From time out of mind, India has been innovating its way to success: most recently, courtesy of the ubiquitous Mr Ambani, through a seemingly quirky re-launch of Campa Cola. With little or no Coca-Cola, and certainly no Pepsi, on the Subcontinent’s supermarket shelves throughout the 1970s and 1980s, your average Indian baby boomer had no option but to reach for a bottle of Campa: it was, as it said on the bottle, “the great Indian taste”, and given Coca Cola had refused to share its (almost certainly mythical) “secret” formula with Indian competitors, causing it to be summarily expelled from the Subcontinent in 1977, Campa pretty much had the field to itself: Pepsi didn’t make it into India at all until restrictions were eased following market liberalisation in 1991.
So Reliance Industries are probably right to feed back into those childhood, fizz-based memories of the boomers now running the fastest growing large economy on the Planet, but while they do that, they’re also standing on the shoulders of giants.
From Zero to Wireless in two thousand years
The mathematical concept of “zero” was (quite literally) born in India. Without it, we wouldn’t have a binary system, which means we’d have no computers, so you wouldn’t be able to read this or anything else in our blindingly brilliant modern age. And if you’re using any USB plug-in, you’ve got India to thank for that, too: Ajay Bhatt (born in Gujarat and a leading man behind Intel’s global operations for the last thirty-odd years). Not to mention chess, buttons for your clothes, snakes and ladders (a thirteenth-century game invented by the Indian poet Gyandev), shampoo (I’m not making this up: the English purloined chāmpo following its creation by the Mughal Empire in the late eighteenth century), and the first person to demonstrate successful wireless transmission to the World wasn’t Guglielmo Marconi: it was Jagadish Bose, another Indian, two full years before Guglielmo lugged his transmitter onto the roof of London’s Central Post Office in 1896…and, of course, without radio, we wouldn’t have television either.
So let’s do a quick stock check…without Indian innovation, we’d have no computers, no radio, no TV…no shampoo (or shampoo adverts on the TVs we wouldn’t have), and we’d all be struggling to do up our jackets with hooks and toggles. It is enough to make you think twice about the current status of Silicon Valley and Western technologies generally…
But that same fertile culture of trans-formative innovation continues on the Subcontinent today.
A Global Innovation Hub
Turbocharged by its own Silicon Valley and strung out between Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai, India has successfully innovated into becoming a global technology and distribution hub, sitting at the beating heart of our ever-more connected World. Modern commerce wouldn’t be the same without India, and there’s no reason to suppose any of that will change anytime soon.
So we can all raise a bottle of Campa to that… because history is on the Subcontinent’s side.
Executive Overview
From small things like Campa Cola to big things like Computers and USB sticks, India has been leading the World for centuries…I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.
Red Ribbon India Real Estate Fund
Red Ribbon India Real Estate Fund is a multi asset class closed-end fund registered in Luxembourg offering investors the opportunity to participate in Growth and Emerging Markets and Mainstream Impact Investments, such as India, that offer returns rarely available in western markets.
Leave a Reply