 "Reimagining India: Unlocking The Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower")
REIMAGINING INDIA: UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF ASIA'S NEXT SUPERPOWER
Edited by: Clay Chandler, Adil Zanubhai, McKinsey & Company
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 432
Price: Rs 699
When it comes to titling books about India, the rules of naming are as rigid as in the most orthodox of families. "[Adjective / Exhortation] India", and then, separated by a colon, a subtitle that includes some assortment of the words "energy", "diversity", "reform", "power", "growth", "next", "emerging", "potential", or "billion". McKinsey & Company, as befits its reputation, has thought superbly inside the box and named its new book Reimagining India: Unlocking The Potential of Asia's Next Superpower, which nicely hits all the high notes, while carefully pointing out that we aren't quite there yet.
The book, which is due to be launched on October 31, is nominally edited by the chairman of McKinsey India and the Asia editor of the consultancy's publishing division, but is presumably in fact a group effort from interested people within the company. But why, the tired reader will ask, should I add another book to a shelf weighted down, among others, by India Becoming, Accidental India, India: a Portrait, India Unbound, and Imagining India? For one thing, the list of contributors is capable of startling even the most jaded eye. In a bravura display of McKinsey's reach, the editors have managed to get hold of everyone from Nandan Nilekani to Fareed Zakaria to Viswanathan Anand; from Kumar Mangalam Birla to Suketu Mehta to Muhtar Kent to Ramachandra Guha; from Zia Mody to Bill Gates to Mukesh Ambani.
Naturally, something from so many hands, most with their own obsessions and the sort of stature that means that you don't tend to deal with difficult questions, can be very patchy. Indeed, the initial essays, where "overviews" of India are provided by Zakaria, Morgan Stanley's Ruchir Sharma, and Anand Giridharadas, are nothing short of teeth-clenchingly awful. Zakaria himself manages to produce an anodyne but unexceptionable paean to the potential of the Indian middle class.
But then, there's Ruchir Sharma's piece on whether India is a "breakout or a washout" - a nice bit of publicity for his book, Breakout Nations - that manages to make vast and frequently contradictory claims without the slightest sense that any of them are grounded in data, or even an attempt at basic analysis.
Consider this: "Singh has tended to dismiss India's growing problems with corruption and inflation as the natural side effects of rapid growth..." [Really? Has he? If so, does he have a point or not?] or "...even though these problems are much worse in India than in other nations at the same stage of development" [Data please? How on earth do you know corruption is worse here? Are you perhaps carefully defining "same stage of development" in order to be right?].
Sharma ends with a tired and equally data-free claim that India's states will rescue it from the Centre's mess, without bothering to point out that for every Nitish Kumar there is a Mamata Banerjee. Or that Kumar is hardly rejecting caste-based politics, but was re-elected on the basis of it. Given that Zakaria's essay is more about the historical sweep of events, Sharma's essay is where readers will first encounter India's real problems; unfortunately, they also encounter the sort of hand-waving and misdirection and rabbits-out-of-hats I'd expect from a chapter by P C Sorcar, not a well-respected analyst.
Sadly, this is followed by Gurcharan Das calling for a moral revolution that transplants values from the Constitution to Indians' hearts - a touching if unconscious rediscovery of Nehruvianism by the ex-libertarian. And then you get Anand Giridharadas meditating for a few pages on selfhood and selfishness in sentences even more unreadable than the ones produced by your average ex-engineer godman.
The section ends with two moderately well-off men, Bill Gates and Mukesh Ambani. It is both interesting and important to hear where Ambani wants India to go, because India might well go there; and it appears he wants more private-sector universities, and private-public partnerships in agriculture.
Gates, meanwhile, writes one of the better essays in the book, on the apparently successful quest to rid India of polio, and the unsung army of two million vaccinators who achieved it.
As this first section reveals, it is only with such, focused, essays that the book excels. Gates writes about a specific issue with humanity, skill and knowledge. So do others: Sonia Faleiro on rural women, Yasheng Huang on India's inferiority complex vis-à-vis autocratic China; Ed Luce on the "vetocracy" that equally hampers Obama in Washington and Singh in Delhi; Zia Mody on judicial delays; Geet Sethi arguing for state support of sport.
And it is when the essays veer in the opposite direction, into pompous over-long restatements of the obvious, that the book stutters and fails. There is a slight tendency, also, for some of the essays to feel a little like op-eds that have no real news value; a short statement of a problem, followed by a list of unlikely and often unhelpful policy recommendations.
Fortunately, in a book this dense and rich, there's enough to read, and in nice bite-sized packets, too. If the worst essay in the book is from the dean of Harvard Business School, the best, by far, are those written by actual business practitioners about actual business. My favourite essay was actually by Kumar Mangalam Birla: it segued beautifully from a story of his youthful panic at the thought that his company would have to abandon its vegetarian-food-only policy when it expanded into Australia ("A core belief! I had broken a lot of family norms, but I thought this one was going to be multi-dimensionally disastrous for me") to the various ways in which Indian companies will have to adapt to compete globally. "The world will change them," Birla says, "as much as they hope to change the world."
It's fun, also, to read Tesco's Philip Clarke arguing provocatively that retail in India will leapfrog from small physical stores to integrated, multi-channel, largely online chains, or Miles White of Abbott Labs explaining why his company, in India since 1910, decided to buy Piramal's healthcare unit in 2010, after 18 months of meetings. Or Muhtar Kent of Coke comparing "dazzled" global companies being drawn to India to his own experience living in Delhi as a boy, and warning them that "if you come to India with some grand, predetermined strategy or master-plan, prepare to be distracted, deterred and even demoralised... see the Indian market as it is, not what you wish it to be."
