New Delhi: Since the launch of DeepSeek, our social media feeds have been flooded with memes, JPEGs, and jokes, celebrating the Chinese AI breakthrough. In our misguided celebration of NVIDIA’s stock price fall, as if it would somehow boost our own competitiveness, we fail to see the harsh truth: India is miles behind in the global AI race.

While we laugh and share viral content, the United States and China are solidifying their dominance in AI, leaving India nowhere in the picture. As citizens, we must stop celebrating distractions and start contributing to the collective effort, or risk being left behind in a race that will define the future.

In the early 20th century, the industrial revolution redrew the global order, rewarding nations that embraced technological transformation and sidelining those that hesitated. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is engineering a similar upheaval, one that is shaping geopolitics, trade, and global influence. The AI race, currently dominated by the United States and China, is not merely about technological leadership.

It is about sovereignty—the power to set global norms, ensure economic independence, and secure strategic self-reliance. For India, a country with ambitions of becoming a global superpower, missing this race is not an option. Yet, the question remains: does India have the urgency, vision, and capability to seize this moment, or will it risk falling into a........

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