We are supposed to be a poor country, or, as some smart alecs put it, a rich country with poor people. All poor countries are supposed to be short of capital - which is why they are poor - and that is the reason they woo foreign investors. Or why is it that we are actually exporting capital, not a few million dollars, but billions of them, and acquiring foreign companies by the dozen, something we never did before?
Since even Tatas don't have that much spare cash, they are selling their shareholding in firms like TCS, and Birlas will be doing the same. The rest of the cash will come from foreign banks and financial institutions, some of whom are making so much money in such deals, they do not know where to keep it, and will no doubt use it to finance more such deals and make yet more money!
What is attracting all this foreign money to India is the reputation Indians have recently as managers and entrepreneurs. Somehow, Indians were never thought of as great managers or even as technical people. But the BPO industry has changed all that. For the first time, foreign companies have seen what Indians can do and they are amazed. They always thought of Indians as colonial people, people who are good clerks and babus, but not good enough as managers, let alone good engineers.
I recall once talking to a 'gora' bank manager in Calcutta - it was Calcutta then, not Kolkata - who presided over a huge army of clerks in a humid hall there was no air-conditioning then - none of whom was doing anything more exciting than adding up sums and post them in their flat ledgers.
For every little instruction, or something that involved a simple decision, they would come to him and ask for his advice. And he shook his head from time to time, as if to wonder how long he could go on with this lot, before he went home for his “tiffin”.
I have worked in England, as well as, of course, in India, and I can say that, man for man, or woman for woman and by the same token, an American, or, to put it mildly, a white man. We are far better educated, have gone through many ups and downs in the last two hundred or five hundred years and have a firm sense of who or what we are. What we lacked all these years was a sense of pride and faith in ourselves, having been bossed over by foreigners, goras and others, for hundreds of years.
It has taken us only 50 years to regain our pride and to think of ourselves as free men and women, second to none in any field of human endeavour. We Indians have at last found our voice, and nothing is more important for a people or a nation or a community, than its own authentic voice if only to tell the world that they have arrived.