The Broken Compact

Why the India, and American, Dream No Longer Holds

It was Dr V’s birthday this weekend, and we found ourselves in the Great English countryside; those great undulating fields and hedgerows that still whisper of an older order. There’s something about England’s pastoral stillness that throws modern anxiety into relief. The calm of inherited hierarchy, the sense that everything has already been decided, makes you think of those of us who were told that nothing was fixed, that we could climb forever if we just kept studying, working and performing.

The Dreams

The American Dream is: I start a business and I win!

The Indian Dream is: I struggle; my parents struggled but I make an incremental leap and the pathway is education; the Generational Company.

That faith, the Indian Dream, and by corollary the American one, was always incremental. Work hard, collect degrees, ascend by merit. It was a kind of soft socialism: the state would open the schoolhouse door, and the child of a clerk might someday become a civil servant, a doctor, an engineer abroad. It worked, for a while. But every compact eventually expires, and late stage capitalism has decimated every type of Dream there is, whether Indian or American.

The End of Incrementalism

Peter Thiel recently called today’s economy an “inter-generational fraud”: the elders own the assets, the young hold the debt, and the system tells the latter to innovate while giving them nothing to inherit.  Indian millennials, model pupils of meritocracy, have collided head-on with this reality.  They did everything right and still arrived too late.  Degrees now deliver anxiety, not mobility.  Education remains sacred but hollow, a ritual of reassurance for a world that no longer rewards it.

The great Indian middle-class compact depended on two illusions: that the economy would endlessly expand and that merit would always be rewarded.  Both illusions have collapsed.  A world of stable bureaucracies has given way to venture capital and algorithmic precarity.  The ladder has turned into a treadmill.

A New South-Asian Left

Out of this fatigue comes something quietly radical.  In New York, figures like Zoran Mamdani embody a generation unafraid of the word socialism.  His politics are not imported romanticism but a response to lived inequity: the working-class Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indo-Caribbean communities of Queens and the Bronx who watch the old desi elite consolidate power through nonprofits and tech start-ups.  They see the distance between theory and rent, between merit and survival.

Their language, justice, housing, dignity, comes not from the Ivy League but from the taxi depot and the bodega.  It is a reminder that South Asia’s original moral vocabulary was always egalitarian before it became aspirational.

Is India is held together by the patience of the marginalised?

The Hindu Exception

Set against this is the remarkable adaptability of the Hindu-American story.  The Brahmin–Bania compact, that ancient fusion of the intellectual and mercantile, has found in Western capitalism a natural extension of itself.  It does not wrestle with guilt; it optimizes.  Where others see exploitation, it sees efficiency.  The result is a cultural divide inside the diaspora: the socialist cadence of the Muslim-Bangladeshi-Pakistani left, and the managerial optimism of the Hindu right.  Both claim authenticity, yet they speak entirely different moral languages.

Material success comes easily to a civilisation that never considered wealth inherently sinful.  For others, the tension between faith, fairness, and survival remains unresolved.

The Death of the Dream

The Indian Dream was not false; it was finite.  It lifted millions out of poverty, produced scientists and novelists and global CEOs.  But it cannot reproduce itself indefinitely in a saturated world.  The pipeline from exam to office to visa has narrowed to a trickle.  The next generation faces something its parents never did: stagnation after success.

Across the diaspora, one senses exhaustion; the feeling of being permanently proximate to prosperity but never secure within it.  Education has become the new inheritance tax: everyone pays, few benefit.

After Meritocracy

Maybe this is the moment to stop mourning meritocracy’s death and start questioning its sanctity.  If the compact is broken, the question is not how to fix it, but what to build instead.  A society that measures worth only by productivity was always going to collapse under its own cleverness.

Perhaps what follows the Indian Dream will be smaller, slower, more communal: less about climbing, more about belonging.  The South-Asian story has never truly ended; it just keeps rewriting its social contract.  The new one will have to begin where the old one refused to look: with justice, with rest, and with the ordinary dignity of staying put.