The Ride Of The Valkyries

The Ride Of The Valkyries

The economic games we play are not lost when profits start to disappear but much before. It is when an economy fails to understand which way to jump to get ahead and keeps subscribing instead to the game it knows. It thinks it is playing to its strengths by doing this, but yesterday’s victories mean nothing to tomorrow’s challenges.

And this goes double for ideological shibboleths. You cannot bring back, for example, the Congress Party glory years, at least politically, as in Mrs Indira Gandhi’s time, with its successive terms and majority governments by playing her garibi hatao card rebooted in 2013. It will not work but the government does not seem to agree. So we shall see what we shall see.

There comes a time though, with terrifying speed in these days of rapid technological obsolescence and great leaps of invention, before no-one knows who you are anymore, because you, truth be told, belong to another era.

This is how The Economist writes pessimistically, startlingly, of Microsoft’s future, because it has not quite kept up with the shift away from the PC towards hand-held devices, the tablets and smart phones that everyone seems to tote about these days.

So even though at present with Windows 8 it is still making good profits, the tomorrow scenario is going to thrust it into yesterday’s greatness. It has happened to Apple in comparison to Samsung though many claim the fat lady has not yet sung in the apple tree. But visionary Steve Jobs is gone and they simply don’t make game- changing inventors like him every day.

Apple is struggling with its minimally improved iPhone 5 and Blackberry is trying to resurrect itself from the dustbin of history with the Z10. Nokia, king of the hill just five years ago, now dead in the water, is doing and hoping likewise with its Nokia Lumia.

On the software providing side,  our own Infosys and Wipro are trying to survive in a world that is looking for innovation and not cost savings through body- shopping and offshore batch- processing. With the Western economies shattered there is no demand for the old model of growth. TCS may be surging for the moment but the ebb- tide is not far away for them either.

The bigger picture is that the 56% of the Indian economy, perhaps a bit more on momentum, is  under siege and is going to shrink, unless there is massive reinvention to suit a very altered reality.

So our growth engine, the key to the India Story itself is dying, even as we have been railing against obtuse government monetary and fiscal policies and surging inflation.  But consider this, even if the government, this one, or the one that follows it, did everything right, we still might not be a software superpower anymore.

Our software providers are experiencing shrinking demand and not just cheaper competition. Ditto the world of call- centres. They need an economy to cater to too! So never mind cheaper competition from the Philippines,  because that is not the real problem.

Looking at the West, France has slipped into recession, the second biggest economy in the EU, only just in the quarter past, but experts say the contraction will accelerate. Under the Socialist Francois Hollande it can do nothing else, because Socialism has no answers for the challenges of growth.

First placed Germany has grown but just 0.1%,  and is expected to get better, but number 3, Italy, is down 0.5% and slated to get worse. There is no possibility of the EU as a whole turning around, even slightly, till 2015, or later, and its banking system could collapse in the meantime, pretty much anytime.

Richard Wagner’s work in parts were a great favourite with the Nazis. They loved the intoxicating grandeur of his music and felt it expressed the heroism of the “Aryan Race” and the glory of the Third Reich with its crashing cymbals and soaring notes.  They also thought he was anti-Semitic like them. All the better to like his music, though there is some doubt on Richard Wagner’s paternity and that he might have had a Jewish father, that Wagner senior may not have fathered his ninth child. But the myth- making carried on unheeding.

In The Ride of the Valkyries, a short five minute or so piece within his 2^nd Opera, Brunhilde and all her sisters assemble at the top of the mountain to carry the fallen heroes to Valhalla, the German but more especially, the Nazi heaven.

Valhalla, and the many flaxen- haired blue- eyed Brunhildes of the Nazi imagination, must have been   very over- burdened by the time the WWII ended. It was truly a dream gone wrong. A would be thousand year Reich ended in just three with millions sacrificed to its ambition.

It is time for us to realise that the old India is not adequate to the task. And we don’t have the luxury or time to prevaricate and dicker. With a population of 1.21 billion, we need to come to conclusions that deliver 8 to 10% per cent growth or preside over what promises to be a very painful decline.We may, without a drastic makeover, find ourselves going backwards, like the Europeans, the Japanese and the Americans. Who would have thought?

(883 words)

May 16^th, 2013

Gautam Mukherjee