Subir Roy: India gets exciting

OFFBEAT

You guys are living through exciting times, said the mail from Pintu, my friend of over four decades. If you've been to the same school and college, and then cemented the bonds by sharing a barsati, circa 1970 in Delhi, it is difficult to be totally out of each other's radar permanently.

Pintu soon tired of the management trainee's job at what was then a blue-chip company paying raw youngsters something as absurd as a Rs 1,000-plus. He went back to studies, first to a top American university and thence permanently into academia, maturing over the years into a suitable management guru. I, of course, remained a scribe, accepting the challenge to live respectably at pays that would make sensible mothers with marriageable daughters give me a wide berth.

The contacts waxed and waned over the years and remained for the most part infrequent as neither of us was a good letter writer. So it had to be my rare trip to the US or a grand get-together of friends in Kolkata during one of his occasional visits back home.

The last time we met was not so long ago, circa 2000, on a bright winter's afternoon in Gurgaon, the north Indian winter sun living up to its reputation and making the beer on the terrace of our house go down exceedingly well.

Pintu, I found, had changed and not changed. In college, he was not only among the brightest in our batch but almost certainly the youngest. If you are that among a set of first-year 16- to 17-year-olds, you would earn the appellation that he did. The kid is still growing, we kept saying of him, well into the third year.

Over two decades later, he was still growing but now sideways. He was a grey-haired hulk, quintessentially American in stature but retaining his appetite for the best of Indian food. So we met again in a couple of days for lunch, polishing off enormous amounts of biryani and fish fry, topped with sweet and fragrant firni.

The big change that has come between us friends is that the email has arrived, crashing distances and time, helping revive memories and making possible exchanges, still infrequent but occasionally longish, which so help you get a grasp of time measured in decades.

It was one of these mails in which he sent the synopsis of a conference he chaired on consumer psychology in transition economies. And in the forwarding note was a request for a copy of my recently published book so that he could cite it while reviewing Prahalad's tract on the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid for a top marketing and public policy journal.

That got me all excited, making me talk about how India's knowledge base and cost competitiveness were making things happen in his area of interest, the business side of development. It is then that he said it seemed exciting times in India.

I couldn't help recall that three decades ago, the best and the brightest among us went to America and came periodically only to meet friends and relatives and have the traditional khana.Today there is a ferment in eternal, hitherto unchanging India, making it exciting both to live in and to behold.