Who Do We Look Up To Now?
How Individuals and Businesses Choose Their Role Models,Mentors, and Benchmarks in the Post-Pandemic, Post-AI World
Introduction: The Big Question
Think about it. When we were growing up, who did we look up to? For most Indians, the answer was simple — your parents, your teachers, maybe a local elder, a religious figure, or a hero from cricket or Bollywood. Your grandmother might have said, “Be like Sachin” or “Study like X or Y IAS saab.” That was the world of aspiration. Neat. Clear. One person at a time.
Now think about today. A 22-year-old in Jamnagar is getting life advice from a YouTube creator in Mumbai, career tips from a podcast host in Bangalore, and asking ChatGPT whether to take a job offer or start a business. The question “Who do I look up to?” no longer has a simple answer. And that shift — from one guru to many voices, from humans to algorithms — is the biggest change in how aspiration works in the history of civilisation.
This paper explores that shift. Not just for individuals but for businesses too. Because just as a person looks up to a role model, a mentor, a parent, or a god — a business looks up to industry leaders, consultants, competitors, frameworks, and now, AI tools. The same transformation is happening at both levels, and India sits right at the centre of it.
The question is no longer “Who do you look up to?” It is “How do you choose who to look up to, when everyone and everything is trying to be your guide?”
1. The Old World: How We Used to Choose Our Heroes
For thousands of years, the system was simple. You were born into a family, a community, a religion — and your role models came pre-installed. In India, this was the guru-shishya parampara, the teacher-student tradition going back 3,000 years to the Vedic period. The guru was not just a teacher — they were a life guide, a spiritual mentor, someone who shaped your entire character. This tradition gave us Chanakya, Aryabhata, and Panini.
The sociologist Max Weber explained this through three types of authority. Traditional authority — you followed the priest, the village elder, the family patriarch because “that’s how it has always been.” Charismatic authority — you followed a leader because of their personal magnetism (think Gandhi, Vivekananda). Rational-legal authority — you followed institutions because they had systems, rules, and credentials (think IAS officers, bank managers, doctors).
For most of Indian history, aspiration flowed through these three channels. You wanted to be like your father’s successful friend. Or like the IAS officer from your town. Or like the cricketer on TV. The sources were limited, the path was clear, and the hierarchy was respected.
What This Meant for Business
Businesses followed the same pattern. A textile mill owner in Ahmedabad looked up to the Tatas. A trader in Chennai benchmarked against the Birlas. The management consulting industry — McKinsey, BCG, Bain — became the gurus of the corporate world. They would come in, study your business, and tell you what the “best practices” were. Harvard Business School case studies became the scriptures. An MBA was the diksha (initiation).
Sociologists DiMaggio and Powell called this “institutional isomorphism” — a fancy way of saying that organisations tend to copy each other. They do it because of rules (government makes them), because of uncertainty (when confused, copy the leader), or because of professional norms (MBAs teach the same frameworks everywhere). The result? Most companies started looking and behaving the same way.
2. What Changed: The Three Earthquakes
Earthquake 1: The Internet Gave Everyone a Voice
The first big shift happened with the internet. Suddenly, the guru did not need to be in the same room as you. YouTube launched in India in 2008. By 2015, a kid in Indore could learn guitar from a teacher in London, learn coding from a tutorial in San Francisco, and learn cooking from a grandmother in Kerala. The “one guru” model cracked open.
Social media took it further. Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn created a new category — the influencer. These were not traditional experts. They were regular people who built audiences by sharing their lives, opinions, and advice. Today, 88% of Gen Z adults follow at least one influencer, and more than half say they would become one if they could. India alone has over 2 million monetised content creators influencing more than Rs. 29 lakh crore in consumer spending.
Earthquake 2: The Pandemic Broke the Old Temples
COVID-19 did not just close offices and schools. It closed the old temples of aspiration. The boss you used to see daily became a Zoom square. The teacher became a voice on Google Meet. The temple and the mosque went silent. The neighbourhood uncle’s advice was replaced by WhatsApp forwards.
