WORLDLY PEOPLE

IN A YEAR WHEN INDIA BECAME OFFICIALLY the most populous nation on the planet ever, it’s perhaps less surprising to see so many of our tribe running the show elsewhere in the world. And were the definition of ‘Indian origin’ expanded to include akhand Bharat, well, we saw the crowing memes about England, Scotland and London having desis in charge. Hmm…why not Wales, given that they already have an Indian accent? That said, the Indian conquest of the Anglosphere has been in progress for some time now. Seven of the ten in this category have been sitting pretty at the top since the last iteration of the High & Mighty list, although the order has changed somewhat. Rishi Sunak was just the well-liked Chancellor of the Exchequer back in 2021. He has since shown the raw ambition and guile necessary to rule the island nation for the past seven months. No wonder he has snatched top spot from Kamala Harris, whose term as America’s Veep has been uneventful by comparison. It’s worth remarking that unlike the others on this list (with one exception) Sunak and Harris are also the only foreign-born Global Indians here. A sign, perhaps, that the geography of birth is rather more crucial for a political career than other fields of achievement. The rest of this Indian-born cohort have gone on to storm the bastions of international rich lists, academia, finance and industry, Hollywood and, of course, Silicon Valley. There was a time when India bemoaned the ‘brain-drain’. Yet, while there’s no indication that the exodus of well-qualified Indians has attenuated—quite the contrary—globalisation has paradoxically assuaged our fears that Global Indians are lost to us.