As soon as some person of Indian origin becomes CEO of this or that public company in the USA or Europe, a predictable set of events unfold in India and on SM.
First, some will take excessive pride in it, as if they have achieved it themselves and literally pat themselves on the back. Somehow we think we Indians are superior. That’s bollocks.
Unfortunately, the dynasty is not in power so no “intellectual” or “journalist” is going to credit Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s vision for such achievements. But you never know, Ranaa Ayyub or Sagarika Ghose may just do it.
Second, Stalinist leftists and their ecosystem will start attacking that person for being of “privileged birth” and imply he or she made it good only because of that.
In fact, when Venki Ramakrishnan got his Nobel, he faced a lot of abuse along with kudos. But he is a clever man, after all, he won the Nobel for science, not humanities, so he started dropping the right sound bytes, soon all was OK.
Some NRIs are of course, better than others
Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee are, of course, the toast of the left-liberal circuit. They are economists that help us end poverty. That’s the beauty of economics. You cannot have two scientists in different years winning Nobel for saying E equals MC squared or finding that H-Pylori bacteria causes ulcers. You have to invent something else. But dozens of economists can win Nobel year after year for “helping us solve global poverty”. Just as generation after generation of Nehru dynasty royals can campaign on “garibi hatao”. No one dares ask them “Hey?! What about your granny’s promise?” Unless of course, you want to get branded as a Sanghi troll.
While Sen wears his leftist sympathies on his sleeve and proudly endorses Rahul Gandhi (a pre-requisite to be a certified Marxist these days), Banerji is far more circumspect and tries to be bipartisan. It is a matter of time before he says something inappropriate (read pro-Modi) and gets cancelled.
A few NRI worthies are lucky. They can never be wrong.
Exhibit A has to be Dr. Raghuram Rajan. The rock star who was, IMHO more of a rock than a star. He did not outrage much when everything not nailed to the ground was being looted and crony loans were being doled out by the billions, under his watch, but suddenly publicly worries about “Idea of India” etc., when Modi took over. And starts to predict recessions and doomsday every Amavasya.
You have to see him interviewed by our “fearless, independent journalists that speak truth to power”. It is like some first-term student interviewing a Professor known for his short fuse and inability to suffer fools, for the college magazine. They nod gravely, lap up his each word and treat his predictions as oracle from the heavens. And always talk about that one prediction he got right. And they regularly plant stories of how he is going to be the next Fed Chair, Governor of UK Reserve Bank or replace Daniel Craig as James Bond (ok I made that one up!).
Talking of grave faces and doomsday predictions we are reminded of another one of our brilliant NRIs – “Dr” Ramanan Lakshminarayan, who practically cornered the market for COVID quotes. Any article or TV show about COVID in the context of India is practically worthless unless it features him. You see, he is an economist running some NGO based out of Washington! DC is as nice a place to park yourself and solve difficult third world issues as any. And of course, great qualifications for talking about virus.
He predicted millions will go in the first wave which was mild and then said all will be fine before the devastating second wave. Since his predictions are useful for anti-Modi narratives, he will never be asked to explain his earlier predictions. When one wears out, he can produce another. Nor does he have to produce “peer reviewed” papers to prove his points. Poor statistician Dr. Manindra Agrawal of IITK had to endure much abuse and told he is “not qualified” because he didn’t offer the right sound bytes.
While there are few like ones we mentioned earlier, who went out as obscure common Indians and found fame overseas, the reverse has been true in the dynasty years. We had obscure NRIs suddenly becoming high profile, giving us gyan because they had the right qualifications. Anyone remembers Sam Pitroda?
A clever NRI is a anti-Hindu(tva) NRI
As I pointed out earlier, it helps to be anti-Hindu(tva). Whether you are a RI or an NRI. If you show your devotion to Hindu Gods you will face abuse. Ask that poor NASA NRI employee that faced nasty abuse for displaying pictures of Hindu Gods on her desk.
But if you start writing anti-Hindu(tva) articles, doors open. You get into Cambridge or Oxford without any trouble.
Ananya Vajpayee is one such brilliant academic. She is often seen with Kashmiri “separatist” groups and traces all the problems in Hinduism back to Rig Veda. So they cannot be solved without destroying the faith itself. But others’ problems are merely interpretation issues, you see! If you mention the genocide of Pandits in the valley, you will be told not to “weaponise” it.
The fastest way to earn your blue tick on Twitter and keep it is to abuse Hindus. Ask the UK academic that said Hindus should not be allowed to migrate overseas. If you had said 0.001% of that against any other faith your career, if not life, is over. Forget blue tick Twitter handles.
One NRI “research scholar” cum OpEd writer I greatly admire is Sadanand Dhume. He shows us it is never too late to change your bad ways and join the woke liberal circuit and vaccinate yourself against all future cancellation virus mutations. His job is secure. A supporter of Modi in the early years, now he considers a day as wasted if it doesn’t end with some anti-Modi tweets and OpEds. He is just one small step (such as endorsing Rahul for PM) away from being declared “eminent intellectual” – we are told by our fake news correspondent that the Politburo sub-committee is studying his record carefully before granting its seal of approval.
Yet another beauty is, once you sprinkle yourself in the woke version of gaumutra, it works its instant magic.
Your lighter skin or upper-caste elite background then hardly matters. Being woke or Hindu phobic leftist or a courtier at the Palazzo washes all prior sins of all previous births.
But the success of our NRI brothers and sisters is not always something to celebrate. A lot of breast beating self flagellation takes place. You see, India is hopeless, we Indians only do well when we run away. Or to put it in Indian English, “we are like that only”.
Exact same drama played out when Parag Agarwal became CEO of Twitter, to add to the long list of Indian origin leaders of big tech companies – Nadella, Pichai and many others.
But while Pichai or Nadella may have to tread carefully to avoid offending woke sensibilities, Parag is safe. Twitter is practically run by leftists. If he can keep it that way, he will be another well respected NRI.
Coming back to self-flagellation, It is not as if everything is wrong about India. For every Pichai, we have a dozen that stayed behind and made it good under much worse odds.
NRI success has nothing to do with Gandhi family’s vision
Despite what the ecosystem tries to sell you, NRI success has nothing to do with Rahul Gandhi’s vision or that of his Momma, Pappa, Granny or Great Gramps, our beloved Panditji. Who we are told, set up all these great colleges that enabled such NRI migration. Pity neither Signor Vinci nor many of his other progeny found them good enough to be educated in, and went abroad for petty degrees.
To me, the real advantages are our English language skills and comfort levels with diversity. If you can drive in Delhi traffic you can drive blindfolded anywhere in the world. If you can deal with India and its myriad bureaucracy, everything-that-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong environment and multiple regions, languages etc., you can easily deal with any cataclysm.
People from one culture, one race, one-language societies like Japan or China don’t have that advantage. They too are brilliant of course.
Most importantly, we do have a great indigenous culture and history that we believe in and for the most part, try to take pride in. If you don’t and think you were savages until “civilised” by the colonials as some Asian countries (and sadly Indians) think, then your English skills etc., are wasted. You are born to be a serf.
This is exactly also why leftists are trying to destroy our culture, history, heritage and our pride in it. They know this. Total obedience to their ideology and the Politburo despots requires it.
To cut the long story short, let us try to be good NRIs. You know how.
Originally published by the author on substack, republished with permission. You could read the original article here.
