I find the whole notion of a stock market in India absurd. Yes, this sounds like an extreme statement. But this is the view I have maintained for many years: that the stock market in India exists to serve 100 FIIs +Mutual Funds, 100 Promoters and 25 Brokers.

That's pretty much the interest group that the stock market in India serves. Beyond this, the stock market affects few lives.

Go to Dadar in Bombay, and you will find a distinct detachment to the daily vicissitudes of the stock market. And of course, go to Kolhapur, and few would have even heard of this beast called the stock market.

Essentially, the stock market is a non-issue for 99.99 per cent of the country...but it is the remainder that hogs the electronic and print media spaces, and has a voice, that convinces us that the stock market means something to India. To dream that one day Sensex will replace the Dow as the benchmark index of choice for the world is a thought so ridiculous that it makes Yashwant Sinha look like a genius. Let's view India for what it is: a country puffed up on an exaggerated sense of its own self-worth, plumped by an adoring local financial media, a largely clueless corporate world (2008 showed up Indian companies for what they were: companies fattened by cheap foreign capital, and a sense of global megalomania, combining to make for colossal investment mistakes), a country somehow convincing itself that it is China's peer, and in some vague, undefined way, the contender to the US' throne.

Stuff and nonsense.

India is a country where the first sight of a morning landing in any city of the country shows dozens of people defecating on the streets. Cows and bullock carts running over cars and pedestrians. Power cuts.

Erratic water supply. Abysmal living conditions for the majority of its people. And oh... let's not forget the utter and complete lack of governance at all levels of the government and the bureaucracy.

I can understand a fool who has never been to China, speaking of India and China in the same breath. But when educated people like analysts and fund managers begin to spout such nonsense, I really start to get worried. India is 100 years behind China, at present. And the gap is increasing massively. India is big on talking and bigger on delusions of grandeur. China is big on execution, and rightly so, is bigger on delusions of grandeur.

They deserve to be. They have earned it. India has done nothing except believe its own press. So when comparisons with the US start, I stop looking worried and I start laughing.

The US will be, in my opinion anyway, the global leader in all aspects of life, except poverty. Americans are the most innovative, the most honest and the most focussed people, collectively speaking, in the world. India for all its "largest pool of scientists and engineers" has zero inventions in anything (well, it did invent the zero, though!). For years, our "madrasas" have brainwashed us into believing that we are somehow superior to Americans, because Americans know no maths or accounting! Beats me how it is that all the technological and financial innovations continue to pour out only from America, then (and mind you, from Americans, not just Indians or Chinese there), and none from India?

Truth be told, India has an unbridgeable gap to fill vs the US... in fact, in my view, the gap with China itself is unbridgeable. So my view is clear: the only way this puny, over-rated index in a vastly over-rated country, Sensex, can overtake the Dow, is if the Dow companies come and list in India and thereby become part of Sensex.

No other way.