If most people of the great Indian middle class yearn to send their sons and daughters to Harvard Business School, its hardly surprising, given the Indian obsession for job-oriented training rather than liberal arts education. When your children get into elite business schools, you feel youve fulfilled your dharma. After that, they get lucrative jobs in Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and the like. There they work with men and women from around the world whose Arjuna-like focus is to make piles of money and purchase an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a spectacular beach house in the Hamptons, take skiing holidays in the Alps, summer in the south of France or a villa in Tuscany, an apartment in Paris or a great London hotel.Well, just as American assumptions about making easy money in finance have been upturned by the dismal reality of economics, your idea of dharma is about to take a beating. The chickens have come home to roost. Twenty-eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unlamented demise of Soviet communism, we are witnessing a massive assault on runaway capitalism unleashed by global finance. When a bunch of ambitious yuppies is given run of the markets, you should expect immature behaviour. Accustomed to manipulating markets a thousand points up, a few thousand points down at will, masters of the universe who thought they were invincible, have got their comeuppance. Weve also seen this happen in India in the first four decades of independence. Young people with means and connections attended elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge and returned to high positions from where they pushed the intellectual ideas of the day. The result was Fabian socialism which created a pampered elite. The leftist intellectuals who ran the country advanced distorted notions about egalitarian growth from positions of privilege. They pushed weird ideas: commanding heights of the economy for the public sector; restrictions on private enterprise; outright nationalisation of ‘core sector industries deemed vital to the country; development banking and subsidies populism. This entire edifice came crashing down in 1991 when the government went bankrupt. Slowly and painfully, a new structure arose in its place: a tentative reforms regime frequently held hostage to mindless moffusil politics practiced by con men and goons, bigots and activists who fill party offices. One thing is obvious; the old elite has had to make way for ambitious interlopers, in politics and business. The old elites next generation largely opted out of public service and made their homes in the global financial community: in New York, London, Hong Kong and Singapore. This is where the story becomes intriguing: at the intersection of the next generation of the Indian elite and the world of global finance. Once a secure and lucrative sinecure, it is now the centre of the meltdown. If recovery is long in coming, these young men and women are likely to head home. As they pour in looking for elite perches, they will…
