The Conquest Nobody Planned

Or, How a Guy Who Has Seen Exactly Five Indian Movies Explains Why India Won Without Trying

I can list every Indian movie I have ever seen.

This is not a boast. This is the confession of a man catastrophically, irredeemably, almost heroically outside his country’s cultural mainstream. Here is the complete, unabridged filmography of my Indian cinema experience:

1. Lalkar [The Challenge]

2. Victoria No. 203 [Victoria No. 203] — a heist comedy about con artists and diamond thieves that I remembered for decades as Victoria No. 420, because 420 is Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code — fraud — and the film is basically about fraud, and there’s a famous Raj Kapoor film called Shree 420, and apparently my brain, having allocated minimal storage to Indian cinema, decided to merge them. I have seen exactly five Indian films and I can’t even get the titles right. This is the level of expertise we’re working with.

3. Padosan [The Lady Next Door]

4. Pati Patni aur Woh [Husband, Wife, and the Other One]

5. Shatranj Ke Khilari [The Chess Players]

The last — a Satyajit Ray film about two Lucknow noblemen so obsessed with chess that they barely notice the British East India Company annexing their kingdom — was superb. The others? Take them or leave them.

Five films. That’s it. A lifetime as an Indian, and I could watch my complete Bollywood retrospective during a single flight from Delhi to New York with time left for the safety briefing.

And it gets worse. My uncle is friends with Amitabh Bachchan — the Amitabh Bachchan, the man François Truffaut called “a one-man industry,” the defining actor of Hindi cinema for half a century, the face that launched a thousand films. I’m told he’s a very nice person, which I do not doubt in the slightest. I have never met him. I have never seen an Amitabh Bachchan film.

Or so I thought. It turns out — and I discovered this while researching this post — that Amitabh Bachchan narrated Shatranj Ke Khilari. His voice is literally in the one film on my list that I actually liked. I sat through a film featuring the most famous actor in India, a man my uncle knows personally, and didn’t even notice.

My disqualification to write this post is not merely theoretical. It is empirically verified, exhaustively documented, and apparently heritable.

My father was no better. A decorated naval fighter pilot who had faced down enemy aircraft, ejected over the North Sea, landed on a sheep, broken his back in three places — and was completely, immovably defeated by Indian cinema. He hated musicals. As do I. This appears to be genetic, a condition for which the Indian Penal Code does not yet have a Section number, though I expect one is forthcoming.

But my mother loved Indian movies. And so, on Sunday afternoons, in that strange era when India had exactly one television channel — Doordarshan, which translates to “distant vision” and was considerably more distant than visionary — she would insist on watching the weekly 3.5-hour Hindi movie broadcast. In black and white. With the picture quality of a memory viewed through cataracts.

These broadcasts came complete with the “Rukhavat Ke Liye Khed Hai” interruption screen — “We apologize for the interruption” — which appeared with the regularity and predictability of a monsoon. The interruption would last anywhere from thirty seconds to an eternity. Sometimes the film returned. Sometimes a different film returned. Sometimes nothing returned and Doordarshan simply moved on, as if to say: We’ve decided this movie wasn’t worth finishing either.

My father, the man who had survived ejection from a jet fighter, could not survive these broadcasts. The solution was characteristically Indian in its ingenuity: we got a second television and put it in another room. A retired Naval Commander and his teenage son — refugees in their own home, displaced by Bollywood.

And then there was Chitrahaar [Garland of Pictures]. Wednesdays and Fridays at 8 PM. I’d blocked the exact schedule, the way trauma victims block painful memories, but it was two nights a week. Chitrahaar excerpted the song-and-dance routines from Indian films and broadcast them as standalone entertainment — all the musical numbers without even the thin pretext of a plot. My father and I found this execrable. Beyond execrable. It was needle-scratch-level unwatchable, an act of cultural aggression from which no second television could protect us, because you could still hear it through the walls.

We were both, by any objective measure, MILES outside the cultural zeitgeist.

Here’s the thing about that execrable program, the one that drove a fighter pilot and a future physicist from their own living room: it eventually reached 150 million viewers. Became the most-watched TV show in India. Ran for decades. Mainly in rural areas, where hundreds of millions of people thought it was the greatest thing on television. Which, given that there was only one channel, it technically was.

