India, April 30 -- If you have read my columns over the years, you know I have been one of the loudest advocates for Indian innovation and engineering talent. That belief has not wavered; I still see enormous potential. But I have now reached a point I never expected to reach: I have given up on India for one of the most critical roles I need to fill at Vionix Biosciences - a medical researcher who can think differently and devise new ways of detecting disease. Let me explain why. On paper, the candidates look outstanding. Their resumes are immaculate, with prestigious institutions, relevant internships, publications, and glowing letters of recommendation. Even the emails, which not long ago were full of "plz", "u", and "thx", have suddenly become polished and articulate, with clean structure, perfect grammar, and sometimes genuinely impressive phrasing. But this is just Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated slop. The moment you get on a call, the facade cracks. The same person who wrote that eloquent email cannot explain a simple scientific concept or walk you through their own claimed research. They hesitate, speak in vague generalities, and circle around questions without ever answering them. Push them to explain how they arrived at a conclusion in the proposal they supposedly wrote, and they either go silent or pivot elsewhere. This is worse than the illiteracy we see in most WhatsApp messages, because not even AI can put lipstick on this pig. I am not the only one complaining about Indian talent. A February 2026 LinkedIn report found that 74% of Indian recruiters are struggling to identify genuine talent, with more than half pointing to AI-generated applications as the cause. AI-generated resumes, essays, assignments, research proposals, and even academic papers are rapidly becoming standard, and the volume of convincing but hollow material is growing so quickly that the signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed. In business, the same pattern is playing out: Pitch decks and presentations that look polished fall apart under basic questioning; strategy documents are assembled from generic frameworks rather than real insight; consultants present recommendations they cannot defend; executives rely on AI-generated briefs without truly understanding the assumptions behind them. What looks impressive on paper often disintegrates the moment real thinking is required. This is not only in India; we are already seeing the same cracks appear globally. Lawyers in the US have been sanctioned for submitting briefs that cited completely fabricated cases generated by AI. Media organisations have had to issue embarrassing corrections after publishing AI-assisted content riddled with factual errors. Companies are quietly discovering that employees who rely heavily on AI tools can produce impressive-looking work quickly, but struggle when asked to defend it, adapt it, or go beyond it. This is going to hurt India the most because the educational foundation of its graduates is so antiquated. The education the British installed in India was designed to keep the people subservient. It rewards memorisation, pattern recognition, and compliance, and leaves little room for curiosity, experimentation, or independent thought. Students are trained to deliver the correct answer, not to ask better questions. For decades, this system produced competent executors. In the age of AI, we are only compounding the disaster. Governments have always known this and often announced reforms, promised to reduce rote learning, and talked about fostering creativity. But meaningful change has been slow, and now AI is exposing these weaknesses brutally, with teachers unable to keep pace with what their students are doing and institutions struggling to even measure real understanding. India is now producing a generation that seems intelligent on paper but lacks depth. There is polish without substance, fluency without understanding, and confidence without the discipline that comes from struggling through hard problems. Over time, this erodes intellectual honesty and replaces real capability with the illusion of competence. At Vionix, we are trying to solve some of the hardest problems in science, combining physics, chemistry, and machine learning to detect disease early. This requires original thinking, not just technical competence; it requires the ability to question assumptions, design new approaches, and interpret complex signals. In India, all of the people I have interviewed cannot do anything like this. That is why I had to give up on the country for this new R&D position which required out-of-the-box thinking and questioning why things work the way they are. I am even thinking of moving this R&D back to the US. This should worry everyone, because the consequences are not limited to hiring frustrations or weak job candidates. Over time, this erodes the very foundation of innovation. A country that cannot produce independent thinkers cannot lead in science, cannot build transformative companies, and cannot solve its hardest problems. It can only execute on ideas generated elsewhere - and even that becomes harder when the ability to truly understand begins to erode. Indian education needs an urgent, fundamental reset - not incremental tweaks or policy announcements, but a serious rethink of what is taught, how it is taught, and how students are evaluated. Assessments need to reward original thought; classrooms need to encourage questioning; students need space to explore, fail, and iterate; teachers need to be retrained to guide thinking, not just deliver content. Unless something changes - quickly - India will find that the very system that once powered its rise is now holding it back, leaving its brightest minds unable to compete in a world where real thinking is the only thing that cannot be automated....