The new india?

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Sreesanth: The perils of aggression

From "Lucky and modest" in 1983 to "Lucky and immodest" in 2007. I guess that would sum up Indian cricket (and, India to a great extent) between 1983 and 2007.

Let us talk about Indian cricket, first. There was a time when these guys would go out in whites, play for 5 days and a lot of us wished they had some fighting spirit like... the Aussies or even the Pakistanis. But, we were all glad that they never indulged in dirty tricks like sledging which the Aussies did. "So, what if we lacked some fighting spirit we were not mean," went the general thinking. Now, to give Aussies the upper hand in on field behavior, now that is something unheard of.

Let us now talk of India in general. Let us see how we got to be one of the talked about stories, one of the BRIC nations. Narasimha Rao and Dr. Manmohan Singh probably would not have opened the economy if their hands had not been forced due to the foreign exchange reserves crunch. And, Narasimha Rao may not have been the Prime Minister hadn't Rajiv Gandhi been assasinated (And, had Rajiv Gandhi survived the campaign he would have lost the election).

The storied software services industry was chugging along for a good fifteen odd years (how many working in today's software services industry in India have heard of F. C. Kohli) until internet and VoIP (neither of which was developed in India or by Indians) came and reduced distances. Now, we have twenty somethings walking with a swagger and talking with an attitude. But, fundamentally nothing has changed - the cooking of resumes still happens. As a fellow indian remarked, "it used to be that we were unsure and unprofessional. now, we are sure and unprofessional."

Recently, a friend of mine wrote a book and sent press coverage of the launch. It was quite amusing to listen to the interviewer. She is doing an interview of the authors and makes no bones of the fact that she has not read the book beyond the back cover and nor does she care ("if you are into something intellectual, this is for you."). Clueless but confident... we are there America.