By Kollengode S Venkataraman (written in 2004)
India’s rapid growth and the accompanying expansion of the Indian middle class — 300 million and growing — the success stories of Infosys, Wipro, Ranbaxy, and other ventures, and the shrinking number of people living below the poverty line are regular features in the global media. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have written tongue-in-cheek stories on India-based call centers servicing English-speaking customers all over the globe.
As India is trying to move up the technology chain, fast-food joints are proliferating. One recent story contrasted Delhi suburbanites splurging on French fries in shopping mall food-courts on the national holiday marking the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, who preached and practiced frugality and simplicity.
India’s exports show steady increases, now over $45 billion, with around $10 billion in IT alone, and foreign exchange reserves are over $90 billion and growing. Goldman Sachs recently reported that by 2050, the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — would have a higher GDP than the G6: the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France, and Japan. Instead of feeling good about traffic jams as a sign of progress, Indians now complain about them. This is a good sign.
These are the views of the jet-set class from 30,000 feet above, or from corporate boardrooms and video-conferencing rooms in India, that are reassuring to the affluent and upwardly mobile in India.
Let’s forget for now that even as anglicized Indians on toll-free lines service English-speaking customers all over the globe — from booking hotel and airline reservations to fixing PCs when they crash — similar services are not available for Indians living in India. Also ignore the wide chasm between the quality of primary and secondary education that the middle class buys from private schools, and what is available to the working poor. Finally, let’s also forget for now India’s scandalous healthcare system, which bankrupts even the middle class, not to speak of the poor.
Recently when I was in India, I saw reassuring changes from the worm’s eye view and here are the snapshots.
Scene 1. Boarding area in Singapore Changi airport. I was waiting to board my plane to Chennai. Almost all the passengers were Indians or at least of Indian origin. Business travelers, vacationers and the like. Most of them were also well groomed. Their attire and demeanor showed that. One was embarrassed to display once ignorance on the nuances in filling out customs and immigration forms.
I was on my way from Pittsburgh to Chennai through a circuitous route of Pittsburgh, Detroit, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Singapore, Chennai, and I was on the last leg in this long tiring journey. I was in my crumpled shorts, loose half shirt, wearing rough shoes. After changing hotel rooms every night, I was dishevelled after long hours in planes. I hand carried two books of poems by 12th and 16th century Tamil M\mystic poets Pattinattar and Thayumanavar. Many of today’s anglicized, upwardly mobile Tamils may not even know their names, leave alone their times of their works.
Around me was a medium built chocolate coloured traditional middle-aged Indian. He was filling out his immigration forms on seeing such a contradiction in my demeanor — a bald middle-aged Indian in dishevelled clothes and shoes living somewhere in the West. My clothes and demeanor showed it — and I was comfortable enough to carry the works of classic Tamil acetic poets to read during air travel. He gingerly approached me speaking in Tamil for some clarification on the form he was filling.
Hesitantly, he started. “I am half-baked in English naan Englishle arai kurai.Will you tell me what I should write here?” He was embarrassed he was stuck with one phrased, “Port of Embarkation.” I have to credit the Indian babudom for such linguistic assaults that stun ordinary Indians, much like deers against the headlights in rural roads in the US
After filling out the form. We told each other our backgrounds. He was proud that unlike him, his children went to English medium schools and are now in college getting degrees.
He was a businessman dealing in textile machinery and also in textiles, both traditional sarees and dothis and readymade garments. He had visited Mauritius, South Africa developing business contacts and was in was on his way home after negotiating successful. Business deals in New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore. He has seen money rolling in and lost also lost money big time in business
And after losing big time for the second time in a failed partnership, he was starting all over again. He had confidence in himself to go to far off lands, even with his limited English language skills and lacking in what the urban Desis would call the sophisticated demeanor for making business deals overseas. As I boarded the wide-bodied plane, he disappeared inside and I never saw him again.
As a plane taxi to take off, I was wondering that if he had gone to college and earned a degree, would he still have had the courage to go strike on his own? In our possibility, instead of being a successful entrepreneur, he would have disappeared into the amorphous Indian Barbudom.
Scene 2. A Barber shop in Thane near Mumbai. I went there. Not for a haircut, but for a complete shave. A 20-year-old Barber asked me, “Kya saab shave hai?” (What? you want a shave?) “Haan Ji, lekin dadi mein nahi, sir pe!” (Yes. On my scalp and not on my face. He didn’t say anything, but I’m sure he wondered why this middle-aged man wants to shave his head in a suburban barber shop. The barber took his knife with its 6-inch-long blade and elegantly held it between his forefinger and thumb in his right hand.
He was adept in his trade and had no use for any of the modern electrical accessories we see in hairdressing salons here. He went over my page slowly, gently but firmly, with the sharp blade running over my scalp once. Did I feel any twitching or hurt? He was so good that he was instinctively economical. He didn’t have to run his blade twice on the same area to remove any tonsorial remnants on my head.
The ultimate compliment for him was when I showered as soon as I returned home from the Barber shop. My aunt wouldn’t let me enter her kitchen without that shower. As I poured water over my head, I had no burning sensation anywhere on my now bald scalp. The Barber was so skilful that even as he was shaving my head with his handheld knife, he made sure that his blade made no contact with the scalp underneath to inadvertently irritate the skin.
