Clicks, Reels, Events and India’s Mutation into a Carnival Country

It’s turning out to be a season of spectacle.

India’s youth are going beyond their means to choreograph weddings that look like Bollywood fairy tales. The greatest footballer of our times is paraded around in stadiums without any play, but selfies abound. The founder of the country’s most valuable tech unicorn goes bonkers about untested science. While China flaunts its first indigenously designed aircraft carrier, we celebrate the passage of a boat which is stitched by hand and built in the 5th-century style. Top policymakers and corporate honchos fly to a freezing Swiss town to meet each other.

If you have not noticed it yet, we have become a country obsessed with the optics of things. The sentiment seems to be that everything sells if it is packaged well. And the most alarming manifestation of this jugaad is the phenomenon of the ‘event’.

Things happen in these carnivals. Billionaires promise bets bigger than their fortunes, politicians talk about a glorious future for which they are unlikely to stick around, celebs from movies and cricket bring the necessary bit of sparkle and the press hangs around with bated breath to record the first draft of history. Yes, we too are culpable.

Talking about the endless revolutions of the 20th century, philosopher Isaiah Berlin had compared their violence to eggs. At first, it was argued that a few eggs need to be broken to make omelettes. And then, at some point, the objective was forgotten and the breaking of eggs became an enduring habit. In the same vein, the schizophrenia of the event has taken over our public life. Nobody cares about ‘to what end’ anymore.

If it is left unchecked, it will have a debilitating impact on our economy and polity in the long run.

The effects are already visible in the start-up ecosystem. It has been more than three years since ChatGPT kickstarted a global race for artificial intelligence, yet we don’t have a single tech company to take on the likes of OpenAI and DeepSeek. The countless AI conferences and tech summits won’t help create technology. Neither will the virality of bombastic clips pulled out of scripted podcasts with influencers.

An interesting exchange broke out on X last year when top tech executives got into a debate about an upcoming event. One of them said, “The US and China didn’t lead in AI because of influencer summits. They did it through university labs, open-source contributions and start-up founders building from first principles. We need to build an ecosystem to listen and learn from builders.”

I was there at the summit and became no richer with perspective because of it. But it is heartening to know that a conversation around the merit of such mindless events is afoot. There’s still hope.

At Outlook Business, we go by the famous words of American management scholar W Edwards Deming: “In God we trust; all others must bring data.” That’s why our start-up special issue bases itself on a hard look at the numbers. We have ranked our outperformers in growth-stage start-ups on factors like funding, revenue growth and profitability. Investors have been ranked on the quality of their portfolio, while states and cities have been measured for their attractiveness to start-ups. Our effort is to hold a mirror to the ecosystem through the rankings.

No matter what the mood of the nation is, the numbers don’t lie. As my Gen-Z colleagues in the newsroom are often told, “delulu can’t be our solulu”.