Defined by Dhoni

Mumbai has only regular member in the Indian Test and ODI teams; Bangalore and Kolkata too have only one each. Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad have none. The class structure has also changed. The team no longer teems with

Maharashtrian brahmins from the Dadar-Shivaji Park area and upper middle class boys from Bangalore. The current Indian cricket pantheon bristles with young men from distinctly lower middle class and even penurious origins. This trickle-down effect in Indian cricket, the emergence of players whose childhood deprivations just made them hungrier for success, steeled their resolve even more, is a great sociological victory for the game. Dhoni as captain, whose father operated the pumphouse at an officer’s colony of public sector engineering firm Mecon, brings that groundswell to its first inevitable peak.

But this 26-year-old from Ranchi holding two of the three second-most important jobs in the country (he is captain in one-dayers and 20-20 matches; the Test captaincy is still up for grabs) signals something even larger than the democratisation of the game we are mad about. It signals the emphatic and permanent arrival of small-town India in our metro-focused consciousness. These people, millions and millions of them — 62.2 per cent of the total urban population according to the 2001 census — have been traditionally dismissed by the metro elite as hicks and hillbillys. Yet the signs have been around us for years now. The signs have been there in the proliferation of computer academies in every small town, in the number of private schools offering quality education, in the explosive growth of telephone density, in the boom in beauty parlours. A large majority of the students of the IITs now come from small-town India. Visit any Tier 3 town, and the rising aspirations and newfound confidence and determination are palpable.

Perhaps nothing highlights the positive transformation that non-metro towns have been going through in the last decade more than the rise of their women. A significant percentage of young stewardesses in the burgeoning private airline industry are not from the metros, and you would never know unless they tell you. The case is the same for many of the young women in the music videos that India watches raptly. Awareness — through television’s omnipresent and global matrix — and self-belief have left societal assumptions and impositions in tatters. Watch the brio of the girls from Jabalpur and Indore and Siliguri participating in television’s myriad music contests, and you see a society transformed, a generation born with no baggage of the past, for whom all of the future is a happy challenge.

According to a 2005 study by consultancy firm Mckinsey & Co, “several Tier 3 towns have emerged as wealthy centres and, on a per household basis, are richer even than some of the top eight mega-cities”. It goes on to note: “While population ratios will be roughly stable, India’s middle class will begin to move beyond Tier 1 cities and spread into Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities. Middle-class growth in the next two decades will be so dramatic that, even if the entire population of Tier 1 cities were middle-class or richer, they will still account for only 35 per cent of the country’s middle-class and rich households in 2025… 45 to 58 per cent of middle-class consumers will reside in Tier 3 and 4 cities and towns by 2025.”

If these projections are even halfway correct, India is in the process of a seismic change that will more than shift every known paradigm in our society and economy. And anyone less than terminally cynical will instinctively know that these will be more than halfway correct. This is a wave built on inexorable economic logic that is now self-perpetuating, beyond the control of any human agency. This is millions of small-town Indians waking up to the possibilities that are open to them, that could be within their reach. Millions of young small-town Indians who want to seize the day and are willing to give it their best shot. And Mahendra Singh Dhoni being made captain of India just made all of them even more ambitious and resolute.

The writer is editor, The Financial Express