India just celebrated its 80th Independence Day.
Seventy-nine years after independence, there is a growing confidence about where the country is headed. India wants to become a developed nation by 2047, the centenary of its independence. It wants greater self-reliance, greater economic strength, greater influence on the world stage. Governments are courting India. Companies are investing in India. Universities around the world are competing for Indian students. The language of the moment is full of possibility: demographic dividend, rising middle class, innovation economy, global talent.
Viksit Bharat.
India has named a destination.
But has it developed a direction?
I have been thinking about that question for some time while working on my next book: 79 Not Out — a book about the unfinished work of educating India’s young. One of the ideas I explore in it is what I call India’s leadership-density gap.
India has never lacked brilliant people. There is no shortage of extraordinary founders, scientists, executives, teachers, artists, civil servants, thinkers, and entrepreneurs. In a country of this scale, exceptional people are everywhere.
But exceptional people are not enough.
And demographics are not destiny. Neither are GDP projections, IITs, unicorns, coding skills, English proficiency, or millions of university graduates. A young population only becomes an advantage when enough young people become capable of exercising agency over their own lives and responsibility toward the world around them.
A nation of nearly a billion and a half people with aspirations of global leadership cannot depend on a relatively thin layer of people capable of exercising judgment, taking responsibility, and navigating complexity. Leadership has to become denser. It has to exist in companies, classrooms, neighborhoods, institutions, and families. It has to show up in people who are willing to think for themselves, challenge assumptions, make decisions when the answer is unclear, take responsibility when those decisions go wrong, and continue learning when the world changes around them.
That kind of leadership begins long before anyone receives a title.
Which is why the past week and a half has been so interesting for me.
I have spent much of it talking with high school students across India about what it means to become future ready. I usually begin with a question students have heard countless times before: “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
A few hands go up almost immediately. Someone wants to be a doctor. Someone else an entrepreneur. Another student says engineer, designer, computer scientist, lawyer.
They understand the question. They have been hearing some version of it for years.
Then I ask another one.
“Do you think you are future ready?”
The room changes.
Students look at one another. Some smile. A few hesitate. Most are not entirely sure what I mean. Ready for university? Ready for a career? Ready for artificial intelligence? Ready for adulthood? Ready for a world that even the adults in the room are struggling to understand?
Then I put six questions in front of them.
What have you tried? What have you learned about yourself? What do you do well? Where do you need to grow? What kind of problem are you willing to work on? What is the evidence behind your direction?
There is almost always a hush and that hush tells us something important about the way we prepare young people for their futures.
The questions themselves are not particularly complicated. What makes them difficult is that most young people have had far more practice answering questions about where they are supposed to go than questions about who they are becoming.
We ask them to choose subjects, streams, courses, majors, universities, countries, and careers. We help them build profiles, prepare for board examinations, take standardized tests, meet prerequisites, write personal statements, and submit applications. We have constructed an enormous ecosystem around helping young people make consequential decisions.
But how much time have we spent helping them understand the person making those decisions?
A student may know that she wants to study computer science without knowing what she has actually enjoyed building. Another may confidently say business while having little understanding of what kinds of problems hold his attention. A student may have learned that medicine is prestigious, engineering is safe, entrepreneurship is exciting, or studying abroad represents success without ever separating inherited ambition from personal direction.
None of those choices is necessarily wrong. What should concern us is how quickly we treat the answer as evidence that the student knows.
I do not expect a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old to know exactly who they are or where their life is heading. I would be more concerned if they did. Their answers should change. Their interests should expand. Their confidence should occasionally collapse. They should discover that something they thought they loved bores them and something they never considered becomes unexpectedly compelling.
Uncertainty is part of growing up.
Education should give young people enough experience to do something useful with it.
That is what I have started thinking of as formation guidance.
Much of what we currently call guidance is really navigation. Which subjects do you need for this course? Which universities match your grades? Which countries offer the best opportunities? Which applications are due next month? Which scholarships are available? Which career appears promising?
All of that is useful. Students need good information, and the people who help them navigate increasingly complicated systems perform important work.
Yet navigation works best when someone has at least begun developing a direction.
Formation asks different questions. What have you actually tried? What did that experience reveal about you? What comes naturally and what requires work? What kinds of environments bring out your best? What assumptions about success have you inherited? What do you care about enough to keep working on after the excitement wears off? What evidence supports the story you tell yourself about who you are?
Those questions do not produce a university list.
They produce a person who may eventually be better equipped to make one.
