Indians will one day be the largest English-speaking population on the Internet. What will we have to say to the world?

And how will the rest of the English-speaking world react?

Balaji Srinivasan is one of the most innovative and exciting thinkers in the world today. If you keep up with the discourse around cutting-edge topics in politics, history and technology, it is very unlikely that you've never heard of Balaji and his ideas. He has written extensively about concepts like cryptocurrency, decentralization of political and economic power, and has also introduced new concepts like the "network State" model into the discourse. If you're a frequent consumer of non-mainstream western media, the expression "Balaji was right" (often humorously referred to as the three most dangerous words in the English language) will be quite familiar to you, and if it isn't, you should definitely try and catch up with his ideas.

However, with his all famously-wild (in a good way!) predictions in the tech sphere, the observation from Balaji that I find most interesting is his point that in the near-to-medium-term future, Indian people will become the largest section of the English-speaking population in the world. This is an observation that recognizes a trend that has been underway for many years now, but the perfect storm in the last five-seven years of increased access to cheap and fast internet, and a growing English literacy in India has accelerated this process. So, while we don't know for sure when exactly it will happen, the fact that Indians will one day be the largest English-speaking population on the global internet is a numerical inevitability.

This development has the potential to be a transformative event, not just for India, but also for the entire English-speaking Internet population as a whole. How will this development change Indians? And how will it change the rest of the world? Will either of things change for the better or the worse? These are among the questions I am seeking to think through in this article.

How we got here

This numerical pattern that Balaji has observed has been made possible most directly by two economic and technology-based trends - the fact that Indians are increasingly getting access to cheap and fast internet connections, and the fact that more and more Indians have the devices to use these internet connections (i.e. a proliferation of smartphones and other similar devices). This is combined with the fact that, while a lot of new Indian internet users are using their native languages to access the web, an increasing English-fluency in the whole country means that a large proportion of these new users are using English as their primary medium of search and communication.

Various economic and political revolutions have made this process possible: the Jio Telecom revolution, which led to an emancipation of 4G internet speeds at an affordable cost to Indian people all across the economic spectrum; The Chinese have (perhaps unwittingly) played a big part in this process as well - the fact that smartphones are as cheap and high quality as they are in India, is largely due to the aggressive pricing and marketing of Chinese companies like Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, etc. Even Indians who don't use a Chinese brand smartphone, have benefitted from this, as other companies like Samsung have had to compete in the same pricing economy as the Chinese firms, which has created a strong downward pressure on smartphone prices.

When you combine these trends with the fact that India is the largest possible internet market in the world that is not closed (unlike the actual largest internet market in the world - China), the story and trajectory starts to make a lot of sense.

The World wants to be dealt-in

Understandably, as the size of the Indian internet user-base has exploded, global corporations and organizations have shown that they want a piece of the pie.

In simple terms, today's India is too good of an economic opportunity for any globally-minded corporation to ignore. India has the second-largest population in the world (soon to-be the actual single-largest), a growing middle-class that has more money to spend on goods and services every day, and unlike China, India also doesn't have back-breaking barriers to trade that would prevent a foreign company or entity to set up shop in the country. Of course, this situation is not perfect, and much more can be done to streamline the process of foreign investment, but it is definitely a more open system than China, with almost the same possible market size. It is surely a mouth-watering prospect for most global corporations.

And this doesn't just hold true for the Amazons and Walmarts of the world, but even smaller corporations and entities around the world can look at the Indian market as an exciting area for growth. This is even backed by the simple law of numbers - even a small percentage of a billion people is a very large number. Even if you can corner 0.01% of a 1.4 billion population, you still end up with 140,000 people, which can be a very large number of customers for a lot of small businesses around the world.

Perhaps an unexpected place where we are already seeing this pattern in action is on social media. Influencers from all around the world seem to have realized the seemingly limitless potential of building an audience of Indian people who primarily speak English. Therefore, we have seen an explosion of foreign content creators on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, etc. who focus almost exclusively on trying to appeal to an Indian audience through travel and food blogs, etc. relying on the obvious Indian interests of wanting to see how the rest of the world sees us.

A particularly funny aspect of this is the number of Pakistani channels on YouTube that have come up to take advantage of the understandable interests that Indians hold in trying to understand the brains of our long-lost Punjabi and Sindhi brothers and sisters. The imposition of Urdu, a language that was spoken by around 2% of the population of what is today Pakistan in 1947, on the Punjabis and Sindhis in Pakistan, has made this interaction possible.

It's not crazy to predict that this phenomenon of foreign content creators hunting for Indian eyeballs on the internet will keep growing and growing. But fascinates me is that it has the potential to create its own organic interest for the world into India's affairs. Because having spent five years in the United States completing my undergraduate degree, one thing was made extremely clear to me - India is perhaps the largest and most important country that the West doesn't properly understand. For a long time, India was seen as too passive, too harmless, too poor, and too involved in its own affairs, for it to be worthwhile for any western "expert" to spend their time learning Hindi or any other Indian language. My time in college was full of meeting westerners who were learning Arabic and Chinese, because these languages were predicted to be professionally "useful" in the short-medium-term future.

However, the above-mentioned organic interactions that the internet facilitates are starting to bridge this gap of western interest and knowledge about India. The English language is the medium that is allowing this process to occur, and it could also be the medium of the obvious next step of this process - until now, it is mostly Indians who are listening and watching westerners and their experiences with India, but eventually, we will also start to see the opposite happen - Indians will start to speak back to a western audience, and our numbers will make sure that we have a pretty sizable voice, something that will eventually be impossible to ignore.

