I had started thinking of myself as a vegetarian back then, but I’d eat chicken as long as someone else ordered it. This was a unique point in my vegetarian to non-vegetarian and back arc, a story that many will resonate with.

I ate my first fish fillets on a flight to Muscat when I was perhaps 8 years old. It was delicious, and I’d later often long for it. Having been raised in a vegetarian household, I found it quite delicious and wondered why we didn’t have it more often.

These were early days of meat-eating, and going to restaurants in my early teens usually meant Chilli Chicken. Like many Indians in the Gulf, we remained a predominantly vegetarian household, but we were constantly exposed to shawarmas and grilled meat of the roadside. Meat was thus normalized for us in a way that it hadn’t been in India.

I travelled a lot in my early twenties, and my flexitarian diet allowed me to enjoy most cultures through their cuisine. I had mutton in Egypt, quail in Oman, Hilsa in Bangladesh, and barbecued lamb in the US. In 2014, I travelled to Brazil for the FIFA World Cup and realized that the world ate mostly meat, and mixed meat & animal products into pretty much everything. At my BnB, I had a choice- eat pork or go hungry. I decided to avoid hunger, but that was one of the last times I ate meat.

Around the time I turned 27, that point in life when you start critically evaluating your life-choices, and have more confidence to go against the common-sense of the masses and even the force of friends, I became vegetarian again. But this was not a fallback to religion or traditional practice. It was my tiny vote for a certain kind of world.

Today, ten years since I took this path, I still do strange things. I procure chicken for my dog, and even mix it with vegan kibbles at times. I don’t buy leather shoes, bags or belts. This also means I’ve stopped wearing watches, as most nice watches have leather straps. I drink milk, eat curd, paneer and eggs, although I know these too have a considerable impact on animal welfare.

I’m lucky that my partner, a non-vegetarian, puts up with my strangeness. Sometimes, I wonder if my choices make any impact on the grand scheme of things. What exactly did I achieve by not consuming chicken, fish and other kinds of meat?

So I did the math.

Turns out that my choices did matter. Over the past ten years, I’ve spared the lives of 180 fish and sea-animals (crabs, shrimps, lobsters), 25 hens and a goat. That’s over 200 lives, and it’s just me. My impact.

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I recognize this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Some people love their meat a lot more than I love my curd (which I find very hard to substitute). But I’m telling you my story and being vulnerable here because I want our discourse about animals to be truly about them. And not about us.

Not about caste or religion, or food-habits of certain communities.

Not about the purity of veganism and the bad people who aren’t vegan.

Here’s some arithmetic that convinced me purity is the wrong goal anyway. If we take a hundred people and convert three of them into committed vegans (a heroic result, by the movement’s own thirty-year track record), the group’s animal consumption falls by roughly three percent. Instead, if we got sixty of them to simply cut back by a fifth each - meat-free weekdays, dal or tofu instead of chicken twice a week - it falls by twelve percent. Four times the impact, from people who never once had to change who they are! The margin beats the conversion. And it’s not close.

I think everyone makes choices every day, and even a few choices that substitute meat for other delicious foods (oh, and there are so many delicious vegan and vegetarian foods!) spares sentient beings of suffering and death.

That’s why I made this calculator. It is a project of love, built to help people realize the power of their choices. And also to inform folks about their baseline impact - which can turn out pretty eye-opening.

It works like this: five questions about how you actually eat. About a minute of your time. Then it shows you your numbers - the animals your current pattern touches in a year, and what even small, realistic changes would mean. No score to beat, no leaderboard, no guilt anywhere in it. Just your ripple, and how it moves when you move.

Every number traces to published data on animal yields and consumption, and the full methodology is one click away on the site. These are honest estimates, not precision instruments — and if you find an error, I’ll fix it publicly and thank you.

Here. Give it a spin: the-ripple.app. Let me know your feedback.

You don’t have to be vegan to matter. You just have to make a ripple.

Queen Satyabhama has donated her husband, Lord Krishna, to charity in a fit of pride and must now buy him back by his weight. He sits on the balance. She piles everything - her gold and jewels, all items in the coffers - but the scale just doesn’t budge. The more she adds, the lighter her side becomes! Then Rukmini places a single Tulsi leaf representing her devotion, and the scale balances.

The Tulabharam (weight balancing) story is told as a lesson that love outweighs gold. But when we look at the actual ritual, we discover it’s a valuation mechanism. It puts a person on a balance and asks the world to produce his exact worth in tradeable goods. The spiritual force of the story comes from the scale’s refusal to balance. No quantity of gold can equal Krishna.

But it has always been easier to measure humans than gods.

Today, in the temple of Guruvayoor in Kerala, a doe-eyed devotee sits on the wooden plank of a grand weighing scale, her weight balanced by hundreds of lotus flowers. Her worth in lotuses, for a promotion at her new job. Next, a man old enough to be her grandfather weighs himself against a mound of yams.

The scale from the ancient story persists. We just started letting it balance, at least ceremonially for humans.

