From Tryst to Tendulkar: The History of Independent India

by Balaji Viswanathan

  Bangalore's climate was suitable, the city was welcoming, the infrastructure was strong and also well connected to other major southern metropolises of Madras and Hyderabad with both talent pool & transportation infrastructure.

  Thus, the Indian government lost no time in putting all its research investments in the city. Bangalore is the headquarters for:

  National Aerospace Labs

  Hindustan Aeronautics Limited

  Indian Space Research Organization

  Bharat Electronics

  Bharat Earth Movers

  Hindustan Machine Tools

  Indian Telephone Industries

  For decades, Indian government put a sizable chunk of its investments in Bangalore. The best part about government investments is that it often constant and immune to changing economic conditions. This sustained public investments created a large tech workforce & a knowledge network that was tapped by waves of tech companies.

  Stage 3: Offshoring comes to Bangalore

  By 1980s, Bangalore has been already a major education center and a center of research. In 1983, N. R. Narayana Murthy [the cofounder of Infosys] decided to move its fledgling startup supporting IBM mainframes, from Pune to Bangalore, while at the same time Azim Premji [founder of Wipro] decided to setup a software subsidiary in the city. While the rest of India didn't know/care about these new entrepreneurs & busy celebrating the World Cup victory of that year, these Bangalore guys were busy scripting a new era.

  In 1984, Texas Instruments setup an office in Bangalore to tap the research pool and that gave further credibility to the location. But, still the city's tech business was a small thing. This is where the 1989 deal with GE, mentioned earlier in this chapter, proved to be a game changer.

  Stage 4: Startup revolution

  By the late 1990s, the world was going through a frenzy. Everyone was worried about the Year 2000 problem. This dramatically increased the demand for Bangalore's engineers & there was abundant work. But, the problem passed & there was also a major meltdown in the silicon valley in 2001 after the dotcom crash. A returning pool of unemployed engineers seeded a round of new startups - who started exploring things further beyond outsourcing.

  There were also other returning expats who got tired of working for big corporates like Amazon. A couple of them started Flipkart in 2007 - India's answer to online retail. In the same year, a HBS grad got tired of Mckinsey and founded the mobile ad network InMobi.

  Flipkart and InMobi did to the Bangalore startup ecosystem what Google and PayPal did in the valley [albeit at a much smaller scale] They unleashed a pool of ambitious, well trained entrepreneurs from their alumni who went on to found various other startups.

  India's startup story is still in the making and just two IPOs away from a massive explosion.

  * * *

  Green Revolution

  Just two decades before the Indian invention of zero came to India's rescue [through the Y2K bug], a much bigger revolution changed India's destiny. It was a work of the Nobel winning biologist, Dr. Norman Borlaug, that was brought to India by Mr. MS Swaminathan.

  Green Revolution is a collection of technology and policy initiatives funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations of the US that rapidly increased the yields of a few cereal crops like wheat and rice. New seed varieties and the massive usage of fertilizers were at the core of this revolution. It was a global event although it benefitted India the most.

  Within four decades of the Green Revolution, wheat production increased nine times and the word famine was erased from the Indian lexicon, despite the addition of 800 million people to the Indian population since then. In 1964, India produced less than 10 million tons of wheat. In 2014, it produced more than 94 million. Increase in rice production was less dramatic, but still very impressive - from about 30 million tons in 1966 to 106 million tons in 2014.

  The root of the Green Revolution lay in 1944, at the closing stages of the Second World War. In that year, a microbiologist, Dr. Norman Borlaug, working for DuPont in the US moved to Mexico taking up the offer of President Avila Camacho. Back then, Mexico imported half of its wheat. In the next 20 years, Dr. Borlaug enabled Mexico to export half of its wheat.

  To enable such an explosion of production, Dr. Borlaug interbred a Japanese wheat plant Norin that allowed for sturdier stalk and better nutrient absorption [allowing heavier accumulation of the grains] and a Mexican variety developed for its disease endurance. The combination of these two varieties proved to be explosive. By 1963, 95% of the Mexican wheat fields used this variety.

  In parallel, there was a revolution happening in rice, albeit at a much slower rate. International Rice Research Institute was established in the Philippines and started to become the nodal point for exchanging best practices all over Asia.

  While all this was happening in Mexico and Philippines, India was reeling from a severe agricultural crisis in the mid-1960s. The two wars with China and Pakistan pushed down the rupee and made all imports costlier. The national leadership was shaky. India was willing to try out any solution to the agrarian crisis.

  The Mexican wheat variant especially looked quite suitable for the lands of Punjab in northern India. It was the starting point of the Indian green revolution. Within a decade, the production grew so fast that India stopped requiring wheat imports.

  For rice, the Indian agronomist Dr. Surajit Kumar De Datta came to the rescue. He discovered a new variant [prosaically named the IR8] that showed the potential to increase rice yield by up to 10 times under optimal conditions. His "miracle rice" changed the destiny of countries all over Asia, including India. It is sad that most Indians have not even heard of this hero.

  Factors that helped the Green Revolution

  Introduction of new seed varieties with the crossbreeding of both ideas and plants among multiple agricultural regions.

