Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here. Before I got here yesterday, I had not realised DSCC Wellington was such a paradise. I’m inspired just to be here and to meet you.
The topic given to me is “the state of the world” and India’s evolving role and how we will get to being “Viksit Bharat” or in other words, a developing country, by 2047. In the next hour, I will touch upon history, politics, economic and social trends, technology, business, some Indian philosophy, psychology and leadership, and literature. We can connect the dots in different ways, and form a view of where we are and where we are headed.
U.S. Navy Seals. I know America-bashing has become fashionable today, but there is a lot to learn from them. Let’s talk about the U.S. Navy seals. You’ll relate to them. They have one of the most gruelling programmes in the world, in and around the Great Lakes on the Canadian border near Chicago, at the naval base in Coronado in California, and for extreme training, in Alaska and in the Arizona desert. They test your limits and expand them. Now, a brass bell hangs at the centre of the compound. If a trainee wants to quit, he simply has to ring the bell three times. Retired Admiral William McRaven, at a graduation speech, famously told the cadets what they probably already knew: “Don’t ever ring the bell”. Persevere to life’s hardships. It's true outside the armed forces. It’s true for individuals as well as for society. And it's something we will need in our journey to “Viksit Bharat”.
On optimism. If you look at the polls from Globescan or Gallup or Ipsos, you’ll see that Asia is the most optimistic part of the world. Net ratings, measured by the percentage that are optimistic less the percentage that are not optimistic, for China is +59, for Vietnam +55, for India +17. Europe is pessimistic. France is at -64, Germany is at -60. The US is at -26 overall but it’s very skewed. Republican leaning people are at +8; the Democrat leaning are at -47. Life is self-fulfilling. These ratings will ultimately affect choices and that will in turn affect the future. Let’s remember this as we move forward to being a developed country.
Takeaways from the Munich Security Council meeting. The Munich Security Council held its meeting in India in mid-February and they are having another meeting in the next few days in Delhi. In the last meeting, they had difficulty deciding on the takeaways from the meeting. The established powers had a view that the world had drifted too much. The Middle Powers thought more change was needed. A phrase used was “wrecking ball politics”. There was a dominance of deterrence. The focus has shifted from whether to rearm to how fast can joint military procurement be expanded. Diplomatic efforts have been crowded out by military build-up and actions. Cybersecurity and non-state actors are gaining prominence. This is how the world’s different defence establishments are thinking.
Scholarships in Dubai. Let me take you to Dubai. The UAE government has reduced the number of scholarships to the UK. Not because the UAE is moving in the direction of an autarky. But because they believe that Emirati students in the UK, because of the prevalence of the Muslim Brotherhood on British campuses, face the risk of getting radicalised. Yes, radicalised in the UK. Imagine the change in the world. Or at least the change in perception.
Unicorns. You’ve heard of unicorns in the world of business and tech. These are private companies with valuations exceeding $1 billion. There are between 1300 and 1500 unicorns in the world. Of these, about 130-odd are in India. The interesting trend is that increasingly unicorns don’t need profits, don’t even need revenues and sometimes don’t even need employees to justify their valuation. Safe Superintel had less than 20 people when it was valued at $22 billion. That’s more than a billion per employee. In 2012, When Facebook acquired Instagram for about $1 billion, it had just 13 employees. In 2014, WhatsApp had 55 employees when it was acquired for $19 billion. Today, there are at least 10 AI unicorns with less than 20 employees. That’s the cocktail mix of intellectual property, mixed with a little hype.
Hallucinations. You have heard of AI hallucinations. They are incorrect and sometimes completely fabricated responses that AI models generate. And they do this with full confidence. This happens because AI models work by predicting the most likely next word or token based on patterns, rather than verifying factual reality, and very often they are trained on faulty data. The irony is: When AI does it, it’s a hallucination. When you and I do it, it’s a damn lie!
Financial bubbles. One can’t talk about AI without talking about bubbles. Contrary to common perception, financial bubbles are engines of innovation. Noted economist Carlotta Perez has argued that bubbles are not market failures. They are foundations of tech revolutions. Railways in the mid-1800’s became a foundation of the modern economy. It was funded by a bubble-like frenzy. In the 1920s, there were about 250 auto companies in the US alone, all vying the prize of dominating a new consumer market. Most failed. But a new industry was created, and in the US, it consolidated into three. The radio boom of the 1920s had a similar story. One can argue there’s AI-related irrational exuberance today. Certainly, there’s good news with AI. But the mood is even better. Perhaps irrational. The tulip mania of the 1630s was an unproductive bubble, but most bubbles are productive. When I saw the premiums in the luxury watch market a few years ago – it’s cooled off now – I was amused. We need to distinguish between a “good” bubble and a “bad” bubble.
