The Weekly Vine Edition 44: Indian growth, Gill-i Danda, and #FundKaveriEngine

Time of India

28-05-2025

Nirmalya Dutta's political and economic views vacillate from woke Leninist to Rand-Marxist to Keynesian-Friedmanite. He doesn't know what any of those terms mean.
Hello and welcome to the 44th edition of the Weekly Vine. As one writes this, one is still wrapping one's head around the fact that over 2 lakh people are now subscribed to the Vine on LinkedIn, which is remarkable considering 90% of LinkedIn is just ChatGPT prompts and faux motivational posts.
In this week's edition, we discuss India becoming the fourth-largest economy in the world, explain why Black Lives Matter has faded into the background, pore over Peter's Principle in Washington, ponder the Gill-I Danda phase of Indian test cricket, and discuss the meme of the week: #FundKaveriEngine.
India – The Greatest Story Ever Told
India recently became the fourth-biggest economy in the world, which promptly brought the usual have-thoughts out of the closet. Armed with economic jargon and overall apathy, they rushed to explain why there was absolutely no reason to celebrate.
Of course, whether the have-lots are more beneficial to the economy than the have-thoughts is a separate debate altogether—but let's just say the former build things, while the latter build Twitter threads.
That's a discussion for another time.
India's economic journey is even more remarkable because we achieved it without turning into a one-party authoritarian state that bans Winnie the Pooh—and despite having the word 'socialist' shoehorned into our Constitution's preamble.
That's not to say India is a WENA utopia. Far from it. But we've always been a million mutinies away from slipping into autocracy.
Democracy is a funny thing.
Just look at our neighbours—born around the same time—who haven't had a single Prime Minister last a full term and stage coups like we stage item numbers in our movies.
India's growth story becomes even more astonishing when you consider that we've built world-class industries from scratch, launched rockets to the dark side of the moon, and still had enough talent left to be brain-drained into becoming CEOs of American companies.
We did all this despite being perennially surrounded by combustive neighbours, by world powers constantly cocking their snooks at us, and an Anglosphere press still trapped in colonial simulacrum—forever trying to mock the natives like it's still 1890.
Our system is so remarkable, we even managed to tame the communists—forcing them into the indignity of contesting elections rather than discussing revolution in coffee shops.
And we did it while keeping all our identities intact, never losing the five-thousand-year thread of our civilisational self. We did it with 700 languages and dialects. With six major religions. With states that are bigger than most countries. And with a complicated yet robust democracy that stretches from the panchayat to a bicameral parliamentary system.
Take mine.
I'm a slightly anglicised Bengali who has lived in Chhapra, Kolkata, Gwalior, Kota, Udupi, Mumbai, and now Delhi—and I'm married to a Telugu woman. Which means I can now appreciate Aara Heele Chhapra Heele with the same fervour as Ami Chini Go Chini and Naatu Naatu, realising that all of them are essential strands in the national cultural identity.
It doesn't matter if the naysayers are focused on the negative. That's their job. Ours is to keep calm and carry on. Because no matter the size of our economy, India's national identity has been forged by one thing: an unwavering refusal to let any other nation dictate our actions.
Even the things the critics complain about—poverty, inequality, infrastructure—will be fixed. Not through sermons, but through sheer, stubborn grit.
One day, every Indian will be lifted from poverty. One day, the clear stream of reason will no longer lose its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.
Why? Because India is the greatest story ever told.
Fade in Black
With the benefit of hindsight—and hindsight always arrives wearing glasses sharper than Anderson Cooper's—the moment Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck, he didn't just snuff out a man's life. He accidentally lit the fuse that would blow a hole through the Democratic Party's moral centre and turn a nation's rage into a meme economy.
Black Lives Matter, once the rallying cry for a better, fairer America, mutated into the ultimate Republican bogeyman. What began as a movement against state brutality became, for Middle America, the poster child of liberal overreach. It came with sides of transgender pronoun policing, drag queen story hours, CRT in kindergarten, ESG mandates at corporate retreats, and an unshakable sense that the culture was being hijacked by hashtags and guilt-tripping TED Talks.