  Rapid increase in the usage of tube well to irrigate fields all over the country. Punjab led the nation in irrigation. While only 20 million acres were irrigated in the 1950s, by the 1980s irrigation reached nearly 39 million acres - more than a third of the agricultural land.

  Sharp increase in the use of chemical fertilizers. Between 1975 and 1990, India's fertilizer usage increased five times.

  Colossal increase in pesticide use. From the 1950s to the 1980s, pesticide usage in India increased 40 times.

  New equipments. In 1960, there were only 1,400 tractors in Punjab. By 1960, there were 200 times more tractors.

  Agriculture came to India 11,000 years ago. It changed life in this massive subcontinent that is blessed with the world's largest cultivable area. Like zero, this ancient genie came to revisit in the post-independence era and the result was miraculous.

  White Revolution

  India is a land of cows and the world's largest milk producer by a long distance [producing 50 billion tons more than its nearest competitor, USA]. The Vedas that are at the core of Hinduism extol the virtues of cows in every opportunity. Despite all that, India was perennial short in milk production. The yield was very poor from the starved cows. Something had to change.

  Between the 1960s Green Revolution and the 1980s IT Revolution, came the 1970s White Revolution. It was heralded by a Mechanical engineer from Kerala, Mr. Verghese Kurien. Kurien won government scholarship to complete his Masters in Mechanical engineering with a minor focus on Dairy engineering from Michigan State University.

  To satisfy his bond commitment [for getting his Masters funded], the government asked him to serve briefly at the Government creamery in Anand, Gujarat. It served a little known cooperative named Amul that had the blessings of two major Indian politicians of that time, Sardar Vallabhai Patel and future Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Kurien planned to get out of the bond as soon as possible. But, his stint with the dairy farmers of Anand changes his life and India's.

  At the core of the Operation Flood that Kurien initiated was a milk grid that connected India's core milk producing regions with the major metropolises. It also
enabled the use of innovative marketing techniques that brought a higher price for the rural farmers as well as built a number of value added products such as butter and ice cream.

  In 1978, India's total milk production was 25 billion MT. By 2014, it was 141 billion MT. The availability of extra milk increased the health of the nation and reduced malnutrition, besides adding further income to the rural poor.

  Factors that Contributed to the White Revolution

  Using new varieties of cows and buffaloes that produced a lot more milk. This was accompanied with the use of better vaccines that produced healthier cows.

  Better integration of milk consuming markets with the milk producing ones. This allowed farmers to command better prices and have more incentives to grow production.

  Increased availability of financing for buying cows through the nationalized banks.

  * * *

  Chapter 15: Bombay Dreams

  Brothers lost in internal migrations find each other through a family song.

  A poor boy fallen in love with a rich, upper caste girl elopes and get married.

  A petite, innocent girl is brutally raped. His brother avenges her death.

  A poor, rural boy climbs the ladder of success after a motivational song.

  A poor, rural boy unwittingly becomes a major gangster fighting" for good causes.

  Peppered with four or five musical sequences, for the most part these cliched storylines define the Hindi movie industry, Bollywood and various regional movie industries of India. In a nation of 1.3 billion people and a billion different problems, the movie industry is the primary stress reliever. Viewers spanning rich and poor, urban and rural divides embrace these movies to fill their leisure time and temporarily forget the harsh realities of life. For centuries, theatre has provided as a safety valve for the Indian pressure cooker. In the past century, the movie industry has filled up the role of the traditional theatre.

  Motion pictures entered India in 1896, when the pioneers of Cinema - Auguste and Louis Lumière - sent a guy named Marius Sestier to the swanky Watson hotel in Mumbai. This show inspired a local photographer, Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatavdekar, to order a camera from the UK. He shot the first film in India - a wrestling match in Mumbai. This created a minor sensation and inspired later movie makers like Hiralal Sen. A strong movie making culture was established in Bombay and the then national capital of Calcutta.

  The first full length feature film Raja Harishchandra was directed and produced by Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913. Crowds thronged to the theatres; ever since, movies formed a core part of the contemporary Indian culture.

  Diverse Movie Industries of India

  While a casual outsider might see the Indian film industry as synonymous with Bollywood, Bollywood is neither the only film industry of India nor producer of the most number of Indian films. Bollywood is a portmanteau of Bombay and Hollywood. It is just one of the 13 movie industries in India that produce more than 10 films a year. Together these 13 produce close to seventeen hundred movies each year, of which a little more than two hundred is by Bollywood.

  At the top rung of Indian Cinema is the highly commercial industries of Bollywood (Hindi), Kollywood (Tamil) and Tollywood (Telugu) each with more than 200 movies a year. Not just in naming, but even in storylines these three industries have a lot in common. Many films from these three industries are often derisively termed as the Masala (spice) movies - referring to the generous mix of multiple genre (musical, drama, thriller, comedy) just like how Indian cooking mixes a range of spices. Popular screenplays move around these industries very quickly. The core of these three industries are popular music sequences that are often used in a very formulaic way.

