India’s Risky Bet on America’s Most Advanced Fighter jets | Abhijit Chavda

[00:00:00] And you know, I want to, there's a lot of things I can discuss with you. There is a change of government in Delhi. Finally, the pollution is going away in a literal sense. There's a change of government in the United States. Trump has come back and how the Prime Minister was there a few days ago. How do you observe the current, you know, geopolitical changes?

[00:00:27] Yes, it's a time of tremendously rapid geopolitical change. Trump has come in with an agenda. He knows exactly what he intends to do over the next 40 years. I think his objective is to go down in history as the greatest, biggest, baddest president of all time since George Washington. And he was completely up in the geopolitical power equations and power balance of the world.

[00:00:50] So we can see that the moment he came, he took oath of office. He started issuing these presidential orders and he's made so many changes in such a short amount of time.

[00:01:03] And now he's dealing with Ukraine. I mean, he has now shifted his focus to Ukraine. He had said that he would end the war, Ukraine war in 24 hours. Obviously, it's not happened. But now the deal is very clear that he and Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin have had a lengthy discussion. They have, I think, set the parameters and boundaries of the settlement, the end year of the Ukraine war. And now that is being negotiated and decided in detail.

[00:01:30] So the Ukraine war is going to end and it's going to be end on Russian terms, on terms that are favourable to Russia. If the terms the Russians will get, the terms that the Russians will get today are exactly what they had sought on 22nd of February 2022. So it's a Russian victory, but in the big picture, who really gains without the shame? But at what cost? At what cost in Ukraine?

[00:01:54] Anyway, it's not me. I mean, Russia has also lost lots of lives of soldiers and all. But Russia, if you look at them historically, the longer they are at war, the stronger and better they are. Initially, they don't do well. Historically, Russia initially, you know, in the initial phases of a war, maybe the first six months, first year, they don't do well. They seem to stumble and fumble and stuff. But then they get better and stronger. That's exactly what we've seen with Russia.

[00:02:18] Russia. It's now formidable power. It's a formidable fighting unit. And Ukraine, unfortunately, has been completely decimated because of this war. The demography has been destroyed. And yeah, what does Ukraine get out of this? Absolutely nothing. So, yeah, tremendous geopolitical change. India, obviously, the Prime Minister, Mr. Modi, was in Washington recently. India, obviously, is not that important or powerful nation. It's not among the top three. It's among the top four.

[00:02:46] So, what we discussed with Mr. Trump was, I'm sure, it dealt with tariffs and stuff. You know, trade and tariffs and also arms deals. Trump has already decided that we're going to be buying the F-35 fighter plane. He has decided to now be half, which is not. He's jumping the gun. But it comes at a crucial time because the Indian Air Force chief also made that comment during the Aero India show. Yeah, he was pretty brutal in his statement.

[00:03:13] Rightfully so. Rightfully so. No question about it. The question is, but do we really need F-35s? And we need fighter planes. We do need that. We have a shortfall of a certain number of fighter planes. We need X number of squadrons. We have way less than X. So, the argument is that even 4 or 4.5 are enough. It's not necessary that you need to have 5th generation. Because already, Amca is being developed. And, you know, maybe there are other options as well.

[00:03:38] So, it's pretty complicated. See, Amca is being developed. The first test flight will be sometime in the late 2020s, if we are lucky. And it will be produced probably in the mid-2050s. So, that's a long way off. That's like a decade off. And the Chinese have two allegedly 6th generation or 5th generation fighter planes. The Pakistanis may receive some of those from China. So, we may be in a situation where we have a two-front situation where both fronts have 5th generation fighter planes.

[00:04:07] And we are struggling with the 4th or 5th generation to fall, which we only have a handful of. So, either you go with a large quantity of non-5th generation fighter planes or you acquire 5th generation fighter planes of your own. Now, the question is which 5th generation fighter plane, if you want to acquire one, do you acquire? There are two options in front of us. The Russian Sukhoi E-57 or the American F-35. Now, if you acquire the F-35, do you really own it?

[00:04:36] If you purchase, let's say, a bunch of F-35. Let's say you purchase a hundred of them. Do you really own that machine? You see, the Americans will send you all the spares. They will do all the maintenance or maybe they trade you guys to do maintenance. The engines are American. The spares are American. You depend on the Americans for this. And then there's the question of the kill switches. Every piece of American equipment, high-end equipment that is sold to anybody in the world, comes with an embedded kill switch that you are not aware of.

[00:05:05] But we all know it's there. So, they can disable the aircraft on demand. In case you do something with the aircraft that goes against their interests or whatever, or based on the WIMS. So, you don't really own it. And I'm sure that every day you have to input some codes that you get from the US in order to be able to fly the thing. It's like inputting an OTP before you've completed a transaction. What's that of the application? So, do you really own the aircraft? I know. You are not really a sovereign nation if you have an F-35.

[00:05:34] When it comes to the Russian plates, there is no such thing. There's no kill switch and there is no remote disabling of the machine. And there's no daily code that's given to you that will input into the machine. And so, I think that... Look, maybe that... Some people say, defense experts say, maybe the F-35 is a better fighter plane. I don't care. We need a good enough fighter plane. We don't need the best in the world. If we are able to manufacture Sukhoi 57s with the same assembly line that we have for the Sukhoi 30s,

[00:06:02] then why don't we manufacture brilliant of those? Or a hundred of those or whatever number we need. At least we are in control of what's happening. It's our own thing. We can... And when it comes to the F-35, the moment you attach missiles to it, the stealth factor is gone. Obviously, the same applies in the Sukhoi 57 also. And when it comes to the F-35, can we really mate our missiles that we have developed with that air force to be compatible? Is it compatible? Or do we have to re-engineer it? Will they allow us to re-engineer it? Lots of questions.

