Brain Drain To Brain Gain
Rahul Kansal
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As India extends beyond geographical borders, barriers with NRIs have fallen
Over the past week, we've witnessed anot her breathless public display of affection between Prime Mini ster Narendra Modi and the NRI community . Reproached for years as a self-serving people who deserted the motherland for their own ends, the community is now increasingly feted as proud sons and daughters of India.Censured for having first taken the benefit of subsidised Indian education and then participated in a massive Brain Drain from the country , they are now heralded as the creators of a `Brain Gain' that will power India into a glorious technology-studded future.
It's interesting to observe how our attitudes towards our expatriate brethren have transformed over the past decade or two. Remember Bollywood's portrayal of the NRI of the 60s in films like Purab aur Paschim, where westernised Indian girls chain smoked, and moms who should have been slaving away on sewing machines to pay for their son's education wasted away their hours in swimming pool parties? Clearly , as these ingrates abandoned our shores, they exchanged the virtuous Indian way of life for the materialistic, decadent values of the West.
The 90s witnessed, through films like Dilwale Dulhania and Aa Ab Laut Chalen, an attempt to understand the community and empathise with its dual pressures of blending in with the host country while still staying true to its Indian values. The vastly more sympathetic portrayal, prompted in part by the desire to garner a world market for these films, also reflected changing domestic attitudes towards the community .
Over the last decade, the relationship has entered a whole new chapter. That earlier sense of overseas Indians being a distinct group, separated physically and culturally from the motherland is gone.Far from passing any value judgment on them, films now tend to effortlessly include overseas Indians in the narrative, depicting them as desirable, confident, globetrotting role models.
How has this sea change in attitudes taken place? At a basic level, our seamless acceptance of Indians abroad has been paved by a general change in our attitudes towards money and success. As socialist ideas have given way to market-driven ones and the pursuit of material success is seen as a legitimate goal, the prospect of Indians seeking out their fame and fortune beyond Indian shores hardly seems suspect.
On the contrary , the success of Indians abroad is now triumphantly viewed as a reverse colonialism of sorts.India may have thrown off the yoke of foreign rule in a physical sense seven decades ago, but we are still to fully throw off the yoke emotionally .
Each new announcement of an Indian being appointed to the helm of a leading global company , feels like sweet revenge against two centuries of subjugation. The Indian diaspora spread across the capitals of the world and increasingly making its presence felt there, seems akin to an advance party of a civilisatio nal army set to conquer the word.
In terms of hard economic and political benefits too, the contribution of expat Indians is equally gratifying. India is the world's top recipient of remittances, even though the Indian diaspora is not the largest in the world (China's is more than twice as large) suggesting a greater degree of emotional and cultural connectivity with the homeland. At over $70 billion per annum, the value of remittances from overseas is just 25% less than the Indian government's entire annual Plan Expenditure of $94 billion! The Indian IT boom also owes substantially to the reputation that Indians settled in Silicon Valley have made for themselves as geeks and innovators a prowess celebrated in American popular culture through characters like Asok of the Dilbert comic strip and Raj of Big Bang Theory . This perception has allowed us to steadily move up the IT value chain, from body-shopping in the 80s and 90s to vanilla IT assignments like Y2K, to IT consultancy and new idea centric start-ups making waves globally .
No wonder, then, that concepts like Brain Drain seem so out of sync with the times. As PM Modi rightly observed, the diaspora today seems like a brains trust which can offer a whole lot more gain for the country .
Like in any relationship on the mend, the NRI's view of the homeland also seems to have undergone a sea change in the past decades. A generation ago, the NRI shared a complex love-hate relationship with his motherland, comprising both guilt and a deep resentment of the conditions back home that forced him to leave. Shashi Tharoor described the relationship thus, in a book published in 1997: The attitude of the expatriate to his homeland is like that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has spurned for not having merited his fidelity .
However, with India progressively offering new opportunities after liberalisation, and the West slowing down (precipitously so, after the global financial crisis) we're witnessing a healthy two-way flow of talent.
Indian expats now find it much easier to return to the country , with a shrinking differential in salaries and nearglobal living standards in secluded enclaves in our metros. Conversely Indians today happily explore opportunities overseas without any guilt that they may be seen as deserting the motherland.
