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Nadella as Microsoft CEO: A slap in the face for Indian system
Is the appointment of Satya Nadella a feather in India’s cap or a slap in the face for the Indian system? While Indian newspapers were over the moon about Nadella’s elevation, with some justification, there is another side to the story we need to consider: why is it that India’s tech and other geniuses flower only in the US or Silicon Valley
Why is it that every India-origin person to win a Nobel after independence in the sciences is not an Indian citizen any more? Hargobind Khurana won the prize for medicine in 1968, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar for physics in 1983 and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for chemistry in 2009. All of them flowered only because they left India, and not because they were Indians per se. They left India behind. In fact, Ramakrishnan was downright rude when Indians called to congratulate him in 2009. He said: “We are all human beings, and our nationality is simply an accident of birth.” He also complained about “all sorts of people” writing to him and “clogging up my email box. It takes me an hour or two to just remove their mails.”
While his immediate reaction may seem churlish to us, underlying it all is the real issue: our “Indian” successes abroad have little to do with the fact that they are Indian. They succeed because they abandoned India.
We need to ask ourselves: why does our system kill future heroes, while the US helps raise even ordinary Indians to iconic levels? It would not be out of place to mention that it is well-nigh impossible for 99 percent of Indian aspirants to get admissions even to an IIT or IIM, but it is far simpler to get into an Ivy League institution. If you don’t get into an IIM, you try Harvard. The short point: our system is designed to keep people out, not get them in.
Read more at: Nadella as Microsoft CEO: A slap in the face for Indian system | Firstpost