And the thing it was showcasing? Indian cinema? That went on to sell, at its peak, 3.6 billion tickets a year. More than Hollywood. More than any film industry on earth. In 20-plus languages, across six continents, to audiences who have never heard of Doordarshan and wouldn’t know a Rukhavat Ke Liye Khed Hai if it interrupted their streaming service.

I am, in other words, spectacularly unqualified to write this post. I don’t watch Indian movies. I don’t do yoga — after multiple back surgeries, bending into a pretzel seems less like enlightenment and more like a trip to the emergency room. I don’t even like Chitrahaar.

Which makes me exactly the right person to write it. Because soft power doesn’t need your permission. It doesn’t need your attention. It doesn’t even need you to watch the damn movies or do the damn poses. It just... goes.

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The Evidence Is Skating

Not long ago, at the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, a Russian-Georgian figure skater named Anastasiia Gubanova — the 2023 European Champion, representing Georgia — glided across the ice to the title track of Dhurandhar [Stalwart]. Dhurandhar is a Bollywood spy thriller I have also not seen. At 3.5 hours for just the first installment of a duology, it is far too long for me. But then, at 3.5 hours, so was the average Doordarshan Sunday movie — the same runtime that once conquered 150 million viewers on a single black-and-white channel — and that somehow conquered the world. Length, apparently, is a feature, not a bug.

The details of Gubanova’s routine border on performance art as geopolitical commentary. She wore a red bindi. A red-and-gold costume. Mid-routine, she incorporated a Punjabi folk step — a bhangra move, on ice, at the Olympics, in Milan, while representing a former Soviet republic. Her routine opened with “San Sanana” from Ashoka [The Great Emperor], then transitioned into the Dhurandhar title track.

Indian social media naturally lost its mind. The tweet that captured the moment: “India didn’t send anyone for figure skating to the Olympics in Italy, but Russian Anastasia Gubanova volunteered to be the ambassador for Hindu culture and Indian music.”

India didn’t even show up and still won.

This was weeks after the same Dhurandhar soundtrack was played at an NBA game in San Francisco, where the Bhangra Empire dance troupe performed during a Golden State Warriors-Milwaukee Bucks game to a crowd of twenty thousand Americans who, I’m reasonably confident, could not locate Amritsar on a map.

Meanwhile, a Telugu-language comedy called Anaganaga Oka Raju [Once Upon a Time, a King] — a film in a language spoken primarily in two Indian states — grossed ₹100 crore at the worldwide box office. Not Hindi. Not English. Telugu. A language most Indians don’t speak, let alone most humans. The film was streaming on Netflix within two months of release, available to 190 countries, in a language that would have puzzled even Macaulay.

India now produces over 2,500 films per year in more than 20 languages. That’s not a film industry. That’s a continental content ecosystem. For comparison, China produces 792 films a year. The United States, home of Hollywood, produces around 510. India makes more movies every year than the next two largest film producers combined.

Indian artists’ international streaming on Spotify grew 2,000 percent between 2019 and 2023. In 2024, Indian artists were discovered 11.2 billion times by first-time listeners on the platform. Close to 50 percent of all royalties generated by Indian artists now come from listeners outside India.

And I’m sitting in Connecticut, having watched none of it.

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The $10 Billion That Bought Nothing

Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990 to describe a nation’s ability to influence others through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment. What he couldn’t have anticipated was that the concept would produce its most spectacular test case in a contest between a country that spends more on soft power than anyone else on earth and a country that barely spends anything at all.

China allocates more than $10 billion annually to soft power — more than the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan combined. For this staggering investment, China has produced the Confucius Institute network: a chain of Chinese-language and culture centers planted in universities worldwide, which peaked at over 500 locations and is now collapsing like a Ponzi scheme of cultural goodwill.

Sweden shut them all by 2020. The United States has closed over 100 amid suspicion of propaganda and surveillance. Universities that hosted them found themselves quietly pressured to avoid discussing Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen. As one Neue Zürcher Zeitungjournalist observed, even for someone who only wanted to learn “hello” and “goodbye” in Chinese, the pragmatic case had become impossible to sustain.

But the Confucius Institutes are merely the visible failure. The deeper problem is the Great Firewall — which may be the single most devastating act of soft power self-sabotage in history.

China blocks Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (or X, or whatever it’s calling itself this week), YouTube, WhatsApp, all Google services, Gmail, Spotify, Twitch, Reddit, Wikipedia (intermittently), Slack, Dropbox, and thousands of other platforms. VPN users risk fines and imprisonment. In November 2025, the Ministry of State Security issued fresh warnings about the illegality of circumventing internet controls.

