I, of the tiger: India’s influential diaspora

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Thirty years ago, Derek Jarman's daring film called Blue came out, featuring just a single shot of, well, the color blue. The compelling storyline about being gay in London at the peak of the AIDS epidemic all comes out in the soundtrack. And for a while there, it seemed like racehorses weren't getting any faster over time, as if breeding had come up with the speediest steed possible. A new study not only shows that horses are getting faster, there's also more genetic gains to be made. First up, though. Vinod Khosla immigrated to America in 1976, he was at the time of pretty limited means.

I couldn't move to the US Unless Carnegie Mellon paid for my education.

But his move turned out to be a success, a big one. Mr. Khosla Co founded the computer giant Sun Microsystems and later became a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He's now one of the richest people in the country, in the upper half of the Forbes 400 list. He says that over his nearly five decades in America, perceptions of Indians like himself have evolved and that it was much, much harder to raise capital when he started out.

You were the people with a funny.

Accent and the name hard to pronounce name and you had to pass a higher bar. It wasn't assumed you'd be smarter or harder working or more successful back in 1980.

Mr. Khosla is among a growing club of Indian migrants in positions of real power. Microsoft, Alphabet, even Britain. They're all led by people with Indian heritage. And that's a very good thing. For the world's most populous country.

The Indian diaspora is the biggest in the world. In fact, it has been since 2010. And it's not just the size of the Indian diaspora that's so striking, but it's its power.

Avantika Chalkoti is an international correspondent for the Economist.

Indians abroad are known to do well. They do good jobs, respected jobs as doctors and engineers. In America, for example, Indian migrants have a median household income that's double the American average. That's great news for India. These people are building a positive image of their home country and they're giving the Indian economy a boost as well. India's inward remittances came in at over $100 billion last year, and it's far more than any other country has received.

Beyond remittances, what does the strength of that diaspora mean to the country?

India's diaspora plays an important bridge building role between India and the West. So if you look just at the rich world, there are 2.7 million Indian migrants in America. There are more than 800,000 in Britain, there's lots more in Australia and Canada. And these people have a good reputation. It's building a good image of India. At the same time, however, this diaspora is benefiting from the positive image that India has in the West. I was looking at a Gallup poll recently done in America, and it shows that about 84% of people there view China unfavourably. In comparison, only about 27% view India negatively. At a time when Russia and China are sort of at loggerheads with the west, when they're challenging the liberal world order, India is incredibly important to America and its allies. Here's this vast democratic country. It's growing well, it's doing well. And that relationship between India and the west has just strengthened as the American Chinese relationship has actually worsened.

You're painting a picture in which it is just sort of universally good for Indians to come from India. Is that a fair depiction?

No. I mean, you're totally right, Jason. So Prime Minister Narendra Modi has many, many critics all over the world. Since he took power a few years ago, India's democracy has been in decline. Liberal freedoms are Definitely under attack if you're a journalist there. Harassment raids, they're really on the rise. In March, earlier this year, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress Party, he was disqualified from Parliament on pretty spurious defamation charges. It's incredibly worrying. And throughout the war in Ukraine, India has refused to condemn Russia. It's stockpiled on cheap Russian gas and fertilizer. And yet, because India is a big, fast growing democracy, the west simply can't afford to cut ties with Mr. Modi. When the Prime Minister goes to America later this month, he'll meet with President Joe Biden in Washington dc. While he's there, he'll probably use the chance to court that Indian American diaspora as well. Every time Mr. Modi travels, he makes a point of holding a big event with them. Last month in Australia, he spoke to tens of thousands of Indian Australians and at a jam packed arena in Sydney. And his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, was not going to miss the opportunity to be on that stage with him.

I said to my friend, the Prime Minister before, the last time I saw someone on the stage here was Bruce Springsteen. And he didn't get the welcome that Prime Minister Modi has got.

There aren't many politicians around the world who draw such a big crowd among the diaspora. Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, they're very popular. The diaspora actually helped Mr. Modi get elected in the first place. He came to power in 2014 in a landslide election and at that time, thousands of Indians from Britain and America went to India to campaign for him. Many more were calling and sending text messages to family and friends back home to sway the vote. And even outside of election time, you know, Mr. Modi needs to keep the diaspora on side. Indians at home care how they're perceived overseas. They really care how the diaspora does. Every time someone wins a position of power overseas, whether it's Ajay Banga at the World bank or Rishi Sunak, you know, in Downing street in Britain, they really care. And Mr. Modi needs to keep that diaspora on side.

