After weeks of relentless climbing and coasting every potential setback, the Sensex this week crossed a dizzying 8000. Never content, stock market analysts barely took time to relish the development before pinning their hopes on an even more ambitious 10,000 mark. How viable these expectations are and what the future of the markets is likely to be is a subject that is avidly debated by financial experts. But the Sensex’s gravity-defying act, if one looks closely, has wider, intriguing implications.To begin with, take the business of stocks itself. There was a time, and not so long ago, when a company like Reliance had to send out vans with specially made audio-visuals all over the country to motivate wary investors to shift the money from the safety of their banks into stock. Today, every Sharma, Mehta and Kejriwal is a speculator. Trading is not an activity carried on by dhoti-clad figures exchanging mysterious hand gestures; it is a business discussed with great seriousness by men and women in suits and designer glasses. There are magazines and news channels devoted solely to the markets. One can watch prices rise and fall on a ticker tape in the comfort of one’s home. Or buy and sell with the click of a mouse.All this points to the centrality money has come to occupy in our lives. Money not just in the stock market but everywhere. Look at the top news stories of the last couple of weeks and you will find they are all about money: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, capitation fees in private colleges or the rising price of petrol.No longer is it considered vulgar to talk about making money or to discuss how much one makes. Or spends. Couples will today gladly lay bare their assets and earnings for investment advice from media experts. Teenagers will allow magazines to examine them from head to toe to calculate their brand worth. Everything is quantified: apartment rentals, evening bags, a seven-day cruise or the cost of prasad at various temples. Undoubtedly the trend is consumption-led, with the media increasingly playing the role of a shopping guide. But the preoccupation with money has also been accompanied by a rising penchant for numbers in general. As any researcher will testify, it was impossible some years ago to get even basic figures of, say for instance, the male-female ratio in the country, without knocking on many doors. Today, figures pop up everywhere. We know, for instance, the cost of marketing a top Bollywood film in 2001, 2004 and even in 2006 (Rs 5.2 million, 8.8 million and 10 million). How many Indian students went to Ireland this year (1000). How many unforced errors Sania made in her last match (23).Technological developments have much to do with the phenomenon. The ability to collate vast amounts of data and process them into graphics and boxes have transformed the way we look at cricket and elections. There are a large number of institutions devoted to studying numbers, and not all of them are in the corporate arena.Non Governmental Organisations, such as the Punarvasan Sangharsh Samiti for instance, which carried out a survey of malnourished children in a district in Maharashtra and came up with findings dramatically different from those put out by the state, are providing hard facts. An increased use of the Right to Information is likely to give a greater fillip to such efforts.To comprehend why all this is so significant one needs only to look at past western stereotypes of the Indian mind. Indians, according to foreign travelers, would shake their heads in indecipherable ways to indicate a positive response; Indians when asked how far a certain place is from another, would answer : “very far” or “just here”. In the mid-90s, I interviewed several managers of international firms setting up shop in India for a survey of human resources. All of them claimed that their local employees, while exceedingly capable in many ways, had an infuriating tendency to leave loose ends in their reports.“Vagueness” and “imprecision” are probably the two words that could best sum up these perceptions. It is not as if these are necessarily negative qualities. There are many who would argue that a recognition of ambiguity has been a distinctive element of our philosophy and culture. But in the hustling, competitive, globalised world we live in, it seems to be the new Indian penchant for exactitude that is giving it a greater confidence.
