Why India should not rejoice over Nadella's selection as Microsoft's CEO

Ever since Satya Nadella got selected as the new CEO of Microsoft, Indians have been over the moon. The newspapers are filled with editorials dedicated to the "the great Indian elevation" and everyone's swelling with a touch of pride.

However, have we once stopped to ask whether this pride is well deserved? Satya Nadella has not even once referred to his homeland, India, in any of his speeches, blogs, tweets, whatever. He has not been overwhelmed by the Indian love that is pouring all over him. Why? Maybe because he understands that he owes his success more to the US than India. Maybe because he knows that the best decision he ever made was move to the foreign shores because he probably wouldn't ever have attained these heights in India. And why only Satya Nadella? We have many other examples of such immigrants making it big because they managed to move out of the Indian borders. Case in point, Kalpana Chawla, Amartya Sen. One must ask: Why is it that every India-origin person to win a Nobel after independence in the sciences is not an Indian citizen anymore? Hargobind Khurana won the prize for medicine in 1968, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar for physics in 1983 and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for chemistry in 2009. And they had all left India far behind.

Who is to blame here? It would be easy to assume that all these people are highly ungrateful for having not thought of their motherland in their hours of glory. But the truth probably is far from that. The truth probably is that, as already mentioned, their motherland did not do anything for them to hand them their hour of glory and had they stuck by her, they probably would have fared no better than the millions of educated professionals, thinkers, entrepreneurs that follow their mundane lives in the hustle bustle of the Indian cities. Indians tend to flourish only when they go abroad. Okay. Let me be honest, even going abroad is not a guarantee that you will fare as well as Nadella, Chawla or Sen. But, at least, there you are only competing on the basis of skills and talent. The only thing probably pulling you down is the lack of the same and not the system itself.

That's right. The root cause of the problem is our system itself. The Indian system of exclusion rather than promotion. Our system is designed to keep the mediocre out and not to promote the extraordinary further. Our IITs and IIMs are designed to be one of the best institutions in the world. But, 99% of our aspirants cannot get in. Half of these may actually get through to any Ivy league college in the US and would also fare well in life. The question is are IITs and IIMs actually honing the skills of the people who are selected? They are the already selecting the best of the best, then why should it be a surprise if these people shine in their lives. What is the value add by these institutes? When the people entering the institution are the best among the best, they will shine no matter what the quality of faculty or the curriculum. Also, after that is the question of what next? Most of the grads from IITs and IIMs grab the placements in MNCs and take the first flight out of India. Why? Probably because the years in these institutes have dawned on them the realisation that IIT and IIM are just brand names whose stamps they have earned, but by and large, it's up to them to give a direction or a boost to their careers.

Well, Nadella did not study in either IIT or IIM. He graduated from Manipal, which is also a good college / university but not in the league of IIT and IIM in India. And he has fared well because just like many others, he flowered only because he had left India, and not because he was an Indian per se. If Satya Nadella had remained in India, he would probably be working as a coder in Infosys or TCS. Earning a high salary no doubt, but an unlikely candidate for CEO. Not much unlike many of our non-IITians are doing nowadays.

Even if we leave education sector apart, we see the Indian system's design to 'keep people out rather than help them get in' in other spheres as well. Our politicians' resort to name-calling and strategies to pull each other down when they actually should be focussing on doing something themselves. It's running in the blood of politics now. So, if Modi talks about a Gujarat model, everybody has to bring it down. If Rahul claims his government's biggest achievement is the RTI, everyone will belittle it. If Chidambaram claims high growth as UPA's success, the Left will say this growth is not helping the poor. So much so that, a candidate with a track record of years of demonstrated development work is being run down as a 'chaiwallah' while a certain nobody who knows nothing about sorting out problems except sitting on 'dharna' and blaming all and sundry (read, Delhi Police, Central Govt., previous CM, etc.) for all the problems of the society is voted in to power and designated as a CM. What a spectacle is being made of the Indian democracy in the world at large when the CM sits on a 'dharna' and sleeps on the road. Maybe Kejriwal needs to remember now that he is not an activist anymore and it's now time to stop acting like one and start delivering on the promises made. Time to pass the buck is long gone now.

In the world of sports also, we felicitate Sachin Tendulkar with the highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, when more often than not he played for himself, setting extraordinary records, rather than for the team; while we let Rahul Dravid vanish into an oblivion, when he almost always had put his heart and soul in bailing the team out of difficult situations instead of focussing on his personal records. If the records did come by, they just happened to be incidental. (With all due respect to Sachin, I truly believe that his skill is legendary and beyond par but I also believe that Sachin benefitted more from the Indian team rather than the other way round. Also, I feel that in comparison, Rahul Dravid has been handed an unfair deal when in his case, it was truly the team benefitting from him rather than him from the team). Then again, the younger breed was kept at bay as long as the 'diggaj' were still on the field and the awesome talent of Virat Kohli, Gautam Gambhir, Suresh Raina, Shikhar Dhawan, etc. were brought out only after the likes of Saurav Ganguly, Anil Kumble etc. faded helplessly after the endless struggling days of sub-dued, out-of-form performances. But, actually no bureaucrat in the Indian system had the guts to challenge why they are not bringing forth new players when the old ones are not performing. Another example of our system of exclusion: keep celebrating the past, rather than focus on the future.

So, to conclude, before we felicitate Satya Nadella, we should learn to felicitate a Cyrus Mistry, who broke the family legacy barriers in the omnipresent Tata Industries to take over the reins from Ratan Tata at such a young (comparatively) age. We must learn to discard the 100% cut-off in SRCC and encourage our children to look beyond a ranked college and then offer equal opportunities to students coming out of a Hansraj, Hindu, Venkateshwar College. We must learn to support politicians who have demonstrated development work and not shun bureaucrats like Durga Shakti who actually act instead of sitting on their chairs and do nothing but answer affirmatives to bosses.

Only after we learn to do that and raise as many Satya Nadellas, Indra Nooyis, Kalpana Chawlas and Amartya Sens in India do we have a right to hail them.