Last decade’s unthinkables become this decade’s symbols.
The empires of the future, said Winston Churchill, will be the empires of the mind. So it is not surprising that the most exciting thing about the first decade of the 21st century was in fact the avalanche of new ideas. Picking the ten most important is a mug’s game, but we venture forth bravely.
So what was the decade’s newthink? From mobile phones to Facebook, the way people connect changed fundamentally. From budget airlines to Nano, the way they travelled changed too. Between 20-over cricket and 24x7 news and 24-party coalitions, the world around turned upside down. Crorepatis became billionaires and sting operators went after politicians’ skeletons and flesh!
Mobile mania
This is one industry which is unrecognisable from what it was a decade ago when you paid to make or receive a call, call rates were more than a few rupees a minute and you had to shell out tens of thousands of rupees to get a decent handset. Today, you can go mobile with just a few hundred rupees. Prepaid options begin with a Re 1 denomination. Per second billing, and that too as low as a paisa a second, has become common as still newer entrants seek to grab market share through disruptive pricing. India enters 2010 with close to 550 million phone users!
Flying @ low cost
This was a decade when the common man’s airline ceased to be an oxymoron for Indians. Captain Gopinath’s Air Deccan was the first to get off the ground in 2003 and was followed by a handful of others like Spicejet, Jet Lite, Go Air, Indigo and Paramount Airways. They managed to entice many first-time flyers and, thanks to the global slowdown, they even grabbed corporate traffic as cost control measures kicked in. About 60 per cent of the 130,000 people that take to the air on any given day opt for these low-cost carriers or LCCs.
Nano – world’s cheapest car
A hundred years after Henry Ford gave John and Jane his Model T, Ratan Tata rolled out a one lakh Nano for Sastry and Singh, realizing Sanjay Gandhi’s dream of a ‘people’s car’. There are now others in the country (think Bajaj Auto) getting ready to pitch for a similar price point. Global auto majors meanwhile are revving up to serve their version of small cars to Indians (think Volkswagen, Honda). Not surprising then that India is tipped to be the world’s manufacturing hub for small cars!
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Social networking online
India’s low internet and broadband penetration may not reflect a highly connected society, but it is, thanks to a large chunk of Gen X and Gen Y which is online. You can find these 18-40-year-olds chatting on Google, Twittering, Skyping, blogging, updating their Facebook status, posting videos on Youtube and even managing job offers through Linkedin. They meet and greet online, play online games, build networks, careers and even fortunes online (think Second Life). As for the sheer numbers, from less than a million connections at the beginning of the decade, there are some 60 million connected Indians today. And interestingly, a Twitter message can make or break fortunes (think Shashi Tharoor).
Sting operation
It is said that wrongdoers in the country — and there are many of those — are not scared of the public or the police or the courts or the newspapers but they get the shivers on seeing a camera, especially of the hidden kind. So sting operations became a popular stratagem among news channels in the eyeball-grabbing game. Viewers got sneak previews of elected representatives accepting wads of currency or schools asking for donations or bedroom peccadillos, until there were some instances of fabricated stings. A self-imposed code of ethics finalised by the broadcasters last year places sting operations in the “last resort” category and that too, only if it is in the larger public interest. The decade, therefore, saw the birth, as well as the maturing, of sting operations.
Multiplexes and malls
There were just about three malls in the country at the beginning of the decade. Today, some 300 dot the landscape, of which about 40 per cent are outside the six big cities — the metros, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Many more are in the pipeline. For millions of Indians, the way they shop has changed forever. The trend is the same in multiplexes. The days of the old-fashioned single screen theatres with basic facilities are all but over in the span of a single decade. Today you can watch your favourite new movie in la-Z-boy (pronounced lazyboy) chairs while glancing through a pricey coffee table book or admiring artwork lining the walls. The large multiplex chains today boast of some 800 screens across the country from less than 50 at the beginning of the decade.
IPL’s neo-cricket
Cricket smartened up during this decade. The matches became shorter and sharper — just 20 overs per team — to suit an audience with much shorter attention spans. Organised under the aegis of the Indian Premier League headed by Lalit Modi, these matches came bundled with cheerleaders and Bollywood performances. Captains of Indian Industry (think Vijay Mallya, Mukesh Ambani) and Bollywood stars (Shah Rukh Khan, Shilpa Shetty) got to own teams and players. This so-called franchisee model of cricket is set to expand to newer cities and teams as advertisers, broadcasters and viewers have lapped up this neo-cricket crafted for a neo-audience. For those interested in numbers, Sony Entertainment paid over $1 billion to bag the broadcast rights of these matches for the next 10 years.
Coalition politics
That the electorate would not trust its fortunes to any single party became established in this decade. Split mandates were not a one-off thing anymore but a definite trend. The flip side of the coin was that political parties had to learn to work together with regional satraps and concede their demands whether it was for development or ministerial berths or for new states (think Telangana). These changes in the political landscape changed the economic history of India too. We would have been sitting in a different India if the Left parties were not supporting the Congress government in 2004, with many public sector entities transcending to private sector status.
From crorepati to billionaire
When salaries of over a crore of rupees became common, tracking of crorepati’s gave way to tracking of billionaires. Business Standard’s Billionaire Club boasted 382 entries last year which is over three times the 120 entries that we had in the Billionaire Club at the beginning of the decade. The number of dollar billionaires also more than tripled during the period, going up from 9 at the beginning of the decade to 20 last year. Interestingly, there were over 600 Billionaire Club members in 2007 prior to the global economic shakeout. As the economy gets back on track, get ready to see newer billionaires on longer lists.
24-hour news
As news turned into entertainment, and fans of Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi got to see the wedding of his estranged daughter live on the local news channels, 24x7 TV channels became ubiquitous. From less than 10 at the beginning of the decade, there are some 240 news channels (including regional channels) feeding viewers round the clock in multiple languages. And more are planned as businessmen, politicians and even godmen choose to speak from platforms which they own.
Here’s to more ideas coming your way!