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Somewhere between “respect your elders” and “be first in class,” India lost its moral compass. We have raised a generation that knows how to code, but not how to coexist; that can solve equations, but not ethical dilemmas. We are manufacturing overachievers—clever, restless, and dangerously hollow.
The ten-year-old boy on Kaun Banega Crorepati wasn’t an accident of bad manners. He was a mirror—one reflecting a nation drunk on self-importance. The trolls called him arrogant. I call him a product of an education system that has replaced curiosity with competition and humility with hubris.
The Factory of Overconfidence
Step into any Indian school and you’ll see it. The teacher rewards the “topper,” ridicules the backbencher, and sends a loud message: mediocrity is sin, and marks are morality. Children learn early that empathy doesn’t fetch marks, teamwork doesn’t fetch applause, and humility doesn’t fetch a career.
We’ve turned childhood into a pressure cooker and call it “excellence.” Parents compare report cards like stock portfolios. Teachers act like stockbrokers, trading in percentiles. And we still wonder why our kids grow up restless, rude, and arrogant.
Our classrooms have become the assembly lines of a new national export—Gross National Arrogance.
A Nation Obsessed with Percentiles
We worship the 99th percentile and ignore the 99% of our streets filled with garbage. Our “toppers” can recite Newton’s laws but can’t follow traffic rules. We build IITs and IIMs, yet our bridges collapse after a drizzle. The same engineers who topped their class design roads that drown in one monsoon. Percentiles don’t build civilizations; character does.
Look at our roads. They are metaphors for our manners—honking, jumping signals, bullying pedestrians, overtaking from the wrong side, throwing plastic out of SUVs bought on EMIs. This is not progress; this is educated chaos.
You can judge a nation by how its people drive. Ours drive like they live—impatient, loud, and self-important. Vikshit Bharat? We’re still stuck in first gear.
The Death of Team Spirit
Teamwork? We killed it in kindergarten. Our schools treat collaboration as cheating. Our teachers preach competition, not cooperation. The result: adults who cannot work in teams, leaders who cannot share credit, citizens who cannot stand in line.
Meanwhile, in Europe, where I spent four decades, schools forbid public ranking. Children are graded A to D, not humiliated from first to last. Group projects are sacred. Debate is encouraged. Humility is expected. In Germany, arrogance is vulgar. In India, it’s aspirational.
We celebrate mediocrity in every field—from politics to bureaucracy—and then congratulate ourselves for it. It’s as if self-praise has replaced self-improvement.
The Mirage of Modern India
We have confused wealth with worth. A sudden rise in income has created a class that believes status is a substitute for substance. We’ve become a society that buys what it doesn’t need to impress people it doesn’t like, with money it doesn’t have. Children learn early that showing off is success.
Everywhere, you can feel it: in boardrooms, in WhatsApp groups, in television debates—swagger without substance. Arrogance has become our default national language.
And our leaders? They’re no better. Their speeches drip with triumphalism, their tone mocks dissent, and their gestures scream, “India is perfect.” Perfection, apparently, now means silence, not progress.
The Moral Bankruptcy of a Rising Nation
Our ancestors built a civilization that spoke of viveka—the power of discrimination between right and wrong. Today, our education system produces graduates who can’t distinguish between confidence and conceit. We’re raising citizens who mistake shouting for strength, speed for success, and ambition for ability.
It begins at home. Parents reward arrogance disguised as confidence. Teachers reward memorization disguised as intelligence. Society rewards noise disguised as leadership.
So yes, the child on KBC interrupted Amitabh Bachchan—but who interrupted his moral education?
Vikshit Bharat or Arrogant Bharat?
We shout about Vikshit Bharat 2047. But unless we fix what’s broken in our classrooms and homes, we will get there as a rich but rude republic—a nation with money in its wallet and emptiness in its soul.
Vikshit Bharat cannot be built on inflated egos and hollow education. It will be built on humility, respect, and emotional intelligence—the very virtues we have starved in our children.
Until then, our roads, classrooms, and conversations will remain the same: loud, chaotic, and self-congratulatory.
A truly developed nation doesn’t just build skyscrapers; it builds character.
India may be rising, but let’s ask: rising towards what? A Vikshit Bharat — or an Arrogant Bharat?
Mohan Murti, Advocate & International Industry Arbitrator, Firmer Managing Director- Europe, Reliance Industries Ltd, Member of the Supervisory Board, Innoplexus AG, Germany
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