Scales are much more familiar with animals, which are routinely worth their weight to buyers. A butcher places two leg pieces and a chicken breast on a digital scale, and then charges for 600 grams of flesh. A weight, and a multiplier. That’s the worth. Equivalences between animals are then drawn using money: a chicken is worth about $5 (Rs 450), and a hog is thus worth 40 such hens.

Our ladder thus runs from the unweighable down to the trivially weighable. You are excused for missing the quiet violence behind the idea that a pig is worth forty hens. The moment you convert a pig into hens, you’ve not just measured two animals - you have declared them the same substance, just varying in amount (weight) and quality (multiplier). The scale doesn’t see pigs and chickens, it sees units and generates a price - and the price, once it exists, quietly begins to feel like a fact about the animal. And everything with a price becomes convertible into everything else.

But the convertibility doesn’t stop at pigs and chickens. The same arithmetic has the ability to reach upward - a human life becomes some number of pigs, an AI becomes some number of human careers, and even God becomes quantifiable in the donations He receives.

The butchers, Blinkit, the MACT, the US Dept of Agriculture, the insurers, the courts, Anthropic’s token price list, the temple budget - the whole ladder is already priced. And it’s in public, available right now. Language does the thug’s work of keep these lists separate; it spends a ridiculous amount of effort ensuring the price-lists do not merge.

Today, we print all the numbers in one column.

The Ladder of all things

Our column is a ladder. The rungs of our ladder lead us up a price-list. But our brains process categories better, so we skip some rungs and come back to them later. We start with animals: salmon, hens, pigs, cows, lions and whales.

The chicken is designed to live for exactly 47 days, and sell for 5 dollars.

The 100kg pig sells for $200, and the 600kg bovine sells for $3500. In Munshi Premchand’s famous novel, Godaan, the protagonist Hori Mahato purchases the coveted cow on credit for 80 rupees (around 2 lakh in today’s rupees) and spends the rest of the novel being destroyed by that number. The cow, meanwhile, is worth about 17 pigs. You can hunt a “canned lion” in South Africa for $20,000 a pop, but a wild lion for $50,000. The Atlantic salmon goes for 30 bucks, and a small baleen whale can be commercially hunted off Norway for $5000.

5 dollars to 50,000: that’s our animal range. While extending this to humans, we run into the 同命不同价 (tóng mìng bù tóng jià) problem. This is a major social issue in China that means “same life, different prices”. Victims of road accidents in China received different compensations based on their urban or rural household registration (hukou).

A society thus saw its own pricing, got disgusted, legislated the matter, and only managed to half-fix it. Now, a working age Chinese person is worth 20 years of their own earning potential, roughly $150k based on average urban income. Higher in a city like Shanghai. The “same life, different prices” problem widens while moving countries.

India’s own MACT uses a similar earning-potential driven formula to arrive at a range of Rs 20 lakh - 3 crores ($20k-300k). This is what insurers pay for deaths due to road accidents. The same metric for a working-age Nigerian is ₦300,000 – ₦2m ($190–$1,250). And Americans are on the upper end of this spectrum (but not too far ahead of Indians): their lives are seen to have a median value of $300k.

A chasm separates what we say a life is worth (Americans claim willingness to pay $14.1 million for safety improvements that altogether prevent one statistical death) and what we actually pay. In 2026, human lives typically go for a few hundred dollars (cheaper than a pig) to less than half a million. That’s in the same ball-park as the Machines.

This is important because we live in the age of ascendant machines. Just like the pig equalled forty chickens, Klarna’s CEO boasted that its conversational AI equalled 700 humans, before replacing them. They walked back their “human savings” but that’s a story for another day.

Here’s what machines actually cost to run. Embodied machines like a 6-axis industrial arm can cost around $30k, the same price as Tesla’s Optimus and Boston Dynamics’ Atlas. But these are mostly mindless physical manipulators. When we enter the intellectual zone, we must consider LLMs at near-human performance on specific tasks.

A one-hour Claude Opus 5 agentic session consuming 50,000 input and 15,000 output tokens means 65,000 tokens per working hour. Fifty years of productive human life at ~1,800 hours per year gives ~90,000 working hours. So the human-equivalent LLM costs us ~6 billion tokens, approx. $40k today just for inference. This doubles to $80k for Claude Fable. And if you add amortized training and human oversight, the LLM career-worth is in the 100-200k dollar range. Just like a human.

Notice what we have been doing. To climb the ladder, we converted everything into everything else - an easy step for the materialist. In a disenchanted world with no souls, where even consciousness is said to be explained by a complex but computable firing of neurons, everything should be convertible to everything else: a cow can be 17 pigs; a pig, forty hens; and a piece of software can be one human or 700, depending on how you measure. We dislike the final comparison more than anything else, because the ghost of humanism - a spectre of language - has made us feel like a person climbing the materialist ladder, rather than another rung in it.

The disenchanted framework leads to a final rung that is quite strange: God. Remember we started with Satyabhama’s failure to value Shri Krishna and the scale’s refusal to balance? That was a world of greater faith, every inch pervaded by the divine. What if we committed the cardinal sin today of converting our devotion into dollars, by using our donations as a proxy for our faith? This stinks of financialization, but it doesn’t stretch our crude materialism too far; people do this all the time.

