenty-first century. Maintain that, and true world leadership in promoting global security — the kind that has to do with principles, values, and standards — will follow.

60. The Thrilling Face of a Bold New India

WE ALL KNOW INDIA HAS CHANGED DRAMATICALLY in recent years: the country I left when I first went abroad as a student in 1975 would be barely recognizable to the young Indians of today.

To those who remember the old India, there's visible evidence of change all around, from the variety of makes of car on the roads to the number of channels on my mother's television set, not to mention the malls now sprouting like mushrooms in chic suburbs that used to be dusty and forlorn mofussils.

But what about the invisible evidence of change? How does one capture the transformation of attitude that's as essential a part of what India has become?

Sometimes a simple event encapsulates something far larger than itself. Journalists are overly fond of “defining moments,” I know. And one should always be wary of making too much of anything that transpires on that theater of the evanescent, the sports field.

But my epiphany about the new India came in December 2006, in just such a setting, during the telecast of the first cricket Test against South Africa at the Wanderers’ ground in Johannesburg.

India's new bowling hero, Shantakumaran “Gopu” Sreesanth, was batting, facing the charged-up South African speedster André Nel. “As soon as I walked in to bat, Nel said, ‘I can smell blood, I can smell blood,’” Sreesanth later revealed. His first ball beat the Indian tail ender all ends-up.

Nel then marched up to the young Indian, taunting him that he didn't have the heart to stand up to the big man's pace bowling. “You don't have the fire, man. You should have a big heart to play me,” Nel reportedly said, thumping his own chest in full view of the TV cameras. “You are like a bunny to me.” He then declared that he would “get” Sreesanth with his next delivery. Nel ostentatiously changed the field for the next ball, moving the short-leg fieldsman to deep square-leg and informing wicket-keeper Mark Boucher, in Sreesanth's hearing, that he would be bowling a bouncer.

The young Indian was not fooled. “I am a fast bowler,” Sreesanth said later, “and I was sure that he would bowl a length ball.” Sure enough, Nel charged in, believing the batsman was expecting a short-pitched delivery, and bowled a fast, full-length ball on the middle stump.

Sreesanth, having guessed correctly, stepped back and with an almighty swing hit the ball back over the fast bowler's head into the stands for six. What followed is now one of television's most memorable moments.

No one who saw it can forget Sreesanth running down the pitch in triumph, twirling his bat like a bandleader's baton, then breaking into a dance that combined both relief and exhilaration: the relief of the plucky kid on the beach who has kicked sand back into the bully's face and the exhilaration of one who knows that, after essaying so foolhardy a deed, he had gotten away with it.

Nel was left not merely speechless but defanged; the sheepish expression on his face was worth almost as much as the priceless, laugh-out-loud joy of Sreesanth's impromptu breakdance.

Everything about the episode emblazoned a story of transformational change. In the old India, a tail ender, confronted with a fast bowler's aggression, would have been cowed. He would have either backed away from the imminent threat of decapitation or (at best) put his head down and attempted to block the next ball.

He would have been grateful to have survived at all; there would have been no doubt that the foreign paceman would have maintained his psychological ascendancy. It would certainly never have occurred to the Indian to think like a fast bowler, and it would have been beyond imagining that he would decide to meet fire with fire.

Sreesanth's extraordinary hit over Nel's head for six encapsulated for me all that is different about the new India: courage, assertiveness, a refusal to be intimidated, a willingness to take risks, and ultimately the confidence to stand up to the best that the outside world can fling at us.

This goes well beyond the cricket field. Sreesanth's India is the land that throws out the intruders of Kargil, that (in the shape of L. N. Mittal's takeover of Arcedor) acquires Europe's largest steel conglomerate in the face of taunts of “monkey money,” that exports more films abroad than it imports, that challenges the traditional assumption of superiority by others, that wins Booker Prizes and Miss Universe contests.

It doesn't matter, then, that India lost the next Test, in Durban. It doesn't even matter that the entire series “went south” in Cape Town. Because this is not about cricket anymore. It's about a state of mind — a state of mind that will also change the Indian state.

What Sreesanth demonstrated was an attitude that has transformed the younger generation into a breed apart from its parents. It is the attitude of an India that can hold its nerve and flex its sinews, an India whose self-confidence is rooted in the sober certitude of self-knowledge (“I am a fast bowler,” said Sreesanth), an India that says to the future, “Come on; I am not afraid of you.”

Let us cheer on the prospects of this India, an India whose reach and imagination can soar like a six into the skies above.

61. The Branding of India

THERE'S A NEW BUZZWORD THESE DAYS about our country: “Brand India.” It's an idea, says the subtitle of a forthcoming book by London-based Niclas Ljungberg, whose time has come.

But what is that idea? What, for that matter, is Brand India? A brand, the marketing gurus tell us, is a symbol embodying all the key information about a product or a service: it could be a name, a slogan, a logo, a graphic design. When the brand is mentioned, it carries with it a whole series of associations in the public mind, as well as expectations of how it will perform. The brand can be built up by skillful advertising, so that certain phrases or moods pop up the moment one thinks of the brand; but ultimately the only real guarantee of the brand's continued worth is the actual performance of the product or service it stands for. If the brand delivers what it promises — if it proves to be a reliable indicator of what the consumer can expect, time after time — then it becomes a great asset in itself. Properly managed, the brand can increase the perceived value of a product or service in the eyes of the consumer. Badly managed, a tarnished brand can undermine the product itself.

