What this means is that my child today will not play with a Rubik cube though that may have been what an American child played with 20 or 10 years ago. My child will go straight to Internet games. If you put this through the rich country, poor country filter, it doesn’t work.

I’m saying let’s think a little bit about what should be the centre of gravity of ‘global’. Lots of MNCs tell me they will now work with global standards and global solutions and I say to them that if you just look at the data on where the future economic and demographic growth will take place, the centre of gravity has got to be us, India and China.

• But surely companies have found for some time now that the Indian market has not behaved as they initially expected it to. What’s prevented a change in strategy or a mid-course correction?

I would say it’s a mindset that what we do in the West is actually the global standard and everybody will do it. If I’ve already invented it and if I’ve already proven it and if I already have all those investments, then why do I have to reinvent the wheel for you?

So just the notion that you have to start doing it completely differently here means that there is a cost involved, an effort. I think C.K. Prahlad says it very well: MNCs will change the emerging markets forever, but the reverse is also true. Like a cola company’s model worked in Mexico, it worked on Poland, so the assumption is it will work here. But it won’t work here because there are just not enough outdoor toilets and people will not drink more cola. The GDP may grow, but the number of outdoor toilets perhaps may not.

... contd.