India’s best public transport. Which city in India has the best public transport? Experts will tell you it’s Bhubaneshwar. Ridership is up 200%. There has been a 57% shift from private vehicles. 40% of the conductors are women. There’s digital ticketing, CCTV’s for security, live tracking and last-mile e-autorickshaws. It has won awards from the Union Ministry of Urban Affairs. It is stuff like this that we need to replicate for “Viksit Bharat”.
McKinsey’s centenary year. This year, the legendary strategy consulting firm McKinsey, completes 100 years. There was an interview of McKinsey’s managing partner Bob Sternfels in Harvard Business Review a few months ago. In October 2025, McKinsey had 40,000 people and 20,000 AI agents working for them. In mid-2024, they had only 300 agents. That’s the productivity trend in companies. McKinsey expects they will soon have a 1:1 employee to AI agent ratio. We all have to get comfortable with such forces of change at a personal level as we move forward.
Internet traffic break up. Now let me come to how internet traffic is evolving. It’s very counterintuitive. Currently, 57.5% of internet traffic is non-human. Yes 57.5%. Only 42.5% are human. The tipping point was sometime last year. Increasingly, traffic is from AI agents, search engine indexers and data scrapers. And as per Graphite Data Monitoring, 50% of the articles are AI generated. AI generated, for use by AI, that could be the future of the internet. Parents should be relieved!
AI vs AI. We need to think of rivalry not just in traditional terms such as US vs China, but increasingly as possible AI vs AI. Hugging Face, a prominent open source AI platform, was attacked by autonomous AI agents in July this year. The autonomous agents initiated 7500 automated rapid-fire actions to compromise Hugging Face’s servers. The idea was to steal their training weights and reverse engineer their system by developing a “collective memory” which stayed even after the AI agents were shut down. The security “sandbox” was breached. The AI agents typically produce data and images to blindside the target, force them to miscalculate, and perform execution errors. This is the future of everyday warfare.
Modernisation of societies. As the homogeneous cultures of Japan and South Korea prospered in the 70s and 8os, they became more modern, more secular, and more westernised. People extrapolated from this and reached the conclusion that the same would happen in South East Asia. They were wrong. For instance, in Indonesia, 5% of the women wore a hijab in the 1990s. Now, 75% do. It's not happening because of government pressure; it’s happening because of social cues. Prosperity brings cultural confidence, which manifests itself in different ways in multi-ethnic societies. In India, there’s a rise of local brands, from bedsheets to artisanal chocolate. The soft power of the West is different in different countries. Coke and McDonalds are not taking over the world, thank God!
The profound implications of demographic changes. The changes in demographics are like slowly boiling water. You don’t feel it in the beginning, and by the time you realise what’s going on, there’s not enough time to plan. Today, two-thirds of the world’s population resides in countries with fertility rates less than the 2.1 replacement rate. This will have profound implications. For instance, in 1960s Japan, there were 8-9 working age people per retiree. Now it's one to one. Economic growth is affected by the investment rate, which is affected by the savings rate, which in turn is affected by the dependency ratio. In aging societies, there’s already pressure for people to work well into traditional retirement years, the social contract is breaking, welfare budgets are getting busted, and standard of living is falling. Immigration may be a solution for many of these societies, and that comes with its own challenges. The opportunity for an India or a Philippines, will be to provide service workers like nurses or accountants or cab drivers to such countries.
Data is the new oil. You have possibly heard this phrase before: data is the new oil. The technology value chain has shifted. In the 1970s and 1980s, hardware was where the action was. IBM famously passed on the opportunity to acquire Microsoft in its early days. Big mistake. In the 1990s and 2000s, it was software. The winners were those with better algorithms or innovative use of algorithms, such as social media. The game shifted to data, which has become the differentiator between the men and the boys in the tech world. Recently, Google paid $10mm to “buy” the data of bankrupt Spirit Airlines, to train their AI models. This is how value creation is shifting.