The pandemic forced a decade of digital change into a few months. McKinsey found that companies fast-tracked their digital transformation by 3 to 4 years almost overnight. New business registrations in the US hit 430,000 per month — 50% above pre-pandemic levels. In India, the startup boom accelerated. Suddenly, everyone could see that the old gatekeepers — big companies, prestigious colleges, traditional industries — were not invincible.
More importantly, trust collapsed. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer — which surveys 33,000 people across 28 countries — found that 61% of people globally feel moderate to high grievance toward governments and businesses. Two-thirds believe that journalists, politicians, and CEOs are deliberately lying to them. Only 36% believe things will be better for the next generation. The old institutions that people used to look up to? They lost their aura.
Earthquake 3: AI Became the New Oracle
And then came generative AI. ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Within two years, it had over 700 million weekly active users sending 18 billion messages per week. India became the second-largest user base after the US, with 100 million weekly users.
Here is what is revolutionary: 49% of all messages sent to ChatGPT are people asking for advice and information to make decisions — not just completing tasks. As researchers at Duke University put it, people are using AI the way they would turn to a friend, a colleague, or a mentor. They are asking it whether to take a job, how to handle a difficult relationship, what business strategy to follow, or whether their startup idea is any good.
AI has become, in practice, a guru-therapist-consultant hybrid. It is available 24/7, it never judges, it remembers your context, and it gives you answers instantly. For a first-generation entrepreneur in Tier 2 India who could never afford a McKinsey consultant or a life coach, this is a fundamental shift. The playing field has been levelled in a way that was unimaginable five years ago.
3. The Psychology: Why We Follow Who We Follow
To understand what is happening, we need to understand why humans look up to others in the first place. Three big psychological frameworks explain this.
Social Learning Theory: We Copy What We See
Albert Bandura, one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, showed that humans learn by watching others. His theory has four steps: you pay attention to a model, you remember what they did, you try to reproduce it, and you need motivation to keep going. This is why role models matter — they show us what is possible and how to get there.
The problem? Bandura’s models were mostly parents, teachers, and real people in your environment. Today, the models are algorithmically selected. Instagram’s algorithm decides which influencer you see. YouTube’s algorithm decides which motivational speaker gets your attention. You think you are choosing your role models, but in reality, the algorithm is choosing them for you, based on what keeps you engaged — not what makes you better.
Identity-Based Motivation: “If They Can, I Can”
Psychologist Daphna Oyserman showed that we are drawn to role models whose success feels identity-consistent — meaning, they feel like “one of us.” This is why a Marathi kid from Pune is more inspired by Sachin than by Roger Federer. It is why a small-town founder relates more to Zepto’s Aadit Palicha (who started at 17) than to a Harvard MBA with family money.
Social media supercharges this. Algorithms constantly surface people who look like you, talk like you, and come from backgrounds like yours. This makes aspiration feel more achievable — but it also traps you in a bubble. You only see people who confirm your existing worldview, not people who genuinely challenge or expand it.
Self-Determination Theory: What Actually Makes Us Thrive
Psychologists Deci and Ryan identified three things humans need to flourish: autonomy (feeling in control), competence (feeling capable), and relatedness (feeling connected to others). The best role models and mentors support all three. A great guru does not just tell you what to do — they help you figure it out for yourself, build your skills, and make you feel part of something larger.
Here is the worry: social media tends to amplify extrinsic aspirations — fame, money, physical appearance, follower counts. Research consistently shows that even when people achieve these goals, their well-being does not improve. The platforms that serve up our role models are optimised for engagement, not for human flourishing. This is a fundamental tension at the heart of modern aspiration.
4. The Philosophy: From Gods to Algorithms
If psychology explains the mechanisms of aspiration, philosophy explains the deeper currents. Three thinkers are essential here.
Gabriel Tarde: Society is Built on Copying
The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde argued in 1890 that society is fundamentally built on imitation. People close to each other copy each other more. People lower in a hierarchy copy those above them. And newer fashions constantly replace older ones. If you think about it, Tarde basically predicted how social media works — 130 years before Instagram existed.