Just imagine how resourceful he would be if you give him and the likes of him all over India, half the modern electrical tools and accessories of a Barber shop in the West.
Scene 3. My niece is home in Ghatkopar, a Mumbai suburb. My niece and her husband an MBA marketing guy in the exploding car market in Mumbai, were renovating their flat. On the day I went, the Carpenter and his assistant were giving finishing touches to their work. Only bearish tools were lying around the house. Hammers, mallets, chisels, wooden markers, planes, screwdrivers, tools for drilling holes in wood, all accelerated and nothing like Bob Vila. Yet his renovation wood work was outstanding. Solid wooden doors made with different types of hardwood, having contemporary looking joints with flowingly smooth curves put together perfectly well coordinated custom-made cabinets and furniture, with even a small shrine for lighting diyas (traditional oil lamps), all handmade with the barest of tools.
After his work, I picked up conversation with him over tea and visits I in my broken Hindi and he in his broken English. I asked him how he learned his trade, expecting him to name some of India’s trade schools. Dismissively, he replied. “Yeh hamaara khandan Mein hai.” (This is our heritage.)
Then a cell phone rang. I thought it was nieces, but it was the carpenters. He took it from his toolbox, some from another location, called an updated him on the status of his work. Intrigued by his confident role, I asked him more about his business and himself. He came to Mumbai from Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh ten years ago. He was barely 35 now and has 23 people working for him proudly, he told me. I work as a subcontractor for architects and interior designers. I don’t do chhota mota kaam. (I don’t do sundry jobs.)
Scene 4. Chembur vegetable market in Mumbai, Chembur, populated mostly by Goans, is now a Kerala adda with second and third generation Keralites from Palakkad, Ernakulam, Kochi, Thrissur, and Trivandrum. The vegetable marketer caters to this. Population. very well. Even Marathi vegetable vendors know the important South Indian festivals like Onam, Karthi, Thiruvadirai. And the special vegetables used in cooking for these festivals.
Twenty-five years ago, when you went to the market you had to buy individual vegetables for the different dishes you want to make at home. With women increasingly going to work above 15 years uh ago, all that you have to tell the vendor is give me vegetables for avail when people and he will give you the seasonally fresh vegetables in the correct quantity in correct proportions. According to Making Real Kerala dish made from the medley of up to eight vegetables, coconut, green chili, Curry leaves, and buttermilk.
With women increasingly exchange time. Defenders have the food chain now. Many sell fresh vegetables. Different dishes, the office going women, customers happily paying for the service time and they go home. Hmm garden-fresh pre-cut vegetables.
A Traditional vyapari (trader), a barber and a carpenter, and a vegetable vendor. Not one of them the product of India ‘s anglicized college-educated upwardly mobile class, not one of them the beneficiary of the organized sector schooling, but all of them successful entrepreneurs.
Looking at young men and women in India waiting for job interviews/job offers from multinational companies — my friend Ajay Sood, who refers to himself as coolie with the PhD — I wondered: how many English-educated college graduates in India, with all the sophistication college education brings, can be on their own or, better still start a business employing people as the carpenter from Kanpur did in Mumbai,
I also wondered. How much more productive India’s skilled craftsmen — carpenters, barbers, tailors, weavers, electricians, metalsmiths, and mechanics — would be if they had half the modern tools one finds in places like Home Depot and other places.
Inadequacy of the Indian education system stood in sharp relief when seen in the background of the small businesses that have succeeded with no help from the formal Indian education system. A digression is necessary here.
A digression is necessary here.
In the 1960’s and 70s when India was in the thick of Nehruvian concepts, pay your money in government run industries, Sri Rajagopalachari, NG Ranga, K B Kripalani, Minu Masani, Casa Subbarao and others started the Forum of Free Enterprise. The forum argued that the Permit-License-Quota Raj of Nehru was an unholy alliance among politicians., bureaucrats and the high industrial houses to fleece taxpayers and was a prescription for economic disaster. The forum for Alley, but unsuccessfully for any unruly alliance the Congress Party and its Marxist cronies shamelessly called themselves, called them CIA agents. Most of these government run companies never even broke even.
After wasting precious 40 years and millions of taxpayer money in the late 1980s, India came close to bankruptcy during Congress parties Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh era. With the IMF and the World Bank breathing down their neck, they were forced to stop the state-controlled economy. This is exactly what the forum of Free Enterprise was pleading for nearly 30 years ago. Everyone. Praised the Rao Singh Alliance for the change but the fact is they had no option.
On seeing the divestiture of government run industries one by one in India (even state governments run by Congress party are doing it), I couldn’t help admiring the foresight of the people in the Forum of Free Enterprise. If I can fault them on one point, it was that they were ahead of their time by thirty years. If any of them were alive today, they would be having their last laugh.
So, on seeing a vibrant India from the trenches during my recent visit, I realized that India was betrayed not by its working class or small traders and skilled workers, but by the unholy alliance among its politicians, bureaucrats, big businesses and their mannered managers and its educated middle class. Their only motivation was to preserve their unenlightened self-interest and the status quo even as they saw the ground on which they stood was changing and changing fast.
In India, inevitable prosperity in the coming decades, the impact of the success of thousands of traditional small businesses and craftsmen on the micro level will be no less significant than the success stories of Infosys, Ranbaxy, Wipro and all the call centers put together.
That should make everybody feel good.