Diminishing Returnees

Thousands of unsuspecting westerners, reading their New York Times and Guardian in the early and mid-2000s, had discovered an India pregnant with opportunity, populated mostly by the young (statistics suggest almost 60 per cent of us are now under 30), an irrationally ambitious place with call centre employees loafing about malls, chasing Nokias, nightlife and each other. In parallel, the Indian media documented the rise of a new middle class demanding freedom from prejudice, hierarchy, and patriarchy, along with unfettered capitalism and their sort of real estate.

Reading all this, and seeing the snow pile up outside their windows, the West showed up here. They showed up as investment bankers and consultants, restaurateurs and graphic designers, actresses and ad filmmakers. They showed up with money (venture capitalists) and chasing money (entrepreneurs). They drove real estate prices up, made restaurants and nightclubs busier and our cities more cosmopolitan. Some were westerners of Indian origin.

To locals, it sometimes seemed as if a secret society or Masonic lodge of ‘accented’ go-getters had just been ejected from an NRI spaceship, demanding, among other things, to revolutionise age-old Indian family businesses. A patriarch from a well-known Mumbai pickle business explained to me, "Some kid from some London bank showed up and said, uncle, I’ll invest if you can make this company state-of-the-art. I told him, beta, I don’t have state-of-the-art. I have Dholakia, my manager for 30 years. If you invest, whatever state he’s in, that’s the state you get."

A lot of expat packages included cars and nice flats, servants’ salaries and kids’ school fees plus a salary package, so the salary never got spent. It was a great life (weekends in the Maldives)—till, of course, you lost your job. If you look carefully at the activities of Messrs Writer Relocation today, you will notice, that as the rules of India’s boom have changed, the trucks are not moving in, but out. India not being immune to layoffs, and global companies suffering the way they are, suddenly companies have been saying to their people—it’s over.

"I’m stuck in a foreign country with the financial overheads of a maharaja but no more Wall Street money to back me up," confesses an expat family man who called up his Writers truck a week ago. "It’s not that I want to go home, New York is a graveyard for jobs right now, but I guess I’m scared to live hand-to-mouth in a country I barely know outside posh hotels and restaurants."

A single expat woman friend suggests a lot of these corporate sorts were lured to India not just by its economic promise but by its romantic one. Single men who had, if you like, read their Darwin on natural selection and decided they had better chances with the ladies of metropolitan India than six-foot blondes from Yale. "They were rich (by Indian standards), some of them looked Indian, they imagined they could share experiences of world cities, talk about lavish lifestyles they led in West, and Indian girls might fall for that," she says.

That’s not quite how it worked out. "Today’s Indian girls are clever and ruthless. They’ll appear loving but leave you penniless and alone," laments a single expat male who moved to India some years ago, with dreams, he confesses, of a perfect match and double-digit returns on investment. Today, this gent, once a millionaire bachelor, dating and spending with reckless abandon, is a stuck single unemployed expat in Lower Parel, worried about his mounting fixed costs and depleting savings. On weekdays, he plays squash with other expats, figuring out how it all ended. "Everyone splits the bill now, earlier someone would just pay," he says of his squash expenses. "I guess we’re trying to last out as long as we can on the rupee vs the dollar. This isn’t the Incredible India I imagined". His only joy nowadays—positive responses on shaadi.com to his angular photo in front of The Louvre.

(The author is a Calcutta-born playwright who relocated to Mumbai from New York in 2005—and is staying.)