How did India's diaspora get to this position to be so influential, to be essentially power brokers for the people back home?

So India's long had all of the ingredients needed to be a top exporter of talent. It's got lots of working age people, it's got an English speaking elite and it has really excellent higher education for the lucky few who can get a spot at those good schools. That really marks out the Indian diaspora from the rest. So one study from the migration Policy Institute, a think tank, suggests that only about one fifth of Indian migrants in the US struggle with English. At the same time, more than half of Chinese migrants do. And you also see it in the sorts of jobs Indians get abroad. The excellent technical education at home helps. For example, if you look at America's H1B visas, those specialty visas for people in high end occupations like computer science, more than 70% of them went to Indians in recent years.

But isn't there a downside here? If so much of India's talent is heading abroad, what about what stays at home?

So this is basically the question of the brain drain. It's not a new theory and it's certainly correct. India is losing some of its very best, its brightest students, especially those in technical fields. The one school that everyone's really preoccupied by is the India's Institutes of technology, the IITs. And you get a lot of studies of them. You know, a lot of the big CEOs in Silicon Valley, they were trained at the IITs. And there was a recent study of applicants to IITs, and it found that more than a third of the top thousand students who were applying to the IITs about eight years after taking that exam, they'd left India. Often they'd left to go to America to go on for graduate school. And you see it happening at home that there's just not enough good bureaucrats, there's not enough smart people in business when so many of the good minds are going abroad and it's too early to tell if many of them will return home in future.

So all of the forces here seem to be fairly fixed in place and perhaps growing. Is it the case that the diaspora will always be good for India and India good for the diaspora forevermore?

At the moment, it seems so at the moment, Mr. Modi and the Indian government is really making the most of how well the diaspora is doing. I guess I have some worries about whether divisions are starting to emerge. You know, the democratic backsliding in India has been terrible for minorities. If you're a Muslim, if you're lower caste in India, life has become pretty difficult under Mr. Modi. And you're seeing some of that unhappiness, the division, the persecution that's going on in India now emerge within the diaspora. You know, last year in Leicester, we had riots between Hindu and Muslim populations, something that hasn't been an issue for a very long time. In Silicon Valley, you've had caste issues emerging amongst Indian migrants working at big tech companies. So far, these are just, you know, one or two incidents, they. They're not hogging the limelight. But I do have worries that the divisions at home emerge amongst the diaspora and really start to erode their reputation.

Avantika, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

Radio is relegated to the background for most of us.

William Warren is our senior creative producer.

We listen while we get ready for work in the morning, shop for clothes or while we're driving late at night. Podcasts are a little bit more involved. You have to choose what you hear, although I'd bet that most people listening to this now are scrolling through one timeline or another. But radio doesn't have to be in the background. And ironically, one of the finest examples of this comes from a different medium entirely.

You say to the boy, open your eyes. When he opens his eyes and sees.

The light, you make him cry out, saying, oh, blue, come forth.

Blue by the visionary theatre director Derek Jarman, is is truly unlike any other film. That's because the film's visuals, credits and titles aside, consist of a single still blue image. The film was first shown 30 years ago this month and watching it is an intense experience. Jarman, at the time, was suffering from an eye infection, Cytomegalovirus retinitis, a complication of aids. The infection led to an almost complete loss of vision, except for the colour blue. The film is really an immersive audio experience, partly based on notes from a hospital diary Jarman kept. This is a uniquely intimate exploration of a dying man's world and it's also a masterclass in sound design, colliding specific and abstract noises from his world. The Bosnian Mr. Frosting, Fred. The hurried Cyclist, the sobbing woman in the waiting room, his irregular heartbeat. Jarman is a giant of the British queer art scene. As a director of film and theatre, his daring works included a homoerotic retelling of the life of Wittgenstein.

I'd quite like to have composed a.

Philosophical work which consisted entirely of jokes.

Sadly, I didn't have a sense of humor.

Jubilee, a raucous take on 70s punk rock Britain.

As long as the music's loud enough.