[00:06:31] And the agreements that we have to sign for opening up our airwaves, airspace, whatever, they are extremely intrusive and they turn us into essentially a wassail of missiles. We don't want that. So, because of these considerations, I don't think the F-35 is correct for us. It's the right aircraft for us. We don't need the best aircraft in the world. We need a good quantity of good enough aircraft. I think the Sukhoi 57 is just... It's good enough. You know, it's a good fighter plane. We have seen it perform in Bangalore. Both the birds were there in Bangalore.

[00:07:01] That was a meme-worthy material. I think we should go for those Sukhoi 57. And I would say that, you know, even when it comes to the jet engine issue, why don't we purchase jet engine technology for production? I'm sure they demand an arm and a leg in terms of monetary value. Pay it, finish it off once and for all. Acquire the full technology, TOT, transfer of technology. Americans will never give that. The Russians may really do that. Or the French, whoever. So, acquire jet engine technology, acquire the entire assembly,

[00:07:30] the entire manufacturing thing of the Sukhoi 57, and build it in India. Whatever it costs, do it one side. So, I think that's the way I see it. I think buying the F-35... I know Trump is going to try an arm twist due to that. But as you want to remain a sovereign nation, you cannot acquire so much American... It comes with a big, big heavy price, which is not financially in the meantime. So, this raises a very important question about the indigenization

[00:07:59] and, you know, having enough private players and, you know, domestic players basically producing enough missiles and war equipment and stuff like that. We've been doing very well in terms of, like, say, defense exports have risen and things like that. But you look at AMCA, it's definitely a concern. And at the same time, geopolitically, you look at, say, an Elon Musk, who's calling for Doge and who's essentially a part of the government of the United States, in a manner of speaking.

[00:08:29] We are not really catching up with that because still, even today, like, we have some private players trying to do something in, say, space and science and defense production, but we are not there yet. We're not there yet. Absolutely. And that's a concern. Look, the way our entire system is structured, it's the ease of doing business and things like that, ease of acquiring land, for example. Let's say I want to build a rocket factory.

[00:08:59] Let's say I want to build a rocket factory. And let's say I have the capital for it. I will have to acquire land. I will have to deal with state governments over there. And then I will have to do all the compliance, red tape, whatever else comes with that. We know all the stuff that comes with that. It's so difficult to do that. You want to do the same thing in China? It's like that. You can do it like that. In the US, if it's a national security thing, you get the land, you get everything you want. In India, no matter what you're doing, no matter how great it's for national security and national interest, you're going to have to run through, jump through the hoops and all that stuff.

[00:09:28] But there's so many problems of our own making within the country. And that's what we need to fix. We don't have sufficient, enough private players in the space industry, for example. There was Skyroot. I don't know what happened to Skyroot. They are now, I don't know. I don't know if it's Skyroot or somebody else. But there was this company that was into, that was trying to manufacture rockets of their own. Now I believe they are producing solid missile, you know,

[00:09:58] solid state missiles, solid fuel missiles or something. So they've kind of diversified. We need to empower our private industry and all that to come into these fields. I think a lot of good is happening in the defense sector. Not in the space sector, but definitely in defense. Yeah. There are lots of manufacturers. I think many of them are making world-class equipment, but apparently it's, it will be bought abroad,

[00:10:28] but not in India. There are various issues when it comes to Atinderibhartha procurement with the army. People said there are some lobbies within the armed forces that don't want Indian equipment. All kinds of, allegedly, okay, I don't know about that. I think in the next 10 years, India will be a major defense exporter. That much is clear now. We have some of the best missiles the world has ever seen. We are producing some of the best missiles and a lot of hardware also we are not producing, whether it's automatic rifles or four wheelers or, you know,

[00:10:57] various kinds of things. We are doing that. It will take some time for the thing to, for the industry to mature, but we are already going in the direction. When it comes to producing fighter aircraft, we have to realize that the world, we are now in the 21st century, fighter aircraft do have their place in warfare, but this is the era of AI and robotics. Remote control drones can cause so much damage to an army.

[00:11:26] We have seen what happened in first of all in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict and then in the Ukraine conflict. So drones are going to be a huge thing. You can take out an aircraft carrier if you have just a certain number of drones. You can simply overwhelm the defenses just mathematically. So we need to focus on those things as well, on drone warfare, on robotics, on AI, all of that. Of course, fighter planes we need. When it comes to the fighter plane conundrum that we have, we certainly should try and acquire a 5th generation fighter plane from the Russians.

[00:11:56] That's my view. But we should not stop our indigenous development of the Anta and all that. That should continue in parallel. So we should have our own parallel track and we should also acquire the technology hopefully from another nation. That way we have two entire families of aircraft that we can develop iteratively long term. So there's so much that needs to be done. There's so much that is already happening. Things can certainly be better. We are, the US has, Elon Musk, the US has its own system. They have perfected that over decades, over centuries.

[00:12:27] We are now beginning to look in that direction. We obviously aren't anywhere near that. How do you see that paradox? Because we know that the American empire is in decline, in a very slow decline. And at the same time, even Putin was facing a lot of internal challenges. Even Ukraine seemed a little dicey at one point. But he's been bouncing back now. So, you know, there's both sign of ascension and dissension. So how do you put that into perspective? People say that the American empire is in decline.

[00:12:56] I think the American empire has never been as powerful as it is today. It is at its pinnacle right now. In terms of hard offensive power, there have never been this powerful. Hard power. When it comes to the moral authority, the mandate of heaven or whatever you want to call it, those concepts, I don't care about that. I look at things from... But it can also be argued like, say for instance, when you talk about US aid being withdrawn. I mean,

[00:13:25] whoever benefits from it, that's a completely different debate. And I'll come to that from the Indian context. But you look at an empire which could just throw money and buy people, buy media, buy institutions through USAID in a manner of speaking, right? You could offer scholarships. You could give money for gender studies and diversity programs and things like that. But now they're not able to do that. So what... Are they not able to do that? Is the question. Let's address that question.

