One of the problems that most educated Indians face is that they do not know what to do about most of the ‘surveys’ conducted by people attending major American universities. And because they are confused, most educated Indians seem to believe that there can be nothing wrong about surveys conducted by virtually anyone who has maged to become a student of one of the Ivy League American institutions like Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, UCLA and so on. The equation is not all that simple or uncomplicated. There are people doing their postgraduate or doctoral work in these universities who are more concerned about completing their work rather than losing too much sleep over the absolute correctness of facts or data. And it is quite easy for the Ph.D. supervisor to casually ask the student whether he or she is quite sure about the data furnished. The matter ends with the student’s assurance that he or she has been very careful about the authentication of data. As such, it is hardly surprising that a recent ‘survey’ of Indian preferences about the form of government suitable for India conducted by the Pew Research Center should claim that while 85 per cent of the people of India trust their tiol government, 55 per cent of the people in India support autocracy in some form and more than one-fourth (27 per cent) want a strong leader. Apparently 53 per cent Indians believe that military rule would be a good thing! We would like to know from Pew Research Center how large their sample of respondents was and from how many metropolitan cities these English-speaking respondents were drawn. After all, the India of these research centres is exclusively in metropolitan cities and has to be English-speaking. So we ought to know how reliable these surveys can be.