We Were Taught How to Climb. Were We Ever Taught to Look Down?

I have been looking at a picture for longer than I expected to.

It is an Indian adaptation of a very old image. The original, the Pyramid of Capitalist System, was published in 1911 by the Industrial Worker, the newspaper of the Industrial Workers of the World, and was itself copied from a Russian flyer of around 1901. It shows society as a pyramid. A few sit on top. Everyone else holds the structure up.

The Indian version keeps the shape but changes the words. At the very top: "We rule your mind," drawn with religious symbols. Below that: "We rule you," with a politician, a businessman, a godman. Then "We fool you," with media, breaking news, drones. Then "We shoot at you," with police and paramilitary and army. Then "We enjoy on your labour," an elite dining table with money and selfies and the scales of justice. And at the base, holding everything, "We work for all. We feed all." Farmers, laborers, sanitation workers, women, children.

I have spent my life being trained to succeed inside a structure like this one.

I studied engineering. I studied management at IIM Kozhikode. I have been taught to build products, to understand markets, to manage organizations, to read a balance sheet and a customer at the same time. I have sat in those classrooms. I have also stood outside those networks. And I keep asking myself where exactly, in this pyramid, I am standing.

Surely, education was supposed to help us climb.

And it did.

But looking at this picture made me wonder whether climbing was ever the difficult question.

The difficult question is what happens after we climb.

What our education is very good at

India's elite institutions are extraordinarily good at one thing. They teach people to navigate systems.

We learn to allocate capital, optimize operations, understand consumers, manage organizations, build technology, and compete. We are taught, with real rigor, how the machine works and how to make it run faster.

What we are taught much less about is the people who make those systems possible.

The delivery worker who brings the machine's output to your door. The sanitation worker who keeps the city running. The farmer. The construction worker. The security guard who opens the gate of the premium office. The millions whose labour holds the structure up, and whose children will almost certainly never sit in the classrooms we sat in.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the actual shape of the Indian workforce.

The India Employment Report 2024, published by the International Labour Organization and the Institute for Human Development, states it flatly: nearly 82 percent of the workforce engages in the informal sector, and nearly 90 percent is informally employed. Its figures put informal employment at roughly 90 percent of all workers, meaning work without a written contract, paid leave, or social security. Formality is the exception in India, not the norm.

Agriculture tells the same story from another angle. Per Statista's data on India's workforce, over 40 percent of India's workers are employed in agriculture, while the sector contributes only around 15 percent of gross value added, a share that government data shows has fallen steadily for three decades. A large share of the country works the land for a small and shrinking share of the country's income.

Even the "modern" economy runs on precarious labour. NITI Aayog's 2022 report, India's Booming Gig and Platform Economy, estimated 7.7 million gig workers in 2020-21 and projected that number would rise to 23.5 million by 2029-30. Most of them, the drivers and the delivery riders whose apps we open without a thought, sit outside the protections that formal employment carries.

This is the base of the pyramid. It is not a metaphor. It is the overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens.

Success is not the same as leadership

Here is the sentence I keep returning to.

India has become very good at producing successful people. But success and leadership are not the same thing.

Success is measurable. It is revenue, efficiency, capital raised, shareholder value returned, a package announced at placement season. By these measures, our institutions perform brilliantly. At IIM Ahmedabad's 2024 final placements, Accenture and Boston Consulting Group made the most offers. At IIM Calcutta in 2024, consulting absorbed 31.6 percent of the batch, with finance and technology close behind. The elite management graduate flows, overwhelmingly, into consulting, finance, and technology.

There is nothing wrong with any of these careers. I have built one adjacent to them.

But notice what these numbers describe. They describe a system extremely good at routing its most credentialed people toward the optimization of capital, and much weaker at routing them toward the people at the base of the pyramid.

Leadership begins somewhere the placement report does not measure.

It begins with a set of questions.

Who benefits from the system I am improving? Who pays its hidden costs? Whose voice isn't in the room?

And the hardest one:

When something is clearly wrong, does my education give me the courage to question it, or merely the intelligence to rationalize it?

That last question is the intellectual center of everything I am trying to say. An elite education is, among other things, a training in rationalization. We learn frameworks. Frameworks are powerful, and frameworks can justify almost anything if the person using them has decided in advance what they want to conclude. The same mind that can model a market can construct an airtight argument for why the injustice in front of it is somebody else's problem.

What "leaders" actually means

Every elite institution in India speaks about creating leaders. It is in the brochures and the convocation speeches and the mission statements.

I want to interrogate that word, carefully, without turning the institutions into villains.

Producing capable CEOs, consultants, and founders is a genuine achievement. It is also not the same thing as producing leaders.

Leadership, if the word means anything beyond seniority, means moral imagination directed toward the people over whom your decisions exercise power. The worker whose shift your algorithm schedules. The farmer whose price your supply chain sets. The customer whose data your product harvests. Leadership is the capacity to hold their reality in your mind when you make the decision, especially when holding it there costs you something.

That capacity is not on the syllabus. It cannot be graded. And a system that only rewards what it can grade will, over time, quietly stop producing it.

Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit, names the mechanism precisely. A meritocracy, he argues, generates hubris among the winners and humiliation among those left behind. The more we see ourselves as self-made, the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. Daniel Markovits, in The Meritocracy Trap, makes a parallel case: the meritocratic elite is not a fraud so much as a machine that reproduces itself while sincerely believing it earned everything.

The Indian version of this has a name the American version does not. Caste.

The distance we do not notice

Here is what I have come to believe is the quiet danger of an education like mine.

Elite education creates distance. Not all at once, and rarely on purpose. It creates distance progressively, one reasonable step at a time.

