Lately GDP has been as much a household name as LPG is. We all know what makes it grow and the many rewards from its growth and the dire consequences if it stalls.

I want to divert the attention from the rosy picture painted on the windshield, to the rear view mirror where we can see our grandma. The road our grandma walked (not drove a car) was unpaved. In the morning, she did not use a toothpaste or brush but let plaque keep her teeth going till her 90's without needing yearly dentist check-up or artificial teeth. She went off to milk the cows and make food and skipped adding to GDP by not buying the sugary junk sold as breakfast cereal, bleached-flour breads and health-drinks with preservatives. After eating yesterday's leftover, she cooked the greens or pumpkins or banana from the backyard. And gardening, mind you, does not contribute to GDP.

And she cooked the food on hand-made stove, fuelled with cow-dung-cake or wood, and was not shelling out money to enrich the oil-barons. She did not have cleaning supplies expense, cosmetic and beauty expense (a $2.7B or Rs13,000 crore market), telephone or electric bills and never bought big ticket items like fridge, TV or washing machine, things we are sure are "essential" for human survival as we know it. And she never paid late fees for credit cards either.

And when grandma was sick, she took home-made herbal remedies and rested without realizing that she must see a doctor, get a bunch of tests done and pop some pills and thereby help the now $36B or Rs 1.8 lakh crore healthcare industry and enable its 15-20% per year growth. And grandmas gossiped, rather than go to the movies or subscribe to cable TV, and un-patriotically denied growth opportunities to the media industry. She had a closet with hardly any clothes, barely any beauty accessories and possibly one slipper. Grandma never went to paid school or to college, and alas, thus refused to pay her part for the boom in for-profit education industry.

Grandma's Domestic Produce of pickles, sweets, songs and stories were sustainable, wholesome and empowering to her, her family and her community. The view from the windshield, the one of double digit growth, in debt and inflation along with GDP, and the many busts is very exciting indeed, especially compared to the stone-age of the last decade. And when the road-to-nowhere meets the truth that there is no such thing as endless growth, the car would reverse and the grandma would be our grand-child.