I’ve forgotten who said this originally, but I have heard it repeated often and it struck a chord for me. It also made me wonder, what were the other defining moments in the journey, for India, and what were the eras in between?

The way I see it, India has been through 4 eras in the 64 years since 1947 – each spanning roughly 15-16 years. It’s instructive to look generations of Indians in terms of the eras they grew up in (age 8-20) in and stretches when they were in positions of power (age 45-60).

Nation Building; 1947-1962

Nehru

This was the generation of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime-minister of India, a man whose vision defined much of the future of the country. Under his stewardship India adopted the Soviet planning model built around 5 year plans and a sprint for self reliance. Infrastructure and heavy industries were a key focus, as was import substitution.

Nehru’s generation had grown up in pre-independence India. They had fought for freedom and were infused with the dream of nation building. Idealistic and forged through sacrifice, this generation set out to put the bulwarks in place for the growth of the country. Hindsight and economic history tells us that this socialist philosophy outlived its utility by a few years but for the first 15 years of India’s journey as an Independent country, it’s hard to argue against the contribution of this era. Especially as the seeds were sown for the technical institutions such as IIT’s which would bear fruit in the generations to come. As would the creation of innumerable public sector industries which would continue to contribute to India’s growth and self reliance.

My parents were born around the time of Independence. My grandfather was sent to jail by the British government briefly for joining in revolutionary activity of the social networking de-jure – he wrote an inflammatory letter. On release he was promptly sent to London by his parents to keep him out of trouble and to complete his education.

The Lost Generation; 1962-1977

Satyajit Ray made his first film over 3 years, having to fund it himself and scratching around for funds from friends and family. He sold his life insurance policy and pawned his wife’s jewels and still had to depend on the largesse of the West Bengal Government and the MoMA, New York. The film (Pather Panchali, 1955) went on to be recognized as one of the great films of all time. And Ray went on to dominate the film making industry in Kolkata & India, making films in the style of, and inspired by European greats such as Jean Renoir (The River) and Vittorio De Sica (The Bicyle Thief). Almost all of Ray’s work was in Bengali, which underlines the fact that most people of this time identified first with their language and region, and only afterwards, with the nation.

Through the 60s and 70s, while Ray was enthralling audiences in movie theatres, Indian industry was firmly in the grip the “license Raj” – a process of handing out government licenses for setting up any manufacturing business. Access to the licenses and to licensing authorities was never democratic or egalitarian. As a result, this era produced some of India’s great industrial empires, as only established industrialists were able to obtain licenses and capital to expand into newer segments. The very same principles which had aided the initial nation building were becoming significant economic millstones around the countries neck. The seeds of vast economic inequality were sown in this period as the restrictive policies designed to protect the poor were used against them.

Nehru served as the prime minister till his death in 1964. After a brief term of Lal Bahadur Shastri, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, took office, ensuring a near dynastic rule by the incumbent “Congress” political party. The idealism of the first decade and half of Independence had given way to the stark realities of being a poor, disorganized and a highly dispersed nation. Despair was compounded by frequent floods, food shortages, droughts and epidemics. The country went to war 3 times during this time. The first of these, an unsuccessful war over lines of control, against China effectively marked the start of this 2^nd era. The other two were wars against Pakistan. This era also witnessed India’s only departure from democracy, during the “emergency rule” of 1975.

My parents entered the workforce in this era. Their childhood may have been defined by the Nehruvian idealism, but their youth was marked by protests against the Indian government, by internal strife and police brutality. The violent and nihilist Naxalbari movement in West Bengal claimed or scarred the lives of many educated, left leaning idealist youths of the generation. I was too young to remember this, but into my protected world came fretful words like “naxal” and “emergency” obviously carrying ill portents.

Mrs Indira Gandhi was defeated in 1977, exactly 30 years after independence. As critical a signpost as any for the end of the second era of independent India.

The Emerging Nationalism 1977-1992

Kapil Dev

A strange and wonderful thing happened in 1983, when I was 15 and close to finishing my schooling. India won the World Cup in one-day cricket, under the radiantly cheerful Kapil Dev. This was an alien feeling for most of us – the idea that we could be the best in the world at anything. We had vanquished the professionalism of the English and the Aussies and the sheer athletic insouciance of the all conquering West Indians. Sunil Gavaskar had previously established himself as the premier opening batsman in the world, but Kapil took the whole nation to the summit. Albeit fleetingly. We have not since climbed that mountain, but it had become possible.

