| Someone is knocking at India's door. No one special, just Ravi Khanna, a well-dressed young man who works hard and talks fast. But that unprepossessing exterior masks an agent of revolution, a force committed to arousing passions that are transforming India's tottering socialist order. "Good morning, Mrs. Bedi," Ravi says. "May I come in to show you the new Mitey-Vac? Is the man of the house in?"
Before Mrs. Bedi knows it, Ravi is inside her small New Delhi apartment, demonstrating his wonder contraption. "Can it do cobwebs, spiders and lizards?" asks a wide-eyed Mrs. Bedi. "Anything," Ravi boasts. Mr. Bedi, however, is not impressed by the $200 price tag -- more than two weeks' wages for a senior-grade civil servant such as himself. "The cost is too much," he says. Ravi, sweating now, promises training, service, lifetime devotion. "For me," he says, "the customer is like a god." Mrs. Bedi looks expectantly at her husband, who walks out of the room muttering, "It's your choice."
Ravi and Mrs. Bedi are only drops in the ocean of India's 835 million people, but they are part of a wave that has brought unprecedented change to India's economy and society over the past decade, and especially during the five years of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's government. The participants in this social revolution are the members of India's middle class. A hardworking group with rupees to spare, they constitute a marketer's dream of as many as 200 million people, and are expanding rapidly. Ten years from now, predicts V.A. Pai Panandiker, director of New Delhi's Center for Policy Research, "about 300 million ((Indians)) will be members of the middle class."
In India social position used to be equated with an English education and a job in the Indian Administrative Service. Today it is money that increasingly defines status, giving rise to a middle class that cuts across caste and region. The rush to acquire has affected such sensitive traditions as arranged marriages and has allowed middle-class women to emerge in the work force. It is no longer regarded as shameful to covet the good life and to seek an even better life for one's children. "Indians always accepted drudgery as what life had in store for them," says Mohammed Khan, chairman of Enterprise Advertising in Bombay. "Today self-gratification is no longer a dirty word."
The urge to splurge has been fueled by several interlocking forces. Limited economic liberalizations instituted by Gandhi have freed the private sector to . step up production. A wealth of consumer items now jam once poorly stocked shelves. Even those who cannot afford to buy the goodies are affected by the alluring images produced by India's upstart advertising industry and transmitted into the homes of the country's estimated 180 million television viewers -- about 130 million more than five years ago. Those images, in turn, deepen middle-class dissatisfaction with the socialist restrictions that remain. "This is a greedy class, a demanding class," says Abid Hussain, a member of the Planning Commission in New Delhi. "It is crying out against the tyranny of the small inspector and the bureaucrat."