India- An Investor economy or an asset economy?

If you have read enough about recession,loss of jobs, people not having money etc etc and got bored, take a break and visit a jewellery store in your city and Iam sure you will refuse to accept that there is a word called RECESSION. Even Iam surprised yesterday when I saw this famous jewellery store completed filled with people buying various items of gold for themselves,their loved ones. Being a banker and financial consultant, this took me to the thought of mentality of Indian investor.Its true that people invest in safe assets like gold, FD, debt instruments during instruments. So, Do you mean to say that the consumer behaviour explained in the above para confirms to the investor behaviour? No, because we indians never sell gold that we buy. For us gold is an asset to display our status...our prestige and not an instrument we trade in any market. Across the world people invest in gold ETF, gold bonds and trade in gold in commodity markets whereas in India we buy gold in form of jewellery majorly to which we attach lot of emotional and sentimental value. Though we wear most of the jewellery only during parties and functions,probably once or twice an year we love the jewelery that we wear, we love to flaunt the jewellery, an asset. Parents proudly gift jewellery during wedding and status of parents is mostly judged by the amount of jewellery gifted. If it is an investor economy,probably parents would have gifted an instruments which is tradeable or exchangable. This brings me to the point that we are primarily asset owners and not investors. We love to own assets and invest less. Thats why we have more affinity towards land, gold. If you look at the most favorite instruments of indians for investment,majority would vote for FD which is considered a safe instrument,though this instrument gives negative returns most of the time. Very few urbane people invest in market instruments like mutual funds, stocks and the market penetration in any of these products including life insurance, ULIP is single digit for the same reason. And for this precise reason,whenever FIIs withdraw from markets we get heartache.The fact that in language of financial markets,anything that isnt traded doesnt have market value and hence the gold and real estate unless traded or sold cannot be treated as having market value. Looking at FD, that rarely gives positive market adjusted real returns, I believe that we Indians need to learn a lot on investment if we have to grow as an investor economy and not remain as an asset economy. Unless we learn, we wouldnt be able to dominate our own financial markets and offset the impact of FIIs on our lives.