The result is a generation growing up without access to the global platforms where culture actually spreads. You cannot become a soft power superpower by walling off your population from the internet. It’s like training for the Olympics by locking your athletes in a basement.

India, by contrast, is the world’s largest YouTube market — 462 million users. Indian artists’ Spotify streams skyrocketed internationally. Indian content floods TikTok, Instagram, Netflix. The difference isn’t marketing budgets. It’s architecture. India’s internet is open. China’s is not.

There’s a simple test I’ve come to think of as the Airport Test: When a foreigner lands in Delhi, they can keep using their phone normally. When they land in Beijing, the internet changes. That single fact tells you everything about which country’s culture travels better.

Now, I have real concerns about what Modi is doing to press freedom in India — I’ve said so throughout this series. But the frequently cited RSF ranking of India at 151 out of 180 is, to use a technical term, bollocks. To re-use one of my favorite Yes Minister quotes, “it is a collection of geriatric shoemakers.” (What, you haven’t seen Yes Minister? It’s merely the best television show ever made. Go immediately to watch it. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.) Anyone who has watched five minutes of Indian television news — anchors screaming at cabinet ministers, newspapers eviscerating the ruling party daily, the entire cacophonous, ungovernable, magnificent circus — knows that India’s press is “unfree” the way a food fight is “orderly.” China’s press, by contrast, is actually censored. There’s a difference between a government that wishes it could control the media and one that actually does.

Global favorability surveys tell the same story. India’s median favorability across 24 countries is 47 percent, per Pew’s 2025 data. China’s, across 35 countries, is 35 percent favorable against 52 percent unfavorable. And China spent $10 billion for those numbers.

Here’s what makes this a perfect Milton Friedman parable.

We’ve seen this movie before — pun intended. In Post 4 and Post 19, we traced how India tried central planning for its economy: License Raj, import substitution, the whole catastrophe. That produced Ambassador cars, sugar with stones in it, and GDP growth that the late Raj Krishna memorably called the “Hindu rate of growth.” Liberalization in 1991 produced Infosys, the IPL, and growth rates that made international investors pay attention.

The same principle applies to culture: the less you plan it, the better it travels.

China’s soft power is a Five-Year Plan. India’s is a bazaar.

And here’s the beautiful irony: China’s actual recent cultural successes — Ne Zha 2 (the animated film that outgrossed everything), Black Myth: Wukong (the video game), Labubu dolls, DeepSeek AI — all succeeded despite government efforts, not because of them. They were market-driven. Bottom-up. Exactly the way India’s soft power has always worked. When China accidentally does what India does naturally, it succeeds. When it tries to engineer the outcome, it fails.

Friedrich Hayek called this the knowledge problem: the impossibility of central planners possessing the dispersed, local knowledge that millions of individual actors collectively hold. Applied to culture, it means you cannot sit in Beijing and decide what the world will find attractive about your civilization. Culture spreads through millions of decentralized decisions — what to watch, eat, listen to, wear, practice, believe. No committee can replicate that process. No budget can buy it.

India understood this — not consciously, not as policy, but as a civilizational default setting. Because India has been open for business for a very, very long time.

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5,000 Years of Open for Business

India’s soft power advantage isn’t new. It isn’t a product of Bollywood or Spotify or the internet. It’s older than Rome.

In 2017, archaeologists cataloging Roman coin finds across southern India documented over 170 separate discoveries across more than 130 sites, concentrated in the Krishna river valley of what is now Andhra Pradesh and the Coimbatore region of Tamil Nadu. Gold aureiand silver denarii bearing the faces of Augustus, Tiberius, and Nero — spanning the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE. Three hundred years of continuous trade, attested in metal.

The coins were found counter-marked with local symbols. India accepted the gold but rejected the sovereignty. Which is about as Indian as it gets.

The trade was enormous and lopsided. India exported pepper, textiles, gems, ivory, pearls, and cotton. Rome exported gold, silver, wine, and olive oil. By Augustus’s time, 120 ships sailed annually from the Red Sea port of Myos Hormos to India’s western coast. Pliny the Elder — Rome’s great chronicler and serial complainer — fumed that “India, China, and the Arabian peninsula take 100 million sesterces from our empire per annum.”

Romans were complaining about their trade deficit with India two thousand years before Donald Trump discovered the concept.

