India, Aug. 14 -- Non-alignment and mixed economy were the two terms which described India's strategic and economic positioning when the generation to which this author belongs was in school. To be sure, the Soviet Union was history and the 1991 reforms had already happened by then, but textbooks and institutional wisdom were still wedded to old values in the Tier-3 town in Bihar where I grew up.

The next two decades would be transformational. Almost everybody from my school cohort went to a private engineering college in some state in west or south India and landed a reasonably well paying, and more importantly, prospect-enhancing IT job. Many of them went to the US to do "on-site" jobs and made much more money. They came back and bough...