Heading to India

Discovering the illusion of uniqueness

The night before I flew one-way to India, I lay awake in my childhood bed, wondering if I was making a terrible mistake. All my friends from college were joining brand-name companies with nicely sized salaries. They were going to McKinsey where they would make $80K their first year out of college. Or Goldman, where they’d make north of $120K after bonuses. They had safe, established career paths in front of them. The fear of uncertainty was dramatically reduced.

I was stepping into the unknown. I was going to Asia as a reporter, making $40K, with no real prospects to make much more in the near future. Sure, I was working for a brand-name newspaper, but it’s the kind of name that raises eyebrows at dinner parties, not opens doors to great career paths. To many, it’s still a good job. I knew many people would have killed for it. But for a kid coming from Stanford, looking around at his classmates, it was a risky gamble.

The moment I got on that plane the next day, I knew I’d stepped off the beaten path. I feel like I’d been living for years on that path, always peering into the woods around me, wondering what was really there. I’d been told lots of things about how the world worked, but I’d never actually seen it. I’d taken all the stories at face value, and I’d built a life on them.

Something was pulling me to go find out, to see for myself, to measure up their stories against the real thing.

My family is from India – both my parents were born there – but aside from a trip there when I was 5, that I barely remember, I’d never really been there. To me, it was the land of ancient rituals, a people engaged in the ritualistic life of being good and dutiful. Because I thought of it as an extension of my family, and the Indian community I’d grown up with. The Indian community in America is largely professional, white-collar, upper middle class. They follow the rules; they work within the system to achieve the same goals – wealth, and stability. Their kids all go to college, and many go to the same dozen schools. They become doctors, lawyers, and engineers. That’s the joke, because it’s true.

In a word, growing up Indian in America is boring. A life stripped of unpredictability and adventure. Especially if you grew up like I did, in a family that doesn’t drink, doesn’t eat meat, and is risk-averse to the point of paranoia.

This is what I thought India must be too. Boring. Full of obligated family events, where nothing of interest happens and everyone acts the same. A bunch of large banquet halls with your aunties and uncles ready to judge you if you even think of doing anything out of the normal. Like becoming a writer.

Of course, there’s a large part of India that is more like that. Risk-averse. Conservative. Boring. It’s the same strata that, like here, go to the best schools, live their lives aiming at external goals. They were brought here as kids to do nothing but what is expected from them. This is the same strata that emigrated to the US when it opened up merit-based immigration from Asia in the 1960s. They became the community I grew up in. My family. My parents.

I had no idea that there is a whole different India that also exists, one that diverges far, far away from this strata of high-achieving conformists, that was as chaotic and insane as this one was orderly and predictable. I thought India was a land of conformity; I didn’t realize it was anything but.

When I got on that plane to go live in India indefinitely, to go find out what this other world was all about, I felt like I was leaving this house, and all the people who lived in it. They were telling me not to go, that the world outside was scary and dangerous, and full of uncivilized people, and to just stay inside, where it was nice and clean, and safe. But I had to go. I had to know the truth.

I ended up spending nearly 5 years out there. Five years is a long time. Long enough to change a man. Long enough to never be able to go back to the person I used to be. It changed me permanently, forever. I can never forget what I saw. And I didn’t expect to find what I did, and what I did changed the way I look at everything. It’s the reason, ultimately, that I’m writing this book.

What I learned out there is that the stories we’ve been told about the way the world works, and should work, are a lie.

It was probably my 3rd or 4th year in India. I was sitting in my friend’s apartment in New Delhi. White walls, brightly lit, well-furnished. In his living room, on the armchair facing the 3-seater couch. There was a girl on that couch who I was trying to talk to. She was cute. An Indian American expat come home to experience the motherland. Like me.

By that point, I’d met hundreds of people like her already. Everywhere I went, they seemed to be there. Highly educated at premier universities, hugely ambitious, and intensely, righteously moralistic. They oozed a condescending sheen, as if they had discovered some secret, as if they were so special for what they were doing, because they were right, while everyone else was wrong.

