Never Mind the Bullocks (23 page)

Nevertheless, this didn't mean they could keep India from their door: their garden attracted an endless stream of visitors, Europeans from the ashram as well as the local neighbours,
who appeared quite taken with the floral and faunal abundance of their abode. And the Marceaus were exemplary in their capacity for hospitality, accepting the incursions on their privacy with admirably cheery compliance and greeting everyone who dropped by with a drink and the offer of a seat on the garden swing.

Happily nested on said swing, it was all I could do to drag myself up and plan the next section of my route. I had decided to head north and inland towards Hyderabad, a city of stunning historical architecture that I had visited once before and remembered for its unfathomable draw. Hyderabad was 700 km away, which I figured would require at least one overnight stop along the route. The choices weren't abundant: an agitated search through the
Lonely Planet
's Andhra Pradesh chapter had informed me I was about to enter a large swathe of the country where guidebook-endorsed hotels were few and far between. After some deliberation, I settled on a government hotel in Nellore – a large town on the east coast, north of Chennai.

Whether I was succumbing to a wave of road weariness, or whether my impending departure from Thor was taking its toll, I noticed that my resolve to continue the journey had begun to slide. Since the afternoon at Paradise Beach, there had occurred a shift in my psyche that no longer required me to sit in a car for the next two months, urgently burning rubber and clocking up miles. If I was honest with myself, all I really wanted to do right then was stay in Manapakkam with Thor, the Marceaus and their menagerie. Thor was due to spend another week there before heading back out to Berlin, where we agreed we'd meet when all of this was over. Eager not to cake the situation in too much nostalgic crud, I exercised great willpower in not falling to my knees and begging Thor to take me to Germany with him. Instead, I tried to sound cool and optimistic when he
asked me where I'd be staying that night. Oh, in a place called Nellore, I piped.

‘I've never heard of Nellore.'

‘Oh really? That's strange. It's not far from here and it's so well known for its, er, mica.'

‘Its what?'

‘Never mind. I'll be just fine.'

‘Of course you will, little Thunderbolt. Just take it easy.'

Given that Nellore was relatively close, I tried to delay my departure from Chennai as long as possible. It was 4 pm when Abhilasha and I trundled off (not daring to look at Thor waving in my rear-view mirror), which was just the right time to meet the rush-hour traffic coming to a complete standstill. Two hours and enough creative cursing to fill an Eminem lyric book later, we began to move around the northern outskirts of the city.

Crossing the border from Tamil Nadu to Andhra Pradesh, the landscape flattened out and we finally picked up speed. As the massive Pulicat Lake passed unseen somewhere to our right, the sky began to fall through several shades of crimson. It was a picture worth freezing – an open and now relatively unimpeded road, a vast surrounding panorama, a sky slowly sinking into darkness and a few tungsten beacons blinking here and there on the horizon. I felt like the lonesome cowboy, riding off alone into the sunset with a throbbing heart and a fistful of rupees. So I had left my lover behind: what did I care? The road was mine once more. I had over 6,500 km left to drive over India's feral topography, and the journey started right here. I gave Abhilasha a jolly good cuff around the wheel to celebrate.

HYDERABAD; KM 3,941

As far as I could see, the Nano's popularity was showing no signs of recession. Passing through towns and villages, we were treated to the kind of reception more appropriate to a troupe of touring, puppy-dispensing tycoons. The enthusiasm was unremitting, and surprising to me. It was only a car, after all. How exciting could it be? I tried to imagine similar levels of adulation poured on, say, a Mini driving through an Oxfordshire village: kids dropping their games to run in its wake, screaming its name like they were trying to draw out the spirits from its frame; adults stopping dead in their tracks for a gander, knocking on the windscreen at traffic lights to ascertain the exact fuel-to-distance ratio – it wasn't probable. I mean, I liked the Nano – and in some ways I was even beginning to
love
Abhilasha – but I wasn't about to start sprinting down the road after one.

