Kids who grew up in the 80s are unique. They know a pre-internet era. Here’s another point of distinction – if you are an Indian kid who grew up in India in the 80s and came of age in the 90s and belonged to the relatively small, educated middle-class, then you are the “Manmohan generation.”
Had you come of age 10 years prior it is safe to say your life’s trajectory would have been not very different than had you come of age two decades earlier. Your academic brilliance – or not – would have hopefully landed you a safe enough job; you could have gotten lucky and cracked the Indian Administrative Service and its long tail that ended in some public sector undertaking.
But Manmohan Singh had other plans for 800 million of us, when he assumed charge as Union finance minister. My generation has lived lives that he set in motion. The fact that we don’t see his hand in all this is just how he rolled and how our unbottled confidence decided to drink its own Kool-aid.
The Indian middle-class dream was built on academic achievement leading to better employment opportunities. This got funnelled through current privilege and social standing, and in a developing country with a high population, there was always a lack of opportunity to go around and impact everyone’s lives. This was the most fundamental shift that the ‘91 reforms bestowed on us. Suddenly new gates opened, there was more that could be achieved, and my generation gladly partook of these spoils.
Pursuing economics in Delhi University in the late 90s, we soon realised the extent to which our reading list took a turn, to ensure we understood what was going on around us. Our professors had lived their whole lives under a different system, and found it hard to recalibrate themselves in classrooms, teaching as they were now from the book of Satan. By the time we graduated from college, new dreams that included investment banking, MBAs, working in an MNC, advertising, media, and fashion had been added to the existing doctor, engineer, IAS, and IIT dreams of our parents.
Also read: Manmohan Singh Was the Gift of the Magi to India
The ascent of Shahrukh Khan has been studied time and again, and the conclusion is usually the same – he captured the zeitgeist of a newly liberalised youth and its aspirations. When he sang ‘I am the best,’ he was shattering decades of being the nice guy. SRK would have found it hard to reach where he has without a Rahul and a Raj and they in turn were born from the liberalisation dreams of Dr Singh. Let’s not forget that cable and satellite TV came in around the same time, and suddenly “media exposure” became a determinant of how people lived and consumed.
To give you an idea on how un-global we felt back then, when Star TV started airing Godrej’s soap advertisements ran during the nightly show of The Bold and the Beautiful. Know-it-all friends remarked that it was the cable guy playing these ads off a VHS, why would an international satellite channel based out of Hong Kong ever play an Indian soap ad?
Manmohan Singh oversaw the telecom revolution which became the internet revolution and then subsequently became the OTT, e-commerce, and start-up revolution in India. Even our current poster-child, the UPI can be traced back to him. Today we pride ourselves as a consumption-driven economy that global companies cannot afford to miss out in their business plans, think of how all of this started as you catch up at the nearest café.
A very high proportion of my school and college mates are part of the Indian diaspora – global and Indian at the same time, first generation migrants with no hardship stories of their parents arriving on foreign shores and making do.
If Jawaharlal Nehru built the temples of modern India that gave us technical and academic brilliance, Manmohan Singh gave us the wings and means to take flight. However, our narratives about ourselves seldom capture how so much of what we take for granted was kickstarted by this one man and his vision.
As my generation takes leadership positions across the world, and their children see themselves as global Indians we must thank the man who made it all possible, quietly.
We are the Manmohan generation. We are the first beneficiaries of the India he made.
Sumeer Mathur is an advertising professional with over two decades of experience. The views expressed are personal.
