Barkha Dutt: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why is there so much talent coming out of India right now? I know you could always say, for a long time, there’s been a lot of talent coming out of India. Surely that’s true, but it does seem there’s a discrete break. If you look, say, at the number of Indian CEOs in Silicon Valley, who also have done extremely well, it seems fundamentally different from, say, 20 years ago. What accounts for that? I actually think that those who are today leading the big companies, whether it’s — I don’t know, let’s take Sundar Pichai of Google or any other big tech firm that you pick up, Tyler. The fact is that they actually left India several years ago, maybe even more than two decades ago. That talent obviously migrated out much earlier and perhaps is today acceptable or recognized or taken cognizance of because there’s proof of concept. I think before Elon Musk took over Twitter, we had an Indian CEO of Twitter. I can name any number of companies. You already know all of them, and so does your audience. I think there’s proof of concept. I think there have been people who’ve proven a mark. We’ve long been described in America as a model minority community. A lot of it has to do with our excellent subsidized institutes of higher education. If you were to look at the background of most of these CEOs who are today leading conglomerates out of the West, most of them would have studied at institutes like the Indian Institute of Management or the Indian Institute of Technology, the IIT or the IIMs. These are very, very difficult to get into. They are subsidized, which means that you don’t have to be rich or wealthy to actually be able to study at them. They really do draw the best minds. Literally, almost everybody who’s making global headlines today has studied at one of these institutes. I think it speaks to one of the success stories, something that India got really right, which is very specialized, highly skilled institutes of technical learning. We may not have got our liberal arts as right at the higher education level, but certainly, our sciences, our management, our technical institutes — I think we’ve done a fabulous job with them. Do you think it boosts the case for an avowedly elitist approach to education, which it seems India has done? It’s very hard to get into those schools. They’re very, very good. If you finish, you’re branded as high quality in some way. Does that interact with caste in some manner, that there’s, in general, an elitist approach, and when it comes to the foreign market, that pays off big time? Or no?…

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