Finally , India seems to be extending beyond its physical borders. The tagline India Everywhere used prematurely by a dotcom brand 15 years ago, seems finally to be coming true.
The writer is Executive President, Bennett, Coleman & Company Limited (BCCL)
It's interesting to observe how our attitudes towards our expatriate brethren have transformed over the past decade or two. Remember Bollywood's portrayal of the NRI of the 60s in films like Purab aur Paschim, where westernised Indian girls chain smoked, and moms who should have been slaving away on sewing machines to pay for their son's education wasted away their hours in swimming pool parties? Clearly , as these ingrates abandoned our shores, they exchanged the virtuous Indian way of life for the materialistic, decadent values of the West.
The 90s witnessed, through films like Dilwale Dulhania and Aa Ab Laut Chalen, an attempt to understand the community and empathise with its dual pressures of blending in with the host country while still staying true to its Indian values. The vastly more sympathetic portrayal, prompted in part by the desire to garner a world market for these films, also reflected changing domestic attitudes towards the community .
Over the last decade, the relationship has entered a whole new chapter. That earlier sense of overseas Indians being a distinct group, separated physically and culturally from the motherland is gone.Far from passing any value judgment on them, films now tend to effortlessly include overseas Indians in the narrative, depicting them as desirable, confident, globetrotting role models.
How has this sea change in attitudes taken place? At a basic level, our seamless acceptance of Indians abroad has been paved by a general change in our attitudes towards money and success. As socialist ideas have given way to market-driven ones and the pursuit of material success is seen as a legitimate goal, the prospect of Indians seeking out their fame and fortune beyond Indian shores hardly seems suspect.
On the contrary , the success of Indians abroad is now triumphantly viewed as a reverse colonialism of sorts.India may have thrown off the yoke of foreign rule in a physical sense seven decades ago, but we are still to fully throw off the yoke emotionally .
Each new announcement of an Indian being appointed to the helm of a leading global company , feels like sweet revenge against two centuries of subjugation. The Indian diaspora spread across the capitals of the world and increasingly making its presence felt there, seems akin to an advance party of a civilisatio nal army set to conquer the word.
In terms of hard economic and political benefits too, the contribution of expat Indians is equally gratifying. India is the world's top recipient of remittances, even though the Indian diaspora is not the largest in the world (China's is more than twice as large) suggesting a greater degree of emotional and cultural connectivity with the homeland. At over $70 billion per annum, the value of remittances from overseas is just 25% less than the Indian government's entire annual Plan Expenditure of $94 billion! The Indian IT boom also owes substantially to the reputation that Indians settled in Silicon Valley have made for themselves as geeks and innovators a prowess celebrated in American popular culture through characters like Asok of the Dilbert comic strip and Raj of Big Bang Theory . This perception has allowed us to steadily move up the IT value chain, from body-shopping in the 80s and 90s to vanilla IT assignments like Y2K, to IT consultancy and new idea centric start-ups making waves globally .
No wonder, then, that concepts like Brain Drain seem so out of sync with the times. As PM Modi rightly observed, the diaspora today seems like a brains trust which can offer a whole lot more gain for the country .
Like in any relationship on the mend, the NRI's view of the homeland also seems to have undergone a sea change in the past decades. A generation ago, the NRI shared a complex love-hate relationship with his motherland, comprising both guilt and a deep resentment of the conditions back home that forced him to leave. Shashi Tharoor described the relationship thus, in a book published in 1997: The attitude of the expatriate to his homeland is like that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has spurned for not having merited his fidelity .
However, with India progressively offering new opportunities after liberalisation, and the West slowing down (precipitously so, after the global financial crisis) we're witnessing a healthy two-way flow of talent.
Indian expats now find it much easier to return to the country , with a shrinking differential in salaries and nearglobal living standards in secluded enclaves in our metros. Conversely Indians today happily explore opportunities overseas without any guilt that they may be seen as deserting the motherland.
Finally , India seems to be extending beyond its physical borders. The tagline India Everywhere used prematurely by a dotcom brand 15 years ago, seems finally to be coming true.
The writer is Executive President, Bennett, Coleman & Company Limited (BCCL)
Source: Times of India, 6-10-2015