This has made me think differently about the conversations I hear throughout international education.
I spend a great deal of time at conferences with university representatives, counselors, educators, and organizations discussing students. We debate what students want from universities, what universities want from students, what parents value, what admissions officers look for, what makes one destination more attractive than another, which courses are gaining interest, and how institutions should communicate their value.
Universities study these questions seriously. They survey students, analyze application behavior, track enrollment patterns, and invest considerable resources in understanding what influences a young person’s choices.
The student has been asked.
But have we helped the student become capable of knowing?
A university can learn that students want employability, affordability, flexibility, or a particular program. A counselor can help a student assemble a list of institutions that meet those criteria. An application platform can make the process easier. Artificial intelligence will soon make much of that information instantly accessible, if it hasn’t already.
What none of those systems can assume is that the young person entering the criteria has developed enough self-knowledge to know what matters and why.
That is where the human work begins.
The counselor of the future may spend less time explaining requirements and far more time asking questions that algorithms cannot resolve on a student’s behalf. Why do you want this? What have you done that makes you believe it? What did you learn when it did not work? What have you avoided trying? Whose definition of success are you carrying? What would you still care about if nobody were impressed by it?
That kind of guidance can be uncomfortable. It takes longer. It does not always produce the clean answer everyone wants. It may also be considerably more important.
Universities have a role here too, even if they understandably resist the idea that they should somehow be responsible for forming teenagers before enrollment. They are not. But universities already enter students’ lives years before those students arrive on campus. They visit schools, conduct workshops, sponsor events, organize summer programs, train counselors, hold webinars, create content, and send representatives around the world to begin relationships with prospective students.
Much of that activity ultimately serves a familiar institutional question: will this student choose us?
I wonder what would happen if more of it began with another question: can we help this student become better equipped to choose?
That would change the relationship between recruitment and readiness. It might also change what universities believe their role is before an application ever appears.
The world is already competing intensely for India’s young people. Universities want their enrollments. Companies want their talent. Governments want their skills. India itself is counting on them to carry the country toward 2047.
That is an extraordinary amount of expectation to place on a generation.
Yet expectations are not preparation.
If India wants greater leadership density twenty years from now, the work begins with the experiences young people are having today. It begins when students are encouraged to try before declaring a passion, reflect before making a choice, encounter difficulty without immediately changing direction, work with people unlike themselves, build something that might fail, and accumulate evidence about what they are capable of contributing.
It begins when education helps young people lead their own lives before asking them to lead anyone else.
But perhaps we make another mistake when we think of formation as something that belongs primarily to the young.
The six questions I have been asking students are useful precisely because none of them has a permanent answer. What have I tried? What have I learned about myself? What do I do well? Where do I need to grow? What kind of problem am I willing to work on? What is the evidence behind my direction?
A seventeen-year-old should answer those questions differently at twenty-five. And a forty-five-year-old who is still relying on the answers they gave at twenty-five may have stopped paying attention.
Formation is not a stage we complete before adulthood. It is the continuing work of becoming.
That may be why these questions have started feeling much larger to me than India, university recruitment, or even education.
Most of us are remarkably comfortable naming destinations. The promotion. The company. The degree. The relationship. The retirement number. The city we want to live in. The title we want next to our name. The version of ourselves we hope to become five or ten years from now.
Destinations give us something to aim at. They can create momentum and organize effort. They matter.
They can also make it remarkably easy to stop examining the direction in which we are actually moving.
Adults become very good at this. We accumulate commitments, responsibilities, routines, and identities. We become the executive, the parent, the entrepreneur, the professor, the spouse, the expert. The destination we once chose begins generating its own momentum, and continuing forward can start to feel like evidence that we are still headed somewhere we want to go.
Which is why the questions I have been asking seventeen-year-olds may be questions the rest of us should keep asking too.
What am I still trying? What am I learning about myself now? What have I become good at, and where have I stopped growing? What problem am I willing to spend this chapter of my life working on? And what evidence do I have that the direction of my life still matches the destination I keep describing?
Those questions do not become less relevant after seventeen. They simply become easier to avoid.
India has spent considerable time defining where it wants to be in 2047.
Perhaps the more important question is who its young people will need to become by then.
The same is true of the seventeen-year-old sitting in front of us. And the same is true of us.
We spend much of our lives asking where we are going. Every so often, we owe ourselves the harder question: who are we becoming on the way there?
Destinations change.
Direction travels with you.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