We won't hear the world falling apart.

And easily the most atmospheric production of the Tempest ever produced for film. But Jarman didn't just speak to the avant garde, he reached a much broader audience directing music videos, bringing his wistful and hyper theatric directing style to videos including the Smith Smith's Song Ask and the Pet Shop Boys It's A Sin, both songs, incidentally, exploring attitudes towards sexuality and shame. In other mediums, Jarman blended the provocative and serene provocation in painted works like Ataxia, AIDS Is Fun, an assaulting painting where Jarman explored his AIDS induced wobbles, as he called them, and serenity through gardening, something that brought him tranquility during his final years. Jarman was one of the first public figures in the UK to announce his positive HIV status. And Blue never shies away from frank discussion of the health crisis. He speaks directly to the audience through a variety of narrators, including Tilda Swinton and John Quentin. In the radio diary, we hear not just about Jarman's deteriorating health, but the then ongoing war in Bosnia and his reminiscing of former lovers who have died with aids.

Dave Bob.

Perry One might quite rightly wonder, though, why it's worth watching a film that is essentially an audio experience. With the Blue void, Jarman attempts to show the audience his world directly through his frail, failing eyes. And the blue of Blue is not just any blue. It's international Klein blue, a deep, rich hue made famous by artist Yves Klein. Klein, who was raised Catholic, was drawn to the religious significance of the shade of blue. Traditionally the color used to depict the robes of the Virgin Mary. It's a big ask for audiences to have to stare at a blue screen for more than an hour, but there's a lot to be gained in doing so. It's a genuinely hallucinogenic experience. You start to see shapes that aren't there. Watching the film today has a slightly unintentional layer of abstraction too. Digital video can't actually handle the still blue image, and compression artifacts will dance around the screen.

Blue as a film pushes the disembodied nature of film as far as it can go. My name is Neil Bartlett. I started making art for a living back in 1982. I work as an author and playwright and a theatre director. And most recently I've been directing a live iteration of Derek Jarman's film Blue.

You say to the boy.

Open your eyes.

Neil Bartlett went to the same gay bars as Jarman did in the 1980s and worked with him briefly. He's recently directed Blue Now, a stage adaptation of Blue, featuring a queer cast, including Russell Tovey. As Jarman.

Oh, blue, arise. I can't remember when I first saw it, but quite soon after it was released. So middle 90s I saw blue and I couldn't bear it. My friends and neighbours were dying of HIV aids, and the last thing I wanted was to sit through a work of art that was asking me for my most profound and honest reaction to that situation. Coming back to the work 30 years later. With hindsight, it's exactly what I need. It provides me and my generation with a safe space where we can remember our dead.

So much of Blue is Jarman's personal sounds that he experienced growing up in London. I asked Neil Bartlett which sounds resonated with him growing up as a gay man in Britain during the second half of the 20th century.

There are three sounds in blue in particular that strike me right in the heart. One is a laughable one, kind of thump, thump, thump bassline of a Boys Town disco track, but heard from the other room. And it reminded me of all those nights in the heaven where I stayed in the bar, not daring to go onto the dance floor because I felt no one would pick me. Another sound is a hospital waiting room, and it's the waiting room of St. Mary's Paddington. And that makes me remember the time I spent in that waiting room when a dear friend was dying. And the final sound is the sound of Derek's footsteps on the beach at Dungeness, walking away and disappearing. What a gift he left us. What a legacy of courage and good humour and grace. And that sound of his footsteps on the beach is now never going to leave me.

30 years on, thanks to rapid advances in medicine, living with HIV is now a completely manageable condition. However, for Jarman, like so many others, this miracle of modern science came too late and he died shortly after the film was released. But Blue lives on as an inspiration to creatives, but particularly sound designers. Echoes of the theatricality and sound rich stylings of Blue can be heard in shows including Radiolab. Have youe Heard George's Podcast? And in a small way, I'd hope economist podcasts too. Podcasting as an art form owes much to Blue, which proved that audio storytelling can go beyond background listening and tell intimate human stories through grand soundscapes.

All right, thank you, Mike. Just a couple left to go in.

The Japanese runner Mandarin Hero taking his.

Spot in the starting.

