Meenakshi Ahamed’s new book ‘Indian Genius: The Meteoric Rise of Indians in America’ (HarperCollins) has a striking omission. Indra Nooyi, the first Indian woman to head a global conglomerate, is not featured.
Ahamed, while talking to THE WEEK, has an explanation for it, taking off on her whole idea of what constitutes ‘genius’ (beyond the obvious making all the moolah).
“Nooyi is very smart; she goes from Boston Consulting to Pepsi and rises through the ranks. Very traditional route.” Ahamed, instead, throws the spotlight on Nooyi’s much lesser known sister Chandrika, who went to the US to work in Citibank, gets recruited by McKinsey, then sets up her own company that virtually becomes the go-to for financial institutions on restructuring, and then does the unthinkable—gives it all up to become a musician.
And no ordinary musician at that. This year’s Grammy nominations list includes her name; it is the second time she has been nominated!
“For me, that was genius, you know, because you’re taking a risk, and not just that, she’s hitting the top at each vocation she pursues!,” gushes Ahamed.
“A lot of people know Indra Nooyi because Pepsi is a Fortune 500 company and people make a big deal (about it), but I wanted to make sure people know of her sister’s story because it is so much more interesting. It’s quite fascinating!”
The rise of Indian Americans itself has been quite fascinating in recent years, with news of yet another Indian ascending to the top of global companies coming in at regular intervals in the past few years. While Ahamed’s book features quite an array of the suits, from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, it is not a veritable list of the desi billionaire boys club. The book maintains Ahamed’s idea of genius being someone who has had the ability to transform, not just success measured by the tonnes of money you mint.
Hence, while Nooyi and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google are missing, she dwells intensely on lesser-known Indian Americans like Atul Gawande, whose ‘The Checklist Manifesto’ helped reduce hospital/surgical infections drastically across the US health sector, as well as Neal Katyal, a lawyer who we’re likely to hear a lot more as Trump II proceeds.
“Gawande’s book ‘The Checklist Manifesto’ changed an entire industry by bringing down infection rates in hospitals by 60%. That to me was genius—to be so transformational that you are impacting an entire industry or generation,” says Ahamed.
Her criteria get stricter. “Lightning always strikes more than once in this case. Can they do it again?” she asks.
In the case of many of the geniuses featured in the book, that seems to be the case. Gawande, for instance, returned with another book ‘Being Mortal’ which dealt with dying in what Ahamed calls ‘An Indian approach to dying, dying with dignity, focusing on what the patient wants beyond the American focus on trying more tests and medication and treatment.”
“He changed the thinking of the medical community (about dying) with that book,” she said, “It’s all about being transformational.” There are reasons why Nadella makes it (Microsoft had plateaued, Nadella took it to a whole new level after Bill Gates, transforming it) while Pichai doesn’t.
So, is there a secret chutney that Indians have to get to be so successful in the land of Uncle Sam-turned-Sameer?
“It’s a good thing to study why these people have achieved what they have achieved because there are some lessons in there for us,” Ahamed says and proceeds with her theory.
“One of the things about India is that when you live in a country with 1.5 billion people, everything is competitive. From day one, you’re competing for everything from a gas connection to a train ticket. To get into an IIT, to get into any kind of job, or just to get into civil service, the IAS, or whatever—the number of people applying for every seat is mind-boggling. So, it’s a very competitive environment.
And so people grow up feeling this crush to compete, which I don’t think necessarily exists in other societies to the same degree. Maybe in China, but not so much in the West. And so, in some ways, you can say that Indians who come there, especially the ones who came after 2000, have a slight competitive advantage in the sense that they’re born to compete. It comes naturally to them.
They (also) have higher education levels. Indians have reached quite far in a very short space of time. And maybe being competitive is part of that.”