Considering our relationship with God to be situational, personal and institution-based, we may estimate our valuation of gods’ temporal proxies to be the perpetuity of donations their establishments receive. For the shrine at Tirupati, that receives ~$200 million (Rs 1880 crores) each year in the Hundi, this works out to a value of $2.5 billion in perpetuity. Vatican’s Peter’s pence leads us to a value of around a billion dollars.

The top rung of the ladder is above the billion mark, orders of magnitude above everything else material.

The Cold Logic

Every price on the ladder answers one thing, and it is not what something is worth. It is how easily the world can produce another one. The chicken at $5, the hog at $200, and the bovine at $3500 - these are numbers from a manufacturing schedule. Forty-seven days, birdfeed and a small cage yields the number 5; six months, a lot of grain and a bigger cage gives 200; eighteen months, an acre of grazing and a tonne of feed gives 3,500.

Chickens are not cheap because we judge them to matter less. They became cheap because they were cheap to make - small, fast-growing, feed-efficient, finished in forty-seven days. We industrialised them for those reasons, and the price followed the biology.

A canned lion for 20k, a wild lion for 50k. Same species. Same nervous system. Same capacity to fear and to suffer. But the wild lion is harder to replace, and fetches 3 times the price.

The mechanism is universal. Twenty years of earnings — India's MACT, China's post-hukou formula — is a replacement cost for foregone production. Which is why "same life, different prices" was structurally inevitable rather than an oversight.

The LLM at $40k is the same logic taken to its limit. AI is infinitely substitutable, and its price collapses decades of intellectual labour to the price of electricity. And God, irreplacable, sits at the top of the ladder.

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King Shibi Ran the Numbers

In the Mahabharata’s Vana Parva, we encounter King Shibi. While we used cold logic to value everything else, here was a great man who heroically valued himself. He was a benevolent king, known to animals and men for his justice. One evening, when a dove fleeing a hawk shot into his sabha and begged him for mercy, he took it under his arm.

"O King," the hawk argued, "I am starving. By nature, this dove is my prey. By protecting it, you are depriving me of my rightful food. If I die of hunger, my death will be on your hands. How can your Dharma be just if protecting one life requires you to unjustly take another?"

The king offers the hawk a feast, his treasures and wordly possessions, but the hawk refuses. Only flesh from his own body, equal to that of the dove, would be a just replacement according to the hawk. So, he places the dove on a balance, and taking a sharp sword, slices flesh from his thigh to balance the bird. Miraculously, no matter how much flesh he carved away, the dove remained heavier.

Now bleeding and weak, he realizes that only his whole self would equal this magical dove. And he places himself on the scale. It balances. The hawk and dove vanish; the gods, Indra and Agni stand in their place. Shibi is showered with blessings and remembered for posterity.

Two stories - Satyabhama and Shibi, two failures of the balance. Both are stories about gods, and they make a god's claim: the divine will not be quantified. On their own terms they say nothing about chickens, machines or humans. But they mark where the arithmetic stops. And we already know what the arithmetic was doing.

It was answering how easily the world can make another one. The chicken’s $5 was a fact about incubators and feed conversion. Then the number did something else: it told us how much to care. A $5 animal is hard to take seriously. Forty-seven days is hard to mourn. We industrialised chickens because they were cheap to make, and the cheapness taught us they mattered less.

The price list is a producer of moral intuitions, not a readout of them.

Which leaves the word doing two jobs. The ladder used substitutability in the production sense — how cheaply can we make another? By that measure the chicken is the most substitutable animal alive. There is a second sense: can this one be replaced? A robot arm is units all the way down; replace it and nothing is lost, because nothing was there to lose. The chicken’s forty-seven days were experienced by someone. There is exactly one of that, and no supplier.

We only ever measured the first. We read the number and concluded something about the second.

Two Doors

Which leaves two ways out, and no third.

The first is to accept the ladder completely. If everything is units, so are we. We were never climbing the ladder or standing beside it — we were always a rung. Humanism kept us off the list for centuries by pointing at intelligence: whatever else we shared with the animals, thinking was ours. That exemption has been sold. It costs about $40,000 a career, and the price is falling.

Take this door and the discomfort resolves. The chicken at $5, the Nigerian at $1,250, the career at $40,000 — none of these are outrages. They are quotes. You simply stop flinching at your own rung. Our civilization moves towards “short, nasty and brutish” with high technology and sophistication.

The second is to question the very premise: that a being who experiences its own life is not a quantity of anything. Pricing a life by how easily we can make another was always a fact about our supply chains rather than about the being.

Some will reach for a third door — we are special because we feel, not because we think, and machines don’t feel. But this is nothing but the second door in disguise. If sentience is what puts something beyond replacement value, the chicken and pig have it too. There is a certain unpriceable worth in sentience.

Every valuation in this essay has been Satyabhama. Piling on gold, certain the right number exists somewhere, watching her own side rise as she adds.

The butcher’s scale will work tomorrow morning, and it’s unavoidable. We have to eat. The hawk was starving, and he was right — you cannot save the dove without shrinking someone else’s plate. But we can price differently.