The Tamil Sangam literature — classical poetry from roughly the same period — captures the Indian side of this commerce with characteristic elegance: “The beautifully built ships of the Yavanas came with gold and returned with pepper, and Muziris resounded with the noise.”

Muziris, on the Kerala coast, was one of antiquity’s great trading ports. Roman agents resided there for years. A temple to Augustus was built on Indian soil. Buddhist merchants from India were found living in Berenike, on the Egyptian Red Sea coast. This wasn’t colonialism. It was commerce — the ancient version of a free trade agreement, negotiated not by diplomats but by merchants who followed the monsoon winds.

And pepper — humble, ubiquitous pepper — was the oil of the ancient world. When Alaric sacked Rome in 408 CE, he demanded 3,000 pounds of it as part of the ransom. All sourced from India’s Malabar coast. India was so central to global trade that the fate of Rome was partially negotiated in Indian spices.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea — a Greek merchant’s navigation guide from the 1st century CE — documents Indian ports with the breezy matter-of-factness of a Lonely Planet guide. Which ports accept which goods. Where to find the best cotton. How the local rulers behave. These weren’t exotic discoveries. They were regular trade routes. India was on the global GPS two millennia ago.

The pattern that emerges from this history is not conquest but absorption. India welcomed Greeks (Alexander, 326 BCE), Scythians, Huns, Arabs, Mongols, Persians, Portuguese, British — and Indianized them rather than being destroyed by them. As we explored in the earlier posts about India’s civilizational operating system, this is the ancient code running beneath everything: absorb, metabolize, re-export the remix. Potatoes came from the New World and became the samosa. Tea came from China and became chai. English came from Britain and became an Indian language. Cricket came from the MCC and became a religion with a $12 billion liturgy.

China, by contrast, oscillated between extraordinary openness — the Tang Dynasty, the early Ming voyages of Zheng He — and deliberate closure. The Ming haijin maritime ban. The Qing restrictions. The Great Wall, both literal and, now, digital.

India never had a Great Wall. The openness wasn’t a policy decision. It was the default setting.

And it’s still the default setting. Right now, India is the peak pilgrimage destination for young Israelis finishing their mandatory military service. Tens of thousands every year pour into Kasol, Manali, Dharamsala, Goa, Pushkar — entire neighborhoods with Hebrew signs on the restaurants. They come, they camp in the mountains, they backpack, they get stoned, they drink, they have sex, they decompress from three years of the most structured obligation imaginable by seeking the most unstructured freedom available.

And India provides it — cheerfully, profitably, without anyone regulating the arrangement or asking permission. The locals built an economy around it because the incentives lined up. Nobody planned it. Nobody approved it. It’s pure spontaneous order — Hayek with a chillum.

Try imagining this in China. Tens of thousands of foreign twenty-somethings, getting stoned in the mountains, behind the Great Firewall, with no VPN. The very thought makes a Party official reach for his anxiety medication.

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What I Didn’t Understand Until I Started Writing This

Two thousand years ago, Roman merchants sailed the monsoon winds to India’s coast, traded gold for pepper, and went home richer in spices and poorer in precious metals. A thousand years later, Arab merchants followed the same routes, absorbed Indian mathematics — our zero, our numerals, our decimal system — and transmitted them to Europe, where they became the foundation of modern science. Five hundred years later, Portuguese sailors rounded the Cape of Good Hope specifically to reach India’s spice ports, accidentally creating the age of European colonialism as a side effect of wanting better-seasoned food. Two hundred years later, the British East India Company came for cotton, stayed for an empire, and inadvertently created a class of English-speaking Indians who would, over the next two centuries, quietly take positions at the commanding heights of Western culture.

The pattern is always the same.

They come. They take something. They leave changed. India remains.

But here’s what I didn’t understand until I started writing this post.

India’s soft power isn’t just about exporting Indian culture — the movies I don’t watch, the yoga I can’t do, the food Tyler Cowen loves more than I do. The deeper story is about Indians who didn’t export Indian culture at all. They became gatekeepers of Western culture itself — among the people who shaped what the world listened to, what the world read, what the world’s biggest companies did next. That’s not cultural influence. That’s something no soft power index even knows how to measure.

Next: The Gatekeepers.

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If you like this, you will like my book, “The Science of Free Will.” I have a lot of interesting stuff in it from why we can’t trade with ants (they can detect cancer) and what does that have to do with the future of AI to why we need a Supreme Court if the world is deterministic. You can get it on Amazon or anywhere else that books are sold.