Awaken

5No Time to Dream

As I neared the end of high school and considered career options, I was confronted with the harsh economic reality of India in the mid‐1970s.

In those days in India, nobody asked, “What's your dream? What's your passion?” Even asking such questions was a luxury.  The only relevant question was, “How the hell are you going to get a job and survive in the world?” Unlike for my cousins, going back to the village was not an option for me. But my prospects in the outside world were not good. India had been run as a semi‐socialist democracy since Independence in 1947. The country's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, deemed that the government should control the “commanding heights” of the economy, through direct ownership and heavy oversight. As a result, India had a centrally planned economy with a huge public sector; government‐owned corporations dominated many sectors. Stifling government regulations bred stagnation and massive corruption.

Nehru's autocratic daughter, Indira Gandhi, became prime minister in 1966 and doubled down on state domination. She nationalized all the country's banks in 1969. The oil crisis of 1973 quadrupled the price of oil, crippling an already anemic economy. Taxes were numbingly high; the highest marginal income tax rate in 1974, the year I graduated from high school, was 97.75%!¹ Per capita GDP that year was $163.² The economy was virtually closed to the world; non‐oil, non‐food imports amounted to a miniscule 3% of India's GDP ...