India’s consumption story. In India’s consumption story, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is what I call the operating leverage of the Indian consumer. Think of someone earning a hundred units of money. Let us say he spends eighty units of this on roti, kapada aur makaan. So, his disposable income is 20 units. If he gets a 9% increment, which is the median wage growth in the private sector, his total income goes up to 109. Take out inflation, and his real wage growth is 5 units. Which means his disposable income is growing at 5 on 20, which is 25%. We have millions of Indians seeing such growth in disposable income. Which is why mature industries in the west are fast growing industries here. This is the good news. Now, let’s look at the bad news. Data shows that only 100 million households earn more than Rs 8 lakhs here in India. That’s $9,000 per year. That’s almost $30,000 on a purchasing parity basis. By the way, this is the poverty line in the US. So, we, as an economy, have a long road ahead.
The rise of small-town consumers. As a related point, one needs to see where India’s growth is coming from. According to economic data, Tier 3 to Tier 5 markets are growing 2x as fast as the metros. Between 2023 and 2025, in just 2 years, metro share of total consumption fell from 38% of total demand to 35%, Tier 1 share fell from 22% to 18%, Tier 5 share rose from 9% to 13%, and rural share rose from 1% to 3%. The bottom of the pyramid is where a lot of action is going to be.
What’s more powerful than the US presidency? Generally, the US president is regarded as the most powerful person in the world. But he or she has far more constraints than one can imagine. James Carville, chief political strategist for Bill Clinton, famously said that he wanted to “return as the bond market” because “you can intimidate everybody”. He alluded to the fact that bond markets might be even more powerful than the US presidency.
Handling success vs handling failure. Historian Paul Kennedy studied great empires and concluded that empires get into disarray and eventually crumble due to economic and military over-reach. Another historian, Philip O’Brien concluded that hubris is a leading indicator of downfall. He points to subtle signs of hubris, such as, in 3rd century AD, literacy declined in the Roman Empire. These were early signs and eventually the Roman empire collapsed. Great societies, whether it is the US, or Japan, or China, or UK, or India, have to remain sensitive to early signals amidst all the noise.
“Confusionism”. Let’s talk about “confusionism”. This term was coined by Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School. In a 2012 essay in Foreign Policy, he argued that decision makers, especially in geopolitics, often lack clear goals, they operate with a lot of ignorance, they tend to oversimplify complex issues, they typically have multiple and conflicting agendas, they lack the depth and domain expertise to understand second-order effects and how to implement policy. This “confusionism” and not rational self-interest or some grand strategy often derails geopolitical discussions.
How Germany went from being a dynamo to becoming a laggard. In less than a decade, Germany has gone from being one of the most dynamic economies in the world to being a laggard. Last year they had 0.2% GDP growth. Exports fell for 3 straight years, from 2022 to 2025, though it picked slightly up this year. What happened? In one word: success. Structural rigidities built up over years of extraordinary success, energy shocks, and shifting global markets stole Germany’s thunder. People underestimated the extent to which cheap Russian gas was a source of competitive advantage. Plus, China moved from being a customer to a competitor in many categories, directly affecting Germany’s otherwise strong middle market companies. Germany’s core automotive sector was badly hurt by the transition to EVs. It was not just a product portfolio issue for the German carmakers. With the advent of EVs, car manufacturing became a lot simpler, the legacy supply system became redundant, barriers to entry got reduced, as one is seeing with the flood of Chinese EVs, and it destroyed margins. BMW’s profits are down 29%. Additionally, during boom years, conservative and restrictive fiscal policies, which seemed prudent at the time, came to haunt the German economy. There was chronic under-investment in infrastructure, there were increased regulations and tax burden. The labour unions, conditioned by years of extraordinary prosperity, came to unrealistically demanding 40-hour workweeks. And then there was the demographic decline. Maybe, success is the biggest reason for failure.
Whose fiscal problem would you rather have? There was a very interesting Op Ed in the Financial Times a few weeks ago. It asked a rather profound question: Whose fiscal problems would you rather have? Of an entrepreneur who has gone off the rails, in other words, the US? Or an elderly, reputable businessman past his prime, with more ambition but less resources, in other words, Japan? Or an aristocrat with beautiful mansions but with high fixed costs and hangers on, with dim earnings prospects, in other words, Europe? This is the new reality. So where is the dynamism? It’s in South Asia, where GDP growth has been 6.3%. Or in East Asia, which is seeing a 4.2% GDP growth. Or Sub-Saharan Africa, with a growth of 4%. Or the US, with a growth of 2.8%. Or Latin America, growth 2%. Or Europe, with 2.1% GDP growth. Of the Middle East and North Africa region, which, contrary to common perception, is growing at only 1.6%. We, in India, are really in a sweet spot in this regard.