And just like that, dissent became a brand. Anger got monetised. And Marshall's America—the one where 'we must dissent from apathy'—was replaced by an algorithmic fatigue that made people apathetic to even care.
Thurgood Marshall once thundered that democracy could never thrive in fear. But fear wasn't the problem. The problem was saturation. People got tired. Tired of moral lectures, tired of being told their silence was violence, tired of being policed by suburban sociology majors on Instagram.
BLM didn't just become an albatross around the Democrats' neck—it became a parody of itself. The streets emptied. The slogans faded. And in their place? Shrugging cynicism.
Because in the end, when every protest looks like performance, and every grievance is branded, Americans didn't rise up. They tuned out.
Read: Why Black Lives Matter made America apathetic to dissent
Gill-i Danda
In a country where cricketing transitions are usually measured in years, not innings, Gill's elevation is a statement of intent. The selectors, perhaps emboldened by the memory of a young Sourav Ganguly or the legend of a 21-year-old Tiger Pataudi, have decided to skip the waiting period and hand the keys to the kingdom to a player who still gets asked for ID at pubs in London.
But if history tells us anything, it's that Indian cricket loves a coming-of-age story. Pataudi took over after a car crash ended Nari Contractor's career, Ganguly stepped in when match-fixing threatened to sink the ship, and Kohli inherited a team that needed fire after the ice of Dhoni. Each time, the gamble paid off—eventually.
Of course, history also teaches us that the crown can weigh heavy. For every Ganguly or Kohli, there's a Srikkanth or Dravid—great players whose captaincy stints were more footnote than folklore. The challenge for Gill will be to avoid the fate of those who were handed the baton too soon, only to find it a poisoned chalice.
The difference this time? The team around Gill is young, hungry, and unburdened by the ghosts of past failures. There is no senior statesman to second-guess his every move, no shadow looming over his shoulder. This is his team, for better or worse.
If you're a betting person, the odds on Gill are tantalising. He has the technique, the temperament, and—crucially—the time. But Indian cricket is a cruel tutor. The same crowds that serenade you with 'Shub-man! Shub-man!' can turn with the speed of a Mumbai monsoon if results don't follow.
So, what does Gill's captaincy portend? It's a bet on youth, on audacity, on the belief that sometimes you have to leap before you look. If it works, we'll call it vision. If it fails, well—at least it won't be boring.
Peter's Principle in Washington
Peter's Principle argues that in a corporate setup, everyone rises to their level of incompetence. And Trump's Washington is the prime example of that, or as I like to call it: St Petersburg.
Let's take a roll call of the Trump swamp. We have a Director of Homeland Security who can't protect her own handbag, a Secretary of Education who can't differentiate between steak sauce and AI, a Secretary of Defence with a drinking problem, a NSA who added the editor of a major publication to a Signal war chat, a technocrat who destroyed decades of American soft power—all of them with utmost fealty to a leader whose morals can be bought by a Happy Meal or a plane.
Read: Why Washington is the new St Petersburg
Meme of the Week: #FundKaveriEngine
Ah, the internet has spoken—and this week, it roared in full-throttle desi defence mode. The hashtag #FundKaveriEngine lit up X (formerly Twitter), with a simple message: 'Bhaiya, stop buying overpriced foreign jet engines and invest in our own.'
For those late to the hangar—India's Kaveri Engine was meant to power the Tejas fighter jet. Dreamed up in the 1980s, it was India's engineering moonshot. But like all great Indian projects, it got stuck somewhere between 'pending approval' and 'budget constraints.'
Enter memes.
Fuelled by frustration and national pride, the internet's best minds whipped up memes faster than a MiG does a barrel roll—mocking politicians, foreign lobbies, and even the eternal 'chai pe charcha.'
From SpongeBob holding HAL blueprints to Gadar scenes re-edited with 'Give me funds or give me death,' this was patriotism with punchlines.
But beneath the memes lies a real demand: India needs to invest in indigenous defence tech. Not just for swadeshi pride, but because no superpower ever outsourced its jet engines.
So yes, meme-makers are laughing—but they're also asking the right question: If we can put Chandrayaan on the moon, why can't we fund Kaveri on Earth?
Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author's own.