The classroom is selective. The office is premium. The network is homogeneous. The neighborhood changes, and then the school your children attend changes, and then the restaurants and the vocabulary and the assumptions change. Each step is individually defensible. Together they add up to a life lived almost entirely among people who resemble you.

The more successful we become at moving upward through society, the less society we may actually encounter.

The data on who gets into these rooms in the first place should unsettle anyone who believes the system is a pure meritocracy. Careers360's 2022 survey of 1,514 students found that 79.8 percent of those who make it into the premier technical institutions, including the IITs, NITs and IIITs, had started coaching for the entrance exam in or after Class 11; among IITians specifically, 76.8 percent had done so. Success runs through an expensive coaching ecosystem that poorer families cannot access, and government survey data shows urban households spend far more than rural households per student on private coaching. The "level playing field" tilts long before the exam.

And it tilts by caste. Consider who teaches in these temples of merit. RTI data reported in 2024 showed that at IIT Delhi, of 633 faculty members, 89 percent were from the general category, with SC and ST faculty making up roughly 2.7 percent and 1.1 percent respectively. Across the IIMs, the picture is starker. Several IIMs have no ST faculty at all, and RTI findings reported no SC or ST faculty appointments at some IIMs against sanctioned positions.

There is a structural reason for this, and it points back to the pyramid. For years, several IIMs did not implement reservation in their PhD programs, the very pipeline that produces future faculty. IIM Ahmedabad implemented reservation in PhD admissions only in 2025, after a seven-year campaign and a Public Interest Litigation. IIM Kozhikode, my own institution's lens on this, was directed by the Kerala High Court to admit an OBC candidate after the court found the reservation policy had not been followed.

The exclusion does not stop at the campus gate. It reproduces itself in the decision-making class the campus feeds.

The study by D. Ajit, Han Donker, and Ravi Saxena, "Corporate Boards in India: Blocked by Caste?", published in the Economic & Political Weekly in 2012, examined the boards of the top 1,000 Indian companies. In 2010, 93 percent of their board members belonged to the forward castes, the median caste-diversity (Blau index) score was zero, OBC directors were under 4 percent and SC/ST directors around 3.5 percent. As reported by Business Standard in June 2024, World Inequality Lab data found that upper castes held 88.4 percent of Indian billionaire wealth in 2022, while Scheduled Castes held 2.6 percent and Scheduled Tribes held none at all. The same research program shows the bottom 50 percent of Indians holding a tiny share of total wealth, while the top 0.001 percent, fewer than ten thousand individuals, claim around 17 percent.

This is the same pyramid. The classroom, the boardroom, and the billionaire list are drawn from the same narrow top, and the base holds all three up.

What the cartoon gets right, and where it is too simple

I do not want to defend the cartoon as literal truth. Reality is not divided into six clean horizontal bands.

People move between categories. A farmer's son can become a founder. Intergenerational mobility in India has genuinely improved over the last two decades, and mobility research suggests improvement across castes, not only among the privileged. The delivery rider is not simply a victim, and the executive is not simply a villain. Power in India does not operate through one lever. It operates through caste, class, capital, political authority, education, geography, and networks, all at once, in combinations too tangled for any pyramid to capture.

So the cartoon is too simple.

But its central question survives the simplification. In fact the simplification is what makes the question legible.

The question is this. Who carries society, and who gets to make decisions about society?

And the inequality data suggests the gap between those two groups is widening, not closing. The World Inequality Lab's 2024 paper, "Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj", by Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, found that by 2022-23 the top 1 percent's income and wealth shares, at 22.6 percent and 40.1 percent, are at their highest historical levels, and India's top 1 percent income share is among the very highest in the world, higher than South Africa, Brazil, and the United States. The authors' own conclusion is that the "Billionaire Raj" is now more unequal than the British Raj.

If elite education disproportionately routes its graduates into the class that makes decisions about society, then that education confers not only opportunity. It confers responsibility.

I want to be careful about what I mean by responsibility. I do not mean party politics. I do not mean turning your LinkedIn into a broadcast tower for causes. I mean something quieter and harder.

I mean the responsibility to remain intellectually awake.

To keep asking questions after the questions become inconvenient. To tolerate disagreement instead of curating it out of your feed. To examine power honestly even, especially, when you are the one benefiting from it. To understand lives outside your own socioeconomic circle well enough that they remain real to you when you make a decision that touches them.

What would be the real failure

B. R. Ambedkar saw this failure coming, in his own community and beyond it. In his final years he spoke with open disappointment about the educated class. In his speech at Agra on 18 March 1956 he said that some people had reached high posts after getting an education, but that these educated persons had betrayed him. He had expected that they would do social service after getting higher education. He had believed education would produce servants of society. He found, too often, that it produced people who used their education to secure their own position and then pulled the ladder up behind them.

That is the failure I fear most. Not high salaries. Not political silence.

The greatest failure of an elite education would be to produce highly intelligent people who become so comfortable inside powerful institutions that they gradually lose the ability to question them.

India needs its engineers. It needs its managers and its entrepreneurs. I have staked my working life on the conviction that building things well matters.

But a nation cannot be built by competence alone.

It also requires conscience.

So I have stopped asking the question the cartoon first provoked in me. I am no longer very interested in "Which layer am I in?" It is the wrong question, and it flatters whoever asks it.

The better questions are these.

Now that education has given me the ability to climb, what am I going to do with the power that comes with it?

And, finally:

Am I helping more people climb, or merely protecting my place on the pyramid?

I do not have a clean answer yet. I am not sure anyone honest does. But I have decided that the willingness to keep the question open, and to let it cost me something, is the closest thing to leadership that my education never actually taught me.

The people at the base are still holding up the structure.

The least those of us near the top can do is stop pretending we climbed it alone.