Shankar

🚨 "Language is only a means of communication. I'm going to promote 5 to 10 languages, including international languages, in every university. It is better to learn Hindi so that we can mingle with people easily," says Andhra CM Chandrababu Naidu.

Here’s the thing: Indians are rising. And that is actually why anti-Indian sentiment is rising. Not because Indians are so weak, but because Indians are once again becoming strong. CEOs of companies. Leaders of countries. Founders and investors. Doctors, writers, professors. Not just slumdogs. Millionaires. Now, I know what people will say. Not all Indians are doing well. More than a billion are still poor! And of course that’s true, and will be for a while. But Indians abroad have risen as individuals: And India is now rising as a country: Indeed, India is the fastest growing large economy in the world over the last decade: And I think Indians have a lot of headroom left. Where does it end up? We don’t know, but if even 5% of 1.4B Indian nationals are at the same level as the ~5M strong Indian American diaspora that currently produces ~6% of US tax revenue, that’s ~70M people capable of producing ~72% of current US tax revenue. So I think it’s at least possible that India returns to its historical level of relative prosperity: As a plausibility argument, recall that before America was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye, Marco Polo sought out China and Columbus risked his life to trade with India. So those civilizations were giant economic centers for thousands of years. And are becoming so again. This perspective demands a different approach. Not the victim mindset where Indians mimic Western wokes in whining piteously upon every slight. But a mature, tit-for-tat morality befitting a rising people where you cooperate with those that cooperate, ignore what is best ignored, and (proportionately) punish only when necessary. Because even from a purely realpolitik standpoint, constant cancellation doesn’t work. Recall that wokes tried that for the last decade, and all it got them was epic political defeat. They overused the penicillin called anti-racism, and now we have antibiotic-resistant actual racism. Indians will need different tactics. And that starts with moving from victim mentality to Vedic mentality, if you'll permit the poetic license. Because India isn't just a rising civilization, it's a returning civilization. And wokes are proven losers, but Indians can be winners.

END OF BLUE EMPIRE All right. Let me now address the Indian nationalist audience, and explain why they too should be supporting DOGE. The simple reason is that DOGE is defunding the Blue American Empire — and thereby destroying India's foreign and domestic enemies. Because defunding USAID means DOGE is defunding anti-national activists, Hinduphobic professors, far left journalists, Bangladeshi fundamentalists, and Pakistani terrorists. As just one example from 2023, here's a USAID-backed NGO linked to the Mumbai Massacre: This shouldn't be surprising. You already know that Blue Americans fund BLM and Antifa in the US, and terrorists and fundamentalists in the Middle East. Well, they back the equivalents in India. Until now. Because DOGE is essentially ending Blue American colonialism. Of course, DOGE is doing this for its own reasons, which include shattering blue power centers and saving money for Red Americans. But it is doing it. And this presents the greatest opportunity for India since the fall of the USSR. It is India's third independence moment: first from British colonialism, then from Fabian socialism, and now from Democrat-funded leftism. As we will see in the following weeks and months, India's Lutyens left cannot survive without Blue American backing. They're waiting for instructions from Democrats...and wires of printed money from the Fed...wires that will never come again. So the new center of discourse in India may be between the technocapitalist center and the Indian nationalist right, with some influence from the genuinely liberal center-left — but none from any Blue American pawns. We have to see the bigger picture. Internet comments aren't funding anti-Indian terrorists, but Western leftists sure are. Or were.

To be clear: Nandan Nilekhani is awesome, and he's done far more for India than any of us can imagine through Infosys, UPI, etc. But he's wrong on pushing Indians to ignore model training skills and just focus on building on top of existing models. Essential to do both.

In November I traveled to India. Met with government officials. Traveled the high Himalayas. Listened to Bengalore coders speak. Here I share what I learned. 🧵