Nevertheless, the sustained hype did make me wonder. Was it the Nano's elusiveness that made it so appealing to the masses? Once it went on general sale, how would the market reflect its popular celebrity? Were people ready to put their cash down on what might be a passing fad?

Before arriving in Hyderabad, I'd been introduced to a professor at the Indian School of Business there called Reuben Abraham. He'd been recommended to me for his expertise in emerging markets, and as such I hoped he
might be able to shed some light on the behaviour of the Indian consumer.

‘You should come down to ISB to see what the future of education in India looks like,' Reuben wrote to me after I sent him the awkward ‘you don't know me, but…' email. They were bold words that duly perked my interest. Besides, I didn't have much choice: the 450 km round-trip detour I'd taken to see Hyderabad had been rendered futile by the fact that most of the city centre was currently out of bounds. On arriving at the Taj Mahal hotel, an establishment whose appearance fell a few tacky architectural flourishes and luminescent signs short of tallying with its name, I learned from a Mr R. Janardhan at reception that a series of local Hindu–Muslim skirmishes had closed off most areas of note in the city, where the police had cracked down on residents and enforced a curfew.

The nature of the unrest and the reasons for it were unclear to me. Even after time spent quizzing R. and scouring the front page of
The Hindu
(a businessman had been beaten to death by a mob, a teenager had suffered rubber bullet injuries, more than two dozen people had been hit by stones), I was still at a loss as to
why
it was all happening. And when it would end.

R. remained taciturn but chipper, waving off my anxious queries and trying to change the subject. Keen that age-old inter-religious rivalries should not diminish my enjoyment of his city, he suggested I take a trip out of town to visit Ramoji Film City, Hyderabad's own Bollywood. Having been underwhelmed by a Wild West show there a decade earlier, I politely skipped over the proposition, asking R. what he thought instead of Hi-Tech City, the suburban home of the ISB and a place whose name inspired in me
Bladerunner
visions of interlocking monorail flyovers and airborne jet skis. R. was less enthused, shrugging off its appeal as if my intention to go there was a personal snub,
though our exchange did eventually finish with his blessing by way of a room upgrade.

As I divined the route to Reuben's office through the corridors of the ISB – after a five-minute face-off with security that was precipitated by Abhilasha's lack of discernable trunk – I was growing nervous at the prospect of meeting the man who, according to my research, was a stalwart of his field. Executive Director of the Centre for Emerging Market Solutions, he had a host of accolades under his belt, including the position of Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, board member of the Soros Economic Development Fund, a TED Global Fellow and a member of the Clinton Global Initiative. What, apart from a short chat about the Nano, would I have to talk about with this superbrain economist?

Instead of the nerdy professor I'd been expecting, Reuben was a sprightly man of my own age with a penchant for parties and electronic music. He shot up from his desk to shake my hand eagerly and introduced me to anyone who'd listen as the girl who was driving around India in a Nano, before whisking me around the college to ascertain the veracity of his conviction that the ISB was a blueprint for education in tomorrow's India. He took me through the building, which looked like a modern desert fortress with a huge inner atrium and a library that spiralled up like New York's Guggenheim Museum. He showed me a system of natural air conditioning that harnessed the cooling power of the wind to blow around the bridges and walkways, and introduced me to a girl who had started her own fresh juice business within the college. Pricey artworks adorned the corridor walls while outside, the manicured grounds stretched for acres of green lawns, and the waft of frangipani trees floated among the campus housing as far as the on-site hotel. Reuben left the final cherry for the last part of our tour: the swimming pool, surrounded by sunbeds where
weary, overworked students could take a break and catch some rays.

It was clear that Reuben was proud of the campus and he had reason to be; it was a stimulating training ground for the businesspeople of a future global superpower that made my list of attended academic institutions look like dingy 1960s throwbacks, and not just because of its arresting architecture. In 2010, the
Financial Times
ranked the ISB's MBA programme as the twelfth best in the world, way above the likes of Yale and Cambridge. Graduates from the school came ninth in the world in terms of average starter salaries, which range from £20,000 to over £100,000.

