On Talent, Ecosystems, and the Billion-Strong Silence

Kunal Shah stayed. That is the anomaly the first part of this essay began with – the talented Indian who built inside the ecosystem rather than leaving it, and arrived at a global appointment without first becoming someone else somewhere else. But Shah is one man. The ecosystem is a pattern. And the pattern, when you look at it honestly, is not encouraging.

At the FIFA World Cup 2026, four players of Indian origin are competing. They represent New Zealand, Qatar, Australia, and DR Congo.

Not one of them represents India.

Sit with that for a moment. Not the pride – that comes easily, and we have already examined what it costs. Sit with the silence underneath it. A nation of 1.4 billion people, watching a tournament it did not qualify for, finding its reflection only in the diaspora children of other nations. Four players. Four flags. None of them ours.

We are very good at producing people who become excellent somewhere else.

Sarpreet Singh was born in Auckland to parents from Jalandhar, Punjab. He signed for Bayern Munich at twenty-three. At the World Cup, he became the first player of Indian origin to start a game at football’s biggest stage. When asked what it meant, he said he hoped to pave the way for more Singhs, more Sikhs, more Punjabi footballers coming through.

He said this wearing a New Zealand shirt.

Tahsin Jamshid was born in Doha to parents from Kannur, Kerala. His father was a former player who represented the junior state team back home. Tahsin joined Qatar’s Aspire Academy, developed inside Qatar’s ecosystem, and now represents Qatar internationally. He holds an Indian passport. He plays for another country.

Nishan Velupillay was born in Melbourne to a father of Sri Lankan Tamil descent and an Anglo-Indian mother. Samuel Moutoussamy was born in Paris to a Congolese mother and an Indo-Guadeloupean father whose Tamil ancestors arrived in the Caribbean as indentured labourers in the nineteenth century. The thread runs from Punjab to Kerala to Sri Lanka to the Caribbean, surfacing at a World Cup in North America, wearing colours that are not India’s.

The question is not why these men play for other nations. The answer to that is straightforward – they were born there, raised there, developed there. The question is why the subcontinent that produced their parents, their grandparents, their hunger and their talent, cannot produce a single equivalent on home soil.

A billion people. Not one Sarpreet Singh.

The easy answer is infrastructure. We don’t have the pitches, the academies, the coaching systems, the pathways. This is true. It is also insufficient.

Infrastructure is a solvable problem. Money builds pitches. Academies can be established. Coaching pipelines can be created. Several nations have done exactly this within a generation. Infrastructure explains a gap. It does not explain a silence this total, this consistent, across every sport that isn’t cricket.

The harder answer is what the ecosystem does to unconventional talent before infrastructure even becomes relevant.

Consider what it takes to become Sarpreet Singh. You must, at some point in your adolescence, choose football over everything the Indian system considers serious. You must do this while your relatives ask about engineering. You must do this without a visible pathway, without obvious financial reward, without the social permission that cricket carries. You must be wrong, publicly, for years – wrong about your choices, wrong about your priorities, wrong about what your body and your talent are actually for. And you must absorb all of that without the institutional protection of a system that believes in you.

The Indian ecosystem does not make this easy. It makes it nearly impossible. Not because it is cruel, but because it is a system optimised for a very narrow definition of acceptable achievement. Engineering. Medicine. Civil services. Cricket, reluctantly, because cricket became too large to dismiss. Everything else is indulgence until proven otherwise – and the proof is demanded before the attempt is permitted.

This is not a bureaucratic problem. It is a psychological one. And it begins not in government offices but in living rooms.

The talent exists. It has always existed. What the ecosystem consistently fails to provide is the permission to be wrong on the way to being extraordinary. The room to fail without it meaning something final. The coach who sees what isn’t there yet. The parent who doesn’t flinch. The institution that bets on a fifteen-year-old who has chosen the wrong sport.

Instead, what unconventional talent meets in India is a weight. Not malicious. Not even conscious. Just immense. A billion witnesses, each carrying an opinion about what excellence should look like and which path leads to it. Under that weight, most seeds don’t break through. The ones that do tend to do so elsewhere – in Auckland, in Doha, in Melbourne, in Munich – in systems built to let strange talent become itself without first justifying its existence.

We are not failing to produce world-class footballers, or athletes, or unconventional entrepreneurs. We are producing them constantly. We are then grinding most of them into more acceptable shapes before they get the chance to find out what they could have been.

The World Cup is only the most visible symptom. Look elsewhere and the pattern holds. Indian-origin athletes in British athletics. Indian-origin players in Canadian hockey. Indian-origin mathematicians at American universities. Indian-origin musicians redefining genres abroad. The dockyard is extraordinarily productive. The ships just sail under other flags.

And here is the part that should make us genuinely uncomfortable:

The diaspora succeeds not despite its Indian roots but, in many cases, because of them. The drive, the discipline, the hunger, the capacity for sustained effort – these are not accidents. They are the product of a particular kind of upbringing, a particular relationship to ambition, a particular understanding of what is at stake. The Indian ecosystem produces these qualities in abundance.

It then fails to give them anywhere adequate to go.

So they go elsewhere. And we watch them at World Cups, wearing other nations’ colours, and feel a complicated pride that we have not yet learned to examine honestly.

There is a postscript to this story, and it is the most revealing detail of all.

The one footballer India found to wear its colours in recent memory is Ryan Williams – born in Perth, developed in Australia, finished by Australian football. His mother is Anglo-Indian, her roots in Mumbai. He surrendered his Australian citizenship to represent India, received his Indian documents personally from Sunil Chhetri, and scored four minutes into his debut. The dockyard, unable to build its own ship, imported one from the country whose player headlines this very essay.

But here is the detail that stops you. Ryan Williams is not the first in his family to play for Indian football. His maternal grandfather, Lincoln Grostate – known as Linky – scored the goal that helped Bombay defeat Bengal in the semi-finals of the 1956 Santosh Trophy. The plank was always there. It did not disappear. It travelled from Bombay to England to Perth, skipped two generations, and returned to an Indian shirt seventy years later.

The Ship of Theseus, it turns out, does not always lose its planks. Sometimes it just loses track of them.

Auckland gave Sarpreet Singh to New Zealand. Perth gave Ryan Williams to India. The ship sails in both directions. We just happen to be on the wrong end of the trade.

This needs to change. Not incrementally. Not eventually. Now.

Not because national pride demands it – that is the wrong reason, and it has already failed us for decades. But because a system that consistently grinds its most unconventional talent into conformity is wasting something irreplaceable. Every Sarpreet Singh who never got on a plane. Every Tahsin Jamshid whose father’s footballing instinct died in a Kerala living room because no one built the pathway. Every fifteen-year-old who chose engineering not because they wanted to but because the alternative was too expensive to imagine.

The dockyard is full. The ships are being built. The problem is not capacity or raw material or even funding, though funding matters. The problem is that we have forgotten what ships are for.

Build the academies, yes. Fund the pathways, yes. Reform the sports infrastructure, yes. But none of it will matter until we address the prior question: whether this culture is willing to give unconventional talent the one thing money cannot buy. Permission to be wrong on the way to being extraordinary. That is what Auckland gave Sarpreet Singh. That is what Doha gave Tahsin Jamshid. That is what India has not yet learned to give its own.

Until it does, we will keep watching from the stands. Proud of our diaspora. Silent about what that pride actually means.