On the surface of it, horse racing is as simple as it is lucrative. Derby lucrative for the winners anyway. The fastest steed wins the prize and makes good breeding stock. The winningest horses end up as the most desirable studs.

Try to hold up Mage. Mage has taken the lead here as they come into the final 16th and. And it is going to be Mage to win the Kentucky Derby.

So there's an obvious incentive for breeders to produce ever swifter horses. But they may be missing a trick, a focus on statistics and genetics instead of Just eyeball and intuition could lead to even better results.

For years, there's been an assumed paradox in the world of horse racing.

Abby Bertix is a science correspondent at the Economist.

People thought that horse racing times were not improving, and they hadn't over decades or even a century. But people were putting so much effort into breeding and making faster horses. But there was a paper in 2015 that questioned the assumptions of that paradox. And now the authors are asking how much breeding has to do with speed and whether racehorses have hindered, hit their genetic peak.

So let's wind back a bit and go through the paradox and how it was cast in shadow. Tell me about that paper in 2015.

It begins with a man named Patrick Sharman. He's a racing enthusiast and also a geneticist at the University of Exeter. And he set out to see whether horses really had hit a plateau. So he kind of collected this giant data set of British races going back to the 1800s. And with all of those race times that he collected, he found that the horses were getting faster, just very, very slowly. Since 1997, the average speed needed to win a race, it increased by around a tenth of a percentage point annually. And this amount was much more salient for kind of the shorter and the medium distance races than it was for the longer distance races. In his latest paper, he just published a new one last month in the journal Heredity. He tried to figure out how much of that improvement can be attributable to the genes of the horses.

I mean, isn't that the whole basis for the idea of breeding horses is that you move the good genes around?

Yeah. With horse breeding, the goal is you kind of try to choose your stallion that looks like it's going to produce very, very fast offspring. You choose the mare that's going to produce fast offspring. And by breeding fast horses together, you're supposed to get even faster horses. But. But it's not super clear that that's exactly what was happening. And Dr. Charman wanted to kind of dig into the genetics and see for sure what was going on. So he looked at his kind of same database of 700,000 race times. These were between the years 1995 to 2014. And he also collected a family tree of around 76,000 horses. And doing some statistical magic, he found that speed is weakly heritable, meaning it's passed down from generation to generation, but only weakly. So the amount of heritability that he found for the sprint races was 12% heritable. So 12% of the variation in Speed can be tied to their genetics. And this is about the same as kind of neuroticism in humans or even lifespan in humans. Through both of these studies, he found that the speed and the heritability and the breeding was stronger with the sprint races. And he mentioned that this kind of makes sense because with sprint performances there's quicker commercial returns. A sprint horse starts racing around 2 years old, whereas the longer distance ones start at 3 years old.

So you mentioned that the speed part is heritable, but not very something like 12%. Does that mean that all the effort that goes into horse breeding, that entire industry is worth the time and the money and the hassle?

The value here is not for me to decide, but it does seem like the breeding and the genetic improvements are accounting for some of the increase in speed. The breeding based improvements in speed is related to the heritability of the speed, like how much it's actually able to pass down just using the genome and also due to the strength of selection. And this is knowing which horses to choose based on how fast they're going to be and how good their genomes are at passing it down. So the first half of that the heritability is kind of set know that's 12%. The second half the strength of selection. That's what the breeders are being a proxy for here. The breeders are selecting. And we found that genetic improvements have accounted for in sprint races at least more than half of the increase in speed seen over the time period studied. And the rest of the increase in speed could be tied down to nutrition. It could be tied down to vet care or jockeying techniques.

So if the notion before was that speeds weren't increasing because the genetic selection had done all of the good work, it could over the centuries. This seems to suggest that there's more, more in the tank. Horses could go faster.

Other sports have kind of seen similar statistical revolutions, like baseball. Famously in the movie Moneyball went from being the intuition and the scouting that was kind of based on watching and gut vibes and that went out the window for a lot of numbers and crunching and spreadsheets. And it could be that horse racing is set for a similar moment and we might see the race times go down even further.

Abby, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Joe Devlin and our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin and Rory Galloway and our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alize, Jean Baptiste, Kevin Kaynors and Barkley Bram. With extra production help this week from Maggie Khedifa, Peter Granitz and Benji Guy. We'll all see you back here on Monday, Sam.