A cocky India enjoys global economic limelight...for the moment

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This year, perhaps more than ever, India has bulged with self-confidence - some say dangerous cockiness - that underscores how executives, politicians and the middle-classes feel the global economic juggernaut is unstoppable.

At a World Economic Forum meeting which began this week, that confidence was evident as business leaders talked about "breakthrough" business models and India's "entrepreneurial spirit."

"Why are we being wooed by the world?" industrialist Mukesh Ambani, one of India's richest men who recently bought his wife a luxury Airbus jet for her birthday, asked the conference.

"Peace and stability and the growth model are what attracts the world to India," Ambani said.

While the United States is immersed in a credit crisis and Europe worries about immigration or outsourced jobs, India has the world's most upbeat consumers, according to a global consumer sentiment index by the Nielsen Company this year.

The survey also showed that about 16 percent of Indians said they had no worries - the highest rate in the survey.

"Indians self-confident? That's the understatement of the year," said Sarang Panchal, a managing director at Nielsen.

The self-confidence is related to India's increasingly wealthy upper and middle classes enjoying economic growth rates of around 9 percent in a trillion dollar economy.

"People are very bullish. They are taking risks they have never taken before," said Panchal.

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