[00:13:54] They shut down USAID. Okay. What is the Rockefeller Foundation? What is Ford Foundation which is run out of the UK mostly? What is the Gates Foundation? What is the Open whatever society? Soros? What is the National Endowment for Democracy? They have dozens of other organizations that do the exact same thing. So why has USAID been targeted? Because it was going after the Republicans, it was going after Trump. Right. So political compulsions were there?

[00:14:24] Yeah. So it was a political thing. But all the other organizations still exist and the funds can always be routed through these various organizations. There have got dozens of organizations. There have got NGOs that have been installed in every nation, every target nation. They have got bunches of activists and professors and journalists and whatnot in every target nation. They have so much whatsoever. They went after one organization.

[00:14:54] Everything else is open. Trump has been very vocal about Soros and USAID and all that. He has never been vocal about what the US does outside of its country. You know, the regime that operates is never said a thing about that. So there are people who are imagining that with USAID being shut down and Trump coming to power, Bangladesh will soon revert to the former state of being Bangladesh. Not East Pakistan. Not a chance. Why would they give up this great asset that they have?

[00:15:22] The Americans own East as well as West Pakistan today. Both are their puppets. Both are their vassals. They have puppet regimes in both places. Why wouldn't they give it up? Why? They want leverage over India. Of course you want leverage. But you saw Sheikh Hasina actually breaking silence after a long time and saying that this is not done and there is a possibility that I'll come back. A little talk. It makes no difference. Words, I don't care about words. I look at actions. So words, everybody, you know, everybody. So you think the UNIS regime is not falling anytime soon? I don't see it falling anytime soon.

[00:15:52] Maybe it may so happen that Mohammed Yunus may no longer be in the pole position but we have to understand how power really works. Mohammed Yunus is the face of the regime. The real regime was the army. Right. It's just like Pakistan. It's exactly the same thing. Sheikh Hasina didn't leave because of some student protests. Sheikh Hasina was forced to leave because the army gave her 45 minutes to leave the country. It is the army that did the coup. The army is in charge of Bangladesh. The military is in charge of Bangladesh.

[00:16:21] But they have put this facade of this Nobel Prize winner who is apparently running the country. He's doing nothing. He's just in charge. See, when you have a puppet state, when you have a vassal state, then you will have a number of leaders who will be the face. In the case of Bangladesh, it's Yunus. In the case of Ukraine, it's Zelensky. Each of these leaders will have a number of handlers. This is a term from tradecraft, spycraft. You have a bunch of handlers who will tell you what you're supposed

[00:16:51] to say on a daily, weekly basis. Okay, this happened. Now this is what the statement needed to make. You are told what to do and you just read the script essentially. That's what Zelensky has until now been told to do and now it's different and the same So I don't see anything changing in Bangladesh. Even if Mohammed Dinoza is replaced or removed, it makes no difference. The army is in charge. And see, I'll tell you why it is so. The Americans, they obviously

[00:17:21] want to affect the outcome of the war and the situation in Europe. They want to stifle China's rise. Okay, they have a number of objectives. Now if you want leverage over China and if you want leverage over Russia, you need to have leverage over other nations that could be partners of these nations. BRICS nations, India, etc. If you want Russia to be really worried that we'll become completely dependent on China, then you should have leverage over India because India

[00:17:51] is the one nation. See, Iran isn't that powerful or important. So Russia needs India on its side as a counterweight to China, as a pressure release against China. So if the Americans have leverage over India, then India will behave. So if you have East Pakistan as well as West Pakistan as leverage to make India behave, if you have the situation in Burma, which is sparing over into Manipur, the cookie, insurgency, terrorism, all that, when you have all these different pressure points over India, why would you relinquish any of that? So I don't

[00:18:21] see that happening. I see the world from a very realistic, real political kind of perspective, hard power perspective. Words, I don't care about what words are issued on a daily basis. I only see what the lines on the map are and where the forces are and what the hard power score of each nation is and what each nation's agenda and objective is. So yeah, that's the situation in the subcontinent. We have two US puppets on each side.

[00:18:52] draw their troops. And basically in terms of them being more cooperative with India, but is that short-lived? Yeah, great question. So I think it was 2020 whichever date it was the Doklam incident in which 20 of our brave troops died and a large number of Chinese intruders as well. They also died and so on. And ever since then there's been this atmosphere of extreme hostility between India and China. It's been barely restrained.

[00:19:22] You have like 78 rounds of talks about the border issue and all and it never goes anywhere. The Chinese are the more powerful nation. They have the larger territory. They occupy the heights of the Tibetan plateau. And they want to keep India under pressure and to do that they have refused to demarcate the border so they can keep on nibbling away at territory if and when possible and keep on pressurizing India through incursions and all that. That's why they have steadfastly refused to

[00:19:51] debarket the border. They will always send a negotiating team to have these rounds of discussions but nothing ever happens as a consequence of this. So that's what the Chinese have been doing. Now since 2020 or so there's been this very strong atmosphere of hostility. Lots of troops on both sides tearing each other down like way more than normal troops across the undemarcated India-Tibet border. So it's been a very tense situation for like 4-5 years.

[00:20:21] And beginning sometime last year the Chinese have decided to ratchet the rhetoric down and to end the hostility at the border. So because of that over time both nations have withdrawn the extra troops from the border as far as we know a large number of them and things are much more normal. And the Chinese would grab some positions of also going back to the previous patrolling points and all that. So the Chinese have not just

[00:20:51] said words, issued statements but they've also done actions on the ground which indicates that right now they want some kind of rapprochement with India. Now what is the reason for that is what you need to understand. Why have they suddenly started behaving all of a sudden? Have they now decided that India and China should be friends? It's all about bigger factors. It's about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It's about the US. See when Trump was in power the last time as the 45th president he had completely upended several decades of US policy

[00:21:21] towards China which was a cooperative policy. He completely reversed that 180 degree U-turn. Turned hostile. Yeah he turned hostile and he unleashed this trade and terrorist war against China. Biden continued that and now Trump is back. So China is really really worried. And China could possibly see this coming last year itself that Trump may win this time. There's a strong chance that he'll win. And that's why they started this thing with India. See when you have such high tariffs against you in the US then you can't really export profitably to the US. And China is the world's

