November 28th, 2007 
Deepak Managers When Aesop (of the Fables) was being sold in the slave market, they asked him what could he do best. He said if anyone needed a master he was very good at that. Sixty years ago India became independent; Indians had a combination of a victim mentality resentful of the West and hungry for any mention of one of us achieving even a polite nod from the same source. Now like Aesop, Indians who were once slaves, are being hired for being managers of MNCS. Deutsche Bank has Anshu Jain and Vodafone has Arun Sarin and Pepsi has gone one better with Indra Nooyi. But, why is it that the turnaround has come now and so late? India was an industrializing country with manufacturing growth at 8.4 per cent per year between 1860 and 1900. Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. India was still the seventh largest industrial nation in 1947. But then we went on to repress and infantilize our private sector in the name of self-sufficiency and socialism. Forty years were wasted in the foolish experiment of socialism, but then the floodgates began opening in 1991. Even it took 10 more years for the private sector to really become free. Now India will not be stopped even by its own political system. Given the rich pool of talent India has, with a capacity to learn, amazing flexibility and habits of hard work and (let’s face it, politicians apart) integrity and honesty, there is no reason why by 2025 India should not be a world leader in multinational management.
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