But this brings the main question of this article into focus - if and when Indians start to speak out to the English-speaking world on all sorts of issues - political, economic, social, etc. - what will we have to say to the world?

Missing the forest for the trees

This is perhaps the point where the main question of the article itself needs to tampered with. Because the correct way to think about this question is not what one thing Indians will have to say to the world, but rather what all things (plural) Indians will have to say to the world.

Because have no doubt about it, the voice coming out of India will be diverse, pluralistic, and even often contradictory and confrontational with each other. India is a civilization pretending to be a country - it is so large in terms of physical geography, population size, regional diversity, religious diversity, ideological diversity - with permutations and combinations of all these different factors adding to the complexity - that it will be very difficult for anyone from the West to wrap their heads around it. So a smart observer shouldn't expect one singular voice to come out of India as it opens up to speak its mind to the world. In typical Indian style, this voice will be loud, argumentative, and difficult for the outside world to understand.

The political voice coming out of India will be multifaceted and diverse, because this is a country where the democratic process still works, in spirit as well as on paper. People in India still believe in the electoral process to effect the changes they want to see in society. This is country the where the incumbent ruling Party can win a nationwide election in 2019, including seven out of seven seats in Delhi, the nation's capital, and one year later, this same Party can get completely obliterated in the elections to the National Capital Region's Legislative Assembly elections. Additionally, when a particular dispensation comes to power, they can actually effect the changes they have been selected to perform, unlike the West today where a technocratic institutional oligarchy runs the show, and the actual elected politicians have almost no say in the real trajectory of their countries. When this belief in an accountable democracy interfaces with the world, it will lead to a fascinating phenomenon of westerners being shocked that Indians lay claim to democracy just as much as they do.

As a large and raucous democracy, the world will find nationalists, communists, communalists, secularists, liberals, etc. and everything in between, when they hear from India. The large Indian population will ensure that the Indian cohort of these worldwide intellectual trends might actually start acquiring a significant say in these global niches, but I do remain concerned about one aspect of this - I don't think the level of intellectual discourse has yet reached the point where Indians have a lot of new things to add to the worldwide discourse.

Today, Indian academia, in particular the social sciences, is mostly a collection of western ideas (almost exclusively from the Western Left) lazily imported into the country with a few local twists and terminologies, and in my opinion this makes it weaker and less original and impactful. Functionally, Indian Academia looks more today like a consulate of the Roman Empire in the remote outer provinces, rather than an independent institution with its own ideas and trajectory. But if India is to live up to Sri Aurobindo's dream of contributing to the intellectual and spiritual development of the whole world, then this self-imposed intellectual servitude will have to change. We will need to break through the guardrails and shackles imposed by the previous generation of ideologues masquerading as "eminent intellectuals", and only then will we be able to claim to have something new to reveal to the world. And this will happen only if Indian academics stop thinking that their life's goal is to "graduate" from India to become part of the western elite, and instead decide to take up their role of being prominent voices of a re-emerging civilizational identity. If and when this happens, India will have a lot of interesting things to say to the world. So while we are not quite there at the position where the "Empire Writes Back" phenomenon has come into full effect in letter and spirit, hope still springs eternal.

Secondly, when the rest of the world looks at India, it will mostly see a large population that still believes in many of the things the modern world considers to be "outdated" or "unfashionable". Indians, irrespective of region and religion, are still largely a conservative people, who believe in antiquated notions like faith, family, virtues, togetherness of communities, etc. Perhaps this is because we haven't been as touched by modernity as our counterparts in the developed world, or perhaps it is because there is something inherently unique to the Indian psyche that can resist the negative side of modernity, but it is a reality nonetheless. Indians will not fall in-line on many of the projects of the western liberal elite - call us old-fashioned, but we still believe in boring old concepts like national borders, in organizing society not to maximize the profits of the shareholders or to re-engineer society to achieve ideological ends, but to the benefit of families. We believe that our state and our leaders should take actions that benefit our own population (a revolutionary idea in the West) and that if some leader doesn't act in this manner, we want a political system where we can remove him or her. A politician seeing his primary duty to be the service and well-being of his/her own people, and not to some vague and utopian ideological goals, might be a shocking prospect to the modern West, but it isn't the case with India. While I'll be the first to recognize that the Indian system is far from perfect, I do think we are better situated than many countries in the West in regards to the first-principles of our society and polity. At least for now.

The Western elite and their media houses are already grappling with these unfortunate realities. They look at India and see a billion people who would be conservatives if they lived in their western countries, and that scares the hell out of them. And seeing this dynamic play out will be interesting to behold. While I have no hope in the western priestly classes improving their behavior in this matter, I do think there is hope for many like-minded people in western societies who might look at India and hope to find the social values that their own countries have long-since abandoned.

An exciting but vague prospect

With all this in mind, I'd like to conclude by saying that whether any of my specific prognostications come to pass or not, it is absolutely certain that this Indian numeric ascendancy on the English-speaking internet will irreversibly change the Internet as we know it. In an interesting intellectual exercise, we might finally get to see what the world would've looked like had the Chinese internet not been a closed compound, and had it been allowed to develop freely along with the global internet. How would it have changed the trajectory of modern U.S.-China ties? How would people-to-people relationships have been different in this hypothetical reality?

All these questions, and more, will get partially answered in the near-to-medium future. We don't know exactly how the western world will react to this development. For example, I can see an Indian numeric dominance on the English-Internet leading to calls within many western countries to create guarded-gardens of their own. It could lead to an end of the Internet as we know it.

But whatever happens, one thing can be said with much certainty. Like many things before this, Balaji will be right once again! We are just waiting to see what the proper form this eventuality will take.