Take the second door and the chicken’s death stops being a transaction. It becomes a sacrifice — something given up, by someone, so that you can eat. Which would make it worth considerably more than $5.

Five dollars is less than what I spent on Claude credits researching this essay.

India is currently the ~35th most popular destination country for foreign tourists, a ranking set to shoot into the teens by 2040. Here's why.

The Puzzle

India sits in roughly the world's top 5% for historical and cultural uniqueness, and offers a variety of geographical and climatic choices for travellers, but has been famously unable to crack the Tourism-code.

India counts 10 million NRIs to boost its annual tourist count (roughly 50% of its 20 million total) but these are locked-in visitors who will come for family, property, and religious reasons. When it comes to attracting foreign passport holders, it draws less than 1/10th of France’s annual count, and performs on par with South Africa, Bulgaria and the Dominican Republic.

The Missing Vibe

India's material conditions, aesthetics, and - for want of a better word - vibe do not measure up to its cultural inheritance. A traveller who would rank India's monuments, cuisine, and civilisational depth against any nation on earth will routinely rank the experience of travelling there far lower. This comes in the era of Travelgram, where digital capture of the visual vibe is an essential tourist goal.

The gap between the asset and the experience is the subject of this note, and the bridging of this gap will drive India's inevitable but delayed rise as a tourist magnet.

The India Tourist Experience

Upon landing in the country, the foreign tourist typically experiences a combination of the following:

(1) Crowding & the Absence of Slack: Every asset — train, road, monument, promenade — is run past its design envelope, with no buffer to absorb a shock, do maintenance, or simply let a space breathe. The feeling one gets is “there are people everywhere” and “so much noise and commotion!”.

(2) Grime and deferred maintenance: The high utilization of assets is not backed up by reliable maintenance cycles, or reinvestment in upgradation and replacement. Assets are sweated but not replenished. This leads to broken footpaths, faded building exteriors, and dirt.

(3) A low hum of hustle and anxiety: People, like assets, are operating under stress and with zero margin for error too. Stopping to clean your cab after a ride may mean doing one less ride in the day; not claiming a seat on a metro means standing; not pushing means not being served. Scarcity is engineered into daily life. Everyone is optimizing for themselves, leading to rudeness, aggression and a general lack of empathy.

(4) Corner-cutting and "jugaad" over systems: Improvised workarounds are celebrated as scrappy genius, but their underlying cause is the country’s inability to build durable systems. When you cannot trust the system to reward investment in quality, everyone optimises for the next transaction, not the repeated game. What this means for tourists: fake-guides at monuments, irritating hawkers at airports and railway stations, and “Bunty aur Babli” style conmen.

(5) Aesthetic chaos: Visual clutter - overhead wires, unplanned signage, encroachment - that high-vibe destinations have legislated away. And, of course, paan.

The mistake is to treat these symptoms as the disease, or as a matter of "civic sense" or national character. They are equilibrium outcomes of the structural conditions below.

The secret of India’s Anti-Vibe

The various aspects of India’s poor tourist experience can be explained by two simple frameworks: one for asset-stress (conditions) and the other for perceived societal misbehaviour (actions).

(1) Anti-Vibe Conditions

The visible “asset stress” a visitor experiences can be expressed as the product of three ratios:

a. The Demand-Supply Mismatch: (Demand ÷ Asset supply)

The first term is the ratio of people to the assets they share. Here scale is destiny: India’s 1.4 billion people press on every road, train, monument, and beachfront at a multiple of what competitor destinations face.

This is also why India does poorly on Nature tourism, and affluent Indians also travel to Vietnam, Thailand, Maldives and Switzerland to experience similar climatic milieus that India too offers.

India’s “serene” trails are densely populated - the crowding is baseline and year-round, not merely a function of tourist inflow. And India’s religious and historical tracks are as densely as other similar regions in the world but they feel more disorderly and stressful.

Funnily enough, India’s national density (~470/km²) is lower than the Netherlands, Belgium, South Korea or Japan — all high-vibe places. The binding constraint is density relative to asset supply and state capacity, i.e. too little asset built per person, not merely too many people per acre. That points to terms 1b and 1c.

b. High Cost of Capital vs Low Prices: (Hurdle rate ÷ Achievable price)

This is an explanation for India’s poor asset creation per capita. This term is essentially what an asset must earn divided by what it can realistically charge. Both halves are unfavourable in India.

First, the hurdle rate.*

Put simply, this means that the same asset would need to generate 4-5% higher returns in India than in Germany, Singapore or Thailand, to make sense for equity investors. Of course, Sri Lanka and Vietnam have even higher hurdle rates but these countries do much better than India in 1a: Demand vs Asset Supply.

The second element of this equation is achievable price.

India's market splits cleanly. The Taj-tier hotel charges $300/night and clears its hurdle easily. But the assets most people actually use — railways, state buses, urban roads, public infrastructure — are priced at politically controlled, heavily subsidised rates that have not kept pace with cost for decades. And value-seeking masses ensure the price ceiling for most private assets (taxis, 3-/4- star hotels, most restaurants) is capped low.