By then, the industrial landscape of India was fairly well set. Well established industrial empires had between them created a stranglehold on opportunities. The rest of the country was subjugated to either working for them or supplying to them. Only a few exploded through this ceiling of controlled ambition. Dhirubhai Ambani, who created Reliance Industries, was one, as was Ramesh Chauhan of Thums Up fame.  Karsanbhai Patel – of Nirma – was a third. Their numbers were small enough to warrant instant fame and mention as exceptions. Because of the protection offered from both internal as well as external competition, few products were of world class quality and left consumers across the country hankering for “foreign products”. If something was good, it had to have been made somewhere else – in Japan, in the US, in Germany, anywhere but India. Owning a Marks & Spencer’s shirt was a status symbol.

Bollywood had by then emerged as a major force, thanks to the superstardom of Amitabh Bachchan. In most films of this era, he played the angry young man fighting the system. The “system” typically involved corrupt policemen, rogue politicians, morally bankrupt businessmen and dissolute bureaucrats. In the land of make-believe films, the angry young man usually won, with his brand of citizen justice and incorruptible values.  A whole separate “parallel cinema” genre, ironically labelled art-house cinema presented a more real picture, where justice was rarely done. It did seem like a fanciful idea at the time.

I was finishing school and heading to college. Presidency College reeked of a glorious history, but both the present and the future seemed faintly malodorous. Unlike my parents though, the overwhelming majority of my friends were not Bengali. We were nationally integrated. Further education invariably meant somewhere else in the country. As Calcutta had gone into an accelerated decline, we had regrouped behind Kapil Dev and Amitabh Bachchan, or (Rajnikant, for those from the southern states) to a more defiant national identity. Underdogs yes, but not without a fight.

Mrs Gandhi, India’s iron lady, was assassinated in 1984, during her second stint in power, by her security guards, as retribution for her brutal suppression of a militant Sikh movement; leading to a spate of violence against Sikhs. India went to the polls and with a wink to democracy, elected her son Rajiv Gandhi, arguably the second most idealistic Prime Minister since Nehru, but with no prior experience in politics. He turned a crushing majority into an embarrassing defeat by 1989, by which time the country was on the brink of bankruptcy. A flurry of changes followed till PV Narasimha Rao took over in 1991. It wasn’t Narasimha Rao directly, but his finance minister Mr. Manmohan Singh, who is credited with propelling India into the next era albeit as an outcome of the bankruptcy crisis.

By which time, somewhat fortuitously, I was in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, attending business school, and dreaming bigger dreams than I had dared to, previously.

Global Ambitions; 1992-2007

Nilekani, Infosys

The allegorical and counterfeit Chinese proverb involving crisis, danger and opportunity has been repeated so many times to me that I requested a colleague to explain it down to me in writing, while I was working in Hong Kong in, 1999. And while proved not to be true, it was a reality for India in the early 90s. We were all hunkered down for a tidal wave of global mega corporations who were going to run amok in the Indian market place and take over our economy, our culture and our lifestyles. After all, we all knew how most Indian goods were inferior and everything from jeans to space dust came from outside the country.

Suddenly, opportunity was everywhere. If it wasn’t to make software for global companies, it was to do their number crunching for them. Or their medical transcriptions. Of course, this meant significant opportunities for training, education and serving these growing firms internally. It wasn’t just about software, though. Many Indian manufacturers, some of whom had been quietly producing world-class components through the license era (Sundaram Fasteners comes to mind), were able to blossom. Financial liberation and the current account convertibility meant that goods and services could be fluently sold across borders. And travel and tourism flourished as well. Notably, in 1987, my good friend Arindam struggled to organize an application fee for a college in the US because of the stringent restrictions of Rupee-Dollar conversions. Today, people sitting in Mumbai or Bangalore regularly buy goods off Amazon in America to have them shipped to friends, in the US.On the contrary, it turned out that like exposure to a vaccination, India discovered a deep well of immunity to the foreign economic invasion. After all, this country had a history of welcoming invaders and then sucking their culture and mixing it up with local flavours to create entirely new tastes and subcultures. We made Urdu out of the Mughal invasions and the Anglo Indian community with the British. And so, as we welcomed back Coke, P&G and IBM, we didn’t let go of Thums Up, of Nirma and we grew our own Infosys. It turned out that all those decades of being poor had made us quite innovative. And India flourished from the 90s. Every crisis, whether global or local, was turned into an opportunity.  The Y2K problem helped technology firms enter an entirely different orbit of growth. Short term pain was very quickly absorbed, and innovation flourished.