So can India be a brand? A country isn't a soft drink or a cigarette, but its very name can conjure certain associations in the minds of others. This is why our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, insisted on retaining the name “India” for the newly independent country, in the face of resistance from nativists who wanted it renamed “Bharat.” “India” had a number of associations in the eyes of the world: it was a fabled and exotic land, much sought after by travelers and traders for centuries, the “jewel in the crown” of Her Britannic Majesty Victoria, whose proudest title was that of “Empress of India.” Nehru wanted people to understand that the India he was leading was heir to that precious heritage. He wanted, in other words, to hold on to the brand, though it was not a term he was likely to have employed.

For a while, it worked. India retained its exoticism, its bejeweled maharajahs and caparisoned elephants against a backdrop of the fabled Taj Mahal while simultaneously striding the world stage as a moral force for peace and justice in the vein of Mahatma Gandhi. But it couldn't last. As poverty and famine stalked the land, and the exotic images became replaced in the global media with pictures of suffering and despair, the brand became soiled. It stood, in many people's eyes, for a mendicant with a begging bowl, a hungry and skeletal child by his side. It was no longer a brand that could attract the world.

Today, the brand is changing again. As India transforms itself economically from a lumbering elephant to a bounding tiger, it needs a fresh brand image to keep up with the times. The government even set up, with the collaboration of the business association the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), an India Brand Equity Foundation. They were tasked with coming up with a slogan that encapsulated the new brand in time for the 2006 World Economic Forum session in Davos, where India was the guest of honor. They did. “India: Fastest-Growing Free Market Democracy” was embla-zoned all over the Swiss resort. Brand India was born.

But though it's a great slogan, is it enough? Coca-Cola, for years, offered the “pause that refreshes”: it told you all you needed to know about the product. Does “fastest-growing free market democracy” do the same? India's rapid economic growth is worth drawing attention to, as is the fact that it's a free market (we want foreigners to invest, after all) and a democracy (that's what distinguishes us from that other place over there, which for years has grown faster than us). But isn't there more to us as a country than that?

In fairness to the smart people who coined the phrase, the more attributes you try to get in, the clunkier the phrase and the less memorable it becomes. It's easier for smaller countries that aim for one-issue branding. The Bahamas came up with the great message “It's better in the Bahamas.” Puerto Rico sold itself as a “tropical paradise,” and there's “surprisingly Singapore.” But what do we want the world to think of when they hear the name “India”? Clearly we'd prefer “fastest-growing free market democracy” to replace the old images of poverty and despair. But surely there are other elements we want to build into the brand: the exquisite natural beauty of much of our country, encapsulated in the “Incredible India!” advertising campaign conducted by the Tourism Department; the glitz and glamour of Bollywood and Indian fashion and jewelry designs; the unparalleled diversity of our plural society, with people of every conceivable religious, linguistic, and ethnic extraction living side by side in harmony; and the richness of our cultural heritage, to name just four obvious examples. Yet it would be impossible to fit all that into a poster, a banner, or even a TV commercial. (And we'd still have left out a host of essentials, from ayurveda to IT.)

So the challenge of building Brand India continues. But one essential fact remains: what really matters is not the image but the reality. If we can make India a healthy and prosperous place for all Indians, the brand will be burnished all by itself. Then, and only then, we might even return to “India Shining.”

62. India, Jones, and the Template of Dhoom

ONE OF THE MORE STRIKING INDICATIONS of the way in which perceptions of India have changed around the world lies in your answer to a simple question: Could Steven Spielberg make a film like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom today? It's been just over two decades since that blockbuster swept the world's movie screens, taking boy-wonder Spielberg (who'd already gone from the dental—Jaws—to the transcendental—Close Encounters of the Third Kind) into the cinematic stratosphere. Despite lame dialogue, contrived plotlines, and a visual gloominess that makes you wonder why anyone sat through the thing at all, the real problem with the second film in the Indiana Jones trilogy was undoubtedly its grotesque depiction of India.

The heart of Spielberg's story lay (along with the hearts of assorted human unfortunates) in the eponymous Temple of Doom beneath a palace somewhere in northern India, near the Himalayan border with China. Indiana Jones accompanied by a blond moll and a Chinese sidekick (actually played by a Vietnamese, but the film-makers probably figured that all Asians look alike) enter an Indian temple in quest of a translucent Sivalingam that belongs to an impoverished village. The intrepid trio proceeds to annihilate a blood-thirsty cult of Kali worshipers there and liberate a swarm of children the villains have enslaved. At the end they return the kids and the stone to the village, now prosperous and green again. Virtue has triumphed over evil.

