Ravil Khan tells me I will "never" see him in a T-shirt. He was well-built, wearing a pale blue, starched shirt tucked into starched trousers, his hair slicked back with gel, his posture so controlled it makes you instinctively straighten your own back. In New Palam Vihar, where he has become something of a minor prophet, this uniform of semi-formal wear is the gospel itself. Khan founded Rise Academy to prepare students for English-language exams, but its signature offering is the personality development class. The business of turning whoever you are into whoever you need to be.

Back in the aughts, the founder of such a school might have been a beauty queen who models her students after Carla Bruni, as Snigdha Poonam reported in 2013, writing: "Among companies with increasing stakes outside of India, many are having their entire teams groomed in Western-style etiquette, starting with the solution to the trickiest test of strategic lunches – what should you do if you drop your fork?" The name of the game then was to learn how to behave. Ever since India was freshly liberalised, its middle class found itself aspiring toward cosmopolitanism. You could make it in the new neoliberal world, they understood, if you could be confused for a pedigreed Anglophone. The Lutyens' Delhi set, fittingly, became their image of aspiration. Now, that coterie is losing its cultural legitimacy, and with it, its power to set the terms. Those who once footslogged toward cosmopolitan uniformity are no longer sure that the Lutyens' model is where they want to arrive. When did the old establishment stop being something to want to be? As it happens, the people who understand this shift best are those who built careers making somebodies out of nobodies. The etiquette industry has evolved to meet the demands of an India that no longer knows what it wants to become.

With little faith in the country’s direction, the only project that seems worth investing in is the self.

Anything that resembles a class exercise in India often begins in New Delhi. The self-improvement industry did too. In 1994, India Today noted how companies were putting “...their executives through ‘finishing schools’ in the hope that a greater savoir faire will help improve business relations and business.” With liberalisation, the finishing school, archaic, aristocratic in origin, was refitted for a striving middle class suddenly courting the multinationals that had begun arriving in the country, stout paychecks in tow.

Over the next twenty-six years, the phenomenon of etiquette schools was repeatedly invoked, each time pitched as if anew, covered at length in The New York Times and The Times. In 2000, The Times of India reported how many IT professionals were being routed through these schools. A little more than a decade later, the same paper described it as having democratised into a necessity for anyone in the private sector. Come 2018, the enterprise was deemed resolutely self-sought, with The Telegraph observing that “young job-seekers and others from the corporate world eagerly attend classes that promise to give their personalities a new gloss.”

Then, in 2024, The Hindu declared: “Indian finishing schools are focusing on hyper-personal goals now.” Which is to say, we are witnessing the final, frantic phase of the Great Opening of 1991. Our collective aspiration has collapsed into private, siloed projects. With little faith in the country’s direction, the only project that seems worth investing in is the self. Now, more than ever, it is each to their own. No matter that nobody seems to know quite what they should be doing, except to always pretend as if they do.

In Self-Reliant India, or Atmanirbhar Bharat, our startup gods service other countries and American companies service themselves, courtesy of the cheap, cheap labour we so readily offer. Since 1991, manufacturing's share of India's GDP has fallen to 14.3%, while services have climbed to 55%. The public sector, once the surest guarantor of a stable, salaried life, was no longer a reliable possibility. When the private sector saw "robust growth," an overwhelming majority of unemployed youth were still left without work. For 66% of that demographic, a degree did not improve their prospects. Even so, the IT-BPO industry expanded rapidly, employing 5.4 million people by 2023. In The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy writes of "hundreds of young English-speaking Indians" being "groomed to man the backroom operations of giant transnational companies," paid "one tenth of the salaries of their counterparts abroad." This pipeline has since narrowed. With permanent jobs culled, labour protections stripped back, and the gig economy absorbing what was left, even hard-earned refinement couldn't guarantee a job. Those who attend grooming schools today are looking for more than just employment.

"[The idea of etiquette instruction has] become more popular. Now people know what an etiquette coach does," says Gitika Bhat, an etiquette coach and image consultant. Once confined to finishing schools, etiquette classes were where "in about three months or six months or one year, you come out 'polished,' knowing how to walk in your heels, how to eat at a formal dining table." Bhat's offerings are vast, ranging from confidence-building, grooming, appearance and behavior to business etiquette, meeting etiquette, even Zoom etiquette, all helping her clients, as she puts it, work on themselves "from the inside out." Over the sixteen years she has been doing this, "things have changed," she says. In her reckoning, etiquette schools have become more popular, and presumably, democratised. The real change, however, might be about what isn't coveted as "polish" anymore.