I had by chance met a recent alumnus the day before who told me how painful leaving the college had been. Students were furnished with top-notch serviced spaces and enjoyed such high standards of living that post-college life was invariably a bit of a let-down. ‘It was tough having to go back to cleaning my own apartment,' complained the graduate, who was now working at a microfinance agency.

An enthused speaker on the subject of free markets, Reuben could whip even the most clueless and under-informed subject (i.e. me) into a raging debate within minutes. Some of his assertions instinctively set my teeth on edge, like his conviction that India needed to be more urbanized and that village life was something to be abandoned and not subsidized by the state.

‘But… but… villages are… nice,' I protested weakly. ‘Aren't they?'

‘That's urban bourgeois romanticism!' he exclaimed, smacking my comment clean out of the ring. ‘Would you want to live in an Indian village? With no running water or electricity or phone connection?'

I shook my head.

‘With an active and discriminating caste system?'

I kept on shaking.

‘The single greatest remover of poverty in the world has been the economic growth of China and, to a lesser extent, India,' Reuben continued. ‘In the last 30 years, over 700 million people have been lifted out of absolute poverty, and this is almost entirely due to the functioning of free markets and liberal economic policies.'

My knowledge of Indian economics was shaky to say the least, but I did have some facts knocking about in the recesses of my noggin that helped me put some of what Reuben was saying into perspective. It seemed that as far as the country's financial system was concerned, there were two landmark years in the last century: 1947 and 1991.

The former was when the British packed their bags and retreated to Blighty, taking with them the Raj and all its exploitive failings. India declared itself an independent republic and, with Jawaharlal Nehru at its helm, went on to construct an economic infrastructure that was primarily socialist with some traces of capitalism. The idea was that it would invigorate its economy independently, that its land would provide everything its people needed – from agriculture to manufacturing and industry – without any interference from the international market, and with no need for imports or exports. The drive to self-sufficiency was an understandable sentiment, given the two centuries of colonial manipulation the country had suffered, but the system itself turned out to be slow, unproductive and above all a fertile breeding ground for misbehaviour and corruption; thoughts of reform only started to bubble in the 1970s and nothing really changed for the Indian economy until the fateful summer of 1991.

That was the year of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, shortly after which the economy went into a crushing nosedive. It was a calamity of huge proportions: India was on the verge of
bankruptcy and needed a bailout plan, fast. The newly elected PM called on his minister of finance, Manmohan Singh,
²⁷
to figure out a master stratagem. What Singh came up with, within a matter of days, turned upside down a great deal of what Nehru had implemented and the Congress party had upheld for the past half-century. His idea was that the government free up the market, both for domestic businesses and for international ones. The reforms were pushed through quickly, and suddenly India was a much freer, much less regulated place. Indians wanting to start their own businesses no longer had to jump through dozens of hoops before ringing up their first transactions,
²⁸
and international companies were now at liberty to deal in India, by importing or exporting their goods and by investing in Indian companies.

The fruits of the reforms succeeded in bailing the country out of its short-term crisis, and before long the enriching effects of the reforms became apparent. India's GDP began to rise steadily, along with household incomes. The percentage of people living under the poverty line has fallen from a staggering 90% in 1985 to under 29% today, so it's difficult to argue that India's economic liberalization efforts have not been largely responsible for lifting millions out of deprivation.

I asked Reuben if the Nano was a direct product of the country's economic growth.

‘Absolutely. It's a sign of industrial power to the extent that you've got a large corporation that has money to put into research and development,' he explained. ‘If you have money to put into R&D, then you've crossed a hump.'

Coincidentally, Reuben was working on a similar project from within the Centre for Emerging Market Solutions: the Nano principle transferred to housing. His team was in the midst of a scheme to build low-cost, high-quality housing for low-income industrial workers in small towns who might otherwise
be living in slums. The houses they were building were set to cost between $6,000 and $10,000, but were by no means a form of charity; this mission was also very much focused on profit. Capitalism, Reuben argued, could be reshaped to include and even benefit the poor, as long as business models were well thought out. The key was frugal innovation or, as he put it, the principle of more for less for more.