The mechanism of this lever is thus arithmetic. To generate the extra ~5 points on low local prices, an owner has only one real lever: push more volume through the same asset — more guests, thinner staffing, low (illegal) staff wages, deferred refurbishment, every square metre monetised. High cost of capital mathematically forces the high utilisation and zero slack the visitor experiences. Slack is the first thing an elevated cost of capital makes unaffordable.

Another simple point of evidence is the cab driver who struggles to pay the EMIs for his vehicle and make a modest living even after working 80 hours/week, while the people he ferries daily still think cabs are already too expensive; so he cannot charge more. He must cut corners, engage in jugaad, and perhaps cheat to make ends meet. And even luxury tourists insulated in their 5-star resorts cannot avoid the anxious taxi-driver.

c. Reinvesting in asset quality and maintenance: (1 ÷ State reinvestment reliability)

The third term is whether revenue collected from assets reliably flows back into maintaining and expanding them. High utilisation is supposed to fund reinvestment; in India that loop is broken, which is why sweated assets turn scratched, broken and grimy.

Vietnam pairs an even higher cost of equity (~12.7%) with a directive, high-capacity single-party state that decides and executes infrastructure quickly, and a much smaller population (~97m) pressing on each asset. The reinvestment cycle functions.

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(2) Anti-Vibe Actions

The above elements are conditions — factors that exist. The four forces below are dynamics — things that perpetuate those conditions. They don’t multiply each other, but they loop. Each one feeds back into the structural trap and makes it harder to escape. The right representation is a self-reinforcing cycle:

The Low-Trust Loop: Defection is rational → cooperation doesn’t form → systems don’t develop → quality goes unrewarded → defection remains rational.

The forces that fold Indian tourism back neatly fold into the mnemonic CAGE.

a. Collective-action trap (no micro, only macro focus):

Citizens oppose a problem in the abstract (”public urination is bad”) while excusing themselves at the point of action (”what option is there?”). This is best understood not as hypocrisy but as a rational trap: when no one else cooperates, unilateral virtue (not bribing, not littering, not jumping the queue) is pure private loss. It is an equilibrium, not a character flaw — which matters, because equilibria can be shifted by changing payoffs (enforcement, defaults, visible reciprocity) even when exhortation fails. Singapore is the existence proof: a similar substrate moved to a high-trust equilibrium within a generation by changing the cost of defection, not the culture.

b. Adversarial over-competition (jugaad, not systems):

Stretched resources and scarce capital produce maximal competition on a "fend for yourself" basis — low-tech, low-value-add, often dirty competition, leading to overexploitation. This is the same low-trust equilibrium viewed from the supply side: when the system won't reward investment in quality, jugaad beats systems as the way to win. The result is what the visitor experiences as chaos — not entropy, but a very efficient optimisation for the wrong objective.

c. Golden Road arbitrage (India’s civilizational leakage):

The art is no longer the artist’s.

India's most painful structural disadvantage: its civilisational exports — Buddhism, temple architecture, yoga, Ayurveda, cuisine, Himalayan spirituality — have been successfully productised by its neighbours. Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, and Indonesia (Angkor, Borobudur, Bali, Thai Buddhism) let the affluent traveller consume an "Indic" experience without the friction of India itself. India is the civilisational R&D lab that does not capture the downstream value. The top-50 arrivals data makes this concrete: Thailand converts 35.5 million foreign visitors and ~$43 billion in receipts from an asset base that is technically downstream of India's own; India converts 9.95 million foreign visitors and ~$35 billion from the primary source.

d. Endogenous friction:

There is a real argument that cultures which price in USD, drop all visa friction (no reciprocity rules), and build for the international traveller rather than the local win in the short run but dilute themselves long-term (e.g. Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam, various Latin American countries). But the counter-example is decisive: Japan prices in yen, maintains real visa structure, and builds for its own citizens first — and is one of the world's most beloved destination because it retained its uniqueness.

The truth is that the tourist and the citizen want mostly the same things — clean air, working transit, safe streets, legible signage. Tourism infrastructure and civic infrastructure are largely the same infrastructure. India's problem is not that it refuses to pander; it is that it generates endogenous friction — visa delays, connectivity gaps, asset stress, aesthetic chaos — that repels the mid-market visitor before the civilisational depth can do its work. The data confirms this: India's per-visitor yield (~$3,450 on FTA basis) is among the highest in the world precisely because only the most determined, high-spending visitor pushes through the friction. The CAGE filters out the casual mid-market tourist entirely.

The Vibe-Shift Underway (present-2040)

We have seen that India is the case where high density, an elevated cost of capital, a pricing structure that is capped on mass-use assets yet decoupled-upward on prime commercial land, an unreliable state reinvestment cycle, and a low-trust behavioural equilibrium all coincide — each amplified by scale (1.4 billion people).

Comparable countries fail on one or two terms and are rescued on the others (by EU funds, by a directive state, by low density, by an informal tourist layer, by an appreciating currency). India is rescued on none.

That is the formula for the problem. But there’s a vibe-shift underway, some of its methods seen, others unseen. By 2040, India will be a Top-20 Global Tourist destination. Here’s why:

Near certain trends & locked-in truths-

• The Infra-Upgrade - Airports and Roads: India's operational airports rose from 74 in 2014 to 163 today, and government policy targets more than 400 airports by 2047. Domestic air traffic is projected to grow six-fold to 1.1 billion by 2040.