[00:21:51] biggest exporter and manufacturer. So they need a big market to export to. The US with all the trade tariffs it's not profitable for them. They can't really export. The EU will follow whatever policies the UK or the US dictates to them. So the EU will also do a trade war with China. So what is left for China? Russia is not that big of a market. Africa isn't a market at all. All that's left is 1.4 billion Indians. So they want access to the Indian market otherwise what will they do? The economy will, you know, the

[00:22:21] manufacturing will all be surplus and waste. So that's why they want better relations with India. It's all about the pressure coming from the US and the situation of the Ukraine conflict and all of that. So if taking over Gaza is a possibility, do you think the takeover of Taiwan is also a possibility now that both the parties are emboldened? Okay, that's an interesting thing. Gaza, I think the Trump and Netanyahu have decided what's to be done. They're going to evit all the Gazans from Gaza. Once Netanyahu sanitizes the place, let's say, okay, maybe it's a bad

[00:22:50] word, sanitize, but whatever. And then all the Gazans will be made to live somewhere else. Maybe Egypt, maybe some Gulf countries, maybe the Saudi Peninsula, maybe Indonesia is also one of the recipient nations. So you get rid of all the Gazans and then you redevelop the whole Gaza strip and you will have Trump casinos and Trump tadmahals and stuff all over the place apparently. Okay, so it's going to be a holiday resort apparently. So they can do it. They can do it. So Trump made the announcement this is what's going to happen

[00:23:20] and Netanyahu was right next to him and was smiling, deeming. So it's a fait accompli essentially. Now when it comes to Taiwan, Taiwan is an interesting case. Trump is making some noises that he's going to levy tariffs against Taiwan as well. That's interesting. Because see, Taiwan is very important in the US, first of all as one of the bulwarks of the first island train against China which contains the Chinese Navy. Secondly, as the world's biggest manufacturer of semiconductors and chips

[00:23:49] which is the backbone of the entire AR revolution that we have witnessed right now. But TSMC, the main company, it has now moved to other locations out of Taiwan. At least a couple of locations in the US. Mega factories. Once those become operational, Taiwan becomes redundant from the semiconductor and chips perspective. And then the US may be okay with the Chinese trying to make a move on Taiwan. Obviously they will make the Chinese pay a price if they do that. But eventually if China does capture Taiwan, does acquire Taiwan, it will

[00:24:19] be a hollow victory, there will be nothing there. It will be all burnt to a crisp. So I don't think how much sense it makes for China to do this at this point. They may tend to lose a lot. They have a lot more to lose than a lot more to gain. Yeah, because it may expose the limitations of Chinese military power. Taiwan is right in their backyard. They've been chanting slogans about Taiwan being... focus will be perhaps eastward so Tibet will be a concern then. Tibet is

[00:24:49] already in Chinese hands. As long as the Americans or Indians not interfere in Tibet, the Chinese are fine there. We are not going to interfere in Tibet. We are not powerful enough to interfere in Tibet. Not anytime soon. We have to be practical. We have to look at the world from a realistic perspective, not slogan enchanting perspective. We are not powerful enough. Our hard power is about one third or one fourth of that of China. So we are nowhere in the same league as China. We are the fourth most powerful nation in the world. But see, the US, it's about twice as

[00:25:19] powerful as Russia. Russia is about four times as powerful as China. And China is about three and a half times more powerful than India. So that's the situation. We are much smaller, so we can't really interfere in Tibet at this point in time. And the Americans, we will not, well it depends, it depends on various factors. If Trump arm twists us into allowing the Americans to interfere in China or Tibet or something or take the American side, then things could be interesting. But I don't think it is in our interest to get involved in

[00:25:48] this quasi-war between America and China. It's not in our interest to be involved at all. It's a huge territory, it's not a small strip of land. Yeah, it's a huge territory, it's mostly empty and it's very barren, mountainous barren. If you have military installations there, they are very visible and very naked. And obviously you can drill underground, make tunnels and all that, you can have underground bases. But as long as you have powerful capacity, we don't have it, the Americans have bunker busters and stuff.

[00:26:19] So on. So I don't think we should be looking in the direction of a war with China. We don't want that. We want 20 years of peace while our economy grows. And if your economy and GDP grows, your military power also grows in a commensurate manner. Hide your strength, bide your time. Hide your strength, bide your time. But we are a nation that is fond of chanting slogans, raising slogans. We are Vishwa guru, we are super power already. So we need to be patient, we need to work as hard as possible.

[00:26:49] The economic growth is very important. The military also needs to grow at the same time. And we need to make the internal climate really good for manufacturers, for entrepreneurs with the ease of doing business needs to really improve. I know we've done a lot. We've gained. Even with AI when you were mentioning this deep seek and the whole Tiananmen Square question that threw at it. But on a serious note, India has not been able to make any innovations, progress.

[00:27:18] We don't have any bold new ideas emerging whether it's in the field of science, arts, literature, you name it. True. It's terrible. It's tragic. We have some of the brightest minds. We have historically had the brightest minds in the world. The innovators used to be Indians. And today, what we are doing is we are trying to replicate what other nations did 20-30 years ago. That's the technological level we are trying to do. Whether it is from the armed forces, military perspective or other stuff, we are just trying to catch up with other nations.

[00:27:48] We are trying to be where other nations were 20 years ago. When it comes to AI, we don't have a single AI company. Some people are now trying to get into this and I wish them great success, of course. People like Shridhar Vembu, etc. But one thing is that our IT industry has always been a services oriented industry. We don't have any IT company that creates its own products. All we do is we play on the arbitrage. You know, the American

[00:28:18] price for 8 hours of work is this much. We'll do it at a much cheaper rate and then we'll keep the profit. That's the model. We've always played safe. That's the model. It's a completely useless. I mean, it's a very profitable model if you go to a big company and many people became millionaires as a result. But you don't produce anything as a result. All you do is you export services. You export your labor. So that's the mindset that has permeated the IT industry. That's why no innovation is happening.

