Premature Triumphalism, the Dangerous Opium of India’s Youth
We are injecting a destructive, premature triumphalism in our young, who are becoming arrogant & delusional.
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I visited the Mumbai office of a newly minted unicorn—not a fancy fintech or crypto start-up, but a good ol’ fashioned finance company founded by young industry veterans. Its valuation is leaping—they’re churning out sexy product structures, new-fangled investments, experimental derivatives— bustling with energy and eager young faces pacing restlessly, up-down, criss-cross, in a metro jungle of flickering screens, talking money and deals!
I was the old man in the glitzy conference room, grizzled by an earlier unicorn exit, and therefore, “thought” to be ubiquitously wise. How ironic! I envied their hi-tech chutzpah, feeling wholly inadequate, while they thought I had all the answers. The conversation, invariably, moved to Donald Trump’s Iran misadventure.
YGB-1 (Young Genius Banker One): Sir, can, and when, will this war end?
Me (suddenly feeling empowered because we had veered to the more familiar turf of geo-economics): This war will end when China wants it to. They are the only guys with real leverage in Tehran. So, when President Xi Jinping believes he’s inflicted enough pain on America, and before the fire begins to singe China, he will push Iran to give an off-ramp to Trump. I believe the end is near. (I concluded my tiny spiel with a pompous flourish).
YGB-2: Sir, isn’t China the real winner here? Just look at how they’ve held rock-solid, steady, while all major economies have reeled and keeled over? One hundred days of oil reserves, still getting tankers through the Strait Hormuz, no panic or fuel shortage on their streets, pinching the world’s jugular with a monopoly on rare earths, astounding successes in AI, even getting the Saudis to sell oil in yuan…what a country, sir!
YGB-3 (cutting in, impatient to toss his voice into the excitable conversation): And just look at us…always firefighting, always punching below our weight. We’re just happy to be good, never great. Look at what we are doing with AI, merrily building data centres, happy to again become the back-office of the world, making easy money by arbitrating our skills and subsidies, genuflecting before the Googles and Amazons, but not daring to create our own deep-tech products. Am I right, sir?
Me (oh oh, carefully weighing words; even a minor, good-faith criticism gets blown up into the curse of “India bashing” in this climate of hyper-nationalism): I think we should be fair to India. Data centres are critical nodes in building AI infrastructure, so we should not downplay our growing prowess there. But yes, our policy makers are dangerously close to repeating the mistake they made in the early 2000s, when we surrendered the chance to build our own platforms by giving “automatic 100 percent FDI” access to Google, Meta, and other tech titans. China banned them, and built their domestic giants, but we gave away our platform market on a platter to these American behemoths. Now it’s happening again in AI. Already, ChatGPT’s biggest and fastest growing market is in India. But why should we freely give it away? We should make their entry conditional upon building Indian expertise, franchises, and joint ventures (JVs). Even Google should be forced to build and register IPs (intellectual properties) and hi-tech apps in local JVs. Instead, we are allowing them to export our water, electricity, and humongous tax-breaks to Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, we are perilously close to making the same mistake again. (I said all of this with huge caution, circumspection).
YGB-4 (who had been listening silently, now blurted out, sounding distressed): I agree with everything said so far, but I think we are denying our crippling shortcoming versus China. We are injecting a very destructive, premature triumphalism into our youngsters, who are becoming arrogant and delusional about this “Vishwa Guru (global leader) syndrome”. Against these hallucinations of grandeur, China’s youngsters are working like maniacs, singularly focusing on making China the strongest nation on earth. We are talking mythological drivel; they are drilling into cutting-edge science.
The room went silent. Had YGB-4 touched upon an aching nerve? By then, our coffee cups were drained, so we did high-fives, said good-bye, and moved on.
Drivel, Drivel, Drivel!
I had barely driven out of the porch when an Instagram reel popped on my phone. A famous Indian actress was gloating about “how Agastya, a sage from ancient India, was the real inventor of cell batteries thousands of years ago”. She egged on her audience to pump up with pride. Because ancient India had invented virtually everything that was convulsing modern science and technology in the 21st century.
I got spooked! Literally a few minutes back, YGB-4 had spoken clairvoyantly about “mythological drivel…injecting a destructive, premature triumphalism in India’s youngsters”. I frantically searched for similarly deranged viral posts on social media.
Gosh, this “drivel” was in spate on the internet! Lord Ganesha’s elephant head was “evidence” of prehistoric Indian doctors who had mastered plastic surgery and head transplants (sadly, this is an “achievement” that humans have somehow forgotten, yet to be “rediscovered”!).
Of course, we also beat the Wright Brothers by several thousand years with Pushpak Viman. Sanjaya, the charioteer, was the initial “war-embedded broadcast journalist, reporting live from Mahabharata, Kurukshetra”. And wait, the Kauravas were the first human babies to be cloned in a test tube. The Brahmastra was the original nuclear-tipped ICBM (Inter-continental ballistic missile). Drivel, drivel, drivel!
Unsurprisingly, a Pew survey in 2021 showed that 72 percent Indians “completely agreed” that their “culture is superior”. Astonishingly, 79 percent of college graduates were susceptible to this civilisational snobbery, while only 69 percent with no formal education signed up.
Although Pew did not ask this follow-up question, I am convinced that 99.99 percent of the believers would have hailed the actress who gloated about Agastya “inventing” electric cell batteries. And the same 99.99 percent would assert, superciliously, that India currently is, and always has been, a Vishwa Guru (global master).
If Marx were alive, he would have altered his iconic maxim for India—Premature Triumphalism is the Opium of India’s Youth.