Crystal ball gazing, where are we headed from here?

"Your next-door neighbour can likely predict what is going to happen as accurately as we can." - Steve Jobs

This accurately sums up the debate today. In India everybody has an opinion about everything but the fact is that nobody knows where we are headed and what’s in store over the next couple of years. Today, on TV, there is a story of a couple killing themselves due to a set back suffered in the market. One day the market jumps 600 points and promptly the next day there is selling pressure bringing it back to the same or lower levels. The pundits who, at the beginning of the year, were talking of the sensex hitting 25,000 (some had even started talking of 50,000) are now asking ordinary investors to ‘have faith’ and keep invested for the ‘long run’. Try explaining this to a guy who had put in his life’s savings in the stock market and his corpus is now down 70%. What a mess, and we still have no clue as to where the bottom is, as we really don’t know how many more skeletons are yet to pop up across the world. Who all are guilty for this is another story, but as Jack and Suzy Welch said, quoting Agatha Christie, in Murder on the Orient Express, I guess, everybody is guilty in one way or another.

The only saving grace of being in India is that we are nowhere near a ‘recession’ and should grow between 6-7% even this year despite the global crisis. All of us who are getting regular calls from NRIs in the west should brace up for handling a greater influx of returning Indians this year, the only catch being – are these returning Indians capable of delivering under the Indian conditions? If not, just like a number of others, they will soon be going back to the west as soon as things improve a bit.

PS. Wipro has just announced its numbers and has cautioned about the future but TCS is still gung ho!