This has been written by an Indian politician. If you know who it is, 
 mail me at [email protected]. Thx. Sorry for poor formatting, it was worse.

 For as long as I can remember, some things have been accepted as axiomatic
 by all of us: the `original' NRI's (Non-Resident Indians), the `other' NRI's
 (Not Really Indians, also known as RNI's -- Resident Non-Indians), RRI's
 (Resident Real Indians), R2I's (Returned to Indians), and the rest. If I may
 paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, I would say: We the people hold the following
 truths to be self-evident:
 That the Rupee will always depreciate against the dollar (US dollar
 naturally -- is there any other kind?).
 That the inflation rate will always be higher in India than in the US.
 That the job market will always be better in the US than in India. That
 the standard of living will always be higher in the US than in India.
 So accustomed are we to accepting these premises without question that we
 have thoroughly internalized them -- we no longer consider these as overt
 externally introduced assumptions, but treat them as immutable laws of life,
 like Newton's three laws and Maxwell's four equations. The Reality
 But now things have gone topsy turvy in this land of India that is Bharat.
 As Marc Antony said ``Oh what a fall was there my countrymen!'' 

Just consider the following facts: The Rupee,
 After depreciating steadily against the US dollar (from 31.37 to the dollar
 in 1991 to 49.07 to the dollar in 2001), the Rupee has now appreciated
 against the dollar, and is now at 48 to the dollar. In fact, but for active
 intervention by the Reserve Bank of India, the Rupee would appreciate by
 another 2.5% against major currencies, including the US dollar. India's
 foreign exchange reserves, which hit rock bottom at less than $ 1 BB (that's
 billion) back in 1991, are now at $ 68.5 BB and climbing steeply. Too
 steeply as a matter of fact. If the RBI did not `sterilize' these massive
 dollar inflows, the Rupee would appreciate even faster than it is at
 present. The `merchandise' trade of India shows a deficit only because the
 Indian government perversely insists on counting India's massive software
 exports of $ 8.2 billion under a strange head called `invisibles.' Its
 outdated rationale is that, since no material changes hands, software
 exports cannot be counted as `merchandise.' But for this and other such
 accounting quirks, India would show a merchandise trade surplus. Similarly,
 our strange way of counting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) substantially
 understates the amount of money that the Indian economy is able to attract.
 A recent issue of Businessworld points out that, if we were to use the norms
 published by the International Monetary Fund, India's FDI last year would be
 $ 8 BB, not $ 2.2 BB which is government's official figure. (As an aside,
 using the same IMF norms, China's FDI falls from $ 40 BB to $ 22 BB.) In any
 case, India is now showing a current account surplus. In contrast, for many
 years the US economy managed to get away with a huge trade deficit, since
 the other countries of the world turned right around and invested their
 trade surpluses in the US. This gave the US a huge surplus on the current
 account, even if it had a trade deficit. But now the trading partners of the
 US are no longer automatically willing to reinvest their surpluses in the
 US, which is one reason why the current economic slump in the US has been so
 prolonged. 

The Indian Inflation Rate
 The inflation rate in India has been hovering at between 2% and 4% per year
 for the past several years. With salaries increasing at a much faster rate
 (especially, but not exclusively, in the software sector), the real incomes
 have been increasing at a very healthy rate. Coupled with the rapid drop in
 real estate values (possibly because most of the black money has already
 been invested in this sector), this implies that the disposable income,
 especially in inexpensive metros like Hyderabad, has just been going through
 the roof. This is why there is such an increase in the number of
 restaurants, entertainment outlets, etc. The Indian Job Market
 And how about the job market? Until the dot-com bubble burst in 2000,
 everyone assumed that the part of one's career spent in India was just a
 prelude to one's `real' career, i.e., a job in the USA. Anyone who had the
 option of going to the USA was considered mad if he did not exercise that
 option. Fresh Master's graduates from very ordinary American universities
 were able to command starting salaries of $ 60 K per year. So it was not
 unusual for kids from middle-class families to take huge loans to go the USA
 to do a Master's degree even without any financial support, since they were
 sure that (a) they would get financial aid after one semester, and (b) they
 could recoup the loan amount and much more as soon as they finished their
 degrees. But now the situation has turned around completely. With the job
 market being so bad, many persons in the US are either delaying their
 graduation or returning to graduate school. As a result, Indian students who
 have gone to the US without financial aid are being forced to complete their
 Master's degree entirely on their own money. If at all a fresh Master's
 degree holder in computer science is able to get a job, he will be lucky to
 get $ 36 K per year -- a drop of 40% from earlier highs. I know of many
 Indian students who have gone to the US taking loans and still spinning out
 their degree programs, since they have no hope of getting a job of any kind.
 Some persons I know are compounding their earlier mistake by taking further
 loans to do a second Master's degree, all because they don't want to
 contemplate returning to India.
 Ever since the downturn in the US economy, H1B visa holders in the US have
 become an endangered species. The downturn in the US software industry has
 not spared even GCH's (that's `Green Card Holders,' for those of you who
 don't regularly read the matrimonial columns). The bursting of the dot-com
 bubble was quickly followed by a seemingly never-ending series of accounting
 scandals, which makes one wonder how much of the `growth' of the US economy
 during the 1990's was real, and how much was simply a stage-managed mirage.
 In fact, many of my US-based friends have told me that, not only has the
 software job market disaster claimed literally tens of thousands of jobs,
 but there is also no end in sight.

