Earlier this week history was made when Rishi Sunak became prime minister of the United Kingdom. History was made because Sunak is of Indian origin.
Kenyans have claimed bragging rights, as Sunak’s father was
born in Kenya. His mother is from Tanzania. It will not be a stretch if Uganda
claimed a few of his uncles.
But Sunak is only the most recent of high performing
individuals who claim Indian origins.
Understandbly, it’s in the private sector, which is more of
a meritocracy that the Indians (writing of Indian origin is painful) have
excelled.
"A list has gone around of Indians who have led more than 20 globally renown companies in the last decade or so. Google, Microsoft, IBM, CitiGroup, Pepsico, Nokia and Motorola are included among that number. No mickey mouse organisations. And these are the ones we see in the news, there easily hundreds other flying just under the radar in companies, academia and every other occupation you can think about.
This is no mean feat. Not only because these are among the
biggest companies in the world, but because they have achieved all this as
immigrants. While most of them have adopted the citizenship of whichever country
they work, they are still considered outsiders.
Sunak’s achievement is therefore even more remarkable, never
mind that he ascended to the highest office in the UK government through a
party vote. It would be interesting to see whether he could lead the
Conservative Party to victory in a general election.
Given the numbers of Indian super performers around the
world, we can agree that this is no fluke.
To begin with is the population of India, about one billion
and the that of their diaspora, more than 30 million by some accounts. Success
is a numbers game. For every Sunak there are probably thousands of others who
would have been PM, had they not taken a wrong turn at school or in their
career or in their marriage. The trick therefore is to put out so many,
increasing the probability that at least a few will come through.
This has been true from the reproductive process. Millions
of sperm have to be expended to produce one child.
It goes without saying that all these high performers are
well educated, but even more importantly they have all gone to the best
universities be it in the US or the UK. This is important, even critical,
because to climb up the corporate ladder takes a lot of “know who”. In western
economies this often boils down to which university you went to and who was
there when you were there. Getting a western education is more about where you
go to school than just going to school there. The same is true everywhere you
look.
The power of the network is what we ignore or are ignorant
about. Its what makes the difference between climbing up the ladder or not. You
can bet Sunak with his first-class degree from Oxford or all these CEOs were
not necessarily the brightest of their respective cohorts. But they plugged into
powerful networks that recognized their worth and usefulness to the collective.
"There is value in good people, talking good things about you when you are not there....
The biggest network the Indians find themselves in is that
they are English speakers. English is the international language of commerce and
trade, spoken by billions of people, whose numbers are growing every day. The
more people you can communicate with the more influential you can potentially
be.
There is something to be said about the phenomenon of the
tiger mum, used mostly to describe immigrant mothers from south east Asia –
China, Japan, South Korea, but could as well apply to Indian immigrant mothers.
The way it is told, these mothers instill an iron clad discipline in their
children and not only push their children to excel in academics, but even chart
their academic path. Their children do no indulge in whatever catches their
fancy but are pushed from an early age to excel in English, math and science.
The Indians have been immigrants for decades and have only
just hacked the system. Given the above we can expect that hundreds of more
Indians are going to make the transition, now emboldened by the example of
their predecessors and within a generation it will not be unusual for Indians
to run Fortune 500 companies or lead the major nations of the world.
Is it systematic? Not as far as I can see. They are not like
the Chinese who we here send hundreds of youth to study abroad, return them and
insert them in their own systems.
At the bottom of it maybe is that India places no restriction on its citizens movement in and out of the country, and dare we say, they may be even relieved if some go away and never come back...
I think it’s the purest form survival of the fittest. Their
vast numbers and emphasis on education means it was always going to be a matter
of time before Indians
This will one day make for an interesting study if its not
already being studied.
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