https://www.dhakatribune.com/opinion/op-ed/2021/12/03/the-unicorn-indian-ceo
Non-stop hoopla rages in the Indian media after Jack Dorsey, the enigmatic founder-CEO of Twitter, announced on November 29 that he was stepping down on that same day, and his replacement would be 37-year-old Parag Agrawal. Just minutes later, Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe (another vaunted technology company) tweeted: “Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up in India. Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants.” To that, the poster boy of 21st century techno-plutocrats, Elon Musk quickly added: “USA benefits greatly from Indian talent!” Those comments triggered fireworks of virtual jubilation from Mumbai to Mountain View. Even now, 75 years after decolonization, nothing flexes the Indian chest more than approval from the West, no matter how condescending. Here, Musk follows -- albeit slightly more palatably -- in the vein of Bill Gates, who told reporters on his first tour of India in 1997 that “South Indians are the second-smartest people on the planet.” As Vijay Prashad puts it in his landmark 2000 book *The Karma of Brown Folk*: “For those who are guessing, he rated the Chinese as the smartest; those who continue to guess should note that white people, like Gates, do not get classified, since it is the white gaze, in this incarnation, that is transcendental and able to do the classifying. The generic assumption in these statements is that Asians (in general) and South Asians (in particular) are especially endowed with an ability to be technically astute workers.” Prashad points out: “The implication is that the high proportion of Asians in the technical fields says something about Asians’ nature rather than about their recent cultural history. No explanation is offered for the poverty in the subcontinent, poverty that cannot be overcome despite the inhabitants’ “genetic brilliance.”" In fact, there are several parallel phenomena at work in the undeniably spectacular storming of the highest levels of American (and to a much lesser extent, UK-based) corporate hierarchies by waves of Indian immigrants. In her 2020 analysis for CNN ( https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/02/perspectives/indian-ceo-perspectives/index.html) entitled *9 Reasons the Indian CEO keeps coming to the rescue*, the veteran journalist, author and media executive S Mitra Kalita did an excellent job of outlining some of those convergent reasons, saying “there is a risk of reading into one group's success as a case of Indian exceptionalism, which I truly do not believe. Rather, a series of external factors have contributed to the rise of the Indian CEO, which says more about the state of corporate America, a globalized workplace, technological disruption and the leaders who might prevail.” Kalita’s article notes that almost all the new Indian CEOs come from heavily quantitative engineering backgrounds which gives them exceptional “data intelligence.” But she also looks at traits that derive from growing up in the highly diverse, endlessly competitive subcontinent, in a country that doesn’t always work efficiently, such as “crafting a Plan B (in case no water comes out).” When I emailed her after the Twitter announcement, Kalita elaborated: “We are in uncertain times. But who better than the immigrant to know that there was a life before, and there will be a life after, but the in between must be about purpose and re-invention. That's the journey of corporate America right now. Anyone who craves stability or takes global dominance for granted probably can't and shouldn't be leading a company. Indians know how to follow the rules, but also have an uncanny ability to know when to divert or disrupt to achieve results.” There was also a note of caution. Kalita told me: “Remember that the Indians who came to America are the best and the brightest, and, recently, increasingly, the richest. Just look at an international student's tuition bill for proof. So we need to be cautious of assigning some sense of superiority to the success of a relatively small (but significant) number without accounting for privilege and power.” This is entirely on point, and why the burgeoning desi corner-office cohort is much better understood in the way that venture capitalists think about start-up companies that survive almost impossible statistical odds to achieve billion-dollar valuations. It was the angel investor Aileen Lee who coined it, in the Silicon Valley staple TechCrunch in 2013, when there were only 39 (now there are over 800). Parag Agrawal is a unicorn. Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Arvind Krishna: They are all unicorns. It takes a nation of 1.3 billion to produce a small stable of them, and it’s absurd to get triumphalist about their successes. Nonetheless, that is what is happening in India, when even the notorious crony-capitalist Gautam Adani (who is India’s second-richest man) tweeted with conspicuous lack of irony that Agrawal’s ascendance was “another great moment for India's depth of talent and USA's meritocracy system.” To ask what he thought of all this, I wrote to Aakar Patel, the acerbic journalist, columnist, and former executive director of Amnesty International India, who runs one of my favourite Twitter accounts (@Aakar_Patel). Patel told me, “There’s no depth of talent in India. Quite the opposite. 50% of Class 8 students cannot do division. 50% of Class 5 students cannot read a Class 2 text. A third of India’s children suffer from severe malnutrition, and cannot hope to live a fulfilling intellectual or physical life. Agarwal and other tech CEOs represent a very thin elite sliver.” Looking at the layers of attrition that go into the making of someone like the new Twitter CEO, Patel said, “These are men who went to the [hyper-selective] Indian Institutes of Technology but then do not pursue engineering. IIT acts as a sort of filter. They then usually do their MBA at the Indian Institutes of Management and get into general management, thus hampering the engineering field. Of course, they come from a privilege that they (as also Adani) are usually unaware of and have schooling, access and opportunities that the rest can only dream of.”