I have an old friend in Mumbai and every once in a while, he will pause, sit back, and ask, how are we doing? How are we changing? A small but visible change, I told him last week, is the rich aroma of coffee in our bazaars. Thanks mainly to Barista, but also to Cafe Coffee Day, Quickies and others, the well-heeled young of a tea-drinking nation have found a fashionable place to hang out, and its women a safe public place to be sociable.
Since we are not a culture of public squares like the Mediterranean cities, we depend on the bazaar to "eat the air" in the evenings and to be seen and to see others. But Barista's success also defies conventional business wisdom: to be able to open a new coffee shop every fifth day in a country of such rigid land laws is worth something.
I find that new professions have begun to come up, as every Indian wants to become a designer. We have had software and fashion designers for some time, but significant talent is also rising in chip design. The biggest surprise is the new talent emerging in automobile and components design. No one could have imagined, in fact, how quickly India would become a hub for global automobile sourcing. Most car companies are now exporting and this is another testimonial to reforms.
Our vocabulary is also changing. No one talks about shortages, hoarding, smuggling, black-marketing, or even rising prices when for decades that's all we spoke about. Nor do industrialists complain about interest rates and high cost of capital. We are more resilient to monsoons and oil shocks now. Despite a bad monsoon last year, most states did not panic; instead they executed water-harvesting programmes that will bring long-term returns.
Similarly, when oil prices shot up last year, we managed because of record currency reserves.
What this means, of course, is that our economy has changed from one of scarcity to plenty, but since we are a nation of complainers, we now moan about excess food stocks and excess foreign reserves. Worse, the mindset of our geriatric rulers remains mired in dearth and hence we haven't come to terms with our disgraceful food mountain, which could have brought relief to the three per cent of India that still goes hungry — that may look small but it is 30 million people! An abundance mentality should long ago have replaced our "begging bowl" agricultural policies with vibrant new ones that will create a confident, food-exporting nation.
What has not changed is the disconnect between our politics and economics. Instead of working single-mindedly to make every Indian literate, the education ministry has enacted a rule whereby donations to Indian colleges must be routed through Bharat Shiksha Kosh (so that a babu decides what donations are worthy). This will surely kill the wonderful movement started by alumni in recent years to give funds to their colleges, and this is why a wealthy Indian in America, Gururaj Deshpande, recently decided to endow MIT with $20 million rather give it to his own IIT Madras.
Second, just when Indians were beginning to feel proud of world-class Jet Airways, envious bureaucrats tried to destroy it with the hare-brained idea of replacing airport handling staff of private airlines by the staff of Air India and Indian Airlines in the interests of security. So the wheel turns, but what never changes is the enormous capacity of our rulers to do mischief.