Channelling the concept developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Modi, who used the term at least five times, explained how being antifragile is not just being able to stand up to shocks and volatility – and we have seen enough of that in the pandemic, climate change-instigated upheavals, a war in Ukraine resulting in major disruptions in global supply chains – but also to become resilient against future challenges and black swan events. This, the PM reminded, has been possible by his government’s ability to adapt. A crucial property of Taleb’s idea is recognising the value of error, with antifragile systems advancing through a negative feedback loop and correcting from what is learnt from those mistakes. Modi laid out many such past mistakes his government has corrected – ‘leakage’ of benefits before reaching their targets due to corruption replaced by direct benefit transfers (DBTs); decades of dam-building projects without any thought towards building connecting canals; ‘Garibi Hatao’ as a mere slogan that facilitated a ‘government-first’ approach to infrastructure-building that has been swivelled to a ‘people-first’ one.
Modi also underlined that the fortunes of this antifragile India and the world are joined at the hip – what’s good for India is good for the world; what’s bad for India is bad for the world. Shaking off its tag as one of the ‘Fragile Five’ – Turkiye, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia being the other four – the PM extended another thinker, Yuval Noah Harari’s idea of finding post-nation solutions for planetary and intraplanetary ‘sapiens’-created problems. Put your future in India and put your future in the world – a message the PM drove home to a global audience from the bright spot that’s India.
