What happens when a quintessential researcher like Rama Bijapurkar with over 35 years experience in number crunching takes you on an odyssey of contemporary India through its many labyrinthine paradoxes, half truths, diversity, consumer insights, and everything that makes India a bhel puri wrapped in an enigma. Revelation and chaos.
A Never Before World- Tracking The Evolution of Consumer India is a magnum opus on Modern day India, that not only astounds you by the sheer sweep of its intellectual expanse but leaves one somewhat bewildered and underwheling.
The book packs an oppressive overload of trends, interesting revelations, monumental errors, spectacular successes (although fewer and far between) and a complex array of observations that are truly remarkable. Rama’s has the keenest, almost uncanny power of observation that would put many an anthropologist in the shade.  A foreword by Chidambaram seems somewhat out of place. Why would someone like Rama want a politician to endorse her work?
The title Never Before World, per se is a bit of a disappointment and a cliché. This almost seems to be a sequel to her earlier book, We Are Like That Only and she has made several references to the earlier work, as if that was the masterpiece and this one an afterthought. A book of this nature is by no means a cake walk. If you want to cover everything about India post liberalisation, it would require a massive effort and in the end it may just become a boring narrative to someone living in the second decade of the 21st century. If you had gone to sleep like Rip Van Winkle in 1993 and woke up in 2013, to an India that had irretrievable changed, this book would be truly mind-blowing. Yet undoubtly this is a masterly account of all the events, the players both in business and Government, the hapless consumers, the winners, the losers and the entire socio-economic strata from the have-nots to the ultra high net worth individuals.
According to Rama, religiosity, cricket and cell phones seem to be “silver thread that binds the country together”, peppered no doubt by the film industry, particularly Bollywood. The truth about any such statement on the country is fraught with difficulty. While cricket is akin to religion in India, perhaps the youth is forever re-inventing their preferences and it would not be surprising if football also attains a pole position. Religiosity of course is underlying bedrock of Indian life and this is more pronounced in the middle and lower part of the pyramid that constitutes 90% of the population rather than the top of the pyramid.
Rama is a messiah of detecting change in human behavior. She makes a comment that consumer India rarely displays mega trends and discontinuities.  According to her change creeps ever so silently upon marketers that their response to it is very belated and inadequate. She does a fair amount of bashing of MNCs especially the expats who come with stars in their eyes hoping to make a killing in this monster opportunity called India only to be completely off the mark in their assessments and understanding. To some extent this may be true and in fact it was a norm in the late 90s, but not so any longer. To be fair to them wouldn’t Indian marketers have been completely at sea had they ventured to say Argentina or for that matter to China to break into these markets. The MNCs in India lived and learnt. Those that came into prominence at the turn of the century came with eyes wide open and have benefitted immensely. Samsung, LG, technology related companies, McDonald’s KFCs and some pharmaceutical companies are examples.
Rama, of course, had to cover the youth and their metamorphosis; from the advent of the cell phone to their penchant for connectedness. Internet narcissism as someone interestingly pointed out. Everyone’s posing for the ubiquitous camera either to click someone else’s picture or for a selfie.
The author believes that there are immense opportunities for Gen Next in terms of entrepreneurship, joining their own family business to a plethora of jobs created by new age businesses. Yet, there is fierce competition among the young for advancement.
Of course there are many paradoxes. For instance, a nation with an obsessive compulsion to gamble still largely keeps its money in bank deposits and does not venture into the stock market for better returns.
The exponential growth of digital (read IP based)  technology is touching every facet of modern life; from buying movie tickets, railway tickets, online to paying electricity bills and filing income tax returns. The Govt. has probably been the greatest beneficiary of this. E-commerce is changing the rule of multi-brand retail like never before. All this is happening across India, from Dibrugarh to Jaisalmer and in a host of Indian languages. She refers to this as DQ, digital quotient.
Rama’s mastery of the subject is beyond doubt, but this book can get very tedious in its detail, yet the irony is that even as a compendium of India’s demographic  DNA, it suffers from not having the depth simple because it was sacrificed it to the expanse of its scope.
That truly was Rama’s dilemma.