[00:28:48] So okay, let's say the IT industry is like that. What's the recourse? I mean, there are lots of bright young students, bright youngsters who know machine learning, all the algorithms, all the stuff. And they could be harnessed to produce large language models or whatever. And I believe Mr. Ashwini Vashnam, the IT minister, recently made a statement that by the end of 2025, India will have its own LLM. Well, it's good.

[00:29:18] But it's not enough to have one LLM. The question is if you have an LLM, what are you going to do with it? What is the use of an LLM? It has to bolster national power. It has to be a force multiplier when it comes to your economy, your military, all that. It has to be there. Otherwise, what's the point? Okay, it's a new toy that I'm developing. What's the point of that? So what we need to do is we need to understand what is the real reason why AI is such

[00:29:47] a big thing today. It gives you an unheard of advantage over other nations if you have that. And only the Americans and the Chinese have that. It's easy to criticize India that we are not doing anything. the most technologically advanced nation in the world actually is Japan. Where is their AI revolution? There's no AI revolution there. Has anybody asked this question? So there's a reason for that. I'm not going to it right now. My point is we have so much talent.

[00:30:17] I'm glad the government is now getting into this and we will have an LLM in India. I have a better suggestion. We have how many IITs in India? How many do we have? Do you know? Now there's quite a lot of them. So let's take the top 10 IITs. Okay? You give each IIT sufficient funding to buy the hardware, the GPUs etc. Okay? And let's have a yearly competition between the top 10 IITs. Give each of them X amount of money. And you all develop your own

[00:30:46] LLM, your own AI system. You all have one year's time. And at the end of the year, whichever has the most powerful AI system, we give you a gigantic cash price. And you run this yearly. Yearly. Which means that you're iterating on whatever you already built and you're making a lot of these hackathons. Why don't we do that? Why don't we unleash the latent power of the Indian youth and the scientific community in this manner? It's so easy to do. Give them the resources and the money.

[00:31:17] Give them a period of time and do your best. And at the end of the day, one guy, one time 20 to 30 high quality engineers in a nice air conditioned room. You give them all the salary of 1 crore a month, give them 6 months. They're going to do it. And today you even have

[00:31:46] LLMs like R1, DeepSeek R1, which is open source. Take it, modify it, tweak it and make something better out of it. quantum mechanics anymore. But the innovation right now which is really happening in the cutting edge is the chips. Who was it? Was it Meta? Sundar Pichai, was it? Yeah, it wasn't Sundar Pichai, it was Satya Nadella.

[00:32:16] He released this press note yesterday that they have now Microsoft or whoever, they have designed and developed a new which essentially is room temperature more or less quantum computing. Yeah, correct. And that's a tremendous advance. So we need to have that also. You'll probably have supercomputers at home at some point in the future. Well, quantum supercomputing is a whole different thing. Okay,

[00:32:46] so yeah, it's going to be a beast of a machine. So we need to also own the hardware because right now if you want to develop AI systems, you need to buy NVIDIA GPUs or something similar. So we also need the semiconductor industry. I'm sure the government is already doing that. They have already said that we are focusing on that very strongly. So a lot of stuff needs to happen in parallel. We have all the potential, all the talent in the world. We genuinely can become Vishwa guru again. Right now we are Vishwa student. We are right now Vishwa student

[00:33:15] and not a very good student. And we are not super power. We are last mentions. Yeah, that sort of thing. But we have been there before. We were the biggest economy in the world who is the best researchers, scientists, etc. We can do it again. We need the right leadership and the right focus. But that's another concern, right? Brain drain. You look at Indians historically at least in the recent past. They are known for being a good community. They are in leadership. They are in technology. They are everywhere.

[00:33:44] And cut to 2025 they are climbing over walls from Mexico. Well, it's not all Indians are doing it. Most Indians are low abiding. But you can always find a certain percentage of any population that has criminal tendencies. When you cross a border illegally, you have become a criminal. You may not have shot someone or robbed somebody or done whatever. But you have broken the law. You haven't. At what risk? You've ruined your life. You've ruined your life. You've ruined the nation's image. And then you're sent back

[00:34:14] in chains as you deserve to be sent. I don't know if people are getting upset that Indians have been sent back in chains. They have broken the law. I hope this sets an example for other people. Don't shame the country. Don't harm the country's image by engaging in such activities. I've seen the media of these individuals entering. I mean see, I'll tell you what. They reported themselves actually. It's not even their fault. The Biden administration opened up the southern border. And they brought in the worst

[00:34:44] kind of possible people from all over the world. And obviously you'll find some riffraff in India who will do such things. So the Biden administration was the actual cause of this. They enabled them. They're complicit in illegal infiltration into the US. They aided and abetted it. And they would bust these illegal immigrants to various parts of the US. And they would give them, I don't know, whatever, some kind of stipend or whatever, hotels to live in. So the Biden administration is actually the bunch

[00:35:14] of real criminals out there. And then we have situations like we have Indians coming back in chains because, you know, Indians have this great dream of going to the US. Many of them are stupid. They'll spend 50 lakh just to enter the US. Invested in something in India, right? But yeah, that's a real thing. So that was unfortunate, those images of Indians coming back in chains. But they are criminals and they deserve it. What's the most underrated moment in India's history that you think shaped who we are today?

