I wasn’t born in colonial India. I was born in nuclear India. Post-Emergency. Post-Pokhran. In Kerala, where literacy was a weapon and quiet resilience ran in the groundwater. We weren’t waiting to be liberated—we were already calculating orbital velocities in the monsoon.

By the 2000s, the West came calling. They wanted engineers, problem-solvers, mental athletes. And we were kitted for it—raised on UNIX terminals, hard math, and harder realities. We weren’t cheap. We were overqualified. They didn’t recruit us—they extracted us.

I moved. I delivered. I fixed legacy rot, scaled broken stacks, bailed out dying deadlines. I learned their systems faster than they did. I made their tech sing. And the moment I became ‘expensive’? The tone shifted. The masks slipped. Suddenly, it was culture fit, performance reviews, restructuring.

But here’s the incision point: I wasn’t programmed to serve. I grew up in a sovereign, post-colonial state that built bombs in basements and satellites on a shoestring. So your passive-aggressive racism? That’s just background radiation. Your boardroom politics? I've seen actual statecraft survive worse.

You invited a surgeon. Not a servant. And now I’m not asking for a seat. I’m building the operating table.