Education Quote by Sanjay Kumar

What looks like admiration is also a quiet power move: a Western yardstick smuggled in as praise. Sanjay Kumar frames his “most surprising aspect” as the “speed” of adaptation, not the value of exchange. The compliment hinges on a premise that Western practices are the default operating system and India is the impressive device that installs it unusually quickly. “Surprising” does a lot of work here, signaling an expectation of lag - bureaucracy, tradition, “emerging market” inertia - that the speaker is pleased to have disproven.

The repetition of “fast, really, really fast” isn’t just emphasis; it’s salesmanship. It’s the language of boardrooms and investor decks, where velocity equals competence and “time-to-adoption” is a proxy for profitability. Kumar isn’t describing cultural change so much as lowering perceived risk: if Indian teams and customers can absorb Western methods quickly, the market is safer, the labor force more “plug-and-play,” the integration costs smaller.

Subtextually, the line flattens what “Western practices” actually mean. Are we talking about compliance regimes, management styles, consumer behavior, workplace norms? Lumping them together turns “the West” into a single, exportable package and “India” into a receptive surface. That’s convenient for business, less honest about the reality that adaptation is rarely one-way. India’s tech and service sectors have spent decades mastering global corporate codes, yes, but they also mutate them - with different hierarchies, languages, constraints, and improvisations that don’t neatly fit the template.

The intent, then, is not cultural curiosity. It’s reassurance: India is modernizing on schedule, and the deal won’t stall.