Today’s India insists on repatriation. If we were still in "Congressiya" India, startup bros, celebrities and influencers would have staked everything on their English fluency and global exposure. Instead, they speak more Hindi. They overplay their middle-class provenance. They wear kurtas to product launches. They rhapsodise over their mothers' cooking. They aestheticise the old, crumbling cities that become the object of their reels. They denounce college degrees. They want to be so securely Indian that India's afflictions become someone else's. Whether inadvertently or not, they're emulating the man who has long modelled himself as the perfect composite of a global citizen with rooted loyalties.

Our Prime Minister, unlike his mostly upper-class, pedigreed predecessors, eschews English. Those his proponents derisively call the "Khan Market gang" and the "Lutyens' Delhi elite" have relentlessly mocked him for his stilted hold of the language, only for him to win the war of optics. In 2022, Modi claimed that the New Education Policy, which made regional languages the medium of instruction in early schooling, would free the country from the "slave mentality" that came with English: "English language was considered a mark of being intellectual. In reality, [it] is just a medium of communication." "While [Modi] favors Hindi as a political gesture," Akshya Saxena writes in Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India, "[he] instrumentalizes English for its metonymic association with global capitalist modernity." Shashi Tharoor, who once said that "even when [Modi] meets world leaders, he will speak through an interpreter," has lately called him "performative, theatrical, but effective." But champion of the free market and face of Hindutva ascendancy alike, Modi's contradictions, however many, are mistaken for authenticity.

As the country's most visibly rich, famous, and successful stars, business tycoons, entrepreneurs and entertainers form a personality cult around him, Modi's singularity is a study in brand-building. Vanessa Friedman, chief fashion critic of The New York Times, dubbed him "A Leader Who Is What He Wears." During the pandemic, when Modi faced multiple tirades, he traded his "baseball cap and chic sunglasses" for his hair and beard “long, reminiscent for some of a Hindu sage.” Be it his "revisionist" "Modi" jacket or the combat vests he wears when posing with lions, he is the decolonial global citizen who, for many in the aspirational class, serves as the template for how to absorb global currents while holding one's own. Those of us who merely speak politely, like the supplicant waiters in those restaurants, the obliging staff in those hotels, and the customer-care agents before automation took over, will keep limping toward clone-like conformity. In Modi's India, such deference is passé.

Now, the self-improvement industry seeks to teach something more totalising and intangible than just corporate-speak in nimble English. “If you have two personalities – the one you show in front of the people and one you show at home – maybe you can be caught when you will be speaking in front of professional people,” Ravil Khan tells me. On the first day of his personality development classes, Khan has students play dress-up, handing out a new shirt, pants, shoes, and a "professional watch," as he calls it. He photographs them before and after. In the new finishing school, the first lesson is that of presentation. "The difference is that the person is looking more 'rich,' the person can have more rizz, the person can be more attractable [sic], and the person looks far better than before," Khan concludes.

The vanguard of "polish" was always an ambivalent object of desire for the middle class.

The never-ending foreboding of being "caught" is the permanent condition of the striving cosmopolitan, and the middle class was afflicted by it. This class, writes Pavan K. Varma in The Great Indian Middle Class, was no longer "willing to be taken for granted by the Congress" after "the formation of non-Congress governments in 1967." Its "more confident" members began sending their children to "better schools, preferably in the 'English medium'." Soon, "lifestyles, as yet remote and shunned as shehri or city-like, were emulated." Now, many of them are choosing to abandon the performance altogether. The vanguard of polish was always an ambivalent object of desire for them. As much as they wanted it, and as much as they measured themselves against it, they had always suspected that even after a lifetime of acquiring the right accent and the right manners, they could still be made to feel like an interloper.

The wealthier cohort of aspiring "new Indians" aren't spared from the anxiety of getting "caught" either. Their goal is to appear as though there was never any goal, which means discretion is everything. Meghna Khanna, a Bengaluru-based image consultant, once considered calling herself the "Secret Stylist." "It's very difficult to even bring up the topic that someone could use some personal styling sessions," she notes. Her clients are "not women who want for anything." Unlike Khan's students, who might deliberate over the price of a single polyester blazer, Khanna's clients possess both the funds and the overstuffed closets. Here, the consultant's task is to shoulder the "cognitive labour of discernment," curating a version of "taste" that feels inherited.

