नेहा श्रीवास्तव (Nehā S)

श्रीमन् महादेवाय नमः ! On the auspicious occasion of Mahashivaratri, we're starting a fundraising campaign to meet the additional & urgent expenses of the ongoing construction in our Gurukula. We request all Dharmanishtha sajjana-s to watch & spread this msg as much as possible.

श्रीमन् महादेवाय नमः ! On the auspicious occasion of Mahashivaratri, we're starting a fundraising campaign to meet the additional & urgent expenses of the ongoing construction in our Gurukula. We request all Dharmanishtha sajjana-s to watch & spread this msg as much as possible.

भारत के शिपिंग इंडस्ट्री के अधिकारियों की तारीफ हो रही है, इतनी तारीफ हो रही है कि आंसू निकल आएं सुन कर, शिपिंग मिनिस्टर साहब अगर थोड़ी भी शर्म है तो इन भिखारी अधिकारियों को बर्खास्त कर देश की इज्जत बचाने का काम करें 🙏

This mindset is the result of the meticulous way in which the seeds of inferiority complex were sown in our collective psyche by the British hundreds of years back. Unfortunately, even after independence, we continued with their flawed system of education. Nothing was done to change or get either the education system or our mindsets free from this mental slavery. We still seek validation from the 'goras'. It's still a privilege to imitate them. We consider it an honor even if the worst of them has even the slightest contact with us. The only good thing is that over the last few years, things have started changing, but this is still too little and requires a paradigm shift in our thinking.

What do you get the US President who just got a $400 million jet to play with? Nothing anyone but the billionaires can afford. Which brings us to the Indian-American billionaire class—specifically, the Sundar-Satya-Srinivas types. The ones who dot Silicon Valley, sparkle on conference panels, and get accused of not doing enough for their country of origin in the way the Jewish diaspora, who are also US citizens, do for Israel. They stay silent during Pahalgam and do not spend money in the right places to further Indian interests. The expectation is that, having cracked the capitalist cheat code, they would now use their riches to nudge geopolitics. But we forget: these people are billionaires only in money. In their souls? They are still middle-class. First-generation Indian immigrants carry a unique trauma: they once stood at a U.S. visa counter and said. “I will return to India after my studies.” Decades later, they are still afraid of being caught. They fear that showing open allegiance to India might somehow make the US revisit their entrance interview and then take back their H-1B... retroactively. We misunderstand the Indian-American billionaire. Their dreams are modest—own a franchise cricket team or get Shah Rukh Khan to dance at their dayghters’s wedding. These are not acts of empire; they’re just deluxe versions of your uncle’s bucket list back in Pune. Real power—world-shaping, memory-bending, Wikipedia-rewriting power—terrifies the middle-class Indian soul. It is loud. It draws attention. It makes you a target. Like Musk is. Better to build a unicorn than a legacy. Better to be loved at Davos than feared in D.C. These billionaires grew up fearing their manager’s performance review, their neighbor’s gossip, their aunties’ unsolicited opinions on their life-choices. Even now, they’re haunted by the great middle-class ghost that whispers, “What will people say?” And so, they build, invest, disrupt—within their little sandboxes—but dare not declare. They don’t understand that the privilege of being a billionaire is not caring what people think. It is deciding what people think. They don’t have to fit in. Others must now fit into the world they build. Will this change? Maybe. Maybe in a few generations, Indian-Americans will finally exorcise the ghost of their origin story. Their children and grandchildren may grow super-rich, come to terms with the hyphenation of the American and Indian within them , and internalize the phrase "memory is policy"— collective memory drives political action, and that identity, not just income, defines who we are. But until that happens, don’t expect any help from your super-rich NRI uncles and aunties.