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Feminists may descend into collective apoplexy at the mention of Ally McBeal, but this body-obsessed, man-hunting lawyer of American television is the new icon of Generation X, especially, to paraphrase Maureen Dowd, of the ``smart, urban working women who shop and have intimate relationships with American Express.'' It is this generation of thirty-somethings that may just turn out to be the G-spot of our pharmaceuticals industry, for Douglas Coupland's Genera-tion X, unlike its baby-buster parents, has at least fifty years of life left. This new reality is driving the booming business of `lifestyle medicines' -- Viagra being the most potent example of a sunrise industry that has spawned more than 100 biotechnology companies actively researching age-related disorders in the US alone.
As the West grows greyer, Ally Mc-Beal's body obsession -- the desire to look young, to appear desirable -- is no longer limited to thirty-somethings. It's become a cross-generational longing, which is why of the 120,000American women who had breast implants in 1997 a number almost four times as many as in 1992 -- a third were aged 35 to 40. Half of the Am-ericans opting for liposuction, again, were women between 35 and 50. And if Pamela Anderson Lee has given silicon a bad name by junking her implants, well, a Dutch company is already around to fill the void with herbal breast-enhancement pills.
The aging West has just discovered the Third Age -- polite expressions like `senior citizen' and `the elderly' are passe -- when, post-breast implant, post-facelift, post-liposuction, post-hair transplant, you rediscover your youth and want it to stay with you forever, for your insurance company has been telling you to manage your health, instead of falling ill. And cha-nces are that you may not have children (or at least accessible childr-en) or even a partner to see you through your Third Age in an aging society. The last thing you want to do, therefore, is fall ill or become infirm.
Here's an opportunity just waiting to begrabbed, so isn't it time for our pharmaceuticals industry to wake up to the rising sun, to see R&D (finally!) as a multi-billion-dollar business proposition? There's, in fact, a similar market, as yet nebulous but very much there, developing in our own backyard, what with the high-spending class becoming the demographic mirror-image of West.
High-spending Indians are also the ones who are living longer, and living alone -- their children, after psychographically seceding from India in their teens, are now feeding the aging West's growing appetite for a pool of young, super-specialist professionals. It is this demographic category that has acquired a Peter Pan mindset -- you'll see them shaking a leg at the most happening disc in town (anyway, they have the expendable income to get a disc membership) -- and their thirty-something children, the ones who stay back, that is, identify themselves completely with Ally Mc-Beal (so what if Calista Flockhart belongs to another civilisation altogether). This is theclass that is becoming increasingly body-obsessed, as much for financial reasons as for the desire to be with-it. In other words, this is the sunrise industry beckoning our pharmaceutical majors into the new millennium. The business of staying young, in fact, is no longer the concern only of the Shahnaz Hussains and the Blossom Kochhars of the world.
With demographic walls collapsing in the new global village, our prized asset, really, is our ancient tradition, which is what Deepak Chopra has made an industry out of. Chopra may have been discredited over the notorious amrit kalash, but he understood the baby boomer generation's desire to stay forever young much before others even woke up to the fact. Today, this need has become even stronger -- fuelled in part by astronomical hospital bills -- which is why our pharmaceuticals industry must start investing in ayurveda.
If the Dutch company hawking the breast-enhancement pill has taken the herbal route, it is no coincidence. After all, in America alone, theherbal market is expected to grow by 8 percent a year till 2002, by which time it will be worth $8 billion.
It is this market reality that has spawned mega-corporations like the California-based Sun Rider, which has grown into a $1-billion company in just 17 years of merchandising traditional Chinese medicine. Just this week, it has entered the Indian market, sensing the enormous market potential our population offers. Isn't it strange that a US company proposes to sell Chinese herbal extracts to the land of ayurveda? It isn't. The only difference between Sun Rider and our pharmaceutical majors is that one has a global vision and the others don't, having been rendered complacent by a patent regime that allowed them to get away with replicating molecules created by others, simply by modifying the production process a little.
Well, the time has come for them to think originally. There's money in it.At the Sixth Conference of the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare last month, a resolution pleadedwith the governments in New Delhi and in the states to earmark at least 20 percent of their allocations for Health and Family Welfare for indigenous systems of medicine and homeopathy. It is 3-4 percent at present.
That's a nice thought, but shouldn't our corporates be investing in traditional medicine to make it contemporary India's second success story after software? At present, Indian ayurvedic formulations have to be marketed as food supplements in the US because the FDA still isn't convinced they are products of `safe manufacturing pro-cesses'. Even their labels don't measure up to international norms. Isn't it a shame, when there's a mammoth market out there beckoning the world?
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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