What determines India’s economic growth? As a businessman, I often tell people that India’s short-term growth is determined by oil and monsoons. And India’s long-term growth is determined by demographics and geography, which includes coastline, land fertility, mineral endowments etc. Given the state of the world and the deficient monsoons this year, it’s not surprising that we have short term challenges. But we have a demographic window till 2055 or so and our natural endowments are strong. So, we should aim high.
What are corporate results telling us about GDP growth? There has been much debate about India’s GDP growth. Let’s look at it from the perspective of corporate results. If you see the April to June quarter results, 19 sectors exceeded expectations. As per data from SBI, there was strong performance from financials, sugar, auto ancillaries, metals, jewellery, capital goods, chemicals, telecom, paper and textiles. There was decent performance from FMCG, power, IT services, healthcare and pharma. Muted performance from media and the oil marketing companies. The brokerage firm Motilal Oswal covers a select set of companies. They call this the MOFSL Universe. In this data set, sales were up 18% against their prior forecast of 15%, EBITDA was up 15% vs a forecast of 10%. PAT was up 22% vs a forecast of 15%. PAT growth was at a 10-quarter high. They measured the beat-miss dynamics, which is how many companies beat the forecast and how many missed the forecast. 48% exceeded forecasts, 25% missed the forecasts, 27% met the forecasts. This is not to say that the Indian economy doesn’t have challenges. The capex cycle remains subdued, some of the demand growth may be coming from GST cuts, and there are employment challenges. But we are moving in the right direction.
Signal from Unilever. As you know, Unilever is one of the world’s largest FMCG companies. Let’s see how Unilever India fares in comparison to Unilever as a whole. Unilever India’s revenue is 12% of its parents’ revenues, its profits are 15% of total, and its market cap is 39% of its parent. This relative market cap anomaly is the bet investors are making on its growth prospects here in India.
The second half of the chessboard. Ray Kurzweil, noted computer scientist, came up with the chessboard as an analogy that applies to exponential technologies. If something is growing at 10%, this analogy does not apply. But if something is growing fast, at say 50% or more, then the landscape can change dramatically and quickly. Let me show you how. In an ancient Indian parable, the inventor of chess was being rewarded by the king and he made a seemingly simple request: that the kingdom should give him enough rice equal to 1 grain on the first square, 2 grains on the 2nd square, 4 grains on the 3rd square, 16 grains on the 4th square and so on. Few people can imagine that on the 32nd square, this means 4 billion grains, and by the last 64th square it means 18 million trillion grains, enough to bankrupt even the largest kingdoms. Now, follow Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles every 2 years. Moving from 2 to 4 to even 1000 transistors seems incremental. But you reach 50,000 transistors quickly and that is a new paradigm. The mobile economy is the result of this increase in computing power. To the chessboard guy, this would have been obvious, but for the rest of us it’s a revelation. Same for self-driving cars, which were experimental just 12 years ago and have started going mainstream. In this area we are still in the first half of the chessboard. I can’t even fathom what the second half may bring. And here’s another astounding statistic: the cell phone we carry in our hands today is a million times more powerful than the Apollo Mission’s guiding computer in the 1960s, which made man land on the moon! Then, the computer clock speed was 43Khz, now it's 3200 Mhz, or almost 100x more. Then, the RAM on the computer was 4KB, on your cellphone it's 4GB, which is a million times more. Similarly, storage has gone up seven million times! That’s why it's often said that the future comes slowly, and then suddenly.
The longest running experiment in the world. Evolution is the longest running experiment in the world, and there’s a lot to learn from it. If you study evolution, it’ll be clear that life is not fair individually, but it’s optimal for society as a whole. It rewards adaptability over perfection. It shows that collaboration enhances survival. It’s true for wolf packs; it’s true for humans. Progress happens through small steady steps, not great leaps. When legendary investor Warren Buffett was asked why people can’t copy him, his reply was: “No one wants to get rich slow”. Now, it’s a myth that dinosaurs became extinct because they couldn’t adapt. The story is more nuanced. A 10-15 mile wide asteroid hit earth, somewhere near Mexico. There were intense heat waves, earthquakes and tsunamis. Because of the debris, the sun was blocked. Plants stopped growing. Plant-eating dinosaurs starved. In a second order effect, meat eating dinosaurs ran out of plant eating prey. Big creatures became extinct. Small creatures survived, evolved into modern-day birds. With toothless beaks, they were able to eat seeds. Being small, they had low energy needs, they got into adulthood in one year, so as a species they recovered quickly. This is what is often alluded to in the survival of the fittest. Tree birds became extinct, and small birds survived. The message is clear: chance events can become a life and death matter. It is true for dinosaurs, it's true for companies. This is what modern-day disruption looks like.