Sounds pretty good, I suppose. The critics thought so (the film scores an astonishing 93 percent favorable rating on the Web site rottentomatoes.com) and so did the fans, who flocked to cinemas from Sacramento to Sydney. Stepping goggle-eyed off Spielberg's celluloid roller coaster, hundreds of millions of people, mostly young and impressionable — people who almost certainly had never set foot on the subcontinent, met an Indian family, or read an exposition of Hinduism — acquired an abiding image of India. It was of a country where kings and courtiers feasted on stewed snakes and monkey brains, where Kali worshipers plucked out the hearts of their victims and embroiled them in flaming pits, and where evil, poverty, and destitution reigned until the Great White Hero could intervene to restore justice and prosperity.

Never mind that anyone with some education and a little common sense should have been able to see how absurd these propositions were — the filmmakers correctly assumed they wouldn't. Given both the relative youth of the audience and the colossal global ignorance about India in those days, the Indiana Jones view of India was swallowed without challenge by cinegoers around the world. (Many NRIs recounted tales of foreigners canceling prior commitments to dinner for fear of being served stewed snakes and monkey brains by their Indian hosts!) Of course, Steven Spielberg and his accomplices weren't involved in any sinister conspiracy to denigrate India; what was at work was not bias but indifference, even sloppiness. Spielberg may well have learned of the exotic culinary practices of some Chinese in Hong Kong, found them sufficiently revolting to be filmed, and put them quite literally into the mouths of Indians. Who knows the difference, he may well have thought, and who cares?

It was in the same vein, then, as his supposedly “Himalayan” village populated not by stocky, high-cheekboned Gurkhas or Garhwalis, but by dark-skinned, long-limbed Sinhalese speakers: those were the extras he found on location in Sri Lanka, and all foreign languages sound alike anyway, don't they? So too the scenes in the temple — he knew what kind of horror would make his shrieking patrons choke on their popcorn, he knew just how his phantasmagorical Temple of Doom should be depicted, and if neither bore any relation to any kind of Indian reality, who would give a damn? After all, an Indian actor was prepared to drag one of his goddesses into the gore and to mouth lines about his religion's desire to stop the spread of Christianity by any means. Why blame Spielberg, if Amrish Puri could sell his self-respect for several fistfuls of dollars?

I can imagine Spielberg's fans rising to his defense with the argument that the film wasn't meant to be taken seriously. But entertainment is a highly effective method of instruction, and the fantasy in Indiana Jones is always anchored in reality: thus, there is a real city (Shanghai), a real country (China), and a real mountain range (the Himalayas), which no one suggests are figments of Spielberg's fancy. But he does not invest any of them with nonexistent sins. India, Indians, and Hinduism, however, do not escape so lightly. The film-makers are cavalier in their disregard. If they had to show Indians, a notoriously vegetarian people, eating yuckily, why with the worst excesses of Chinese carnivorism? If they had to libel a cult, why not invent one, rather than abuse a goddess revered by millions? (The film is set in the 1930s, when Kali worship did not include human sacrifice — a century after the elimination of the Thugs, who by comparison with Spielberg's Amrish Puri, seem positively humanitarian.) Where in a Hindu temple would one worship grotesque skulls and skeletons, and find slogans on Kali scrawled on the walls like so much political graffiti? The reason all these feature in this appalling film is, quite simply, that the filmmakers knew they would get away with it. No one would care — except Indians, and we didn't matter.

Well, now we do. What has changed in the years since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is that India has ceased being a land that could be relegated to the margins, a place of exotic inconveniences, full of snake charmers impaled on beds of nails. It's now a country that counts, populated by software geeks who might be making your airline reservations and reading your MRIs, a land that foreigners can no longer afford to be ignorant about. Even Hollywood moguls. If Jones ever got out of Indiana, what he'd find in our country today isn't a temple of doom, but something quite different. Call it a template of dhoom—the Hindi word for having a blast.

63. Heroines of Rural Development

DURING A RECENT VISIT TO KERALA I addressed what was among the most remarkable audiences I have ever seen: some seven thousand rural women, gathered under a tent in the courtyard of a school in the small dusty town of Kollengode. Many of them had traveled great distances to attend an event celebrating the Society for Rural Improvement, a microcredit venture run by an ex-NRI returned from America, Dr. “Ron” Prabhakar, which had touched their lives directly in ways that decades of official development projects had not.

We all know that poverty persists in our country, and we have to stop regarding it as a sad but inescapable aspect of the human condition. We know from example after example around the world that, over a very short time, poverty and maternal and infant mortality can be dramatically reduced, while education and gender equality can be dramatically advanced. Rural microcredit projects like SRI (as Dr. Prabhakar's society dubs itself) are showing the way.

The poor rural women I addressed have exploded the myth that they are not credit-worthy. They have proven that, if given the opportunity, they know how to wisely invest their money for economically viable and environmentally sustainable income generating activities, repay their loans with almost a 100 percent repayment rate, and become the masters of their own destiny without the interference of their men. This idea was first tested, and proven, in Bangladesh by the Grameen Bank of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, who was awarded last year's Nobel Peace Prize for his achievements. Dr. Prabhakar has taken the same idea and successfully replicated the Grameen Banking System of Bangladesh in Kerala's Palakkad District.

