If, like me, you tuned into events last Sunday at the Narendra Modi Stadium only to anguish over every Travis Head boundary like a blow to the heart, you certainly weren’t alone because the steady progression of Australian runs ultimately proved too much for the Men in Blue, and the trophy was lost on home soil. Well, so far, so bad, but if, unlike me, you don’t follow cricket, none of that makes a whole heap of sense. What trophy are we talking about here, what’s a “boundary”, and who is Travis Head anyway? Bear with me, though, give me a moment…and I’ll try to join the dots more inclusively. What we’re talking about here is the Spirit of a Nation: and, of course, when push comes to shove, it often collides with major sporting events, but far more frequently, it involves something more profound than cricket…and it's been happening in India for years.
For example, when India’s founding father, Jawaharlal Nehru, died in 1964, surging crowds of 1.5 million people attended his funeral. In the breathless moments before an Indian spacecraft landed on the moon earlier this year (making India only the fourth nation to achieve that extraordinary feat), every moment was followed live by more than 7 million Indians on YouTube alone (pretty much the combined population of Scotland and Wales, and that’s leaving aside the millions more locked to television screens on the Subcontinent). And, yes, for the cricket aficionados among us, 1,250,307 fans also shouldered their way through turnstiles this summer to watch the World Cup live.
India is now the most populous nation on the Planet…so none of this should surprise anyone: almost everything is bigger and better on the Subcontinent these days.
Take Indian GDP: that’s currently projected to grow at 10.5% over the coming year, and has already hit $3.63 Trillion for the year just gone, compared with $3.3 Trillion in the former mother country, which consistently, quarter by quarter, registers zero or close to zero “growth” (www.ons.gov.uk/). The Subcontinent’s burgeoning population is increasingly middle class, ever more aspirational, and increasingly urbanised, so the prospect of its economy slowing down anytime soon is about as high as Boris Johnson becoming the next Pope. And that, in a nutshell, is why India is also home to some of the World’s finest and fastest expanding companies: companies like Reliance Industries, TATA Consultancy, and HDFC Bank, which together have a market capitalisation of $40.51 Trillion…precisely because their success is fuelled by the latent, pent up power of India’s burgeoning population.
After all, it all comes down to the power of more…
The Subcontinent has been at the heart of Red Ribbon Asset Management (www.redribbon.co) for more than a decade, shaping its successful investment strategies in conjunction with an unparalleled knowledge of the Subcontinent’s markets: delivering higher than average investor returns, and looking after the Planet and People in the process.
Whether you were glued to the screen last Sunday or not, the sheer scale of India’s numbers makes you sit back and think.
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