I ask whether she is, in effect, instructing her clients in "taste." "It's a certain discernment, for sure," she concedes, adding that these women will eventually have to shop unchaperoned. The trouble is that "taste" is notoriously skittish; Immanuel Kant himself called it "enigmatic." A more customized but socialized style makes more sense. Khanna begins in the wardrobe, which is usually in the bedroom, which means, as she puts it, she is in "[her clients'] mind and in their heart and soul." She takes pictures of how the client wears something, then how she would style it. Often, she finds herself negotiating with husbands as well, who are often communicating "with the eyes" a definite "yes or no" to a new look. After finding silhouettes that make her clients "look brighter, happier, and healthier," she works on helping them assemble a style personality that feels "authentic." Sometimes she curates "holiday capsule wardrobes" for destination weddings. Other times, her "shopping advice" hinges on the "look" her clients want, which can range from dressing the part for a corporate executive to a "feminine goddess archetype." The clothes are, Khanna notes, all about "soft power."

When I was talking to Sugandha Mittal, the founder of Confianza Finishing School, I accidentally called her a personal stylist. She looked as though I had slighted her, then politely corrected me: "…it's great that you picked this up by mistake so that I can address this." Within the self-improvement world, not all roles are equal. "The role of a personal stylist," Mittal tells me, "is to prepare the client for a particular day." In image consultancy, which she maintains is a "completely different concept," the consultant helps "you understand how to dress or create an image." Professor Suchismita Chattopadhyay, who has extensively studied Delhi's grooming and self-improvement industry, notes that consultants "are always trying to make that distinction." Since a client is "paying a premium," they're reminded of it at every point. Even where the pedagogical practices are the same, image consultants will insist "they are not personality development teachers."

In these one-on-one sessions, the client's life and sense of self are accorded priority. Anyone willing to pay the price would expect nothing less. Shalini Mehta, a personal development coach with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, tells me there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to etiquette. Her clients' problems, it turns out, are mundane. They cannot stop checking their phones, they slouch and cross their arms without realizing it, they interrupt impatiently, they come off aggressively. These are the habits, she says, that "broadcast their anxiety." What her clients are paying for, it would seem, is someone to notice what they cannot see in themselves.

Khanna adds that much of her work is more about listening than styling. "It can get overwhelming for the person I'm working with because they've spent so long looking at themselves a certain way." Her sessions last four to six hours, "at the very least." Most of the clients of this "covert operation" are forty-plus women who have, as Khanna says, "had enough of dressing for people" and want, finally, to dress for themselves.

Although there is no official record of the rates, publicly listed private tutors advertise fees ranging from roughly ₹2,000 to ₹3,500 or more per hour. Anyone I asked about their rates was often testy. One of them told me that “it wouldn’t make sense” to me, noting that the range is “huge.” I would be defensive too about the pricing. If "polish" can be billed by the hour, it is no longer rarefied.

The clients who work with Mehta and Mittal are typically busy, financially secure professionals looking to up their gravitas. They want to be "upper class" without ever seeming "middle class." The presumption is simple. If you can afford to pay someone to help you attain poise, it should come easily, even naturally. Such is the expectation if you're rich.

In the industry, then, there is a two-tiered system of refinement. The poorer are students; the richer are clients. It would seem, however, that both share a mutual destination in their journeys of becoming new Indians. What they'd like is to acquire enough skills to be able to eventually leave India, at least mentally. The self they are all building is, in the end, an exit strategy.

Khan tells me there is a "proper" way to pronounce "tiger." When he says it, the word takes on an affected cadence, like a brown man imitating a British nobleman, which, in a way, he is. Sometimes students tell him, "Sir, when you speak Hindi, you totally look like yourself, but when you try to speak English, it seems like you're forcing it." He assures me, "It has now come into my natural." To convince me, Khan invokes the example of A. P. J. Abdul Kalam: Kalam's accent "was not very good," but "the words that he used to speak were very fine and understandable. People used to get inspiration from him. So, I think people speaking some different language, some different accent, cannot be a barrier if the words are spoken correctly." It must be true, for when I met Khan, I was struck by his easy charm and poised authority.