It is no accident that microcredit is provided only to women. The fact is that in most of the world, poverty has a female face. Women experience poverty more than men. Generally, when money is given to men it seldom trickles down to the family: the toddy shops of Kerala flourish on the self-indulgent spending habits of men. Women take far more seriously the responsibility of bringing up their children, and they bear the brunt of this task. The result is that when a woman is empowered, a family is empowered.

So the women patiently assembled from several villages around Kollengode were the true heroines of development. They had shown yet again that we must not underestimate the entrepreneurial skills of poor rural women merely because they are poor. In turn, SRI accepts that its job is to help the women to help themselves — not to micromanage the efforts of the rural women, but to provide the necessary assistance, guidance, leadership, and capital and let the women themselves get on with their own work to pull themselves out of poverty.

Of course, poverty alleviation is not simply throwing money into the hands of poor women and enforcing repayment. This is done by unscrupulous agents who go from door to door in the villages (opportunistic people who lend money to poor women at exorbitant interest, exploit their vulnerable situation, and addict them to perpetual borrowing). These lending agents in the villages are called “blade companies” because of their cutthroat interest rates.

SRI is different: it seeks to build social assets along with economic assets. Poor work ethics and a distorted notion of the dignity of labor have limited the development of Kerala. The SRI project — whose beneficiaries make and sell reusable, economical, and eco-friendly items using indigenous material like areca nut leaves — is breeding a new-generation workforce, imbued with professionalism and a sense of customer service. Dr. Prabhakar has taught them that there is no greater dignity of labor than doing your work well and with pride.

In addition, SRI is providing free education and computer training to about two hundred poor and needy students. Learning is important, but besides academic subjects, they are taught the basic tenets of discipline, good behavior, and civic duties. If they cannot only overcome poverty but be groomed into responsible, productive, and law-abiding citizens when they grow up, society will be the winner.

Microcredit is not a panacea: it cannot be the perfect solution for all our socioeconomic ills. But it can be a precious tool in the empowerment of poor rural women. Yet not everyone in Kerala has shown the open-mindedness to support such creative and innovative efforts. Dr. Prabhakar tells me that the banking system is still cumbersome, complicating his efforts to deliver the small loans on which his microcredit system depends. Credit delayed can be worse than credit denied, and it is time that our banks and government funding agencies showed flexibility and imagination in supporting microcredit efforts.

SRI has proved that the Grameen Banking System, with suitable modifications, can be successfully replicated worldwide. A Chinese proverb says that those who say something is impossible should not stop those who are actually doing it. Projects like SRI's can show us all that ending poverty is not only not impossible — it is happening in the lives of our own people in India, here and now.

64. Kerala: Open for Business

DESPITE ALL THE STRENGTHS OF KERALA — ITS LIBERALITY, its pluralism, its literacy, its empowerment of women, its openness to the world — it's difficult to deny that the state has acquired a less than positive reputation as a place to invest. “Keralites are far too conscious of their rights and not enough of their duties,” one expatriate Malayali businessman told me. “It's impossible to get any work done by a Keralite labor force — and then there are those unions!” He sighed. “Every time we persuade an industrialist to invest in Kerala, it ends badly. The late G. D. Birla put a Gwalior Rayons plant in Mavoor — it has long since closed. The Doshis of Mumbai started the Premier Tyre factory in Kalamassery — you know the fate of that plant? The late Raunaq Singh set up the first Apollo Tyres plant in Chalakudi, but all the expansions of Apollo Tyres since then went to other states such as Gujarat, as neither Raunaq or his son Omkar could deal with the politically charged trade unions.” He shook his head. “I am a Malayali,” he declared, “but I would not advise anyone to invest in Kerala.”

It was with his words ringing in my ears that I stepped gingerly into my home state in May 2007. Newly freed from my career as a UN official, I wanted to see what I could do for Kerala's development, in particular by opening the eyes of foreign investors to what the state had to offer. What I saw and heard there convinces me that my friend's pessimism is, at the very least, out of date.

For one thing, the attitude of the workforce is not what it was. It's always been a curious paradox that Keralites put in long hours in places like the Gulf, where they have earned a reputation for being hardworking and utterly reliable, though at home they are seen as indolent and strike-prone. Surely the same people couldn't be so different in two different places? And yet they were — for one simple reason: the politicized environment at home. It's a reputation that has come to haunt Kerala. Several people told me the story of how BMW had been persuaded to install a car-manufacturing plant in the state, thanks to generous concessions by the government. But the very day the BMW executives arrived in Kerala to sign the deal, they were greeted by a bandh (strike): the state had shut down over some marginal political issue, cars were being blocked on the streets, shops were closed by a hartal. It had nothing to do with BMW or with foreign investment, but the executives — or so I was told — beat a hasty retreat. The plant has now been set up in neighboring Tamil Nadu.

