This video is taken from a “fireside chat” I recently had with Professor Tarun Khanna at Harvard’s annual India conference. Professor Khanna leads Harvard’s university-wide South Asia Institute and oversees Harvard Business School’s activities in India. Many years ago, I was his student. More than two decades later, he and I held a wide-ranging conversation about how much has changed since then.

In the intervening years, India’s capital markets have grown thirty-fold and delivered among the best long-term equity returns of any major market in the world, second only to the United States. And yet, there have been painful flameouts of some of India’s highest profile companies -and institutional asset managers- that have left many investors with permanent losses of capital and returns that failed to match the scale of India’s growth.

During our conversation, Professor Khanna asked me to reflect on what it takes to survive and thrive as an investor in India over time, which disciplines will be essential to generating strong returns in the future, and how the best opportunities today are often found in surprising places.

Ours was one of several sessions over two packed days at the India conference. Speakers this year included policymakers, entrepreneurs, scholars, journalists and Bollywood luminaries. The discussions, and more than a few spirited onstage debates, were a vivid reminder of the wildly disparate points of view India’s prominent thinkers hold, their enthusiasm for arguing them, and the love of country that ultimately unites them.

On a personal level, I was struck by how much the conference attendees themselves revealed about today’s India. When I was an MBA student, I had several classmates from India, but there were only three in my cohort who had worked in India (me among them) and I can’t recall many wanting to return after graduation. This year, I met students from the business school and the Kennedy School of Government who already had deep experience in India as entrepreneurs, in the civil service, and even teaching in government schools. They, and many others who have trained at top organizations overseas, are now eager to build careers back home.

The decisive reversal in the flow of India’s human talent, hungry to invest in their country and themselves, is the surest sign I know of the scope of the Indian opportunity and the energy, ambition and intellectual resources its young people are bringing to meet it.

Warmly,
Dan