Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anand Giridharadas (45 min, 27 mb mp3)

We’re getting a personal take on the New India that we haven’t heard before from New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas. When he went “home” after college, from Cleveland to the land of his ancestors, the feeling he confronted was, in effect, hey, your party in America is over, and you may be too late for the party underway in Bombay.

Born in Ohio and educated in Michigan, Anand is a child of that wave of immigration that brought India’s best and brightest out of a bad time back home in the 1970s to the land of milk, honey, high tech and opportunity in America. When Anand returned to do his bit for the mother country, as a McKinsey consultant in the mid-90s, he found not his parent’s stifled old India but rather a swarming entrepreneurial frontier more modern, more gung-ho in many ways than the American Mid-West he grew up in, but also a nation growing less “westernized” and more indigenous on a surging wave of growth.

He carried with him the story of India that his parents had given him, an image of a great civilization trapped in a box; a place where, in his words “No one questioned. No one dreamed. Nothing moved.” He begins this account of that quarter-century transformation through the eyes of his father:

AG: One of the reasons my father left — none of us leaves countries for massive geopolitical reasons, we ultimate leave for personal reasons. His personal situation was working in the 1970s for a company called Tata Motors, selling their trucks and buses in Africa. All he could do to make a judgment about whether he wanted to be in India long term was look around him at work. I will never forget the simple way in which describes why he decided to leave. He said he looked at his bosses twenty years ahead of him in line and concluded he didn’t want to spend his life becoming them.

Now fast forward a quarter century, Tata Motors is today, that same stagnant dead company that in some ways pushed my father out of the country as a whole, is today one of the most admired car companies in the world. Why? Because it no longer only sells rickety trucks and buses in Africa. It has now also made the world’s cheapest car, for about $2,000, in an engineering feat that has wowed every major auto maker.

CL: How did they do it?

AG: There are two ways to think about it. One is to say that they had consultants and advisors who had certainly come back form the West. But here’s another interpretation of what was different. the constraints were in some ways the same. They still had essentially 1 billion poor people around them; they still had engineering constraints; they still had a government that’s not particularly helpful to what business does. But in my father’s day most Indians would have interpreted that context as essentially hindering progress and being an excuse for producing sub optimal stuff. The new language is “we have unique hardships which gives us a unique opportunity to create globally competitive products that are better than anyone else’s products. Because our roads are bumpier, our suspension systems have to be even better than the Americans’ suspension systems. Because people are poor in this country, we have to work twice as hard to bring the price point of a car down to $2000.” It’s the same context, just a different way of looking at it.

Anand Giridharadas in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, March 4, 2010.