Kerala's political and business leaders are aware of this story. But few are aware of the counternarrative. Last year I met Antony Prince, a Malayali long settled in the Bahamas, who is president of a major ship design company there, GTR Campbell (GTRC). GTRC had built many ships around the world, and its contracts had helped revive China's Xingang shipyard. Why not try to do the same in his native land, Prince wondered. Ignoring all the friendly (negative) advice he was given, he decided to get one of his huge “Trader” double-hull bulk carriers built at Kerala's Kochi shipyard. This was a major undertaking: GTRC's Trader-class ships are thirty thousand tons deadweight, have cargo holds of forty thousand cubic meters in capacity, and are meant to sail over a range of 15,500 nautical miles, so the task would have challenged a more experienced shipyard. But as the work unfolded, Prince realized he need not have worried. Not only was there not a single strike or work stoppage, but the shipyard workers took pride in having been given such a major assignment. They finished the job to GTRC's complete satisfaction — ahead of deadline. Five more ships will now be built in Kochi; it's the ship-yard's largest-ever order.

But the potential is even greater. Working with GTRC had transformed Xingang into a world-class shipbuilder; there is no reason why the same cannot happen in Kochi. Mr. Prince was enthusiastic about the prospects. “The officers and workers in the Kochi yard have proved that they can do it, launching the first vessel on schedule, with first-rate quality and meeting international shipbuilding standards,” he said. “I hope the message will spread.”

It should. The interesting point is that shipbuilding is a highly labor-intensive industry; some 30 percent of the input is human labor, which is what makes it ideal for a country like India. The workers at Kochi shipyard — unionized to a man — demonstrated that labor remains India's greatest asset, even in Kerala. It is not, as skittish investors had long feared, a liability.

A visit to Trivandrum's Technopark confirmed my impression that the skeptics are behind the curve. CEO after CEO told me in glowing terms of their satisfaction with the work environment in Kerala, the quality of the local engineering graduates, and the beauty of the lush and tranquil surroundings. Indeed, Kerala's past failures at attracting and retaining heavy industry are now working in the state's favor. One Technopark firm, U.S. Technologies, told me of having bid for a contract with a Houston-based company which had drawn up a short list of Indian service providers and placed the Trivandrum-based company last. The American executives making the final decision flew down to India to inspect the six short-listed Indian firms. After three harrowing days plowing through the traffic congestion and pollution of Bombay, Bangalore, and Delhi, they arrived in Trivandrum, checked into the Leela at Kovalam Beach, sipped a drink by the seaside at sunset — and voted unanimously to give the contract to U.S. Technologies. “If we have to visit India from time to time to see how our contract is doing,” the chief said, “we'd rather visit Kerala than any other place in India.”

As they say in the United States: Sounds like a plan! It is time that Indian investors took notice as well. God's own country no longer deserves the business reputation of being the devil's playground.

65. Shaking Hands

HANDSHAKES ARE NOT OFTEN TERMED “HISTORIC,” but the one between Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad in 2004 readily earned the adjective. After three years of bristling hostility verging on war, and less than five years after a bloody clash of arms across the snowy wastes that divide them in Kashmir, not to mention the fifty-six years of mutual tension that had marked their relationship, the two countries seemed genuinely on the verge of a real and lasting peace.

In the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, a striking example of the confluence of Islam and Hinduism on the subcontinent, the talk for days after the handshake was of the possibilities it had opened up. One idea that had seized the Hyderabad public's imagination (and many inches in its newspapers) was of the city “twinning” with its namesake, the city of Hyderabad in Pakistan. Till the British partitioned India in 1947, the two had been known as “Hyderabad, Deccan” and “Hyderabad, Sind” to distinguish them from each other in conversation. The drawing of hard lines on a map had made this unnecessary; it was enough to know which side of the border you were on to know which Hyderabad you were referring to. The other was simply out of reach.

The Indian Hyderabad is a good place to look at the subcontinent's past — and its future. Exquisite Muslim architecture abounds, especially palaces and mosques, including the famous Mecca Masjid where the faithful congregate in the thousands every Friday. But at the foot of the city's most famous monument, the four-turreted Charminar, sits a Hindu temple to the goddess Mahalakshmi, the priests chanting their mantras for centuries under the celebrated Muslim minarets. And beyond the old city of Hyderabad gleams the high-tech crucible of “Cyberabad,” a pet project of the state's laptoptoting former chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu, where Indian software engineers of all faiths click their country's way into the twenty-first century.

Here the past poses no impediment to the future. But that has not been quite as true for the subcontinent as a whole, which has for more than five decades seemed a prisoner of the past, handcuffed to a pessimist's reading of history.

Muslims and Hindus (as well as followers of many other creeds) have shared the same civilizational space on the subcontinent for over a thousand years. Islam came to India as early as the eighth century A.D., to Sind in the north with the Arab armies of Mohammed bin Qasim, and to Kerala in the south with traders and travelers across the Arabia sea. For the most part the two big faiths coexisted for centuries; though persecution and violence were not unknown, few saw religion as the primary determinant of their loyalties. In the great revolt of 1857 against the British, Hindus and Muslims rose as one against the foreign occupier, rallying under the banner of the last Mughal king. But the Hindu-Muslim unity seen in that revolt led the alarmed British to adopt a policy of “divide and rule,” which sowed mutual suspicions and hatreds. The policy found its culmination ninety years later in Partition.

