The truth is that a decade after the reforms most Indian companies are floundering. With a couple of dozen exceptions the vast majority has failed to become truly competitive. Our companies have still not acquired the confidence or the skills to succeed in the global economy. Most continue with a “factory mindset” when the industrial age is disappearing. Most sell cheap, shoddy products.  

The best teachers and CEOs will tell you that performance is a function of expectations, and those with higher expectations get more out of their students and employees. So it is with nations.

When national leaders create high expectations and follow them up with good policies and rules, citizens and businesses respond and nations prosper. This is in part the secret of China's success, and today it no longer thinks of itself as a Third World nation but as an emerging Asian tiger and a global power capable of challenging America.

Medha M. Kudaisya, The life and Times of G.D. Birla, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2003, 434 pages, Rs

'The World as India' is the title of a lecture that Susan Sontag gave in London last year, which was published in the Times Literary Supplement this June 13.

In it the distinguished writer celebrates the success of Indians in harvesting their legendary English-speaking skills in the global economy through call centres and other services. But Harish Trivedi, the no-less distinguished critic at Delhi University, promptly wrote an angry rejoinder in which he characterised call centres as ''brutally exploitative'' and its employees as ''cyber coolies of our global age, working not on sugar plantations but on flickering screens, and lashed into submission through vigilant and punitive monitoring, each slip in accent or lapse in pretence meaning a cut in wages.''

My niece, Priya, was in town recently. She has been teaching English as a second language in cosmopolitan Vancouver, where every summer Chinese youth flock to learn English. Many are children of the newly rich who have prospered in post-reform China, but it is extraordinary how difficult they find learning English. Of the dozens of nationalities she has taught only the Japanese find it more difficult. The reason is that the languages of East Asia are tonal. The same word in Mandarin can have many meanings depending on the tone; hence, the Chinese have difficulty coping with English grammar and pronunciation, and Japanese children, I am told, have been trying to learn English from kindergarten since 1870, and they still cannot speak it.

Indians have good reasons to feel confident. Our economy has grown 5.9 percent per year since 1980, making it the fifth fastest growing major economy in the world over a 23 year period; this is not a case of one swallow making a summer. We may be well behind China, but remember that the West created its Industrial Revolution at a 3 percent growth rate over 100 years. More recently, our population growth has begun to slow, and in 1998 it was down to 1.7 percent compared to its historic 2.2 percent growth rate. Literacy has also begun to climb—it reached 65 percent in 2000 compared to 52 percent in 1990, with the biggest gains taking place among women and the backward states. More than 200 million Indians have risen out of destitution since 1980 as the poverty ratio has declined to 26 percent. And we may have finally found our competitive advantage in our booming software and IT services. Finally, all this has happened amidst the most appalling governance; imagine, what might happen if governance improved.

I have an old friend in Mumbai and every once in a while, he will pause, sit back, and ask, how are we doing? How are we changing? A small but visible change, I told him last week, is the rich aroma of coffee in our bazaars. Thanks mainly to Barista, but also to Cafe Coffee Day, Quickies and others, the well-heeled young of a tea-drinking nation have found a fashionable place to hang out, and its women a safe public place to be sociable.

When our tax refunds arrived in May, within six months of filing our return, we thought we were dreaming. Since it normally took years, something must be afoot we thought, and decided to pay North Block a visit. There we were astonished to learn that computers had already completed 95 per cent of this year's returns.