"It has been a while since I contributed anything to The Collective in the spirit of empowerment. As a thank you for your and Mr. Treacy's unwavering dedication to cut through the barrage of information and condense it to unemotional investment strategies, I wanted to share a few further impressions of India. A few years back (2007), I embarked on a Constructive Adventure with the building of a house in South Goa. The waters of bureaucracy were navigated safely & correctly, albeit at a speed that would leave most Westerners despair in frustration. Spending the entire fall/winter of 2010/11 between Goa and Bangalore, I recorded some of my impressions of the "new" India Inc. in an essay titled "Degrees of Separation", see attached.

David Fuller's view Thank you so much for sharing your essay with us. I found it objective and also fascinating, not least the concept of 'India Inc'. Here is the opening from 'Degrees of Separation: India Then and Now':

Eighteen years ago in the year 1993, almost to the day, I departed India after a first, whirlwind voyage that took me from the "golden triangle" of Rajasthan to the temples of Tamil Nadu. I left behind clunky Ambassador cars in either black or ivory color, auto rickshaws spewing noxious fumes, telephone calls from public STD booths and flights on Indian Airlines. Vivid in memory are images of the sheer masses of humanity winding their way through streets. Buses were packed to bursting capacity and crammed trains wormed their way out of cavernous stations. While the employed were headed to offices and factories or sat in traditional shops displaying their wares, equally memorable images come back to me: the sheer number of people apparently living on sidewalks or in nooks and crannies of buildings. Small children with hair matted down, wearing hardly more than a rag. Entire families huddled together sleeping on the pavement with traffic roaring by inches away. Cobblers plying their trade on the street; sellers of odds and ends or meager produce - a few limes, a few eggs,- : holes in the wall with a person selling cigarettes one at a time. Cows roaming freely, in more rural areas even pigs, and everywhere scruffy dogs trying to snatch anything eatable in the piles of smelly garbage left to its fate.

Since then, I have been back countless times, have married a native of Bengaluru, and like skins of onion am peeling away at the complexity that is India. In barely two decades, an entirely new India has emerged, accelerating at ever-faster speed of change. I don't know who first coined it, but the media has named it "India Inc.." Quite telling, seems to me, referring to a country as a corporation. A bit like calling your employees the "talent pool". One degree of separation but what a difference, indeed. It is clever, this India Inc. handle, leaving little doubt about the prevailing mindset. Trying to feel my way into its meaning, I get a sense of a split, a division. The 'old' India is there, massively, with its ancient culture and traditions. Simultaneously, an ambitious model is being devised and is presenting itself to the world at large; a different world, mind you, than the time-worn image of India as a largely poor, overpopulated "Third World " country. India Inc. is a country of ambitious entrepreneurs, of people and companies with aspirations no longer resigned to operate within their own borders. Global reach is exemplified by corporate takeovers, international travel and the increasing number of imported goods as well as lifestyles. Out went numerous city names foisted upon it by colonial rule. It has taken me a couple of years but is finally sounding familiar: Bombay is Mumbai, Madras is Chennai and Bangalore (a brand name, almost) is now Bengaluru in a decisive rotation away from involuntary baptism and toward an embrace of Indian-ness. Seldom is the old exclamation of "What to do?" to be heard, though it used to be an oft-repeated daily mantra of frustration. An entirely new level of self esteem has been born. Though in its infancy - this new awareness of Can-Do rather than the resigned What-To-Do, - it is quickly becoming a norm, especially in the metros. Aptly in keeping with the "Inc.", the primary drivers of growth are the cities referred to as "Tier One" cities (Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai), followed by Tier Two and Three, with Four and Five d as runners-up.

To the extent that economic growth is good, and I suspect most of us agree that it is much better than the alternative, I regard the mindset of 'India Inc' as only possible when people see and feel the empowerment of capitalism, to which India is now making its own unique contribution.

Not everyone feels comfortable about progress, which brings a whole new set of often daunting challenges. We also tend to romanticize the past. In the UK, the chocolate box image of thatched Victorian cottages with herbaceous borders, perhaps a winsome lass in the doorway and a small child nearby, remains popular. We tend to forget about the appalling infant mortality, dire poverty and slave-like working conditions for many.