Which is better, lot of attention or no attention?

Tata acquires Corus for a whopping price, so India has arrived! Indian media goes gaga, British papers cannot stop talking about BRICs and so on.

In the middle of madness, I wonder if we are missing a point. How do we know we have arrived? By generating attention? Till 1960s, we lived at the mercy of the Western donors for food. Aid used to generate a lot of media attention (We were proud we got aid!) But after Indo-Pak war in 1965, when Nixon administration stopped food aid, we were forced to modernize our agricultural systems and within a decade, went from being a food importer to exporter. Food aid no longer hogged attention.

As we grew, we cut down all aid which came with caveats. When tsunami struck in 2004, we were an international donor country in spite of losing almost 100000 people and billions of dollars of wealth. When we turned down aid from the west, it generated a lot of media attention. Now barely anyone thinks about foreign aid for rescue.

When Vajpayee signed an epic Nuclear cooperation agreement with Bush (precursor to the current Nuclear deal), some media critics said he is turning India a junior partner to US. We were junior beggars when we were getting aid. Now junior partner seems like a stigma -Signs of change.

A couple of years back, I used to see a M&A deals with deal size of less than a $100 million being splashed in headlines of all national dailies. There was only one Indian MNC, the Aditya Birla Group. Now, anything less $500 mn is relegated to middle pages. Amtek Auto, a nobody till an year back, has presence in a dozen countries today.

Ah, Tata Corus! But in a few years, those kinds of deals would be so frequent no one would care. That’s the time would we have truly arrived. That time beckons.