  Next in line comes the Bengali and Malayalam movie industries with more of art films taking on social issues. The core part is the parallel cinema a new wave cinema movement that was pioneered in the 1950s by Satyajit Ray - [the don of the Bengali movie industry] and later extended to the Malayalam industry by doyens like Adoor Gopalakrishnan. The key elements of parallel cinema include realism, naturalism, and sociopolitical issues.

  After this follows the Kannada and Marathi movie industries that are often overshadowed by more powerful movie industries in their neighborhood. These two make variations of parallel cinema with slightly less sociopolitical themes. Both these industries have the advantage of being based on two of the most cosmopolitan cities of India - Bengaluru and Mumbai. However, the cosmopolitan nature of these cities also gives these two industries a lot of competition from the well-funded top tier.

  In the north east, the Assamese film industry has always dominated. Like the Bengali films, Assamese films are known for the portrayal of serious issues in a slower paced, sensitive style. However, the industry has been declining unable to keep pace with Bollywood that is constantly encroaching into the North East. The Manipuri industry comes next. However, given the small and diverse populace the industries there struggle to attain a sufficient scale.

  A rising star is the Bhojpuri film industry targeting Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Historically, it was the poorer cousin of Bollywood with smaller budgets and more rural audiences. However, as states like Bihar are climbing the rungs of prosperity, this film industry is slowly asserting its own place, not just as the poorer version of the Hindi movie industry. As prosperity reaches India's interior, we could expect further growth in Bhojpuri and its poorer siblings - Oriya and Gujarati film industries.

  Key Sources of Movie Ideas

  With 1,700 movies made year after year often with low budgets and tight timelines, it is practically impossible to make a lot of original movies. Thus, most Indian filmmakers often sought various inspirations to lift the movies from:

  Sanskrit drama: Three thousand years of Sanskrit drama with classics such as Kalidasa's Shakuntala and Meghadoota deeply impact Indian cinema. The key concept of Rasa - conveying complex emotions through facial expressions and body language - is a central differentiator of Indian cinema. These nine Rasas of Sringara (love), Hasya (laughter), Raudra (fury), Bhyananka (horror), Karunya (compassion), Bibatsa (disgust), Veera (heroic), Adbuta (wonder) and Shanta (peace) form the core of Indian cinema. Dance forms like Bharatanatyam have emphasized these attributes for centuries.

  Hindu Epics: In the Ramayana and Mahabharata there exist seeds for a thousand different movie plots. Hindu Puranas (mythology) also contain a rich treasure trove of drama ideas.

  Hollywood and foreign cinema: Indian filmmakers, both bigger and smaller ones, often look to Hollywood for their inspiration. Popular movies like the Sound of Music and the Seven Samurai have inspired a generation of popular Hindi movies. South Indian film actor Kamal Hassan often experiments with new ideas inspired from famous Hollywood stars like the late Robin Williams.

  Rural folklore: India has a rich theater tradition and storytelling was a centerpiece of this. Yatra (Bengali), Terukkuttu and Bommalattam (Tamil Nadu), Koodiyattam (Kerala), Ramlila (UP), Yakshagana (Karnataka) are some of the popular regional theatre types that had a big impact on the regional movie industries.

  Trends and Patterns

  Age of Epics and Royalty

  The movies of the first few decades were predominantly focused on Hindu epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata and royal characters. Classical dance and classical music were mixed with ancient literature to provide very compelling movies that captured the imagination of people.

  One such classic is Alam Ara [the first talking movie in India] which brought the rich tradition of "filmi music" - with original music and choreography played by the actors. The concept of "Masala movies" was heralded by the Tamil classic Chandralekha - a major filmmaking project with plenty of song and fight sequences.

  The freedom movement inspired a few revolution-themed movies like Raithu Bidda [a Telugu film on landlords] that was censored by the government for fear of inciting the crowds. Smart movie directors often cleverly planted ideas related to the freedom movement through historic allegories.

  Gol
den Age of Social Issues

  Starting from 1947, the movie industries shifted much more towards social issues. Without the weight of the British censors, filmmakers utilized the prevailing social sentiment of the people. Films shifted from richness and epicness to focus on things like poverty, agriculture, and slums. While devotional and royal movies continued to be made in same numbers, the explosion in the overall movies made them increasingly a smaller percentage.

  Directors such as Chetan Anand and Satyajit Ray made Indian films a popular fare in international movie festivals such as Cannes and Venice.

  In Tamil Nadu, aspiring politicians used these social films as springboards for their political career. They fully leveraged the very powerful medium to get their political message to the people as the audience unwittingly got captured by hours long political advertisements. Scriptwriters such as Annadurai and M. Karunanidhi became Chief Ministers, as did the popular actors such as MG Ramachandran and J. Jayalalithaa.

  Unlike the parallel cinema wave that was prevailing in the rest of India, MG Ramachandran (MGR) used mostly masala movies to take the same message across. The blend of parallel and commercial cinema brought him a tremendous advantage. While the parallel cinema was watched by a select few educated classes, MGR's movies reached most of Tamil Nadu and earned the epithet of puratchi thalaivar [revolutionary leader]. Three decades since his death, his movies continue to have a major political impact in the state.