Sarci Sense: When Did Looking Successful Become Enough?

There is a particular Indian reflex that deserves more societal study. Someone important enters a room and, before he has said anything worth remembering, people have already rearranged themselves around him. The chair improves. The smiles become wider. The conversation becomes more intelligent, apparently because he has arrived. Nobody has established that he is wise, competent or even interesting. He is simply known to be important, which is apparently sufficient evidence. We have become very good at recognising greatness from a distance.

A surname helps. So does a foreign university. A large company helps enormously. A photograph with a minister is useful. A blue tick is reassuring. A large following is almost a character certificate. If the person has appeared on television, the assessment can be completed without conversation. We like to say that Indians respect merit. What we often mean is that Indians respect recognisable evidence of merit, preferably evidence that can be mentioned to someone else. This is why the question after meeting someone is so often, “What does he do?” It is rarely followed by, “Is he any good at it?” The first question establishes social position. The second would require work.

Our ancestors may have believed that a person should be judged by his character. We have modernised the principle. Now we judge character by the person’s résumé. The foreign degree remains particularly powerful. Say Harvard, Oxford or Stanford or IIM or ISB and watch the room perform admiration before discovering what the graduate actually studied. An institution that admits thousands of intelligent people each year can become, in India, a lifetime substitute for evidence.

We do this with companies too. A person from a celebrated corporation is assumed to be more capable than someone from an obscure one, even when the latter may have built something far more difficult. The logo travels with the employee like an invisible chaperone. And then there is the surname. Some people are born with a résumé that precedes them. Business families, political families, film families, old professional dynasties. The name enters the room first and the person follows. We like to believe we have escaped feudal India, but give us the right surname and watch the feudal instincts return, freshly ironed.

The photograph is perhaps the most efficient status symbol of our time. Standing beside a billionaire, celebrity, minister or famous intellectual now creates a strange form of borrowed significance. The photograph proves only that two people occupied the same geographical area at approximately the same time, yet it is displayed with the solemnity of a joint achievement. We have made proximity a credential.

LinkedIn has taken this instinct and given it a publishing platform. Every professional gathering is now potentially historic. Every appointment is “a privilege”. Every conference is “an incredible learning journey”. Every new job comes wrapped in gratitude large enough to suggest that the United Nations has personally been informed. There is nothing wrong with celebrating professional success. The strange part is how quickly ordinary achievement becomes ceremonial achievement once an audience is present.

And audiences matter more than ever. Followers have become a crude new measure of authority. A person with 500,000 followers is assumed to know more than someone with 500. Why? Because numbers are comforting. They save us from thinking. Popularity is not expertise. It is merely popularity. But we increasingly treat reach as proof of wisdom, particularly when the wisdom comes in a confident voice and a well-lit photograph.

The truly frightening development is that we are becoming impressed by confidence itself. A person who says “I don’t know” sounds less intelligent than someone who has an answer to everything. The first person may have spent thirty years learning how complicated the world is. The second may have spent thirty minutes watching a video. The second usually speaks first, because we have made certainty fashionable.

This is not merely an internet problem. It has entered family life. Parents compare children’s universities, salaries and careers while insisting that they do not compare children. Families say status does not matter while remembering exactly who bought what, whose son moved where and whose daughter married into which family. We are capable of enormous moral sophistication when discussing ourselves and astonishing simplicity when assessing everyone else.

Perhaps the most revealing thing is that we know this. We know that status can be hollow. We know that wealth does not guarantee wisdom, that degrees do not guarantee character and that followers do not guarantee intelligence. We say these things confidently. Then someone impressive walks into the room and we behave differently. That is where the hypocrisy becomes interesting. It is not that we are fooled. Often, we know perfectly well that we are responding to the signal. We simply enjoy the social convenience of doing so.

Nobody wants to be the person at the dinner table who says, “Actually, what has he achieved?” when everyone else is impressed by the celebrity sitting three chairs away. It sounds petty. It sounds jealous. So we keep quiet and participate in the collective admiration. Society has its own peer pressure about whom we are supposed to admire. This is how status survives even among people who privately claim to reject it.

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question is what we teach our children through all this. We tell them to become good, curious, independent human beings. Yet they watch us light up when somebody mentions a prestigious college, an impressive salary, a famous employer or a powerful acquaintance. Children are very good at noticing the things adults pretend not to value. Eventually they learn the lesson: success matters. But being seen as successful matters almost as much.

That may be the real disease here. We have become increasingly dependent on signals because signals allow us to outsource judgement. We do not have to know whether someone is brilliant if Harvard says he is brilliant. We do not have to know whether she is influential if 200,000 people follow her. We do not have to know whether he is powerful if everyone in the room stands when he enters. The badge does the thinking.

And perhaps that is why the most sophisticated person in the room may occasionally be the one who is unimpressed. Not cynical. Not resentful. Just willing to wait, to listen and to discover whether there is actually a person behind the signal.

Because the embarrassing truth is that most of us are not fooled by status. We simply like being impressed by it.