  Simultaneously, India’s high-speed expressways with speeds up to 120 kmph have grown from ~0 to 3,000 km in the last 10 years, and will be around 50,000 km by 2040. Tourists approaching India’s major hotspots will not feel the crowd anymore.

• Population plateau: This is an important mega-trend. India will continue providing talent and workers for the world, while its own population stagnates. This would mean an improved asset-to-demand ratio. There are sure to be several other impacts here, but the population plateau will help India’s tourist destinations compete.

• Capital gets cheaper: Good behaviour gets rewarded in the long term. As India’s risk premium compresses over a 15–20 year horizon — through rating upgrades, deeper capital markets, and a longer track record of macro stability — the hurdle rate that every asset must clear falls with it. Falling hurdle rates make the previously-unaffordable affordable: the slack, the maintenance reserve, and the capacity built ahead of demand.

Likely to happen, backed by policy & consumer needs-

• Law Enforcement on the General Public (CCTVs, digital identity tracking): The state’s tendency to big-brother its people may be terrible for aspects of private life, but will increase law-abiding behaviour through severe disincentives. The cost of defection will rise (like in Singapore, and now, in Sri Lanka). The biggest industrialists and India’s rich will still be exempt of rules, but 99.9% of citizenry will be forced to comply.

• Premium domestic tourist expectations: Traditional bastions of domestic tourism like Goa are facing the heat from international destinations: Bentota, Phuket, Halong Bay, Male. As of 2026, India’s most affluent travellers are getting better value for their money abroad. And it is easier than ever for Indians to travel abroad: lots of Visa-free / Visa-on-arrival options, cheap international roaming and seamless connectivity, UPI and Credit Cards making trivial transactions abroad.
  These people have higher demands of their local hotspots. They won’t settle, and the free market will thus push India’s own holiday destinations to up their game.

• Verticalization - a move away from Sprawl: Pioneered in Mumbai, Gurugram and IT Corridors in multiple cities, Indian cities are growing vertically (with dedicated parking, underground cabling and sewerage etc). This infrastructural shift will improve the vibe for citizens and tourists, by managing density at commercial and tourist hubs without making them appear stressed.

• Rupee depreciates further: India’s dependence on foreign oil is unlikely to decrease in the coming decade, thus maintaining pressure on the rupee. What this means for tourism? The traveller earning in USDs, Euros, Yens and Yuans will feel richer in India, and can buy more than they can in many other competing tourist economies. A massive tailwind.

Wildcard, will supercharge the shift once it happens-

• Centre–state–municipal alignment at a Corridor level: The problem of tourism currently touches all constitutional jurisdictions: the State list (Land, public order, police, local government, water, sanitation), the Union list (Railways, national highways, aviation, ports, foreigner regulation and visas, immigration) and the Concurrent list (Forests, protected wildlife, many archaeological sites, economic and social planning). Coordination is a nightmare.
  You cannot coordinate Centre–state–municipality cooperation across all of India, but you can convene it around a single named corridor with political backing, the way a special economic zone or a single showcase city (the way Gujarat ran the Statue of Unity / Kevadia, or the way the Centre and UP coordinated for the Kumbh, or Varanasi’s central-funded redevelopment under a PM who represents the constituency) concentrates multi-tier attention on one perimeter.
  This alignment is bound to take shape in the 2-3 most important tourist corridors, temporarily collapsing the three tiers into one chain of command.

The perfect storm of conditions that exist seem like immovable impediments at present. But solutions are already underway, and we are likely to see strong tailwinds in the 2026-2040 period. A 10% CAGR, the kind Vietnam sustained for a decade, is no longer far-fetched. India will stop punching under her weight class, and start drawing 30-40 million (3-4X growth) foreign tourists annually.

The inevitable rebirth of Indian tourism is just around the corner.

Appendix:

_{*Method: cost of equity is computed uniformly as the local 10-year government bond yield (the risk-free proxy) plus the Damodaran ERP, assuming an average-risk asset (beta = 1). For India, that CAPM build (~11–12%) is independently cross-checked against the RBSA “Cost of Capital in India” study, which measured a median cost of equity of 12.2% for Indian companies bottom-up — the two methods agree, which is why India’s figure is the most firmly anchored in the table; the others are single-method estimates. Two caveats: (i) for high-risk countries this build slightly double-counts risk, because the local bond yield already embeds the sovereign default spread that the ERP also contains (Damodaran’s own method nets that spread out first), so Sri Lanka’s “>20%” in particular is indicative only; (ii) policy rates and ERP are sourced from central banks and Damodaran NYU Stern respectively.}

Vānaprastha (= forest-path) is the third of Hinduism’s four ashramas (stages of life), and represents a gradual withdrawal from worldly duties (after student/Brahmacharya and householder/Grihastha stages) to focus on spiritual progress and self-realization. While industrialization and colonialism directly reshaped the student and householder stages of life, Vānaprastha remained on the fringes - somewhat shielded from global political and economic forces that cared little for passive, unproductive non-taxpayers.