 But how about the situation in India? 
 After growing at the dizzying pace of
 50%-plus between 1998 and 2002, last year the Indian software industry grew
 by `only' 30%. Being an ethical company, in Summer 2001 Tata Consultancy
 Services (TCS) honoured all the job offers made during the preceding year,
 even if it temporarily led to a surplus in manpower (this has subsequently
 disappeared). Other leading software companies did not honour their campus
 placement job offers, preferring instead to hide behind the euphemism of
 putting these offers `on hold.' But even these companies did not resort to
 massive layoffs as their American counterparts did. Now, in the Fall of
 2002, it is business as usual. Every large company is hiring by the
 thousands. TCS itself is hiring 4,000 persons this year, and others are
 hiring similar numbers. In terms of undergraduate calculus, one could say
 that so far as the Indian software industry was concerned, the first
 derivative has always been positive. The second derivative temporarily
 became negative, but now it too has turned positive. Anyone who even thinks
 about quitting a steady software job in India and going to the US can only
 be considered a fool. 

The Standard of Living in India
 The last point is about the standard of living. As little as three years
 ago, I felt that in my lifetime I will not see a day when a person living in
 India would opt not to move to the US because he would not have the same
 standard of living. There are plenty of reasons why a person living in India
 might opt to stay here, family responsbilities being the most common. But I
 never imagined that the inability to maintain one's standard of living would
 be a consideration. Of course, in the software industry, it was not unusual
 to see a person who had ten or more years of experience opting to stay on in
 India, because he felt that his experience would not be `counted' in the USA
 and that he would therefore not command a comparable position abroad. But it
 was taken for granted that a person holding a particular level of position
 in the USA would always have a better standard of living than his
 counterpart in India. Even I felt the same way. Again it took the slump in
 the US software industry to turn things topsy turvy.
 In comparing living standards in India and the USA, it is desirable (in my
 opinion) to use the so-called `purchasing power parity (PPP)' exchange rate,
 and not the official exchange rate. The PPP was a concept that has been
 around for many years, and is intended to measure the different cost of
 goods and services in different societies. To illustrate, one dollar equals
 48 Rupees. But one cannot get a good cup of coffee for eight cents (four
 Rupees) in the USA, nor a cup of coffee in an air-conditioned restaurant for
 thirty cents (fifteen Rupees). One cannot eat out for one dollar (fifty
 Rupees), and so on. Services are also cheaper in a developing society. One
 cannot get a flat tire repaired in a roadside shop for eighty cents (forty
 Rupees) -- in fact, one is lucky to get it repaired for forty dollars! The
 United Nations formalized this concept in the early 1990's, and started
 ranking international economies on the basis of the PPP-weighted GDP (Gross
 Domestic Product). Of course, the GDP itself is a flawed notion and is
 stacked against developing countries, because a housewife producing lunch
 for her husband is deemed to make no contribution to the GDP, while a
 restaurant worker is believed to do so. But let us not go off at a tangent.
 The point is that, when the first PPP-weighted GDP figures came out in 1993,
 it was determined that the PPP factor for India was about 4.5. This factor
 has remained pretty much constant over time. This means that in reality the
 Indian GDP is undervalued by a factor of 4.5. To put it another way, in
 reality one dollar should be taken as 10.5 Rupees (which I will round
 downwards to 10 Rupees for convenience), and not 48 Rupees.
 If we apply the PPP weighting, it follows that a person earning X dollars
 per year will have a comparable living standard if he is able to earn 10X
 Rupees per year in India. The question therefore becomes: Is such an
 expectation realistic? Even as little as five or six years ago, the answer
 was in the negative, even in sunrise sectors such as software. But thanks to
 the rapid increase in software salaries in India, coupled with a deflation
 in US salaries, 10X Rupees would be the bare minimum a person can expect in
 India. Of course, if a person earns X dollars in, say, Tennessee and 10X
 Rupees in Mumbai, his standard living would be much better abroad. But
 conversely, a person earning X dollars in Silicon valley would be much worse
 off than a person earning 10X Rupees in Hyderabad. As the Chief Minister of
 Andhra Pradesh never tires of telling his audience, one out of four software
 professionals from overseas is from AP!
 In recent months, I have seen a flood of applications from persons either
 living abroad or having recently returned from abroad. When they apply to
 TCS, they are naturally obliged to mention their last salary abroad. With
 this background, I can definitely state that TCS is able to offer 10X Rupees
 per year to a person earning X dollars per year abroad.
 I can add my own personal experience on this topic. When I decided to leave
 the Ministry of Defence after eleven years back in 2000, I explored just two
 job options. One was abroad, in a company that is among the thirty companies
 that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the other was my present
 job in Tata Consultancy Services. Both jobs were comparable in scope as
 well. The overseas job was as a `Research Fellow' to do what I felt like --
 I would have been just the fourth Research Fellow in that company's R&D
 set-up. Similarly, in TCS I became the fifth EVP (Executive Vice President).
 At that time, the US salary was numerically just marginally higher than 10%
 of my TCS salary. So in terms of PPP-weighted income, my TCS salary was
 almost, but not quite equal to, the US offer. Just two years down the road,
 my income in TCS has increased by more than 50%, while I imagine that my US
 salary would not have increased by anything like this amount. Clearly I am
 now better off in PPP terms in my Indian job than I would have been abroad.
 To summarize, at least in terms of PPP-weighted salaries, it is now
 definitely realistic to expect a comparable salary in India as in the US.
 