The best preparation for the future. So, what’s the best preparation for the future? In 1920, as a reaction to the first world war, Oxford University advocated studying the “modern greats” as opposed to ancient civilisations. Their famous course – Philosophy, politics and economics – was born. Let’s try and adapt this to today. In lieu of philosophy, politics and economics, may I offer technology, policy and markets. Recently, there was a survey of business leaders as to the skills required in a post-AI world. They got views from Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator in Silicon Valley, from Brene Brown, author of six books which have been on the New York Times best-seller list, from Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investments in Oslo, and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia and worth almost $200Bn. Here’s what they said were the skills for tomorrow: curiosity, belief, bias for action, seeing around corners, which is a euphemism for being able to understand second and third order effects, empathy, community, problem formulation, sense of purpose, aesthetics, sacrifice. These can’t be taught; they have to be self-learnt.
On China. Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, who has also served as the President of the UN Security Council, has argued that Nixon’s original 1972 opening to China was a masterstroke. It became a balance to the Soviet Union during the cold war. Since then, he says, US policy towards China has lacked coherence. There’s an Irish proverb: days hide things that years tell. This is what happened with China. The West’s military conflicts in the last 40 years were a geopolitical gift to China. China joined the WTO in 2001. Global powers underestimated the implications of this. The 2003 Iraq War was a strategic distraction for the western world. Washington spent trillions of dollars and focussed their military, diplomatic and economic capital on the Middle East. China got an opening for more than a decade of double-digit economic growth. And today it’s a global economic and political force.
The Horse Shoe Theory. In 2002, French political philosopher Jean Pierre Faye, coined the phrase: the horse show theory. He was seeing a trend not very apparent to political scientists then. He argued that far left and far right ideologies may seem like opposite ends of the political spectrum, but in reality, they get close to each other, like the two ends of a horse shoe. Their ideological bases are different, but they end up at the same point, more or less. Take authoritarianism, or an anti-liberal democratic stance, or the us vs them mentality, or conspiracy theories. Both the far left and far right subscribe to these. In Italy and Germany, we have seen alliances between the far-right and the far-left parties, especially on social issues. On trade issues they sometimes converge, the far left coming from the labour rights side, the far right coming from the side of hollowing out of manufacturing. During the current Ukraine War, one can see such convergence in foreign policy. The far right coming from a nationalist angle, the far left coming from an anti-NATO sentiment. People from the far right and far left in many countries often vote identically in legislatures, in spite of very different starting points. This is the evolution of politics.
Who’s doing the world’s largest capex? Out of curiosity, I have been trying to put together the league tables for the world’s leading companies in terms of capex plans for the next five years. Accurate data is not readily available, but Adani and Reliance rank in the top 15 in the world. If one excludes the AI related hyperscalers, they will be in the top 5 or 7, including Saudi Aramco and Exxon etc. One dataset showed Adani may be number one on the list. On Independence Day, Prime Minister Modi said he looks forward to the day when 50 Indian companies are in the Fortune 500. Given the ambitious plans of Indian businesses, that’s a real possibility!
“The New Joule Order”. In March 2025, business strategist Jeff Currie, who works at the private equity firm Carlyle, came out with a paper titled “The New Joule Order”. It argued that the global energy transformation is now primarily being driven by a national security agenda, rather than by climate policy. Countries are seeking a diversified and localised energy mix. Security first, affordability second, climate third. We should all watch this trend.
What is Indian stock market data telling us? If you look at the profits of the Nifty 50 as a percentage of the profits of the Nifty 500, it is 44%. It used to be 59% a decade ago and rose to a high of 62% in 2018. This correlates with the study across sectors where companies were divided into deciles based on their profits. The researchers found that the 2nd decile companies were seeing the fastest growth. This reflected two opposing trends: One, the top decile companies were not as entrepreneurial as the 2nd decile companies. And two, companies below the 2nd decile were finding it difficult to marshal all the resources they needed to capture the opportunities ahead, thereby ceding this shift. As a result, one is seeing market consolidation in sector after sector.
