Ravi Venkatesan, the former chairman of Microsoft India, offered this quiet provocation recently on LinkedIn. In a few words, he dismantled an entire modern illusion:
that movement equals progress, that velocity signals change.

We live in a culture obsessed with speed. In offices and institutions, in startups and bureaucracies, motion has become our religion. The faster we move, the more alive we feel — or so we think. But transformation, the kind that rewires culture and consciousness, doesn’t obey the stopwatch. It unfolds in its own slow, subterranean grammar.

In Bengaluru, I met a young Edtech founder whose vocabulary was full of velocity, sprints, KPIs, OKRs, daily stand-ups. Her dashboard glowed with activity graphs. But her eyes told another story: fatigue, doubt, guilt.

In Delhi, a programme head at an NGO told me, “We’re drowning in outputs, starving for insight.” In a government department, an officer said bluntly, “We have KPIs for everything but thinking.”

The tragedy of our time is that we’ve mistaken effort for evolution. The problem isn’t with work itself, but with the loss of reflection. Real change behaves less like software and more like soil. It needs time, care, and discomfort.

In a village near Sivagangai in Tamil Nadu, members of a women’s self-help group told me how they built financial independence, not through rapid rollouts but through patience. Their meetings resemble storytelling circles more than formal training. They exchange ideas the way soil holds moisture — slowly, organically. Change seeped in not through instruction, but through conversation.

In Gurugram, a logistics company begins its week with one question: what are we not seeing? For a few minutes, everyone stays silent. The stillness feels awkward at first. Then someone admits an assumption. Another challenges a goal. The manager told me, “We lose ten minutes, but we gain honesty.” This is the grammar of transformation: quiet, reflective, resistant to haste.

Leaders are conditioned to believe that transformation is commanded from the top. But it isn’t. It arrives when control loosens.

In Lucknow, a senior bureaucrat told me, “My instinct is to issue orders. But lately, I’ve begun stepping back. I let my team experiment, even fail. That’s when new ideas surface.”

The paradox is simple: the more control one exerts, the less transformation one allows. Leadership today demands not domination but trust, the courage to step aside so that others may step forward.

In a Hyderabad innovation lab, a founder framed it differently: “We tried micromanaging creativity, it died. Now we ask for poetry, not plans.”

Across the fieldwork, I notice two Indias of transformation.

One is trapped in compulsion, producing more deliverables, dashboards, and deadlines. The other India practises resistance, leaders carving space for reflection.

The future of our institutions may well depend on which India wins.

In a Srinagar NGO, one hour a week is kept for ‘dark time’: no meetings, no calls, no laptops. “We thought it would be boring,” said a young staffer. “Now we look forward to it. We remember how to think.”

In Madhubani, Bihar, I met a schoolteacher who spent ten years transforming her classroom. She began not with technology, but stories. Only after her students had learned curiosity did she introduce tablets. It’s a lesson that scales up beautifully: systems, too, must change from within before any external upgrade can work.

Our age is allergic to stillness. Corporates demand quarterly transformations. Governments chase visible outcomes. The media glorifies disruption, not duration. But transformation — the real kind — is rarely photogenic. It germinates in silence, matures in ambiguity, and surfaces only after a long patience. This distinction, between force and readiness, may determine the success of India’s reforms.

Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a management professional, literary critic, and curator