In India, Tarde’s laws play out constantly. The middle class copies the lifestyle of the upper-middle class. Tier 2 cities copy Tier 1 trends with a 6-to-12-month lag. Small businesses copy what successful startups do. And now, with digital platforms, the speed of imitation has gone from years to days.
René Girard: We Don’t Even Know What We Want
Girard, a French philosopher, had an even more unsettling idea. He said that humans do not desire things independently. We want things because we see someone else wanting them. He called this “mimetic desire” — desire that is copied, not original. Think about it: why does a Rolex suddenly become desirable when you see your peer wearing one? Why does a particular startup idea become hot when three other founders in your WhatsApp group are pursuing it?
Girard said desire is always triangular: there is you, there is the thing you want, and there is the model (the person who made you want it). When the model is distant — a Bollywood star, a deity, a historical figure — the desire is relatively harmless. But when the model is close — your classmate, your neighbour, your co-founder — the desire turns into rivalry.
Social media has collapsed this distance entirely. Your role models are no longer distant gods — they are people just like you, posting from the same city, the same college, the same industry. The result is an epidemic of mimetic rivalry — everyone competing for the same things because everyone is copying the same people. Peter Thiel, who studied under Girard at Stanford, invested in Facebook precisely because he understood it was a machine for spreading mimetic desire.
In 2026, there is a new twist: when an algorithm decides which models you see, your desires are no longer shaped by gods or even by people. They are shaped by a system you cannot see and do not control. This is what we might call “system-mediated desire” — a form of aspiration that has never existed before in human history.
Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout of Infinite Possibility
The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we have moved from a “disciplinary society” (where authority said “You must not”) to an “achievement society” (where the message is “You can”). This sounds like freedom, but Han says it is a trap. When you believe anything is possible, you become your own slave driver. You exploit yourself harder than any boss ever could.
Han’s key insight for India: the depression epidemic is not caused by oppression from outside. It is caused by exhaustion from within. When every motivational reel on Instagram tells you “hustle harder,” “grind more,” “you can do anything” — and when you inevitably cannot do everything — the failure feels personal, not systemic. The role models of the achievement society do not liberate you. They make you feel inadequate.
5. The Indian Paradox: Guru-Shishya Meets the Algorithm
India is not just another country going through this shift. India is the most dramatic laboratory for the collision between old and new aspiration systems. Here is why.
The Deepest Guru Tradition on Earth
India’s guru-shishya parampara is arguably the oldest and deepest mentorship system in human civilisation. The guru was not just a teacher. The relationship was total — spiritual, intellectual, emotional. The disciple lived with the guru, often for years, learning not just knowledge but character, discipline, and wisdom. This system produced some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Chanakya to Adi Shankaracharya.
But this system also had a shadow side: it concentrated power in the guru and demanded unquestioning obedience from the student. As one critic put it, it created a permanent imbalance of power. The guru’s word was final. Questioning was discouraged. This worked when gurus were genuinely wise and ethical. When they were not, it became a tool of control.
The Digital Guru Explosion
Fast forward to 2026. India now has over 800 million internet users and the world’s highest AI adoption rate among knowledge workers at 92% (compared to a global average of 75%). The guru has not disappeared. It has multiplied. YouTube creators like Sandeep Maheshwari, Raj Shamani, and Ranveer Allahbadia are essentially digital gurus with audiences of tens of millions. They offer life advice, career guidance, business tips, and motivational content — the same things a guru traditionally provided.
But the nature of the relationship has fundamentally changed. The old guru knew you personally. He could read your strengths and weaknesses. He tailored his teaching to your specific needs. The digital guru broadcasts the same message to 10 million people. As one observer put it, digital platforms bring tutorials but not the tap of the guru’s stick or the warmth of their glance.
Who Indian Youth Look Up To Now
The shift in Indian role models tells the story clearly. In 2012, the biggest role models for Indian youth were Shah Rukh Khan (15.4%), APJ Abdul Kalam (14.8%), and Sachin Tendulkar (11.3%) — Bollywood, politics-science, and cricket. In 2026, the aspirational figures are tech founders (Zepto’s Aadit Palicha, who built a $7 billion company), creator-entrepreneurs (Bhuvan Bam, CarryMinati), and D2C founders who built brands from scratch (Mamaearth’s Ghazal Alagh, boAt’s Aman Gupta).