The students who once came to finishing schools, or its more affordable versions, had a clear destination. Khan's students, however, are not training for a single industry or a single type of job. They are preparing, more diffusely, for a world in which they may at any moment be required to represent themselves on a global stage, be it at a foreign university or an international business meeting. The goals are as varied as the students themselves.

Rashmi Nagpal, a 34-year-old MBA graduate, was enrolled at Rise Academy by her husband to prepare for the Pearson Test of English. She plans to pursue a second MBA abroad to expand her in-laws' elevator business and to learn how to "polish" herself. A mother of two, she tells me that Khan's lessons have had a "good impact" on her children. At home, she follows his instruction to behave with her family as she would with a professional colleague.

In the same classroom sits Aditya Singh Rana, a 15-year-old already mapping out a future at ISRO. His exchanges at home have changed too: "I used to communicate in Hindi, basic Hindi. But right now, I'm using English at home also." He wears a jacket emblazoned with his father's company logo, two sizes too large for his slight frame, and sports the regulation schoolboy haircut. He enrolled in Khan's sessions to prepare for the IELTS, but soon added the personality development course to his regimen. For his bachelor's and master's degrees, Rana is contemplating an institute in Switzerland, and Germany for his PhD, "because some cost-cutting is necessary." And how will he afford the rest? "My father is very reputable – even if he is a driver – and he has direct links to the CEO."

What these schools are selling, ultimately, is a fantasy that if you change yourself enough, you can outrun your competitor, no matter if they had a headstart.

Unlike wealthier clients, these students make no attempt to disguise their enrolment in spoken English or personality development courses. If anything, it's a matter of pride. "I'm a proud Indian, a nationalist, or you can say a patriotic for my country," Rana tells me. Although he thinks "the army is the best defence of our country," he tells me, "diplomacy is the best way" to serve a country's interests, "without any casualties." For this generation, self-improvement and nationalism are the same project. "The conversion of the self into a business entity and a brand coincides with the production of an 'investment-fuelled nationalism' in India," writes Chattopadhyay in "A for Appearance: Aesthetic Labour and the Work of Image Consultants in a Globalised Delhi." As the welfare state sloughed into a neoliberal state in the 1990s, a harried fixation on the individual took hold, overtly denying caste society. In its wake, institutes like Khan's institutionalise a pedagogy of absolutist reliance on the self.

In an ideal world, neither Rana, who studies at DPSG School, nor Nagpal, who holds an MBA in HR, would need remedial instruction in spoken English. But as Chattopadhyay notes, "the very existence of these schools means that there is a gap in the education system, that people have to go to coaching centers to learn how to speak, to learn how to conduct themselves."

The collapse of the public sector coincides almost perfectly with the rise of efforts to school the aspirational Indian into becoming the (brand) new Indian. The finishing school of the aughts had a specific task to prepare a person for that job, in that industry, at that salary. The finishing school of today has a more totalising ambition. The desired job (any job) and standard of life must be earned, and earned alone. If you're not willing to help yourself, no welfare schemes or state policy can help. There is, in other words, no room for a blame game.

This is the perfect neoliberal ending to the story that began in 1991. "There is absolutely no accountability on structures," as Chattopadhyay puts it. The entire weight of aspiration – its failures as much as its successes – falls on the individual. In the promise "if you work hard enough, you will succeed" resides a disavowal of a student's background, but that disavowal does not make its material consequences disappear. What these schools are selling, ultimately, is a fantasy that if you change yourself enough, you can outrun your competitor, no matter if they had a headstart. In these classrooms, any impasse is treated as an individual problem. The students are trained to inhabit a world where universality has not materially been achieved, even if they must act as if it has. By narrativising systemic inequality as solely a personal defect, they offer a world in which one can be a global citizen in the office and apolitical at the dinner table, never once sensing a contradiction.

In a 2012 conversation with Ravish Kumar, an otherwise unabashed Madhu Trehan apologized for her shoddy Hindi: “There was a time when we laughed at people who didn’t know English. Now the times have changed, and you laugh at us.” How long before the joke turns on someone else? In a country always under revision – liberalised, demonetised, made, remade, and made again – the real task might be to remain reliably unfinished. To keep polishing ourselves, in vain hope, for a nation still assembling itself. In making in India, for the world, we remain a sensible, working contradiction.