I made a new friend last week. Shashi Kumar is twenty-nine and comes from a tiny village in Bihar, where his grandfather used to be a low caste sharecropper in good times and a day labourer in hard ones. They were so poor that on some nights he didn't get to eat. But his father somehow escaped this bondage and got a job in a transport company in Darbhanga.

Since they couldn't quite manage on his father's salary, his mother began to teach for Rs 400 a month in a private school in their neighbourhood, where Shashi was educated free under her watchful eye. Determined that her son should escape the indignities of Bihar, she tutored him at night, got him into college, and when he finished, gave him a railway ticket for Delhi.

Today, Shashi is a middle manager in a business process outsourcing (BPO) call centre in Gurgaon with customers in America and he exudes the confidence of a young man with promise. He earns Rs 25,000 a month, lives in a nice flat, which he bought last year with a mortgage from HDFC, drives an Indica and sends his daughter to a good school. Soon they will be leaving for Boston where his company has transferred him for a year's training at their customer's office.

Shashi is an average, affable young Indian, but what makes him different is that he has a sense of life's possibilities and lives and works in an environment that encourages this attitude. His grandfather would have been beaten had he dared to think of such things, and it is partly our 1991 reforms that have given Shashi a chance. Prior to 1991 jobs with dignity and possibilities existed largely in the government, and if you got an education and didn't get into the government you faced a hopeless future. The middle class remembers well the nightmare "educated unemployment."

But all this is changing: services have exploded since our economy opened up, and with telecom reforms a new Fortune 500 company is relocating its back office to India every day. In three years, people employed in BPO alone have grown tenfold to 200,000, and at this rate they will be two million by 2008 and educated unemployment will be gone forever. Shashi is a testimony to globalisation.

Shashi is also a Yadav and belongs to the same caste as Bihar's chief minister, and I wonder what Laloo Prasad would make of him. Shashi escaped but the ones left behind either don't have a school to go to or go to schools where teachers don't show up. They get sick too often because the water is unclean and there is no doctor.

Does Laloo think of these things? Does he ask how Shashi earned his possibilities? The simple answer is that anyone with education, computer skills, and some English can make it today in India, and it doesn't have to be an IIT, for much of one's potential can be realised by learning at the workplace, as Shashi did at his first job in a BPO company earning Rs 3000 a month. Now, here is a challenge for our education policy!

For Shashi, it is a good time to be alive in these days of ferment. His proud mother confesses that she did not understand much of what was happening to them even when it was happening. She simply did what she had to. On the way home from Gurgaon I think of life's possibilities and of Rainer Maria Rilke's lines:

A billion stars go spinning/ through the night, /blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that/ will be, when the stars are dead. gurcharan.das@indiatimes.com; post box 3046, New Delhi110003