The Ancient Way of the Elders

The forest-path of the elders is most clearly defined and prescribed in Indian texts, but close parallels exist in China, Japan, Korea and many eastern traditions. Across texts and lived practice, the forest-path tends to rhyme in five moves:

1. voluntary withdrawal from authority,

2. reduced consumption,

3. centrality of spiritual life,

4. focus on mentorship, and

5. transition into the role of a living witness.

Modern psychology explains some elements of the forest path by reframing them as acts of selection rather than withdrawal. Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) says: when time feels limited, we invest less in achievement and novelty, and more in meaning, closeness, and emotional balance.

From times immemorial, a major section of India’s elderly community had the tendency to loosen their grip and move away from the centre of society - physically and mentally. Their centrality in everyday societal affairs would gradually fade, as younger householders would take the reins under their guidance. These 60-something year olds would move at a slower pace, meeting in their verandahs, or outside at temples and local teashops. To discuss local gossip, and major political developments. Some would carry newspapers or magazines. They would spend more hours in japas and rituals. Their more formal duty would be that of moral arbiters in village/town disputes; satsangs and festivals served as a glue that periodically brought the active members of this community back into view.

The Vānaprastha script remained largely unbroken in tradition, although adherence may have differed based on region, family, caste, socio-economic wherewithal and the individual. The first major impact came during India’s struggle for independence.

Vividh Bharati, Career Indians and the New Indian Elder

The Islamic invasions and European rule did not break Vānaprastha routines. These habits were highly localized, built around family and villages, and hence didn’t break with change in political control. Only with the increased travel for work and break-up of joint families did elders feel a need to start adapting to new realities.

This period - roughly the first half of the 20th century - overlapped with the time the radio captured India’s imagination. As urban clerks, professionals and upper caste elites moved from their villages to pursue careers, their parents became the first generation of elders without Grihastas (householders) to run their home. Their once noisy homes were now filled with the sounds of Radio drama, cricket commentary and Annamacharya’s kritis.

A.I.R. and Vividh Bharati gave companionship to elders. It reinforced their ritual clock. Music, devotion and cricket, all scheduled to give structure to empty time. It also kickstarted a unique transformation that has not quite ended: the elder turned into a consumer from a producer/transmitter of meaning.

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TV killed the Elder Radio star

When Doordarshan entered Indian households in the 60s and 70s, the visual medium made consumption easy and addictive. With radio, the elders could still talk over it and interpret it (thereby maintaining a position of moral authority within their homes), but TV’s visual medium gave its truth a certain finality. The image carries authority that audio rarely does.

With diverse coverage from TV channels over the next decades, elders lost moral and intellectual authority to global experts cabled into family TV sets. There were now people who knew better than wise old dadaji, and told more exciting stories than nani. In a strange way, the same medium that gave indispensable companionship to elders also turned them into passive consumers and replaced them as mentors and figures of wisdom.

Then came Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana and B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharata - the mass rituals of the 80s and 90s. For the first time, millions of families around the country could watch their great historical epics play out on the screen. For elders, this deepened their spiritual free-time, and gave them a new way to run devotion in their homes, especially in cities where temple/community life was thinning.

The Internet’s K-shaped impact

The internet has helped push the retirement age. Many people who would have turned dependents at 60, now remain earning members until 70. Some of these roles would be ideal Vānaprastha roles (advisory, teaching etc) but a large share would remain active work like knowledge-production, trade, entrepreneurship, etc. As human life-expectancy extends, people stay Grihastas longer.

In their free time, Indians aged 65-85 in India inevitably have two poisons nectars of choice: Whatsapp and YouTube. For many, these two apps become the default background of the day.

Prayer and devotion are mediated by YouTube. The wisest and most scholarly voices are streamed into kitchens and drawing rooms; elderly homemakers and retired 80-year old professionals can follow a kalakshepam or relish an upanyasam from the comfort and safety of their homes.

YouTube also doubles up as a continuous-learning tool. Here, they learn baking, new knitting techniques, and how AI works. Once elders learn the fearless world of digital learning where no one can make you feel ashamed for asking a question, they continue on their child-like path as long as their physical and mental faculties allow.

The other elder-favourite, WhatsApp, has helped them regain power as arbiters of what is true and moral. After old-media-apocalypse of the 2010s, where millions of TV shows, news channels, newspapers and magazines each proclaimed their points of view as absolute truth, reality has fragmented. In such a world, interpretation gains value once again. WhatsApp turns elders into interpreter-nodes in networks. They debate, forward and organize. This is an old Vānaprastha habit in a new avatar.

WhatsApp serves as social-glue for our elders. It provides for daily companionship. Every morning, around 7 am, Ammamma used to send us a “Good morning” message on our family Whatsapp group, with a special “Love to paapu” (referring to my son, her beloved great-grandson). She did this until her last day here on Earth. She was 87 when she left us, and she had mastered the use of WhatsApp, YouTube and SMS on her smartphone.

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The internet also comes with a shadow: misinformation and outrage-loops via Whatsapp, infinite-TV addiction via YouTube, and prestige-clashes & family-feuds due to the always-on (but remote) nature of communication.