Other Sectors
 I have argued that, at least in the software industry, India is able to
 offer world-class salaries, at least to persons with about ten or more years
 of experience. Will this idyllic state of affairs spread out from the
 software sector to other segments of Indian society? I am not sure, but I
 would not rule out the possibility either. Many in India are convinced that
 our next success story will be in biotechnology. `BT will follow IT' is a
 fairly commonly-heard slogan. I myself have launched my company's activities
 in bioinformatics, an essential part of biotechnology, so I have studied
 this market a little bit. In principle, I don't see any reason why we cannot
 repeat our IT success in BT. We have some advantages that apply to both
 domains, such as a large pool of reasonably well-trained manpower, attention
 to detail, and of course, knowledge of the English language. India is slowly
 but surely emerging as the `back office' to the world.
 The main worry that people like me have is the apparent inability of India
 to compete in the arena of `pure' manufacturing. Our antiquated labour laws,
 outdated procedures for customs clearance, import and export, our
 (in-)famous bureaucracy, etc. are all factors that are working against India
 becoming a major player in manufacturing. But apparently all is not doom and
 gloom. I see many hopeful signs, all based of course on what I read and
 hear, not on personal experience. Various business magazines have pointed
 out that, whenever a multinational company has set up a plant in India, the
 cost of manufacturing in India has not been significantly higher than
 elsewhere, and in some cases it is the lowest in the world (even lower than
 in China). Examples of this are St. Gobain's of France, one of the leading
 manufacturers of glass in the world. Of course, Tata Iron and Steel Company,
 better known as TISCO, is now the cheapest producer of steel in the world,
 notwithstanding our high cost of electricity, high cost of capital, high
 cost of rail transport, etc., etc. So if we decide to make manufacturing a
 priority, we can make a mark there too.
 The Indian economy grew at an `official' rate of about 6% during the last
 ten years. Even at this official rate, the Indian economy has been the
 second fastest growing economy in the world during this period, China being
 the fastest. But what I see all around me seems to point to much more robust
 growth than this figure would indicate. I have talked to many economics
 experts about this apparent disparity. I should emphasize that I have been
 talking to `real' economists who need to work and survive in the
 marketplace, and not the closet Marxists who pass themselves off as
 economists and infest Indian academia and newspaper editorial pages. What I
 hear the professional economicsts saying is that, while Chinese growth
 figures are based on somewhat generous interpretations of their performance,
 the Indian figures always understate the actual growth. Over the years we
 have apparently perfected a system of officially shooting ourselves in the
 foot, and repeatedly doing it. For instance, the services sector, which has
 been growing at a tremendous clip in India, is given a very low weight in
 our official statistics, whereas static sectors such as agriculture are
 given a huge weight. The late (and great) jurist Nani Palkhivala said ``It
 takes a superhuman effort to keep India poor.'' Earlier we could count on
 our netas and babus to supply this superhuman effort. Now that the Indian
 economy has been unshackled a little bit, they are apparently content to
 present a picture of poverty and degradation through the clever use of
 statistics. If our babus and netas had a little more imagination, they would
 reinterpret our growth figures to present the Indian economy in the best
 possible light. Instead they seem to be doing just the opposite. The Future
 Does this mean that India is poised to take over the US as the largest
 economy in the world? Of course not. The US society has several advantages
 that have been carefully built up over time. For example, the US has the