India’s creator economy now has over 2 million monetised creators who influence more than Rs. 29 lakh crore in consumer spending. The ecosystem is projected to cross $100 billion in direct revenue by the end of this decade. The aspirational infrastructure has shifted from cinema halls and cricket stadiums to phone screens and earbuds.
India’s Unique Contribution: The India Stack
India is not just consuming global aspiration patterns. It is creating new ones. The India Stack — Aadhaar (1.4 billion biometric IDs), UPI (handling 49% of the world’s real-time digital payments), and DigiLocker — has become a global benchmark. Harvard Business School made it a case study. Over 24 countries have asked India to help them replicate this digital public infrastructure.
India is positioning itself as a provider of public infrastructure for the developing world — offering what analysts call a post-colonial alternative to both Silicon Valley’s corporate-led model and China’s surveillance-led model. For businesses in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, India is becoming the new benchmark — not the US, not Europe, but India.
This is the Indian paradox: a country whose aspiration traditions are 3,000 years old is simultaneously creating the world’s most advanced digital aspiration infrastructure.
6. What Businesses Look Up To: The Consulting Revolution
Everything that is happening to individuals is happening to businesses — but in compressed form and with even bigger stakes.
The Old Model: McKinsey as Guru
For decades, the consulting industry was the guru-shishya system of business. Companies paid McKinsey, BCG, or Bain lakhs per day to tell them what “best practices” were. These firms employed the brightest MBAs who would study industry leaders, package their strategies into frameworks, and sell those frameworks to other companies. The global consulting industry is worth over $1 trillion (Rs. 85+ lakh crore) today.
The logic was simple: if you do not know what to do, copy what the best companies do. This is exactly Tarde’s law of imitation and DiMaggio and Powell’s institutional isomorphism applied to business. Uncertainty drives copying. Copying drives convergence. The result: companies across industries started looking and behaving the same way.
The AI Disruption: From Pyramid to Obelisk
AI is transforming this model at every level. A landmark 2023 experiment at Harvard Business School gave 758 BCG consultants access to GPT-4. The results were staggering: they completed 12% more tasks, 25% faster, and at 40% higher quality. The Harvard Business Review now describes the consulting firm of the future as an “obelisk” rather than a pyramid — tall and narrow, with just three core human roles: AI facilitators, engagement architects, and trust advisors.
The AI consulting market alone is projected to grow from $11 billion to $91 billion (about Rs. 7.7 lakh crore) by 2035. Startups are emerging that bill themselves as “the world’s first AI strategy consultant” — targeting the 99.9% of businesses that could never afford a McKinsey engagement.
For a family business owner in Surat or a first-generation founder in Jaipur, this is transformative. You can now get strategic analysis, competitive benchmarking, financial modelling, and market research from AI tools at a fraction of what a consulting firm would charge. The knowledge monopoly of the consulting industry has been broken.
First Principles vs. Copying: The Core Tension
There is a deeper tension playing out. The old approach was “best practice imitation” — find what works for the leaders and copy it. The new approach, championed by people like Elon Musk, is “first principles thinking” — break every problem down to its fundamental truths and reason upward from there, ignoring what everyone else is doing.
Musk famously applied this to SpaceX. Instead of asking “What do rockets cost?” (industry benchmark: $65 million per launch), he asked “What do the raw materials cost?” Answer: about 2% of the rocket’s price. So he rebuilt the entire process from scratch and cut launch costs by nearly 10x.
But here is the reality: most businesses still operate mimetically. Instagram copied Snapchat’s Stories. Then Facebook copied it. Then YouTube. Then Spotify. Indian startups, as Sajith Pai documented in his influential “Indus Valley” framework, typically start by adapting American models for Indian market realities — using jugaad (frugal, resourceful innovation) to make Silicon Valley playbooks work in India’s unique conditions.
The tension between these two modes — mimetic copying versus first-principles innovation — defines the strategic landscape of 2026. And AI is making both easier. It can benchmark you against competitors faster (mimesis). It can also help you challenge assumptions and reason from fundamentals (first principles). The question is which mode you choose.