Tata Steel 1991-2015

If it was going to take a more capital intensive approach to be world beaters, well, that’s what we were going to aim for! You only have to glance at the transformation in Tata Steel’s numbers over the last 20 years to see a microcosm of the change in India.

Indian politics has become increasingly fractious and fraught with coalitions. Uneasy truces and power sharing deals circumscribe the pace of policy change. Manmohan Singh, coincidentally born in the same year as Dhirubhai Ambani, has been Prime Minister of India for 7 years now. Sadly, the man who created the boldest economic policy India since the 50s is now a figurehead – who is conspicuous by his anaemic inaction. But politicians have learnt to keep out of the way of progress for the most part. It seems like as Indian businesses have become global successes, our politicians have become more unsavoury.

Meanwhile, Sachin Tendulkar has gone where no cricketer has gone before him. He is on the verge of scoring 100 centuries across tests and one-day cricket. But the man who made Indian cricketers competitive globally was arguably Sourav Ganguly, the abrasive former captain, who gave his team the courage and gumption to cast off their “third world” meekness and look the combative Australians in the eye. And arm in arm with cricketers, Bollywood has blossomed from a ham-handed make believe world, into a recognized genre with slick production and uniformly breathtaking cinematography with global appeal. The Kapil & Amitabh brigade has yielded to the Sachin-ShahRukh era.

For Our Next Trick; 2007 –

Pranav Mistry, MIT

By the same logic, we are now in the early stages of the next era. What lies ahead?

Global travel and work is as much the norm now as travelling across the country was, when I left Kolkata to study.  And looking at this exploding India from a safe distance, i.e. London, it’s easier to objectively look at this phenomenon. As a friend recently put it after visiting Pune, a new generation has grown up in India that “doesn’t know that India is a poor country”. They have only seen growth, success and ambition.

The Indian cricket team have achieved #1 status in tests and sit second in one-days. Bollywood music can be found in the by lanes of Cusco and Cairo. Indian technologists now man senior positions in some of the most valuable businesses such as Google and Microsoft. Indian managers have also risen to the tops of Pepsi and MasterCard. It’s fair to say that India has arrived on the global scene. But what is more noteworthy is the emergence of the small town India. India’s cricket captain was born in Ranchi, not Mumbai. The whiz-kid Pranav Mistry, inventor of the Sixth Sense wearable computing interface hails from Palanpur, not Bangalore.

In the glow of this brave new ambition lies a brashness that defines the new India. The defining emblem of this brashness is the IPL. Loud, ostentatious and in your face, a marketing success story that pits the best against the best. Strangely, though, in a country that has been twice embarrassed in 12 months for its inability to organize and run major tournaments. There is clearly a lesson here – channelling the ambition and energy will help India fulfil the prophecies of becoming the second biggest economy in the world in another few decades. But if allowed to turn into false hubris, could easily derail and trip the real progress – in the mind. For now, though India is just enjoying the exhilaration of sprinting instead of crawling!

Forgotten is the Javed Miandad 6 off the last ball that confirmed to most Indians our deepest fears – that we simply weren’t good enough. Smart Indians now walk the global corridors of Goldman Sachs and manage hedge funds in New York. Or are building internet businesses in Mumbai. Their target is no longer import substitution or self sufficiency, its global domination. Comfortable anywhere in the world, the Indian sports fan wears an Arsenal jersey with the same comfort as he argues Rahul Dravid’s limitations in 20-20 cricket.

Nestled between the ambitions and the wealth, though, lies the 70% of India, waiting for their turn. Corporate India has made poverty vanish – sometimes by pretending that it doesn’t exist. But India’s social sector is thriving too. The microfinance industry is awash with innovations, and the voluntary sector is increasingly manned by highly competent people.  Having embraced capitalization and tasted the fruits of globalization, might India be ready to recall some of Nehru’s ideals? To cite another possibly specious Chinese quote, this one reportedly from Confucius: “In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”

ThinkPLANK’s next training session “Doing Business With India” is on the 9th of March, at Intellect, UK.

Read more about this here.