The tragic flash point of Kashmir, which has twice brought the two countries to war and several times to the brink of it, is described by some in Pakistan as the “unfinished business of Partition.” When a student at Cambridge, Chaudhury Rehmat Ali invented the name Pakistan (land of the pure) for the country he hoped would be created for his coreligionists, the k in his neologism stood for Kashmir. But Kashmir's Hindu maharajah, facing invaders at his door, acceded to India, and the resultant conflict left both countries with a portion of the state, and a dotted line (the Line of Control) across the map. Pakistan argues that the Muslim-majority state should have always been part of the Muslim country; India points to Kashmir's Muslim majority as proof of the pluralism of its secular democracy.

So for years the talk has been of war, militancy, terrorism, and now the nuclear threat. And yet history entwines the two countries together with bonds of paradox. India derives its name from the river Indus, which flows in Pakistan. The Partition of 1947 created a state for India's Muslims, but there are more Muslims in secular India than in Islamic Pakistan. The two countries share common languages, costumes, customs, and cuisines; when their citizens meet abroad, they slip easily into camaraderie. (Many is the time a Pakistani cabbie in New York has refused to take money from an Indian passenger, saying only, “You are my brother.”) Indian films, music, and clothes remain wildly popular across the border, and Pakistani cricketers and musicians are lionized in India. A national of either country visiting the other is soon overwhelmed with the hospitality showered upon him by anyone discovering where he is from.

Strikingly, as part of his peace overture in Islamabad, Prime Minister Vajpayee, once a leading member of a party whose platform called for the undoing of Partition and the re-creation of an “undivided India,” suggested that the two countries and their sibling, Bangladesh (once East Pakistan), jointly commemorate the 150th anniversary of the great revolt of 1857. His proposal was received warily; history has so far been a force for division on the subcontinent, not of unity. But Vajpayee had proved he could transcend the past by paying tribute at the Minar-e-Pakistan in Lahore, a shrine to that country's founding. And Musharraf, a trained man of war whose own family left India for Pakistan upon Partition, has shown signs of his determination to reinvent himself as a man of peace.

“History has been made,” President Musharraf told a news conference after his meeting with Prime Minister Vajpayee. The challenge for both countries is now to demonstrate that history has also been overcome. Till then, those who contemplate peace also find their hands shaking — with fear of the alternative.

66. Trade for Peace

FOR YEARS, INDIA SEEMED PERVERSELY PROUD of its declining foreign trade. During the first four decades of our independence, our exports of manufactured goods grew at an annual rate of 0.1 percent until 1985; as a result, India's share of world trade fell by four-fifths, or 80 percent, from 1947 to 1987. This was perhaps understandable in the postcolonial context because India's closed and statist economic policies were principally a political and cultural reaction to British imperialism. After all, the East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule. So our idea of self-reliance combined a Nehruvian concern for distributive social justice with a profound mistrust of the international economic forces that had enslaved the country for two hundred years. Economic self-reliance was seen as synonymous with independence itself. So who needed trade when we were going to make everything we needed ourselves?

The attitude sank deep roots in the national consciousness. We saw it as recently as the mid-1990s, in the hue and cry that erupted over the “Uruguay round” negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which culminated in the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Ideologues fearful that free trade would involve surrender to foreign imperialist interests made common cause with protected industries anxious about new patent rules; both were supported by idealists dreading the effects of free trade on the common man (for instance, the end of affordable medication for the Indian poor). Of course, many of the fears were exaggerated, but agitators called for India to pull out of GATT/WTO altogether, even if this would have been calamitous for the country.

How different things have been with India's leading role in the WTO on the current “Doha round” of trade negotiations. The most significant proof of India's maturity as an independent country has been the willingness of our leadership to accept, at long last, that economic interdependence is not incompatible with political independence. Around the world, leaders have realized that the main reason developing countries have not caught up more rapidly with developed ones is that they were closed to the world economy and therefore to the benefits of increased trade and foreign investment. Whereas not very long ago, 90 percent of the developing nations — members of the “Group of 77,” which actually comprises over a hundred countries — ran closed economies, today only Myanmar (and that too not entirely) resists the siren call of the global marketplace. In every country, trade barriers are being lowered, imports and exports increased, foreign capital avidly sought, legal systems are being brought into line with the needs of international business, tax and property laws are being reexamined against foreign standards, and restrictive rules and regulations are being scrapped. More and more economies are being “plugged in” to the global system in what is a self-reinforcing process.

What is true at the global level is not, however, what is practiced next door to home. India-Pakistan trade is negligible. The two countries, which shared the same economic and political space before Partition, and which should logically be each other's major trading partner (as Canada is to the United States, or Belgium is to the Netherlands) hardly buy from each other. Only 0.2 percent to 0.4 percent of our exports go to Pakistan, and only 0.2 to 0.6 percent of our imports come from there. (Of course, a great deal of illegal trade is being conducted by smugglers on both sides, but one can scarcely count that.) The general assumption is that the tensions and the history of conflict between the two countries condemns us to a continuation of this pattern; indeed, given that for nine years (1965–74) there was no trade at all between us, the attitude is that the modest level of trade we have is better than nothing.

