I don’t want to waste time talking about how inefficient, ineffective and invalid the pre-liberalisation thinking on matters of economics and personal finances of Indian citizens was — millions of trees have been uprooted to tell those tales. That the methods didn’t work and its sole achievement was to ensure that the rich in the name of the poor, the powerful in the name of the powerless, benefited through preservation of their little empires that prevented an enterprising Indian to put a foot on their well manicured, well protected turf.

At a time when getting a job was a license to keeping it for life — companies employing people were few and completely protected from even a whiff of competition — a whole new culture was hammered into a people who had just delivered the biggest enterprise of all: Freedom. Fresh from the independence struggle, these risk taking soldiers of freedom returned not as soldiers of fortune but slaves of security. Here you have a man who risked his life, and definitely his career, fighting an imperial government turned into one whose sole aim became financial security. A butterfly turning into a caterpillar.

Sixty years later, as I look at four generations — two of yesterday’s, one of today’s and one being created and nourished for tomorrow — I note clear distinctions in the cultural and psychological DNAs of the four. Don’t hold me to every word, for had it not been for exceptions, trends would have been difficult to capture. The underlying paradigm of this piece is an individual who has been able to get an education based on which an opportunity could open up before him.

... contd.