Finding their American Dream 

Well, I am not, because I believe that intelligence is not endemic to any race or country. I believe that it is spread uniformly among all the people in the world, regardless of race, community, caste, religion, language and ethnicity.

And so, if a dozen of the top CEOs in the world come from a country with 18% of the world’s population, why would I be surprised? In fact, on a proportional basis, I would expect that 90 of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 should be Indians, based on our share of world population. I am fairly sure that is nowhere near the case. (I would actually exclude Indian companies like Reliance when I do the counting; I am talking about American businesses and members of the Indian diaspora, because India’s smartest go to the United States. But even if I included all the Indian Fortune 500 companies, I doubt we would get to 90.)

Chinese people did not need to go to the U.S. to rise to the top

That this is not so is even more surprising, given that the smartest people in India leave at the first chance to go to that “land of opportunity,” the U.S. (As do a lot of mediocre people.) For many of the best of the best in India, an intermediate stop on the journey to the U.S. is one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the country's premier technological institutes. ITTS have a grueling admission test, called the Joint Entrance Examination, to decide who is to be admitted. The admission percentage is 1-2%.

For the majority of IITians, the goal of attending an IIT is to leave India and go abroad. When I was a student there, 30 years ago, more than two-thirds of my graduating BTech (bachelor of technology) class went to the U.S., myself included. But I was one of the few who returned.

Investment should be at home

IITians are not the only smart Indians to go to the U.S. When I went there in 1990, my roommate was a very smart guy from Davangere College of Engineering in Karnataka — he was the gold medalist there.

Many of these people grew up in small towns and did not find out about the IIT exam until much later, too late to enter the IITs. Satya Nadella (the CEO of Microsoft) attended Manipal Institute of Technology before going to the U.S. to get an M.S. and an M.B.A. As I said, intelligence is quite uniformly scattered in the population.

And then there are the non-engineering folks. Many of them study at the other premier colleges in India, such as the IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management), St. Stephen’s, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Presidency, etc., before they find their way to the promised land.

So, in fact, many of the smartest people in India go to the U.S. This “brain-drain” has been going on for the last 50 years, and has been the subject of much debate in India. People ask, quite legitimately, why India should educate Indians at subsidized rates only to see them serve the U.S.

The China comparison

Given this fact, I would think that Indians should actually be over-represented in the list of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. And so, the current list leaves me rather un-enthused and makes me wonder: Is this all the vaunted accumulated brain power of India could do in 50 years — become CEOs in just a handful of Fortune 500 companies?

So forgive me if I don’t join the celebrations.

But you know who should really celebrate? The Chinese. Because Chinese people did not need to go to the U.S. to rise to the top. They were able to create success enterprises for themselves while staying in China. And unlike Indians, who are merely CEOs of companies founded by Americans, like Google, Microsoft and Twitter, the Chinese entrepreneurs founded world beating companies in China — Alibaba, Tencent, Didi, Xiaomi, Great Wall Motors, Huawei, ZTE, Foxconn and many others.

When Indians do that, I’ll join the party.

*Seshadri Kumar is an R&D Chemical Engineer with a BTech from IIT Bombay and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah.