In this article I attempt to examine the role that a literary figure, using an idiom of management speak, may play in proliferating selective narratives of nation and nationalist ideologies. Unlike in the Global North, the project of nation-building remains perpetually incomplete in the South. This is particularly the case with an ex-colonized nation like India that harbors local secessionist tendencies and communitarian nationalisms. ‘India’ as an entity has therefore to be perennially replenished with a managerial rhetoric that may help maintain it in a state of cohesion. Such a managerial rhetoric can, however, assume a dangerously conservative character: exalting a globalized economy, it can simultaneously draw on a theological politics to portray minorities as constituents of an “un-Indian” nation. To discuss the literary transposition of one such perverse brand of managerial rhetoric, I reflect upon certain coordinates from populist Anglophone Indian writer Chetan Bhagat’s novelistic and nonfictional oeuvre.