Book Review: Rising Elephant. By Ashutosh Sheshabalaya. Common Courage Press; 322 pages; $24.95. 

To many Indian expats following the recently concluded US presidential election the news of the warm welcome given George Bush’s victory in India (contrast with Europe) may be puzzling.  Tales of traders on the floor of the Bombay Stock Exchange cheering the results seem a little strange, as do IT stalwarts (such as Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani) sounding off like born-again evangelicals at the victory party (that continued in high spirits to the liberation of Falluja through the time honored method of reducing it to rubble). Still, it’s satisfying that the mood is good on the home front. If nothing else, it at least had the effect of leavening the gloom that enveloped us in the Blue states and, one would imagine, most immigrant communities across this country, the first two weeks of November.

So, what lies behind the contrary reaction from India?  The answer, if it can be summed up in a word, is ‘outsourcing’ and the attribution of India’s recent robust economic performance to this phenomenon.  John Kerry, it was believed, would attempt to reverse the trend by slapping punitive taxes on ‘Benedict Arnold’ corporations that shipped jobs overseas.  George Bush, surrounded by more doctrinaire free-marketers would use a softer approach relying, it would seem, on retraining initiatives (‘No White Collar Worker Left Behind’?) – not really much of a threat to business as usual.

Ashutosh Sheshabalaya admits, in a foreword to his book Rising Elephant, to being surprised by the results of the Indian general election earlier this year.  The general tenor of his book is that there’s no stopping India now from achieving super-power status, and one suspects his vision included a laissez faire political dispensation as well. Alas, the Indian electorate seems to have a little better appreciation of what is in their better interests. Of course, true believers have no doubts that national political forces are powerless against the tide of historicalglobal economic trends.   Rising Elephant lays out the case for a resurgent India riding the outsourcing trend to global greatness.  While the former journalist and consultant has done a good job of amassing a wealth of anecdotes and press citations to back his argument, the hyperbole soon gets tedious.  A little more analysis of all the raw data thrown about here would have been welcome.

Sheshabalaya sets out what he sees as eight popular misconceptions relating to India’s remarkable rise in the world economy over the last decade. He then goes into detail over the eight chapters in the book into various aspects of this phenomenon. Each chapter is divided into bite-sized chunks which appear to have originated as newspaper or magazine columns.

The migration of software jobs from the US to India is well known.  Sheshabalaya presents this issue from different angles: the tendency to gloss over it or hide it, the attempts to legally block it, the underlying racism of some of the Western reaction, and, despite everything, the seemingly endless procession of corporations getting on the bandwagon.

Sheshabalaya does a good job exposing the racism underlying some of the Western press coverage.  So called quality media outlets are culpable as well.  For example, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung finds the fact that India was among a select group of countries with advanced stem cell research, ‘grotesque’!  The Netherlands government seeks to arrest the CEO of an Indian BPO company for minor visa technicalities.  The Western business press does not find this unusual – what the American CEO of Union Carbide got away with boggles the mind.  The use of American names for good old Indian ones by call center employees is another indication of the accommodation to racist culture that is taken as a given in global business.

Rising Elephant proposes that besides software and back-office BPO Indian companies are going for the big time in financial services, healthcare delivery, pharma, and biotech. Evidence presented, however, is largely anecdotal, with little global market share information to help make that case.

Software being where the action still largely is, Sheshabalaya goes into great detail on practically every software product made in India, and all Western corporations that have opened software development centers in India. In seeking to play up the size of the Indian software industry, the author seems to resort to using confusing statistics. According to Sheshabalaya, McKinsey & Co. projects Indian IT sector revenues at $87 billion in 2008. This, he says will be bigger than the “entire economies” of Chile, Nigeria or Pakistan. The author uses World Bank numbers based on 2001 GDPs and growth rate of 5% for the countries.  As a casual follower of relative sizes of national economies, something did not ring right. One hates to have to check up on a guy’s numbers, but I was forced to look these up.  The World Bank World Development Indicators for 2002 has Chile’s Gross National Income at $70 billion and Pakistan’s at $ 61 billion (and India’s $ 455 billion). These ratios suggest that there’s something misleading about Sheshabalaya’s use of statistics.  He may have a different rationale, but this is a consistent problem I faced across the book. Statistics with little context, when used in excess, can make your whole thesis suspect.

In the chapter entitled ‘The Definite Smell of Curry’ the author plays up the role of Indians in the US technology sector.  A table of Indian names bearing titles of Vice President and above in technology companies makes you wonder what he is trying to prove.  With the turnover in the corporate world this list belongs in a magazine article and not in a book which seeks to have some finite shelf-life.

To bolster the case for India’s “weight” in the world economy Sheshabalaya describes in detail how simple consideration of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) instead of GDP measured in US dollar terms would vault India to the fourth largest economy in the world. This is well known, but it’s curious how the author carefully avoids all per-capita statistics since these do tend to darken the overall picture somewhat.

Historically India’s been building up to this moment for 5000 years. Despite scholarly apologia for Western imperialism by golden boys such as Niall Ferguson, India was actually systematically looted and exploited by the British Raj.  The railway system and civil service notwithstanding, the net effect of British rule was the dramatic decline of Indian economy and society to the advantage of the colonial power. Sheshabalaya makes this argument convincingly.

What should America do to avoid being run over by the Indian steamroller? Among the author’s suggestions: retrain workers, beef up education, apply an outsourcing tax to fund job insurance system.  Not much new there.  I found little discussion of how long the political class in the US will be able to withstand calls for protectionism. The Boston Globe recently wrote about the closing of 121 of software companies in Massachusetts, with the loss of 3859 jobs during the past year.  The only factor cited was outsourcing, and implication was that most had left these shores for good. Their not so secret destination: India.

Rising Elephant provides an encyclopedic recapping of Western press coverage of the outsourcing phenomenon.  Some of the numbers are truly impressive.  But, the numbers soon become numbing.  Wading through page after page of anecdotes and statistics, the reader is just overwhelmed by the sheer repetitiveness of it all.  Sheshabalaya offers little analysis beyond the most obvious. With such large volumes of numbers one is struck at the absence of tables and graphs. 

While all eyes have been on China, the quite emergence of India over the last few years is something of note.  Sheshabalaya’s book is a useful journal that addresses India’s growing strengths from multiple angles.  One should commend the author for maintaining a good filing / indexing system of newspaper and magazine clippings relating to offshore outsourcing over the past few years, and doing a masterful job at cutting and pasting these to create Rising Elephant. With the official U.S. doctrine that no other power be allowed to emerge that could threaten this country’s global hegemony, one wonders how this country will react to this looming threat to neocon dreams of permanent world domination.  India and China together would be enough to put them off their porridge. But that’s the subject of another book.

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