India is the most ambitious country in the World.

There is a kind of Indian I seem to encounter more often now, someone whose standards were formed somewhere other than the local institutions around him.

He may have grown up in a Tier-2 city, never studied at a foreign university, or might not even have a passport. Yet the people he takes seriously, finds impressive, and uses to judge his own work seem to be imported from a totally foreign land.

I don't think this was impossible twenty years ago, but it was definitely not ordinary. And the more ordinary it becomes, the more consequential it seems for India, because ambition depends, to some extent, on what a person has learned to regard as possible or probable.

This is where the internet seems to have changed India in a way that is difficult to capture in the usual language of access.

Once you start comparing yourself to someone who lives thousands of kilometers away, nothing feels sufficient. The idea of "good enough" is no longer defined by the distance you have traveled. A person can be deemed "successful" by his local universe but still feel "behind" when he measures himself against the people whose universes he wants to enter.

India has undergone a massive version of this shift. While factors like rising incomes and better education play a role, they alone don't explain why the psychological scale of ambition has expanded so rapidly.

Part of the answer is simple: the ambitious Indian can now see much further out into the world and observe what it is actually like. Once he can see further, he compares. And when he compares, dignity becomes involved. This isn't envy. Envy wants what someone else has. This wants to be allowed to compete.

A person starts to ask:

• Why is the life available to someone of the same age and capabilities elsewhere inaccessible to him?

• Why do certain ambitions require abandoning one's motherland or learning a foreign language?

• Why is competence constantly being exported?

• Why are we stuck in institutions living in prehistoric times?

This irritation is one of the forms dignity takes before it becomes ambition. And ambition ultimately needs somewhere to go.

India has had ambitious people for much longer than it has had good outlets for that ambition. This is why 1991 was something that happened to the Indian individual as much as the Indian economy. One of the biggest shifts was the freedom of the private citizen. 1991 increased the number of avenues where ambition could express itself. A generation that spent decades fighting for a small pool of opportunities suddenly found more ways to act and then raised children with no memory of pre-1991 India. In that sense, you can classify two distinct Indian psychologies: pre-1991 and post-1991.

The next major event in the genealogy of the modern Indian was the internet. This time, the opening went far beyond economics; it opened up global participation. India acquired a direct relationship with the outside world, moving from watching through television screens to directly interacting with it.

This is why the internet has started to behave like a geography of its own. Physical distance no longer dictates what or who is proximate to your psyche. Two people on opposite sides of the planet can spend years inside roughly the same set of conversations, networks, and ideas, connected seamlessly on an algorithmic plane.

As a result, the world enters your reference group. The people who determine what you consider excellent, possible, or impressive are no longer supplied strictly by your immediate environment. Who your peers are, what games are worth playing, and what standards you measure yourself against can now be set globally.

This creates what I call the "global Indian." For this individual, his standards have globalized much faster than his local circumstances.

A person can have a crystal-clear idea of what world-class work looks like while living far from the institutions that produce it. He can know exactly what is possible and still find that the world around him considers his current life exceptional. Everyone around you can think you are killing it, while your true reference group makes you feel five years behind.

This is becoming the common condition in modern India.

It also explains an apparent contradiction: a person can become more confident in Indians while becoming more frustrated with India. He has seen enough Indians operate at a global level to stop believing that capability is the bottleneck. At the same time, he deals daily with institutions that expect far less from him than the world against which he measures himself. In that gap, dignity turns into ambition very quickly.

This explains something I have noticed while traveling: India feels unusually ambitious right now. People want to build. They want to become richer, better, larger, and more consequential.

Indians didn't suddenly become ambitious. Indians have always been ambitious. What's new is that this is the first generation with the world as its reference group, and more places to act on it. What has changed is the scale at which that ambition operates. The modern Indian has more ways to act on it, alongside a much larger global canvas against which to measure himself.

Once you see someone roughly like yourself doing something your environment taught you was inaccessible, the distance starts to feel artificial. You begin to ask why they can and you cannot, why that level of work exists there and not here, and why that life should belong to someone else.

That question can sit inside a person for a long time. At some point, it becomes ambition.