Source: Bhalla, Surjit S: Second Among Equals – The Middle Class Kingdoms of India and China; 2007; revised and data updated till 2025. Cartographers, avert your eyes! If the world map reflected middle class population growth, it would look something like this. North America and Western Europe give way to a dominant Asia and South America. There’s one overwhelming thrust to this view of the world, and that’s the shift to Asia; but within that a more dramatic shift to South Asia. It’s not a shift that is yet viscerally recognized as something real by most multinational businesses. I set up our office in Pakistan in 2007. I can demonstrate there a strong consumer base; can show that it’s much easier to grow a business to a particular fraction of an average Indian business than it would be to expand that Indian business by the same amount; can point to the exceptional local talent; can exhibit the success stories of a few multinationals who have taken it seriously: and I still feel that I’m preaching in a wilderness of prejudice. The fact is that we will be moving well beyond the Rise of China. In the next two decades, Chinese velocity will abate. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam will take up the slack. In particular, the next half-century will be India’s: and yet in my view, most global marketers have not yet adjusted psychologically to this fact. What will this new world feel like? Well, very different to the world the West thinks of now.