What was upsetting my driver wasn’t the traffic, although it was slowing our progress from the airport to a crawl. Nor was it the beggars who tapped on the car’s tinted windows every time we ground to a halt. What was disturbing him was the empty billboards.
Of course they weren’t all empty – but many were. Well not quite empty, but painted white and with a telephone number to call if you wanted to advertise on them. Normally they were used for the marketing of share offers. But now it seemed, the flow of new issues had dried up.
Sunil, the driver, like millions of Indians of modest means – and by western standards they were extremely modest – was among those who had ensured that even the largest of offers were oversubscribed. He had joined the scrum for application forms outside the Bombay Stock Exchange. He read the small ads for rights renunciation forms and odd lots in the classified section of the newspapers. But now such opportunities were few and far between.
There seemed to be two reasons. First, high interest rates meant that companies found it more profitable to lend their surplus cash than to invest it. Secondly, international pressure to improve regulation was making it harder for more questionable companies to list. Nevertheless, it seemed odd to me since the stock exchange was doing well – the index was up over 20 per cent in dollar terms compared to a year ago.
But the index performance didn’t please Sunil, either. According to him, shares – or scripts, as he called them – always went up after an election. Recognising this, foreign institutions had rushed in before the vote, pushing up prices and catching Indian institutions and private investors on the hop.
Nor was Sunil best pleased with the impact of foreigners on India. His wages had gone up because the demand for drivers had risen as foreign executives pushed up the price of housing in Carmichael Road and Malabar Hill. But trickle-down economics had meant that the rent of his home in Bandra had also been increased. And his children, heavily influenced by satellite television, now demanded global brands of cola which cost more than the domestic Thums Up which they had always consumed happily in the past.
I started to explain the benefits of the internationalisation of securities markets to Sunil. I trotted out impressive statistics about how the worldwide value of publicly issued equities now topped $13,000 bn compared with under $3,000 bn in 1980; and how global daily trading volumes had grown at a compound rate of more than 17 per cent per annum over a twelve year period.
But Sunil was still not impressed. In the past his knowledge of local factors and conditions had served him well in choosing stocks. Now his sentiments were those of small investors around the world, ‘What’s in it for me?’
We pulled up at a stop light, behind a sleek Mercedes. Alongside us was a BMW. Global influences were evident for all to see. Some seven years ago, when he had first driven it, Sunil’s Nissan Cedric, with its tinted windows, bronze metallic paint and velour seats, had caused heads to turn. It had stood out from the ancient Ambassadors and Premiers which had made up the bulk of the cars on the city’s streets. Now, though, it seemed a tad shabby in comparison to the sleek modern limousines which cruised past.
My thoughts were interrupted by a gentle tapping at the window. Outside was a ragged girl of maybe eight or nine and carrying an equally ragged baby. In a well-practised manoeuvre, Sunil jumped the car forward, stopping a fraction of an inch from the expensive bumper in front. The light changed and we sped off.
Past the Oberoi, we turned left. The road was now crowded with people who lived, worked and died on the street – people who would wait a long time before they saw the benefits of internationalisation, but who were infinitely better off than much of India’s rapidly growing population.
I wondered why I was no longer shocked by the squalor and poverty which had so overwhelmed me when I first visited Bombay. It could be that, after so many visits, I had become immune.
Or it could be that I was now used to people sleeping rough and begging, since they had become a common sight in much of the West. In creating our own underclass, perhaps we were showing that it was not just in the cars we drove and the sodas we drank that the world was becoming one.
