“Pakistan backed terrorists strike in Mumbai”
“Indian students killed in Australia by racist mob”
“Chinese gunfire injured 2 Indian Soldiers”

What happens when you read/hear such headlines?
You wish your government could hit back say diplomatically, militarily or in whichever way that could teach our enemies a lesson. But the kind of government we have, it would be wishful thinking for us to harbour any realistic chances of that happening.

But I have realized that there is a way you and me could hit back and no we could do it without doing “A Wednesday”. We don’t need a gun to hit them back; we could do it with our wallet.

Way back in 1921, during freedom movement Mahatma Gandhi started Swadesi movement. He asked Indians to wear Khadi and boycott British machine-woven cloth. People burned their machine woven cloth and took to Khadi It was his Gandhi’s way to hit British economically – hit their profits that enable them to get ships and guns to further their colonial prowess.

And that’s what we need to do in 2009 as well. Every company in the world today wants to be in India because One billion Indians represent world’s most attractive market. With growing financial stature of Indians, all of us possess something that when wielded properly could hurt more than a gun in current world and that weapon is our wallet. And if we Indians learn to spend our rupees judiciously we could teach a lesson to Pakistan as well as China.

Every year China sells to India goods worth “Rs. 150,000 crore” i.e. we Indians buy Chinese goods worth Rs. 150,000, crores annually. If we as citizens chose to boycott Chinese goods then could you imagine how we would have hurt the Chinese economy…won’t they think twice about making incursions of upto 1500m in our territory when each meter of incursion could cost them 100 crore worth of lost trade. And it’s simple to do, every 2 out of 3 plastic toys sold in India are made in China we just need to be careful of what we buy. Eid & Diwali are round the corner and a lot of lights and decorative material is made in China, if we could avoid buying that we would have done our little bit to respond to them.

In current world India matters not because we have nuclear power (really do we have?) but because we have power of a billion people who could spend. And if each of us realizes the power of our wallets then maybe together we could find a way to respond to those headlines through something other than just frustration.