The dragon did not wait for the elephant
I was barely six or seven when I first overheard my father, K.P. George, deep in conversation with his Chinese counterparts in the open veranda of our rubber plantation house on Prang Besar Estate near Kajang. It was the mid-1950s in colonial Malaya—a land not quite free, but bristling with ideas. Conversations flowed in clipped English, interwoven with Tamil, Cantonese, and the occasional burst of Malay. Tea was always on the table, steaming in chipped cups, as topics veered from rubber yields to revolution, from family weddings to Zhou Enlai’s latest pronouncements.
These weren’t abstract discussions. They were alive, urgent, bursting with hope, fear, and pride. My father had a deep respect for the Chinese, and they for him. There was no posturing, no need to impress—only a shared sense that history was shifting under their feet and that Asia’s future, especially the Chinese one, would not be dictated by Whitehall or Washington. There was dignity in that stance. And purpose.
It is painful, decades later, to observe how India—the land of my heritage—chose a very different path. From those early heady days when Nehru and Mao were still figuring out whether the dragon and the elephant could walk side by side, India turned westward, bewitched by Britain’s fading pomp and seduced by America’s intoxicating glitter.
Make no mistake: China never sucked up to the West. It studied the west. It used the west. But it never sold its soul to it. India, on the other hand, appears to have done little else. You only have to look at the Indian diaspora’s elite ecosystem—executives in Silicon Valley, cabinet ministers in Westminster, CEOs in London boardrooms, hedge fund managers, lobbyists, and influencers polishing their English vowels while denigrating their own soil.
Meanwhile, China went to work. Quietly, methodically, through blood and toil. The same discipline I saw in the rubber tappers of Malaya—many of them Chinese—echoed later in China’s rise: cyclical, self-refining, rooted in a long-view philosophy the West could never quite decipher. The Chinese built dams and high-speed rail, while India debated quotas and hurled chairs in parliament.
Yet we forget—wilfully perhaps—that there was a moment when India did look eastward, not west. A moment now largely buried under the self-congratulatory rubble of Indo-Western “strategic partnerships.” In 1955, Nehru personally hosted the Chinese economist Chen Hansheng in New Delhi, breaking bread and walking the garden paths in long, intense conversations. Nehru sent study teams to China, marvelled at their land reforms and agricultural cooperatives, and even scolded his own ministries for their mediocrity. He saw the Chinese model not as a threat but as a mirror. “How has China done it?” he asked. “Surely, it should not be beyond our powers to do something that China can do.”
But it was. Or more accurately, it became so. India blinked. And then bowed. First to the Commonwealth, then to the IMF, and finally to the gods of Davos.
And today? Just look. Modi cosplaying as a tech visionary in Silicon Valley, hugging every American CEO like a long-lost cousin. Indian elites lining up for British knighthoods and Oxbridge credentials, parroting TED Talks about democracy while back home the streets run with religious tension and broken infrastructure. India didn’t just miss the boat—it waved it off with a garland and a WhatsApp forward.
China, of course, isn’t perfect. But it didn’t compromise its cultural spine. It didn’t outsource its intellectual future. It didn’t send its best and brightest abroad to get patronised into power. It built a machine. Ruthlessly. Relentlessly. And now it’s writing the next playbook.
K.P. George would shake his head if he were here. Maybe light his pipe, squint into the dusky Kajang horizon, and mutter in his deep voice, “We were warned, weren’t we?” He would recall those rubber estate meetings with his Chinese friends—men who knew revolution, who bore scars and purpose, who believed in the village as much as the future. He respected that. I still do.
The truth is harsh, but necessary: India chose the wrong route. It chased glitter instead of grit. It preferred applause in London to silent reform in the villages. It clung to the colonial umbilical cord, addicted to validation, unable to reimagine its own worth.
And now it sits back, watching China glide by—jealous, confused, and increasingly irrelevant in the race it once had a head start in. Dream on, India. The dragon didn’t wait for the elephant.
Society