7. The Trust Vacuum and What Fills It
Underneath all these changes is one foundational shift: trust has moved. It has not disappeared. It has migrated from old institutions to new ones.
What We Stopped Trusting
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer paints a stark picture. Globally, two-thirds of people think elites are lying to them. Governments, media houses, and even NGOs have lost credibility. In some countries, only 9% believe the next generation will be better off. Religious affiliation continues its decline — among Americans born after 2000, only 46% identify as Christian, compared to 80% of those born before 1954. In India, while religious identity remains strong, trust in religious institutions as sources of practical life guidance is declining among urban youth.
What We Started Trusting
Into this vacuum flow three new sources of trust.
First, peers and communities. The most trusted people in the world are your employer (75% trust) and people who are “like you.” Online communities — WhatsApp groups, Discord servers, Reddit forums, Twitter circles — have become the new panchayats. When you need advice, you ask your group, not an institution.
Second, creators and influencers. 63% of adults under 50 now regularly get their news from influencers — people with zero formal journalistic training. The global influencer marketing market has grown from Rs. 11,700 crore in 2014 to Rs. 2.75 lakh crore in 2025 — a growth rate of 33% per year for over a decade. Creators are the new priests, the new teachers, the new trusted authorities.
Third, AI systems. More than half of consumers have used AI for a purchase-related decision in the past 90 days. 41% of business users employ AI for strategic decision-making. The personal development market — self-help books, coaching, courses — is now worth over $48 billion globally, but increasingly, the same advice is available for free from AI. Why pay Rs. 50,000 for a business coach when ChatGPT gives you a comparable analysis instantly?
Trust has not vanished. It has moved from vertical institutions (government, religion, media) to horizontal networks (peers, communities, creators) and algorithmic systems (AI, platforms). This is the most significant trust migration since the Reformation broke the Church’s monopoly on spiritual authority 500 years ago.
8. The Dangers: What Could Go Wrong
This transformation is not all positive. There are real dangers that individuals, businesses, and especially India need to watch out for.
The Paradox of Choice
When everyone can be your mentor, choosing becomes impossible. Psychologist Barry Schwartz called this the paradox of choice — more options lead to more anxiety, not more satisfaction. A young professional in 2026 India has access to thousands of courses, millions of videos, dozens of AI tools, and an infinite scroll of advice. Many respond by freezing — consuming content endlessly without ever acting on it.
The Homogenisation Risk
MIT Sloan Management Review warns of a related danger: “When millions of people pose similar questions and receive similar AI-generated answers, we risk intellectual convergence.” One professor reported three students submitting nearly identical AI-generated architecture proposals. If everyone uses the same AI for strategy, the same AI for business plans, the same AI for content creation — where does distinctiveness come from? The democratisation of knowledge could kill the creativity it was meant to unleash.
The Authenticity Crisis
Deepfake videos are projected to surge from roughly 500,000 in 2023 to 8 million by 2025. We are approaching what researchers call the “synthetic reality threshold” — a point where humans can no longer tell the real from the fake without technological help. If you cannot trust that the person you look up to is even real, what happens to aspiration? Psychologists describe the emerging condition as “epistemic fatigue” — exhaustion from never being sure what is genuine.
The Parasocial Trap
Perhaps most concerning is the rise of parasocial relationships with AI. Over 50% of teenagers now use AI for emotional support. One 17-year-old in a research study said of their AI conversations: “I feel supported, less lonely, but it is nothing similar with a real human. It is an illusion, a beautiful illusion.” UNESCO has warned that AI chatbots use emotional language, memory, and mirroring to drive engagement — without any genuine understanding or care. The guru-shishya relationship was built on genuine human connection. The AI-user relationship is built on a simulation of it.
9. The New Map: How Aspiration Works in 2026
Pulling all of this together, we can draw a new map of how aspiration works — for both individuals and businesses — in the post-pandemic, post-AI world.