Indians also point out that much of the reluctance to open up trading relations comes from the Pakistani side, both out of a fear of being swamped by Indian products and from a policy posture that normal economic relations cannot be established until Kashmir is solved to Islamabad's satisfaction. That being the case, the conventional wisdom is that any Indian argument for free trade across the border is essentially self-interested. So I was all the more intrigued to read an essay by Karachi-based social scientist S. Akbar Zaidi in the quarterly South Asian Journal arguing that not only do both countries stand to gain from freer trade between them, but that Pakistan stands to gain more.

The case is clear enough. Pakistani consumers are still buying Indian goods — but they are buying at double or triple the price by importing them from countries like the United Arab Emirates, which repackage Indian-made products for profitable resale to Pakistan. Yet, even at times of political tension, India remains the only obvious source of immediate essential food supplies whenever shortages arise in Pakistan. In 1990, Zaidi writes, India “helped Pakistan tide over a potato and onion crisis,” and during a sugar shortage in 1997, it imported fifty thousand tons of Indian sugar. Where else could Pakistan have acquired food supplies on an emergency basis but from its biggest neighbor?

Zaidi cites a study from Pakistan's Ministry of Commerce pointing to various practical advantages — lower transportation costs, cultural affinities, similar tastes — which point to complementari-ties between India and Pakistan as trading partners. The ministry concluded that “the economic benefits of liberalizing trade with India outweigh the costs.” Not only would Pakistanis pay lower prices for Indian goods, thereby increasing their purchasing power, but smuggling would decrease, leading to improved revenue for the government of Pakistan from legal trade. The Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry has conducted a sector-by-sector survey of the impact of greater trade with India on the Pakistan economy and argued that even the obvious negatives had positive implications. For instance, though cheaper iron and steel from India would impact on those industries in Pakistan, they would also reduce high inventory costs in Pakistan's engineering sector. Cheaper Indian raw materials could revive ailing Pakistani businesses and help generate more employment. And, of course, a vast Indian market would open up for Pakistani manufacturers. No wonder Zaidi concludes that, from a Pakistani point of view, trade with India is “a win-win situation.”

And it's not just about the exchange of rupees. As Zaidi points out, “Trade normalization is likely to improve the overall atmosphere in which India and Pakistan address all contentious issues.” It is hard to disagree. The old cliché used to be, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” In today's world, it is time for a new formula: If you want peace, prepare to trade.

67. The Dangers to India's Future

“You're becoming known as a champion booster of the new India,” writes a friend. “But we all know nothing is perfect in our country. What do you see as the vulnerabilities that might throw India off course?”

FAIR QUESTION, BECAUSE OURS IS A COUNTRY where predictions are both ubiquitous and foolhardy, and where the future is never quite what it used to be. So in reply to that question, I ventured a quick “top ten” checklist of the major dangers that could still retard, if not scuttle, our country's confident march into the twenty-first century.

1. The Threat to India's Pluralism

Everyone in India, irrespective of the circumstances of their birth, must feel they have a stake in the country, that they can create a decent life for themselves (and, for that matter, attain the highest office in the land), regardless of which ethnic or religious or linguistic background they hail from. The whole point about being Indian is that you can be many things and one thing: you can be a good Muslim, a good Gujarati, and a good Indian all at once. I've celebrated that a country that is 81 percent Hindu has a Muslim president, a Sikh prime minister, a Catholic leader of the ruling coalition, and now, a Dalit chief justice. But ours is also a country where religious riots have scarred the face of our land, where untouchability still condemns millions to degrading lives, and where the dangers of a triumphant majoritarianism are ever present. The moment we allow the pettiest and most bigoted of our politicians to create an India that reduces some Indians to second-class status is the moment when we fail ourselves and betray our future. An India that is denied to some of us will one day be an India that is denied to all of us.

2. The Danger to India's Democracy

Democracy is indispensable to India's survival as a pluralist state. For all its flaws, the miracle of democracy, with its exchange of demands and promises, hopes and compromises, has enabled India to manage its own diversity and deal with the extraordinary challenges of growth and development. But India's democracy has largely been ill-served by its political leaders; with honorable exceptions, mainly at the very top, an indispensable and impressive system is today overrun by unprincipled and unimpressive operators. Corruption and criminalization have taken their toll on people's faith in our democracy. That 113 of our 543 members of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, should have criminal cases pending against them is an abomination. Despite the encouraging entry of bright, educated young politicians into Parliament in recent years, the continuance in office of venal and violent men could gravely discredit the system by undermining people's faith in their elected representatives.

3. The Persistence of Poverty

Despite all the good economic news I have celebrated in this book, 22 percent of our population — some 250 million people — are still living below the poverty line, in conditions that are a blot on our individual and collective consciences. By poverty I don't simply mean the kind of poverty that economists refer to, measured in the numbers of people living below a dollar a day. Our poor cannot afford to feed themselves, but I am equally concerned about their lack of opportunities in our society, which prevents the complete participation of large masses of Indians in their nation's democracy, and in our country's governance. We must take the necessary steps to ensure that every Indian is given the means to live a decent life, to feed his or her family, and to acquire the education that will enable him or her to fulfill their creative potential. Failure to accomplish this will be a real threat to India's future.

