There is something profoundly absurd about the modern Indian engineering migration story.
Across India's universities, generations studied mathematics, algorithms, computation, distributed systems and cryptography.
Some went deep into elliptic curves, finite fields, digital signatures and the mathematics of trust.
They learned how to construct systems in which claims can be verified without blindly trusting an intermediary.
And then entered a world where their own professional competence apparently required an Australian postcode to become credible.
Four years of engineering.
Years of professional experience.
Thousands of hours of technical problem-solving.
And the great civilisational checkpoint:
"Do you have local experience?"
The absurdity is almost mathematically elegant.
A civilisation develops the intellectual capacity to decentralise trust, yet its educated workforce remains dependent on centralised institutions to authorise its economic existence.
Governments call them skilled migrants.
Economists call them human capital.
Corporations call them talent pipelines.
Immigration systems classify, rank and process them.
And somewhere in this elaborate livestock-management vocabulary, the engineer disappears.
But education was never supposed to manufacture better cattle.
It was supposed to produce people capable of understanding, questioning and redesigning the systems governing their lives.
Migration can be a rational choice. Submission is not its necessary consequence.
The great irony of this century may be that institutions spent decades educating millions of people in the mathematics of independent verification, while assuming those people would remain permanently dependent on institutional permission.
You cannot teach a generation how trust works and expect it never to question who holds the keys.
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