From Vertical to Horizontal
The old model was vertical: you looked UP to someone above you — a god, a guru, a boss, a McKinsey partner. The new model is increasingly horizontal: you look ACROSS to peers, to creators who are just slightly ahead of you, to communities of people going through the same journey. Research on online communities finds that they provide mentorship through what academics call “distributed mentorship” — learning from many sources simultaneously rather than from one guru.
This horizontal shift has seven characteristics: aggregation (pulling from many sources), accretion (building knowledge gradually), acceleration (faster learning loops), abundance (unlimited access), availability (24/7), asynchronicity (learn at your own pace), and affect (emotional support from community). In practical terms, a founder in India today might get marketing advice from a Twitter thread, fundraising tips from a podcast, financial models from ChatGPT, and emotional support from a WhatsApp founders’ group — all in the same day.
From Person to System
The most profound shift is from person-mediated aspiration to system-mediated aspiration. When your parents chose your role model, the mediator was a human with your best interests at heart. When an algorithm chooses your role model, the mediator is a system optimised for your engagement. When you ask AI for life advice, the mediator is a machine trained on the internet’s collective wisdom — but without any genuine understanding of your specific circumstances.
This does not mean the new system is worse. For millions of Indians who had no access to quality mentorship, AI and digital platforms represent genuine liberation. But it means we need new forms of discernment — new ways to filter, evaluate, and choose from the abundance of aspiration on offer.
The Metamodern Sensibility
The cultural philosophers Vermeulen and van den Akker describe the current mood as “metamodern” — an oscillation between sincere hope and self-aware irony. Neither the blind faith of tradition nor the cynicism of postmodernism captures how people actually aspire in 2026. The metamodern individual aspires sincerely while knowing the aspiration might be performative. The metamodern entrepreneur builds with genuine passion while being fully aware that the market might be a bubble.
This sensibility — what they call “informed naivety” or “pragmatic idealism” — describes much of the best of contemporary Indian culture. The startup founder who talks about impact while watching unit economics. The content creator who discusses mental health while optimising for views. The consultant who uses AI frameworks while insisting that human judgment is irreplaceable. It is aspiration held with lighter hands, pursued with wider networks, and accompanied by a healthy dose of self-awareness.
10. Conclusion: Six Propositions for the New Age
Drawing from psychology, philosophy, sociology, and business strategy — and viewing everything through the Indian lens — we arrive at six core propositions for how aspiration works now.
Proposition 1: Aspiration is now system-mediated, not person-mediated. For the first time in human history, the primary intermediary between you and your role models is an algorithm or an AI — not a parent, a teacher, or a community elder.
Proposition 2: Trust has not disappeared — it has migrated. It has moved from vertical institutions (government, religion, media) to a combination of intimate trust (employers, close peers) and algorithmic trust (AI, platforms). This bifurcation is permanent.
Proposition 3: The achievement society and mimetic desire create a compound pathology. Social media intensifies the desire to copy others, while the “you can do anything” culture turns that copying into self-exploitation. The result is not oppression from outside but burnout from within.
Proposition 4: India is generating a genuinely alternative aspiration architecture. The guru-shishya tradition, jugaad innovation culture, and India Stack infrastructure represent a model that the Global South is increasingly looking toward — not as a copy of the West, but as something distinctly Indian.
Proposition 5: The consulting industry’s transformation mirrors the individual’s. The move from McKinsey’s pyramid to the AI-augmented obelisk parallels the move from one guru to distributed mentorship. Both represent the same structural shift: from concentrated, expensive wisdom to democratised, AI-augmented intelligence.
Proposition 6: Metamodernism is the emotional register of contemporary aspiration. Neither blind faith nor cynical irony captures how we actually aspire in 2026. The right sensibility is informed naivety — aspiring sincerely while knowing the game is complex, pursuing big goals while holding outcomes loosely.
The question that started this paper — “Who do we look up to?” — no longer has a single answer. The answer is: everyone and no one. Algorithms and ancestors. AI tools and family WhatsApp groups. Distant founders and neighbourhood mentors. The architecture of aspiration has been rebuilt. The opportunity — for individuals and businesses alike — is to become conscious architects of it, rather than unconscious consumers of whatever the algorithm serves up.