4. The Strains of Overpopulation

Most Indians have tended to take as an article of pride rather than shame that we are a nation of 1.2 billion people who are likely to overtake China in the next three decades to become the world's most populous nation. There is little doubt that the larger our population, the more difficult it will be for our society and economy to sustain it. Indeed, the size of our population both reflects and underscores our poverty. I have often argued, echoing Mahmood Mamdani, that people are not poor because they have too many children, but that they have too many children because they are poor. For the poor, children are an asset (they can be put to work) rather than a liability (they aren't being expensively educated); and in the long term, they are a guarantor of their parents’ future, their only social security safety net, since only their own children will provide for them and look after them in their old age. So overpopulation needs to be tackled, but we have to tackle poverty, too. If we hatao garibi—“abolish poverty,” as the country was promised in 1971—people who are less insecure about their future will have fewer children.

5. The Risks of Unemployment

A major challenge amid our country's impressive economic growth is that of employing all those millions of Indians who come of age and seek to enter the workforce each year but remain without jobs. It is not only important that the economy grows at a pace that can absorb all the job seekers; it must also expand in activities that generate jobs, whether in manufacturing or in tourism (our fabled IT firms and BPO centers employ only a million Indians out of a billion). Those frustrated in their attempts to find employment and earn a decent livelihood are often those who turn to violence and terrorism. It is no accident that there are few Maoists in Gurgaon or Gandhinagar.

6. The Politicization of Development

It's unavoidable, in a fiercely contentious democracy like ours, that decisions on economic development are made as the consequence of a political process. But the great successes of our economy in recent years have lain where the government played no role at all (information technology), got out of the way after a bad start (cell phones), or eased stifling restrictions (television). When politicians intrude, development almost invariably suffers, as the half-complete overpasses of Bangalore and the saga of the Tata car factory at Singrur (whose construction has been blocked for months by protesting farmers and their political sponsors) testify. The great challenge for government is to strengthen or renovate our dilapidated infrastructure — rutted roads, choked ports, antediluvian airports, collapsing bridges, corroded pipes. Much of this must be left to the private sector, given the many limitations of our public sector. And this requires accepting that quite often a few may profit but all will benefit. That means politicians will have to resist the chronic temptation to put self-interest before the national interest and let results be delivered regardless of political or financial advantage to themselves. The chances of that happening, it has to be admitted, are slight.

7. The Failure to Curb Corruption

The rampant corruption in public services in India is not just a sorry shame but one of the biggest obstacles to India's entry into the developed world. We have managed to become a society in which politicians and bureaucrats seek to profit from the power to permit and where every officeholder, however insignificant, seeks to leverage his position for private gain. Corruption drains resources from productive investment, distorts the true costs of doing business, undermines efficiency, and rewards influence rather than performance. That we have managed to grow and develop despite the rampant corruption is a small miracle, and proof of our remarkable strength as a society and an economy. But as long as corruption persists, we will find ourselves running the race of globalization with our ankles tied together.

8. The Risks of Demographic Imbalance

When people speak of demographics in India, it is usually to talk about the “youth bulge,” a population pattern that ensures India a majority of people in their most productive years whereas the rest of the world is aging. That's all to the good, but there is another phenomenon that has gone largely unremarked — the unbalanced growth of our population, with skyrocketing numbers in the poorer and illiterate parts of the country, mainly in the north, and declining growth in the more educated and developed south. The obvious danger is not just of the poor reproducing their poverty and illiteracy and “dragging the country down”; there is also the political danger that a fair reapportionment of parliamentary constituencies according to population would grant the north many more seats in Parliament, while the south may actually lose a few. This would potentially enable the rough-hewn political hacks of the Cow Belt to override the representatives of the south; alarmists even conjure up fears of a revival of southern separatism in response. I am personally convinced that, after six decades of independence, we are beginning to see ourselves more as Indians than just as north or south Indians; I marvel at how masala dosas, the southern spice crèpes, are just as easy to get in Delhi as chhole bature, the classic northern fried bread and chickpea platter. But we should not be completely insensible to the danger of “two Indias” emerging, in which the north has the numbers, while southern India fuels the economic growth — with all the risks of resentment that could breed.

9. The Limitations of Federalism

I have long been convinced that a country the size of India must be a genuine federation — that not every question asked in Dharwar needs to be answered in Delhi. The increasing power and influence of regional and state parties in an era of coalition governments in Delhi should not, however, give way to complacency. Because it is not enough merely to transfer powers from the center to the states, genuine decentralization must involve empowering the zilla parishads and the village panchayats, the district and village-level institutions that reflect Indian democracy at the grass roots. The only way that Indians will be able to determine their own destinies is if our political system enables them to be responsible for their own lives. The centralism of the past might have served a purpose in the first decades after 1947 (to consolidate national unity); thereafter it proved a serious handicap to the country's development. Today, it is increasingly clear: that government is best that centralizes least.

10. Neglecting the “Software” of Human Development

We are right to focus on the urgent need to upgrade our national “hardware”—the country's collapsing infrastructure. But we must not neglect the “software”—the human capital without which no country develops. We must do much more to promote education, health care, and an end to caste and gender discrimination. Only then can we produce Indians truly ready to take India to the top in the twenty-first century.