I don’t know what was different this time, but in that moment, in that fancy living room in a rich suburb of a capital of New Delhi, surrounded by people of a certain class rubbing shoulders with their own, some flash of inspiration hit me. A revelation of sorts.

We weren’t special. This scene wasn’t unique. This party, with all its exclusive airs wasn’t all that different. At that moment, there were probably hundreds of similar parties, in similar settings, in similar cities, with very similar people around the world. We were all there championing how uniquely gifted we were —how intelligent, how charismatic, how well-traveled — but the joke was on us. We weren’t special at all. We were just part of a nebulous network of eerily similar people, all doing the same dance all over the world.

I tried to share my revelation with the girl on the couch, but she didn’t get it. She thought I was making fun of her. In a way, I guess I was.

The realization that dawned on me that instant was one that changed my life. My entire life, I’d been living under the fantasy that I was part of a special club, a unique group of people who actually did the stuff you were supposed to do, unlike all the lazy bums out there. And that made us strong and successful and personable. We were the few at the top of the world, because we had climbed up there, of our own grit and talent and hard work!

But that moment, in the vision of thousands of living rooms with their own social milieu, their own brands of whiskey, their own manners of behavior and smug self-satisfaction, I finally saw something else. I saw an elite of people scattered across the world, all surprisingly similar to each other, with the same ways of talking and striding and sitting and persuading each other that they were the real hot sh*t.

That moment, I glimpsed the reality of a transnational, global elite that makes a disproportionate amount of the decisions that influence the world. Safely ensconced in their jobs at banks and consulting companies and newspapers and TV channels, government agencies, international financial institutions, non-profits, and tech companies, in London and New York and Tokyo and Dubai and Frankfurt and Beijing and Doha, scattered all over the world. Like a few crystals of spice distributed through a dish, they go ahead through the levers of power, run the world. Their tools of power are Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, which crank the huge decision-making gears of the world’s most powerful institutions.

Institutions like the World Bank, Google, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, the State Department, the New York Times — they are filled with people like this. An urban, professional, upwardly mobile class that sacrifices everything, molds themselves entirely to the chase of success. The mold they all wrap themselves around, no matter the language they speak or what country they’re from, is basically the same. Do well academically as a student, play the games to get a good job, and keep playing those games to raise up through their career.

They — no matter where they are — they are more similar to each other than to people on the other side of the globe who they were never near — their high school neighbors, the general populace from whom they are always a good deal removed, almost as if they’re saying all the time “I’m not really one of you, my people. I’m really one of them.”

That’s not to say that there aren’t large differences between people in this social layer, but the differences are largely superficial, compared to the deeper differences with common people. Some drink, others don’t drink it at all. Some care more about money, others about “impact.” Both are just trying to feel better about themselves. They are trying to fill that endless pit within them, the one that demands they prove why they think they cry, over and over again, because at some point early on, they made the mistake of believing they were special, and now it’s the curse that shapes their lives.

There is a very good reason that this particular professional/global elite exists, why around the world the one the channels and mechanisms and incentives to produce them generation after generation. The world’s most powerful organizations are comprised of them, who willingly offer themselves as cogs in the global machine.

In an age of easy money being printed by governments around the world, there is no conspiracy to figure out how it will get distributed. There didn’t need to be a meeting between a few top honchos saying “First you’ll print it. Then I’ll hoard it, and give it out only to you other guys.” And you used to get rich with your decades of skill, lodges and private jets. No one needed to say that, because the culture they grew up with said it for them.

It told them that they are custodians of the world with immense powers that they’ve earned through their natural intelligence and talents. Under such hubs of printing money, it’s the natural thing to do, and the world seems strapped for it. Distributing it to a few programs and institutions with the pedigree to be trusted seems like common sense, in this worldview. And the rich getting richer as a result follows naturally. The people in those institutions and closest to them are there because they deserve to be there. Once you believe that the system works, that the mechanisms have to separate the winners from the losers is fair, everything else becomes common sense. You don’t need a meeting to coordinate how everything is going to work together, because everyone you need to work with believes this already.