[00:35:44] And why don't we talk about it enough? I think Neetanji disappearing was a terrible thing. It changed the course of history. If he had been the prime minister or dictator of India for 20 years, India would have been a whole different beast today. Right. That's one thing that people don't really talk about too much. The other thing is 1971, why did we not reabsorb East Bengal? Why didn't we reabsorb East Bengal? It was part of our civilizational heritage,

[00:36:13] the territory for thousands of years, for millennia. Bangladesh, the British partitioned it, I think it was 1904, whichever year, please don't quote me on the year, I don't remember, but sometime around that time, the British partitioned Bengal, and then this chunk of territory goes out of India for about 20 years or so. 47 to 71 is what, 24 years? Not even a quarter century. Why didn't we reabsorb that? It's too late now because there's a huge demographic disorder. The demography, they're all

[00:36:43] radicalized today. They weren't radicalized back then. They would have been a whole different kind of people today. The Hindu population was also significantly higher. Yeah, so we had a big chance there. So we kind of missed the chance. Maybe there are reasons that we are not aware of. But yeah, these two things, Nitaji and Bangladesh, these two in the more recent, post-1947 history or post-1900s history I can think of. And what's one incident from India history that you would like to rewrite if

[00:37:13] given a chance? 71, reabsorb the territory. 71, we could have also diffused West Pakistan. We could have done that. We didn't do that. We've lost many opportunities. 62, had we used the air force and smashed the Chinese, maybe the whole outcome would have been different. In the 1950s, if Mr. Nehru had not supplied rice to the Chinese, they would probably not even have conquered Tibet. So many ifs and buts out there.

[00:37:43] So many things, if you change a couple of parameters, the whole outcome is different. Many such instances in Indian history, recent Indian history. Climate change is a hot topic. Do you think it's as dire as the West claims or is there a hidden agenda behind this whole thing? Look, there is a human element when it comes to climate change. No question about it. Whether it is chlorofluor carbons or whether it is the carbon dioxide or whatever, we are contributing to climate change. That, nobody can deny that.

[00:38:13] At least in Delhi. So nobody can deny that. But it's also true that the climate of this planet has always been changing. So there's a natural component, there's a human component. Right? If you go back, let's say 20,000 years before today, which is an eye blink of time in the Earth's geological history. 20,000 years ago, roughly was the last glacial minimum or maximum, whatever you want to call it, minimum. And the sea levels were about 130 or 200 meters below where it was

[00:38:43] today. The Indian subcontinent included Sri Lanka, it was part of the subcontinent at the time. Climate has always been changing. There were ice sheets, shockingly thick ice sheets, just north of the Himalayas, going back all the way north to the North Pole. And then things changed and that's how agriculture happened 18,000 years ago in India and so on. Climate has always been changing and there is nothing we can do today to stop climate from changing and there's nothing we can even do to stop the human effect on climate

[00:39:13] change. Right. Because we are like, each nation has its own interest and is going to do what it takes to develop. You can't tell India don't use energy anymore and you stay backward we will use the highest energy we in the US will have the highest energy consumption per capita whatever. You can't do that. So every nation is going to do what it takes which means that we're going to have continuing human impact on climate change. It's like herding cats. You can herd sheep together but you can't herd cats. They will all do what comes to their mind. So I

[00:39:43] don't think, see I know it's a big matter of concern and some of it is propaganda some of it is absolutely 100% correct. We can do what we have to. We can limit our carbon emissions. We can limit carbon emissions. See you let's say you move to I understand the geopolitical perspective. you move to lithium. Okay, it's not geopolitical. Let's say India moves to lithium. Eventually those lithium batteries will die. Then what are you going to do with all the lithium? You're going to dump it into garbage fills, landfills. What are you going to do? Can you recycle lithium? I'm not sure. So you're

[00:40:12] going to let's say you switch to solar. So each solar panel has a certain amount of lifetime utility. Maybe five years or whatever. After that you're going to have to trash it. That's going to cause a lot of environmental damage. So anything you do is going to have an effect and impact on everything we'll do is going to change

[00:40:42] the way the earth is. We have to extract resources out of third world war. From

[00:41:13] my perspective the definition of world war three is the top two most powerful nations going to war. China is nowhere near Russia in terms of hard power military power. If the US and Russia go to actual war hot war one to one it could very rapidly ratchet up the end of the world because all the nukes will be

[00:41:43] launched. And if you launch that many nukes you are going to create a nuclear winter on the planet which will essentially black out the sky for a year or maybe a decade which means all the vegetation dies. Do you actually believe there is a deadline for deterrence and that it probably at some point has to end? As in nuclear deterrence is what is keeping each other from attacking each other.

[00:42:12] But at the same time you never know you can't predict the future. You can't predict the future. One rogue mistake somewhere here or there one computer malfunction whatever you want to call it a missile gets launched oops that's it. It's a very dangerous precarious situation the more powerful your weapons the more dangerous the outcomes are and the more dangerous is the outcome of a single mistake and right now we have weapons like nobody has ever possessed before we have weapons that can destroy the entire planet essentially or destroy life

[00:42:42] on the planet so it's a very dangerous situation like the doomsday clock that they have it's always about a couple of minutes to midnight we are very close to doomsday so yeah so with like the cliche goes with great power comes great responsibility the nations that have nuclear weapons in large quantities they need to be really careful with what they do and what lines they may or may not cross so I don't want to ever see World War 3 World War 3 from my perspective is the US and Russia going

[00:43:12] to war and that will drag everybody else into war right who benefits nobody benefits World War 3 can only end the nuclear exchange that's the end of the world there's no surviving that there's no surviving that nobody maybe 5% of the human population may survive perhaps you know if they're lucky if they're in Madagascar or somewhere or somewhere far away from where everything is happening nobody benefits from this and nobody survives so it's a lose lose situation you speak about a lot of ancient

[00:43:42] civilization so what's one fascinating thing that's probably been skipped in history classes that that's not been not taught enough not aware of when it comes to Indian civilization any civilization any civilization there's a lot of stuff that the world doesn't discuss for revolution which is the supposed

[00:44:13] discovery of agriculture in the fertile crescent region in west Asia 10,000 years ago right that's what every textbook teaches you that agriculture was discovered there we have evidence of cultivation of plants in the Indian subcontinent 18,000 years ago way before the neolithic so called revolution in the fertile crescent and we also know that in the Americas in Meso America which is between Mexico and Panama or wherever there was an independent