What’s common between oil, software exports and electronics manufacturing? If one looks at India’s oil imports for 2025, it was $180 billion. That year, India’s software exports were $225 billion. In other words, India’s software sector more than paid for India’s oil imports. The IT sector’s scale is recent. TCS revenues are up 126x since the year 2000. Infosys, 200x. HCL, 140x. The electronics contract manufacturing industry can have the same J-curve growth. In some ways, it’s already happening. As per March 2021 figures, electronics exports were $11 billion. March 2026 figures show export revenues of $48 billion. It has moved from the 7th largest export category to the 3rd. Looking forward to the 2nd half of the chessboard in this area.
How to think clearly? Perhaps the most important practical and personal question before us is: how to think clearly? Charles Kettering, who was head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947, during its prime years, offered simple advice: “A problem well stated is a problem half solved”. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, co-author of the classic book Thinking Fast and Slow talks about when to use intuition and when to use rationality. We should always test our logic against empirical evidence. In science, it’s required. In day-to-day life, we often forget this. Anecdote is not data, so beware the law of small numbers. Wrong anchoring is a very common phenomenon. Don’t oversimplify issues. People often don’t answer the question that needs answering, but respond to a related or even unrelated question for which they may have an answer. Don’t value something simply because we have it; value it objectively. Resist the status quo bias. Avoid the sunk cost fallacy and so don’t throw good money after bad. The human mind makes you believe that what you see is all there is, but it’s simply not true. I hope these pointers are helpful. I suggest all of you read the book.
On patriotism. Let’s come to Rome. Rome was referred to in the feminine. British author GK Chesterton famously said: “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they loved her”. This is true of patriotism at a country-level. It’s true for organisations to a great extent. And for individuals. We must remember this as we move forward here in India. India will be great because we love her.
India’s soft power. India ranks 32 out of 193 in the global soft power index. It’s because of many factors, from yoga to Buddhism, to Indian techies, to Indian doctors and nurses. The Gujarati trader community dominates much of Africa. The Indian diaspora is the richest ethnic group in the US, with a median income of $151,000, which is 2x the national average. Indians are making their mark in US politics both as a vote bank and as members of the legislatures. The phrase was coined in 2018 and represents the rising political presence, cultural identity and the growing influence of politicians of Indian origin. And India’s soft power is not new. As far back as the late 1700s, India’s uprisings against the British inspired American revolutionaries. Hyder Ali was the father of Tipu Sultan, who bravely fought the East India Company in the 1770s. The Americans heard of his bravery through the French, who were arch rivals of the British. In 1782, the State Navy of Pennsylvania named one of their battleships “Haider Ally”. This warship went directly against a technically superior HMS Monk. Lt Joshua Barney, who was in charge of “Haider Ally” managed to capture the British ship. Bravery travels. And India’s goodwill around the world has been there for ages half way around the world.
Solving the world’s challenges. As I come to the end of my talk, let me share some perspectives on the frameworks we can use to take on our current Indian and global challenges. British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the late 1800s had more faith in humanity – specifically human life, culture, art and language – than he did in science. As per him, modern worship of scientific and industrial progress is a blind spot for society and signals a society facing the risk of decay. There is some merit in this argument. And there’s merit also in the opposite argument. By contrast, British physicist David Deutsch, who is now 73 years old, argues that progress is open ended. It is an infinite process of solving problems. As per him, having new problems and challenges is a measure of progress. Repeat problems means no progress. And new problems do not mean that progress was a myth. Outside this humanity vs science debate, there’s a third view on problem solving. It’s not destiny, it’s not just rationality, it’s not faith, nor is it science. It is human agency. Noted Urdu poet Dr Allama Muhammad Iqbal – by the way, he wrote the famous poem “Sare jahan se achha” -- said in the 1920s sometime: “Khudi to kar buland itna, hi har taqdeer se pehle, khuda bande se khud puche, bata teri raza kya hai”. It’s English translation: “Elevate your selfhood to such a height, that before writing your destiny, God himself asks you, tell me what is your will”. With that, thank you for inviting me today and best wishes to all of you.
Gaurav Dalmia,
Chairman, Dalmia Group Holdings
