On a recent safari to Africa, I heard the story of a king who sends his son out to learn the rhythms of the jungle. On his first outing, against the din of buzzing insects and singing birds, the young prince can make out only the roar of the lions and the trumpet of the elephants. The boy returns again and again and begins to pick up less obvious sounds, until he can hear the rustle of a snake and the beat of a butterfly's wings. The king, however, tells him to keep going back until he can sense the danger in the stillness and the hope in the sunrise. To be fit to rule, the prince must be able to hear that which does not make a sound.
The rhythms of the jungle are far removed from those of New York, where I live, but this old African tale is quite relevant to a world reshaped by the global crisis of 2008. The crisis turned the world on its head, disrupting trade and money flows, unleashing political revolts, slowing the global economy, and making it more difficult to discern which nations would thrive and which would fail in such a transformed landscape. Pessimism came to rule the global community, making it hard for observers to see new rustlings of life, but they are there if one knows how to listen and where to look.
In the world of global finance, people often think of themselves as big cats, but in Africa, the difference between the cats and the rest quickly dissolves. Each year on the Mara-Serengeti plains of Kenya and Tanzania, more than a million wildebeest walk a nearly two-thousand-mile loop that they have traced and retraced for generations. Moving behind the rains and accompanied by zebra and gazelle, the ungainly wildebeest are shadowed by the lion, the leopard, and the cheetah.
The contest looks stacked, but lions are relatively slow and short-winded and catch their prey on less than one attempt in five. Cheetahs are faster, but because they are smaller and often hunt alone, they are forced to concede many kills to scavengers working in packs. Less than one cheetah in ten lives longer than a year. Lions do only a bit better. The circle of life and death turns as brutally for the predator as for the prey, a fact that might give pause to the would-be lions of the global economy.
I've lived in fear for my own survival since I entered this jungle. I started out in investing as a 20-something kid in the mid-1990s, when the United States was booming and emerging nations were still seen as wild and exotic. Financial crises swept from Mexico to Thailand and Russia, triggering painful recessions and reshuffling the ranks of rising economies and world leaders. The collateral damage in global markets wiped out many big investors, including a good number of my mentors, colleagues, and friends.
Wall Street is often criticized for "herd behavior," but even in the real jungle, life is more complicated than that stereotype. The wildebeest's circular migration has been mocked with the old proverb "the grass is always greener on the other side", but the herd shows a certain swarm intelligence. It is right about where the grass will be greener. It follows the rains, north into Kenya in the spring, back south into Tanzania during the fall.
The critical dangers appear twice a year at "the crossing" of the Mara River, which the herd must ford while traveling both north and south. Normally, to avoid predators, the herd heeds an ancient warning system - the shrieks of baboons, the calls of jungle babblers. But this system fails at the Mara, where the wildebeest mass by the tens of thousands, with danger in plain sight: floating crocodiles, rain-swollen waters, lions in ambush on the far side.
Heads down, the wildebeest appear to be talking all at once, their bellows like so many Wall Street analysts on a conference call. The herd waits for one member to go. If this animal takes a step and retreats, fear paralyzes the multitude; but memories are short. Within minutes, another will try, and if it plunges in, the mass follows - many into waiting jaws.
People working in global markets can get sucked into a culture that is programmed, like the wildebeest, to remain in constant motion. Daily research reports urge them to chase the next Big Thing or to run from the next Big Correction, an impulse that has only grown since the global financial crisis. Last year, the first quarter chatter was all about the surging Chinese stock market, the second quarter was all about how Greece was going to take down the global economy, the third was all about the collapse of the Chinese stock market. The alarmists are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but always they move forward, forgetting what they were saying the day before, and why.
Big cats are programmed to survive by conserving energy, not wasting it in constant motion. Lions are known to sleep 18 to 20 hours a day. They avoid fighting over the kill, or panicking in a storm. During the violent afternoon rains that sweep the Masai Mara, I've watched the wild animals stop and stand stock still - predators within striking distance of their prey - until the deluge ends. They seem to understand instinctively that cloudbursts are one beat in the normal rhythm of their days.
Many accomplished survivalists inhabit the jungle, and not all are big cats. The best defenses belong to the hulking vegetarians, the elephants and the rhinos. Even a lion pride will rarely take on a seven-ton elephant with six-foot tusks. The best spies may be the wildebeest, with their network of baboons and birds. The best hunters may be the hyenas, who despite their reputation as thieving scavengers are among the most successful large predators. Unlike the cats, a hyena has endurance, and moving in packs of up to sixty, it can run down virtually any animal, and fears none.
Those who survive the storms that buffet the global economy tend to absorb a few laws of the jungle. Do not expend energy on daily or quarterly blips in the numbers. Adapt to a changing landscape rather than let ego obstruct a strategic retreat. Understand that booms, busts and protests are part of the normal rhythm of life. Focus on big trends, and watch for the crossings. Build a system to spot important signs of change, even when everyone around you is just going with the current flow.
In a world reshaped by the crisis of 2008, the most important signs of national vulnerability to the global slowdown include rising debt, declining population growth, and heavy exposure to the decline in global trade. Every economy is exposed to some degree. Today, even China is slowing sharply after the much hyped up boom as it is particularly hit by a fall in its working age population and too much debt.
But even at a time when growth is slowing everywhere, some nations will still flourish, relative to their peers. The place to look for the next winners is always among the least hyped countries, and India finds itself sitting in a neighborhood of recent laggards that could be potential winners. In recent decades, few countries have fallen farther off the global media radar than those in South Asia. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have been making international news, respectively, for issues like terror, sweatshops, and prosecuting war crimes. These storylines obscure the economic reality, which is that South Asia is quietly rising relative to the rest of the world.
Leaders in the region are pushing at least incremental reform, debt is under control, and working-age population growth is strong. Unlike most emerging regions, South Asia is a region of commodity importers, so low prices for oil and other commodities help it. Stable commodity prices are now keeping inflation rates in check even as economic growth accelerates - the ideal combination. In 2015, South Asia had the highest concentration of accelerating economies in the world.
India is by far the largest regional economy, but it is as much a continent as a country, with 29 states that are as varied and often much more populous than the states of Europe. Today much of the real economic action is in the hands of Chief Ministers from states such as Haryana and Andhra Pradesh, who are traveling from New York to Beijing pitching for investments. With India's small neighbors picking up momentum, the South Asian economies are growing at an average pace close to 6 percent, which is very good, even for low-income countries, in this tough new era. Better yet, they are not - or at least not yet - attracting media hype as the "South Asian Tigers," since hype often signals the end of a boom.
There is no one model for survival in this era. Every country is struggling to find its economic niche. There is also no next king of the jungle with the potential to be as big as China, but there are many smaller candidates, with a particularly strong concentration in South Asia. The only way to spot them is by listening patiently for the telltale signs of major turns for the better or worse, even those that don't make a sound.
(This piece is adapted from Ruchir Sharma's new book, "The Rise and Fall of Nations: Ten Rules of Change in the Post-Crisis World", which you can order here. He is chief global strategist and head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.