Opinion Change you can’t quite believe

That’s all changed. Upper middle-class India has levelled with the returnees on more planes than one. These days,says Reddy,gifts like cell phones and PDAs are met with yawns. Whether in Bangalore or Baltimore,materially and technologically there is a sense that the gaps have closed. Everybody is outfitted with the latest cool gear and gadgets,notices Reddy. “This was brought home when a friend whipped out his iPhone and zoomed in with Google maps to show me a view of his new home,” he said. Returnees perceive a changed attitude towards them as well. There is no longer the awe-and-envy greeting that many have been accustomed to. “There was a time when returnees like me would be treated like rock stars when we came back home,now we are treated like rocks,” says Vivek Wadhwa,an entrepreneur-turned-researcher now associated with Harvard and Duke Universities.

For summer returnees,the pace of change in India continues to amaze. For instance,the airlines in the United States took five decades to go from pioneering spirit to glamourising the jobs of pilots and flight attendants,and launching trans-continental flights. Five decades later,the industry has deteriorated from profitable to devastatingly depressed. “Flights have now become cattle trucks in the sky,” says Reddy. In India,all action seems to progress in fast-forward motion,say returnees. It seems like just yesterday that flamboyant entrepreneurs were launching smart airlines and boasting of hand-picked flight attendants in short red skirts who served extravagant meals even on ridiculously short flights. But within a short span of four years,the Indian airline industry resembles its tattered counterpart in the United States,haemorrhaging cash and seeking life-support.

The arc of change in cities like Bangalore has been anything but gradual. The sexual revolution in the West took place over four decades or more. That transformation in Bangalore has occurred over four or five years,says Reddy,partly fuelled by call centers and other back office companies. The concept of a ‘flat world’ generally alludes to business but in the social context,it is even more stunning,says Reddy. The teenage son of his friend showed his Facebook page and said he watched Stephen Colbert on Youtube,and Reddy was taken aback by the typical American teenager-like behaviour. “There is no information gap anymore,everybody knows everything about everything,” he says. Other returnees say they have observed that Indians’ self-image has undergone a huge lift. “India’s position in the world has changed and nobody is more conscious of it than Indians themselves,” says Venkatesh Raghavendra,the New York-based senior director at America India Foundation,a not-for-profit,who journeys home every summer.

Reddy says middle class India’s go-go attitude is in full evidence in Bangalore’s bookstores where management tomes with catchy titles dominate the storefront display. In the US,it is usually fiction or partisan polemic that gets pride-of-place. Says Reddy,“There is a hunger to absorb the latest and get ahead,and that intensity is missing in the West.”

saritha.rai@expressindia.com