 best universities in the world, by a huge margin. Forget about India - - even
 the best European universities are nowhere near the best American
 universities. A mediocre American university is miles ahead of a mediocre
 university anywhere else. The US also offers a vibrant atmosphere in which
 new technological ideas can be conceptualized, tried out, perfected (and
 also rejected), and exploited commercially. So far as India goes, our
 universities are in an abysmal state, and I do not see any signs of
 improvement. Everyone speaks of the politicization of the universities,
 especially in terms of the appointment of Vice Chancellors. But I consider
 the system of reservations, both in student admissions and in faculty
 appointments, to be a far bigger evil. So I am not at all hopeful that we
 will have a good university education system at any time in the near future.
 On the other hand, the Indian economy is beginning to show a surprising
 amount of dynamism, with merger and acquisitions, branding exercises,
 competition for customers, and all the other positive aspects that one
 associates with the US economy. Unlike many other economies, our economy is
 mostly driven by internal consumption, especially the huge unfilled needs
 for everything, ranging from soaps to soap operas. This is not at all a bad
 thing. With our huge internal economy, I believe Indian society is now
 beginning to offer an opportunity to aspiring innovators and technology
 creators to come up with ``Indian solutions for Indian problems.''
 One criticism I hear about the Indian technology scene is the absence of
 so-called venture capitalists. I for one have never believed in the `venture
 capital culture' that supposedly exists in the USA. If one studies the years
 of the dot-com boom carefully, one realizes that the role of most venture
 capitalists has been to start new companies and take them public, not to
 take them to profitability. Now that the US stock market is no longer
 willing to pay astronomical sums to own shares in loss-making companies, the
 venture capital culture has pretty much died out in the US as well.
 I think too that the popular media (both in the US and India) has played a
 very undesirable role in defining what an `entrepreneur' is. According to
 the media, an `entrepreneur' is someone who starts his own company. `I am
 running a start-up' is the kind of glamorous phrase one is supposed to toss
 out at parties, to draw the admiration of all and sundry. But I must say
 that I disagree with this viewpoint. To my mind, an entrepreneur is someone
 who starts a new venture and creates jobs. It does not matter whether `he is
 his own boss' or not. In fact, this rather romantic notion of being one's
 own boss means, in practice, that one is constantly being forced to take
 short-term expedient decisions, instead of concentrating on creating
 long-term lasting value. When I quit the DRDO, I made a conscious decision
 that I did not want `to be my own boss.' Even leaving aside the dot- com
 meltdown that followed this decision (and partly vindicated my decision), I
 feel I did the right thing. When I persuaded TCS to initiate a
 bioinformatics activity, I had the luxury of hiring 35 persons without
 worrying about meeting next month's payroll. Because of this, we are able to
 concentrate on building up our intellectual assets, which is the only way to
 become a global player. 

Conclusion
 The last two years have been truly amazing in terms of what India can
 expect. Thus far only a few tiny cracks have been introduced into the solid
 wall of Nehruvian state control that has prevented India from reaching its
 true economic potential. But even with these tiny cracks providing equally
 tiny openings in our bureaucratic control mechanisms, Indians have delivered
 the second fastest growing economy in the world for over a decade
 now. The future can only be better, not worse. 

Acknowledgements
 My thanks to Dr. P. J. Narayanan of the International Institute of
 Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, for suggesting that I turn my
 rantings and ravings into something a little more coherent.