India Reloaded

Every book, presentation, or conference on India starts with the potential of a 1.2 billion population. However, little has been said about what these 1.2 billion people really want and what they can afford. Consultants projected the size of the Indian middle class at 300 million and businesses made a beeline for this mass-market consumer in India. Most of these companies, heavily invested in the potential of India’s mass consumer, are still waiting to get profitable. While we may project the size of middle class as 300 million, only 56 million people own four-wheelers in India, according to the Census 2011. Was this a case of over-projection then? Are we living with other such myths about the Indian consumer market?

In their growing-up days, today’s middle-class Indians fancied the Ambassador as the car of their dreams. An Ambassador was a round, voluptuous car with seats that resembled spring sofas of our living rooms. It was most often spotted in white with a beacon light atop — which signified that its owner was a high-powered government officer. The white Ambassador turned out to be a symbol of power, respect, and success. The car had a big presence on the Indian roads, both physically and symbolically. When a middle-class Indian said he wanted to own a car someday, he meant the Ambassador, because that was his idea of a car. Of course, there was an option in the square-shaped Premier Padmini, produced under license from Fiat. But the Ambassador dominated the Indian ideal of what a car should be.

Dabangg (Audacious) is a highly successful Bollywood movie with an equally successful sequel Dabangg 2. The two movies together have amassed close to Rs. 500 crores ($80 million). The movies feed on Bollywood star Salman Khan’s appeal and his demeanor — wearing his shades on his back collar and his effortless Bollywood style dance, swinging his waist while adjusting his belt. The movies have a mainstream appeal with item songs that add to their rustic and raunchy quotient. But there’s more to Dabangg’s appeal. Dabangg is also a story of the quintessentially poor and downtrodden, who rise above their circumstances and ensure justice for everyone. The protagonist, police officer Chulbul Pandey, played by Salman Khan behaves less like a law abiding, government officer, more like Robinhood Pandey. He believes in instant justice and shoots his opponents at will. Dabangg’s appeal is in reinstating the rights and the respect of the masses. It makes the powerless feel powerful, even if it’s only for two and half hours. The raunchy dance sequences and the well-choreographed fight scenes are a bonus.

The capital city of India, New Delhi, now has a swanky airport. While the earlier airport had a single gate for entry, leading to long queues, the new one has more than a dozen. Despite the sudden increase in the number of entry-gates, you will still find long queues at one or two gates, while all others lie vacant. What explains this behavior? Well as Indians, we like standing in queues, sort of. If there are so many people standing at one gate, there must be something right about it, and if there is no one at the others, there must be something wrong about them — why take a chance and be sorry?

One has heard of a free fall to failure, but India experienced a free rise to success. After living with the Hindu rate of growth of 4% for many decades, India grew at a breakneck speed post its economic liberalization in 1992. Its GDP touched 10.3 in 2010 [1], the job scene was rocking and so were the businesses. In those days in India, you could do no wrong — from a business and economy perspective. Multinational companies were setting up shop in India and local companies were expanding their play. Many Indian companies built during the era of license-raj were busy revitalizing their culture and identity, from old and fuddy-duddy to young and nimble, in line with the new progressive India. Young, energetic, and vivacious was the mood of the times. Preity Zinta, who embodied this zest, was an oft-referenced brand personality and a popular brand ambassador of the time.

Television and cinema content in India has traditionally suffered from excessive censoring and moral policing. However, the last decade has seen a breakaway from the nutritional content of earlier times. The kiss has come away from the symbolism of two flowers meeting and is on the screen, not only in the cinema but also on television. Street language — full of expletives and cuss words — has become the staple of movie dialogues and song lyrics. Some of this can be easily passed off as a release from a highly pent-up past. But it appears that content that deliberately crosses the line is seen as the new formula to appeal to the youth. It’s almost as though youth marketers are being advised to use words that need beeping out.

Chaar bottle Vodka, kaam mera roz ka, na mujhko koi roke, na kisi ne roka (four bottles of Vodka is my everyday fix, nobody should stop me, no one ever does) — this song, composed and sung by Indian rapper YoYo Honey Singh, for the Bollywood movie Ragini MMS 2, was top of the charts in India for many months, in 2014. It blared from speakers in cars, discotheques, parties, and homes alike. The mainstream success of the song is culturally interesting, because it celebrates alcohol unabashedly.

The Lunchbox is a 2013 Bollywood film that would typically receive critical acclaim in India, but no commercial success. The film is about a romance through love letters, between a lonely accountant about to retire from his job (played by Irrfan Khan) and a young married woman seeking her husband’s attention (played by Nirmrat Kaur). The story begins when the lunchbox she prepares for her husband, along with her letter of love, lands up at the desk of the accountant by mistake. The movie also features the famous dabbawallahs of Mumbai — a network of people who pick up lunch boxes from restaurants or homes and deliver them to the men at work. It’s because of their mix-up that the lunchbox lands up at the accountant’s desk every day and acts as the two-way carrier of the love letters, as the relationship develops.

Unlike that of China, say, India’s growth story is driven by people, not policy. What makes the Indian growth story sustainable is the personal enterprise of millions of Indians and their desire to move up the ladder of life. The role of state policy thus far has been limited, except for the act of economic liberalization in 1991. There is a reason why state policy in India is not designed to favor the market forces: the India that benefits directly from the market forces and the India that votes the government into power are traditionally two disparate sets of people.