This is India's future. Politicians will execute scams openly and hire India's "demographic dividend" in large numbers to threaten common folks who dare talk about corruption.
Indian billionaires are not failed Elon Musks. They are successful lala-dhandho operators.
Their genius is not in building rockets, robots or AI labs. It is in figuring out how to sit between the state, the consumer and the supply chain, then extract rent from all three.
Buy low, Sell high. Capture a protected market and create a monopoly, then use monopoly profits to fund political party you want favours from. Then you keep winning lucrative tenders. Or otherwise just import in bulk from Alibaba and slap a Made in India sticker, preferably with tricolour packaging. Sell it to nationalism paglus at premium pricing.
If that fails, launch some fake ayurvedic concoction claiming to cure every disease known to man and call it civilizational wisdom.
This is the lala-dhandho complex.
Frontier R&D requires patience, technical obsession and appetite for uncertainty. Leave that to the goras and chinis.
Indians still have an outdated 1990s era stereotype that East Asian-looking people are short and unimposing.
Meanwhile, the average 19-year-old Chinese male is now 175.7 cm. The average Indian male of the same age is 166.5 cm.
For women, it is 163.5 cm in China versus 155.2 cm in India.
So young Chinese men are now about 9.2 cm taller than young Indian men, and young Chinese women are about 8.3 cm taller than young Indian women.
This is what decades of better nutrition, childhood health and rising living standards can achieve.
Meanwhile, in India we are still debating eggs in mid-day meals.