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Not a bad year after all

Throughout this year, wherever I went, the mood was gloomy. Politics went through a long bout of uncertainty. Business was bad. Prices were up and away. So was crime. Jobs seemed to vanish. The stock market was dead. Trading in real estate had come to a standstill nationwide. Nothing appeared to be going right for most people. Despondency was in the air, wherever you looked. Everyone felt morose, downbeat. Many were even frightened. Where was India going?

It was the ultimate feel-bad year.

Yet if you actually look back on it, now that it's over, 1998 was not such a bad year after all. The stresses and strains were, yes, considerably more but the payoffs were also amazing. Particularly if you look at individual success stories.

After a decade of procrastination, the Nobel Prize for Economics eventually went to the man who deserved it the most, Amartya Sen. Confirming what most of us already knew. That when it comes to welfare economics, no one can match this Trinity College professor who (for years has persisted with the view that economic liberalisation and the humane objectives of government can easily go hand in hand if only we were less pig-headed.)

With Sen winning the Nobel Prize, this point of view will hopefully gain greater currency and the hugely exaggerated gap between the Left and the Right will be bridged by more realistic, more workable, less ideologically adamant economic policies. Curiously, for Calcutta, this is the third Nobel Prize in one century. Tagore, Mother Teresa, Amartya Sen.

1998 was also the year when Sachin Tendulkar proved that it's possible (even in a team game like cricket) to outshine everybody else. He broke some records, created a few more but (eventually) showed that to be the greatest player in the world you need much more than just record busting skills. You need style, genius, reliability and the chutzpah to cope with endless acclaim and not let it mess up your game. This is not easy when you are barely 25. But, then, Tendulkar has proved that he is no ordinary achiever.

1998 was also the year when, amidst all the hullabaloo about showbiz going bust and extortionists holding filmwallahs to ransom, a young man of 26 made the biggest blockbuster of all time and, if his luck holds, he will earn over Rs 1 billion from this one film alone. Not bad. His father, a respected producer who has put his money into many films and earned a pittance over the years, actually wanted him to stay away from the trauma and uncertainty of showbiz and become an exporter.

But when Karan Johar decided to force his luck, dad Yash reluctantly agreed. Particularly after his last film Duplicate bombed thanks to Mahesh Bhatt's career arthritis. Today, the cash counters for Dharma Productions simply refuse to stop ringing. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which started as a lark, has ended up as the mother of all blockbusters. Defying the prophets of doom, who were writing the obituary of showbiz in 1998.

Similarly, the obituary of the Indian economy never quite got written during the year. Of course, there was bad news galore. Recession dug its heels in. Some of the best performers for years rewrote their bottom lines in red. Telco, Tisco, Colgate, CESC, ACC, Godrej Soaps, Bombay Dyeing underperformed and how. Company after company changed hands or, like ABCL, simply closed down. Yet, at the same time, 1998 saw the incredible blossoming of a new industry, Infotech.

Infotech harnessed the genius of modern India and showed how quick we are to learn a new skill. It was a politician who lent his unshaved face to this new business and Nara Chandrababu Naidu will find his name emblazed in the history books as the man who ushered the computer era into governance. While IT companies like Wipro, Satyam, Infosys, NIIT, Tata Infotech have transformed the face of the Indian stock market and earned crores for their investors (and, in some cases, their employees) in 1998. Who said there are only losers on Dalal Street today?

1998 was also the year of the Internet in India. Satyam, the first private service provider, came into operation. Faced with competition, VSNL dropped its absurd rates. Net telephony went legit. The first batch of Internet awards created enough hype for the industry and its creative genius to be noticed worldwide.

The amazing stories of ventures like Hotmail and Junglee, which earned their NRI promoters millions of dollars in profit when Microsoft and Amazon acquired them, spurred local talent to try to replicate their success. Whether or not they can is irrelevant. The fact that ingenious youngsters here are now trying to use their entrepreneurial skills to make megabucks out of the net will reduce the rush in the shrinking job market.

In 1998 Shekhar Kapur again succeeded in showcasing Indian creative with foreign capital. His film Elizabeth not only won some of the top awards in 1998; it has shown the world that we can, if we want, do reverse colonisation. Reviewers cribbed that Shekhar has done a Bollywood on the British monarchy's most revered icon but the fact remains that Elizabeth has proved to Hollywood that when it comes to glitz and glam and spectacular showmanship, we are not very far behind. With Shekhar planning to make the next Superman film with Nicholas Cage, we are now entering an era when our showbiz talent will transform Hollywood like our computer talent did in Silicon Valley.

Bollywood also proved in 1998 that the Bachchan era is finally dead and, with it, the nostalgia that kept it alive for two long decades. Shah Rukh Khan is the new king of the box office and he and Govinda, between them, have carved up the entire territory. Shah Rukh won award after award in 1998 and proved that a superstar need not give a string of hits to stay at the top. His hits and misses came and went with tedious regularity but Shah Rukh stayed on top and made more money out of stardom than anyone else has ever done. Savvy brand building, you can say. And proof that a new breed of stars have grabbed control of showbiz and its future.

1998 was also the year when Rupert Murdoch changed his style for the sake of India. Instead of browbeating rivals and dropping governments as he is famous for, Murdoch went swadeshi and began negotiations with his Indian partner to merge Star and Zee. The objective? To form an unbeatable global TV giant managed substantially by Zee. A real time tribute to Indian management skills. Which has already been widely recognised when Rajat Gupta took charge of McKinsey and Jim Wadia of Arthur Andersen.

No, it was not exactly the best idea in the world to break into the nuclear club. Having done this, India was almost written off by the world media. But the BJP-led alliance, lame duck for a long while after the blast, is now looking more businesslike after its rout in the state elections. It refuses to be bullied by friends, allies, assorted lobbies any more.

Prime Minister Vajpayee sounds much confident now than he ever did and is all set to push through his political agenda without worrying overmuch about the RSS or the Swadeshi Manch, Mamata or Jayalalitha. His tentativeness has vanished. It now looks as if he will succeed in giving the economy the thrust it needs to move forward quickly. Instead of hanging in there like a bamboozled Trishanku.

In other words, the scene is not half as dark and foreboding as it looks. What is happening is change. Everything is changing. We are moving into an unknown future, where no one can protect the commonplace, the trivial. Everyone must strive to hit the top. Only excellence and performance can survive in the long run. This is the inexorable logic of globalisation and we, like the rest of the world, have no option but to live with it.

This is the lesson of 1998, the challenge of 1999. A threat as well as an opportunity. Everything depends on how we cope with it. If we succeed, we will no longer aspire to lead the third world into the next millennium. We will be part of the first world.

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