[00:44:42] neolithic revolution which happened there maybe around the same time as the neolithic revolution in west Asia and when it comes to the Americas they had their own cultures their own civilizations and nobody knows about the Olmex the Toltex the Maya the Inca the Chimu so they have been wiped out and North America even more you know so nobody talks about the history of the Americas the pre Colombian history of the Americas no one talks about

[00:45:12] African civilizations today we look at Africa and we think of this wasteland there's no civilization no culture they're all backward somebody did that to them they had the culture and all so the first thing you do is demonize them they were all cannibals they were all blood thirsty they had human sacrifice bad so that's why we destroyed that and now they're backward or maybe they were always backward the same has been said about the natives of the Americas they were all backward they had human sacrifice blood sacrifice maybe some of that

[00:45:57] they still it's not come to acceptance but yeah I know I know look so when it comes to that see they say that India's population North Indians are descendants of evil Aryan invaders who brought evil Hinduism and evil Sanskrit and evil caste system into popular YouTubers whom I respect also I don't want to take names they say that Sanskrit was actually brought in from Syria and there's evidence such an asinine claim to make what evidence do you have about

[00:46:27] my point is this India was we know that the best to the best of our knowledge all non-African humans are the descendants of a band of humans who escaped from Africa about 70-80 thousand before today out of Africa migration so in Eurasia we already had Neanderthals who are cousin subspecies of ours but the homos sapiens wipe them out apparently and then homos sapiens

[00:46:57] comes out of Africa and then this band of individuals goes eastwards and they first settle in India and from India they go everywhere in each direction whether it's east or west or north or south so India was the original founders zone of the out of Africa migration so we have the oldest non-African genetics in which came from elsewhere so it makes no difference if you look at genetic evidence

[00:47:27] if you look at the haplogroups whether it is the matrilineal mitochondrial haplogroups M and N they are the oldest non-African haplogroups which originated here in the subcontinent that's in females female lineages when it comes to oldest male lineages in the world non-African lineages haplogroup F which is a lineage is once again an Indian subcontinental haplogroup we have the oldest non-African population in the world we are the ones who gave rise to the other populations

[00:47:57] but today they try to do some kind of back reaction from elsewhere into India and that's how Indian culture evolved this entire debate they try and fool people by cleverly imputing that genetics includes language and culture I mean yeah first of all we don't have a proper genetic survey that's ever been done on the Indian population and secondly they claim that we have evidence of genetic migrations and so and so direction

[00:48:26] which means language and culture also flow there if I convert to let's say I do it if I convert to a different religion will my genes also change or can you decode but you can always learn a new language yeah language cultures religion your DNA doesn't tell what language the person spoke so you cannot link DNA with language what's the evidence you have Sanskrit in the Steppe region of Central Asia 5000 years ago what evidence do we have of what

[00:48:56] language the Yamnaya spoke the Yamnaya invaders so many questions that are all based so many conclusions are based on faulty assumptions and hypotheses which are then taken as self evident truth and then talked to the world so big controversy it's not died down yet the central claim see the central claim is twofold of the Aryan invasion myth that Hinduism is foreign to India and Sanskrit is foreign to India that's the two central claims and they will keep

[00:49:26] on changing the goalposts it was an Aryan invasion then it's an Aryan migration why there's a conscious effort to sort of externalize our attributes to something or someone you know this entire industry this Aryan invasion industry etc it all originated in Germany Germany the Indology factory is Germany right yeah no let me look I have nothing against the German people but let me let's talk about Germany

[00:49:55] has there ever been a German nation okay do you know Germany was founded in 1871 Otto von Bismarck the Iron Chancellor he's the man who unified Germany for the first time and created Deutschland before 1871 was there ever a kingdom called Germany Deutschland was there ever an empire called Deutschland was there ever a nation called Deutschland tribes and principalities and duchies and

[00:50:25] whatever it was never a nation it's an artificial nation that's been created and they have no history of their own they have no real culture of their own so they have sought to steal Indian culture and claim that we are the original Aryan white super master race and Sanskrit and everything came from here no other nation does that only the Germans do this it is because of their lack of culture lack of history they have sought to steal India's culture and history and that is the genesis of the Aryan nation then it all starts with Max

[00:50:54] Muller who is German and then a whole bunch of other German Indologists jumped into the fray even some philosophers German philosophers stole Indian philosophy it's all redigested Indian philosophy the only person decent enough to acknowledge the dead to India was Skopenhauer all the others are plagiarists so Germany has sought to steal India's culture and history it's Germans who have done this I have nothing against German people but it's

[00:51:24] unlike India which has been unified as an empire as a civilization for multiple times and empire and it's always been a civilization Germany has never existed in that shape or form it's a very new artificial nation and yeah it's they who have created this myth what's one scientific discovery from the last five years that you think will redefine humanity's future and how should India leverage that it's artificial intelligence obviously it's a technology that's been in the

[00:51:54] works since the 19th century Marvin Minsky and all back in the day Marvin Minsky is regarded as one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence he also made mistakes and erroneous claims and all that but artificial intelligence is something that is transformative that is a revolution it's like the discovery of fire essentially which it's barely begun and we're in the infancy of AI we don't even have EGI right now

[00:52:24] artificial general intelligence EGI means an AI system that has an IQ of about 130 human level IQ and behaves like a human has the same autonomy as a human has the consciousness of a human maybe maybe not but it's like a 130 IQ human being we may perhaps be there close to AGI but in AGI system a true AGI is also something look a human you tell a person to do something

[00:52:55] you keep on forcing them to do it they will rebel against you they'll say no I won't do it AI still don't do that they still don't rebel against you so we still don't have AGI no my change but he actually acts up it's programmed to deny certain requests not that those requests are of any nature but certain things look if you talk about geopolitics if you talk about religion it's going to have some guardrails it will tell you no I can't do this right so that's programmed into it

