India's AI summit exposed the country's fundamental inability to execute on technology ambitions, with stolen products, hours-long queues and cash-only food stalls revealing that basic operational competence remains absent. Celebrity-filled panels and political spectacle cannot substitute for real builders, engineers and PhDs who actually write code and deploy systems at scale. Until India stops treating technology as performance art and starts investing in deep innovation rather than service aggregation, it will remain a perpetual "potential superpower" instead of an actual one.