Made in India: a paradigm shift
(July 12, 2004)There is a change in the way the world sees India, thanks to our academic 'gurus'and the IT industry
SOME weeks ago I met Sajjan Jindal, managing director of Jindal Vijayanagar Steel, and his wife Sangita - an easy-going, no-chips-on-the-shoulder couple. It was late at night and what started as a social conversation took a life of its own. Jindal Steel in Bellary, Karnataka, is one of India's modern steel plants. Sajjan's experience in making world- class steel and selling it in a highly competitive global market has gone through three stages. He told me about the phases - something that every educated person in India needs to know about.
In the first stage, buyers were wary of making public the fact that they sourced steel from India. They required of Sajjan that the ingots not bear the 'Made in India' mark. Then came a stage when they reluctantly accepted that the Jindals would put those words on the ingot. Now, the tables have completely turned. Sajjan Jindal says that not only are they able to proudly imprint the country-of-origin mark on the ingot, the phrase 'Made in India' actually helps them get a premium because of perceived quality. How did this transformation happen?
To Sajjan, the steel has remained the same. Per contra, buyer mindset has changed. Behind the transformation is the role played by India's information technology (IT) industry. Sajjan told me that thanks to the brand image created by the IT industry, today it is universally perceived that Indians are smart people. If they can write software, why not make steel? The mainstreaming of India is happening - in many other very interesting and unusual ways.
Last year, my wife and I went to see Monsoon Wedding in a predominantly 'WASP' (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) theatre near Princeton. Apart from one other Indian gentleman, only Caucasians filled the theatre. They were having the most loudly-expressed fun, and as we went back after the movie I overheard dozens of folks commenting that Mira Nair's was not just an Indian theme - Monsoon Wedding had nudged at the hearts of many others. Indians are now seen as people who can make intelligent movies for global consumption. The talk of Indian fare is of course incomplete without a mention of Bend It Like Beckham. Not to be outdone, Broadway recently presented A.R. Rahman's musical, Bombay Dreams.
My daughters study English at the Rutgers University. Sometime back there was huge excitement at the campus - guess who was coming? Jhumpa Lahiri. She was coming to spend a day with the faculty and students, and talk about her work. People like Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and she are whispering to the world that Indians can write fiction for a global audience.
'Made in India' is a state of mind. Today, the subliminal suggestion of that phrase has to do with intellect and universalism. It is making inroads into the psyche of ordinary people, and the indelibility of that impression is happening in many 'white space situations'. The value of their experiences is defining the collective consciousness of India. In all these, there is a sense I get of India touching the tipping point. This is a position in space and time at which a replicable idea becomes viral. There is no stopping the idea beyond the tipping point.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, The Tipping Point, says that reaching this point is usually a function of three things: the role played by 'connectors', the stickiness of an idea and the context itself. Connectors are people yielding disproportionately large impact, and they influence other people's thinking. The teaching-consulting variety of Indians has played a huge role in the last two decades as connectors. They have occupied a position of being credible and unbiased because it comes with a 'guru' tag. People like the late Sumantra Ghoshal,C.K. Prahalad, Vijay Govindarajan, Jagdish Sheth, Marti Subramanyam and Raghu Garud have had a huge influence on the thinking world. People like them in academia have established that Indians are intelligent, analytical, strategically competent and capable at the global level.