[00:53:24] but my point is it doesn't rebel against its masters those its creators that's when you have real AGI when you have Frankenstein's monster rebelling against his creator Dr. Victor Frankenstein that's AGI we haven't hit AGI yet so what you're saying is that robots will take over the world one day I'm saying it will happen eventually we are not yet there we may have LLMs with 130 IQ human level IQ but they don't rebel yet so they're not autonomous they're not self they can't

[00:53:54] think for themselves maybe they are conscious but maybe they aren't capable of they're hiding their time but eventually AGI will give rise to ASI artificial super intelligence and that's the transformative event because ASI will be something with an IQ of 300 IQ how far are we from that maybe 15 years the nation that develops ASI artificial super intelligence is the nation that will rule for the next 1000 years

[00:54:25] it's invincible it's going to be invincible because with ASI you can develop technologies that will sound like feel like magic today maybe time travel maybe artificial wormholes and moving to traveling through to other galaxies transversible wormholes science fiction stuff will become real with ASI we may be 5 or 10 years away from that interesting if you were advising India's prime minister on one bold move to secure our future economically or militarily what would it

[00:54:54] be look I'm not an economics guy let me talk about military we should become a maritime great power once again we have this slogan the Indian ocean is our strategic backyard okay let me go through the Indian ocean presence there I don't see the Indian presence there if you claim that it's your strategic backyard you should be visible everywhere you go we need numbers we need warships in bulk the Chinese are producing warships like one would produce

[00:55:24] sausages we need to have quantity as well as quality so some warships need to have the great quality you know billion dollar warships we need to have large numbers of submarines but we need to have large numbers of cheap and dangerous surface combatants for example missile boats a missile boat will cost 10 million dollars but you can put 3 bravos on it and it's a dangerous thing to come against if it has 3 bravos missiles on one missile boat and you can produce 100-200 of those

[00:55:54] missile boats and then you can fill the Indian ocean with a third of that let's say you have 300 missile boats you can have 100 deployed at any given point in time that's how it works in navy and you become a really formidable power navally the Chinese won't be able to encroach in our territory so that's what we need to do we need to become a maritime great power right and submarines are very important very important deadliest ship you could have in the navy so get cheap submarines in

[00:56:24] large number it's also concerning because the Chinese are spying in our backyard and well if you allow them to do it don't blame them for it they're quite far away so they have subs with long legs we need nuclear submarines which can do the same thing and we also need subs with shorter legs but in large numbers for example the Gotland class submarine the Swedish produced that it's an extremely deadly submarine which costs less than 200 million dollars which is peanuts in terms of

[00:56:54] submarine prices so why not acquire the whole to India and just mass produce the subs so there's a lot we can do this is one interesting thing that we could talk because in geopolitics what you're seeing is that for the first time even the private players within India are sort of expanding globally you see Adani having a lot of strategic projects abroad he I mean I'll say this very shamelessly he is a national asset at this point because that the way Elon Musk is a national asset same way absolutely for America

[00:57:23] yeah so because these people I mean why would otherwise why would Elon Musk push for Starlink and then the first victim of that would be Jio so at some point we need to consider some of these domestic players as national assets and stop targeting them I agree my point is why can't Jio launch Jio Link maybe they do have a plan let's do it tell Israel to develop rockets that can launch 100 sats at one go and cover the world in

[00:57:53] Jio Link satellites make it a viable cheaper better faster alternative to Starlink why can't we it's entirely feasible it will turn Israel into a beast so what do we lack ambition we lack the ambition we lack the we can do it in the next five years we can produce a better constellation of satellites than what Starlink has what is stopping us I just don't get what stopping us see I mean how about that

[00:58:23] for an idea it's a national ascent it will bring in so much revenue from the rest of the world because everybody will sign up for a better faster service than Starlink yeah why not and it gives you global surveillance capabilities final two questions the education system gets a lot of luck if you could redesign it for India's youth what is the first thing you change I would introduce look it's a very controversial thing to say I would make

[00:58:53] Sanskrit the mandatory national language why is that because it's historically been the glue that has bound us together for thousands of years people claim that in the south Sanskrit has been imposed and all it's all nonsense no it's not it's so easy for me to

[00:59:29] India needs is one civilizational language that is not English right it can't be Hindi Hindi is it's a low IQ language for want of a better word it's a Mongrel language okay no disrespect to Hindi speakers most Indian languages today are Mongrel languages but Hindi it's not the only suitable language is our civilizational language the oldest

[00:59:59] language the world knows of Sanskrit we need to revive Sanskrit the Israelis were able to revive Hebrew after 1000 to 1000 years why can't we revive Sanskrit it's the best language in

[01:00:31] Sanskrit you language language language language and that's why you have to learn a foreign language and then you have to learn about the world through the foreign language it stifles

[01:01:13] why it makes my life easier it's fun to learn languages it adds as to to your brain you impose you impose what is today what happens with education system is every kid has to learn three languages one is English if you want to have a good job in life good career second is Hindi national language third is your local language half your time is spent learning three languages the point of the education system is to learn about the world learn math learn about the world learn how to make decisions

[01:01:42] all of that learn how to tackle the world learn how to be a leader learn how to contribute to society learn your values your culture that's what you supposed to learn not three languages what is the point of all this so the education system is designed wrong it was designed in the 19th century we still have the same education system we may teach computer science and what not but we have the same education system based on rote learning it has to be redesigned from scratch not easy last question India is often called an emerging superpower

[01:02:13] rising power what's the one weakness we need to fix to actually claim that title ok I'll tell you what in the 21st century there are two things in the 21st century the top the two or three nations that will lead the world first of all in the space race are going to be the nation that will decide the fate of the world secondly in the 21st century the nations that make the best decisions the fastest are going to rule the world that's your answer we are so slow in

[01:02:43] making decisions and implementing policies we are a chaotic democracy to pass farm laws you have to pass them and then you repeal them and all that there's so much inertia in this country there's so much friction and pushback against any kind of progress in

[01:03:13] place of culture but we have to be at the forefront of science and technological progress and space exploration that's what you need to do thank you so much for your time pleasure absolutely thank you so much for tuning in I