Many well-meaning septuagenarians spend their entire day outraged by something Mamta Banerjee or Amit Shah (or Donald Trump) said. Rage-mining channels and memes maximize this anger, and keep it going for as long as possible. These elders grew up in an internet-free world, and they haven’t learned to block out the evils of the internet.

Depending on one’s predispositions (gunas), self-regulation and internet-management skills, elders can find themselves on either arm of the K-curve. It can deepen their emotional well-being, or completely decimate their happiness and turn them into rage-hamsters.

Seen this way, the question is no longer whether WhatsApp or YouTube are good or bad for elders.

The deeper question is this: what replaces the forest?

Earlier generations of elders had physical cues that nudged them toward vānaprastha — the slowing of the body, the presence of younger householders, temples, verandahs, fixed ritual hours, and the natural fading of authority. Today, those cues are gone. The smartphone does not encourage withdrawal; it encourages infinite participation.

Mohan’s 4.30 am phone is not the problem. The problem is that nothing in the device tells him when to stop engaging with the world and begin witnessing it.

Vānaprastha in the digital age therefore becomes less about renunciation, and more about intentional design of attention.

Designing a Digital Vānaprastha

Agency and security related factors profoundly impact one’s internet experience. If one isn’t comfortable/skilled in using internet-tools (feels “What if I send a wrong OTP and get robbed?”), or is financially compromised (living hand-to-mouth even in their 60s/70s), their experience of the internet will be severely limited. It may even be a net-negative.

Assuming a fair degree of agency and privilege (top 20% of India), the internet-experience of elders is governed by two aspects:

1. information diet: curated feed versus algorithmically driven

2. purpose of use: people-centric versus status-/ news- centric

It is easy to understand this by drawing up a 2x2 and populating each quadrant with best-fitting characters from our itihasas/puranas.

These are not personality types, nor permanent identities.

Most elders - like most humans - drift between these states depending on health, loneliness, family context and the quality of information entering their lives. The same person can be Vidura-like in the morning, channel their inner Daśaratha by afternoon, and have a Kaikeyī moment by nightfall - all depending on what they consume and whom they engage with.

The archetypes merely describe directional pull, not moral worth.

Curated teachings combined with people-centric usage often nudges elders toward a Vidura-like role — steadying relationships rather than inflaming them. Like him, these elders lean on dharma, discern what knowledge to trust, and use information to steady relationships rather than scoring quick wins. For these people, technology can deepen the Vānaprastha experience.

When curated knowledge is paired with news- or status-centric engagement, elders can resemble Vibhīṣaṇa — principled, truth-oriented, but sometimes relationally costly. These people can be forest-path aligned if they manage their cortisol-spikes.

Uncurated, algorithm-driven feeds exert their own gravity. Depending on temperament and emotional context, elders may drift toward one of two familiar paths… the path of Daśaratha, or that of Kaikeyī. The Daśaratha path is one with reactive inputs while being people-centric. These people can drift, as they don’t strictly curate their inputs - leading to bad decisions like exiling Lord Rāma. On the other hand, we have the Kaikeyī moment (post Mantharā’s trigger) — where algorithmic amplification meets insecurity and fear. Not only do they allow random inputs to influence them, they use this to play status games leading to dangerous outcomes.

Mohan’s phone still lights up at 4.30 am. The bhajans still play. The good-morning messages still arrive from Assam, Bhopal and Dubai. But somewhere between the forwards and the footsteps counted on his morning walk lies a choice his ancestors never had to make. The forest has vanished; the path has not. In an age where attention never retires and participation has no sunset hour, vānaprastha can no longer be found in withdrawal from the world, but in gentler acts of curation — what to watch, what to forward, what to ignore, and when to simply witness. The smartphone has become the new threshold between engagement and renunciation. Whether it turns into a shrine, a sabhā, or a battlefield depends not on the technology itself, but on the discipline with which the elder learns to step back - from noise - and rediscover the quiet dignity of the forest-path within.

The liberal diet does not merely regulate our public lives; it reshapes our private ones. Its impact is deeply psychological and quietly cultural. It is invisible to those undergoing it. It is comparable in impact to a religious conversion process, but it happens without our explicit consent or any elaborate rituals or ceremonies.

Some of our closest relationships – that between parent and child, between siblings, between lovers or spouses – are reshaped by liberalism’s assimilative processes.

Formation of the liberal self (friends & lovers)

Humans start developing deep friendships and falling in love in their teens and their twenties, ages when passions run high and intellectual development is not yet complete. The high energy of youth combined with their low social power status turns them into restless sponge-creatures: they can mobilize, absorb and assimilate faster than everyone else.

If society can be likened to a car, then laws are its seatbelts and its culture is a training in defensive driving. While legal liberalism acts as a failsafe mechanism to protect individuals in a multicultural society, cultural liberalism is an important tool to reform people in the liberal mold. If more people accept that others can behave, look, eat, love, worship, speak or think differently from how they do, then the dependence on legal provisions to protect individuals from illiberal incidents will, no doubt, reduce over time. And humans have long realized that cultural change is best driven through a society’s restless sponge-creatures, its youth.

When America was trying to end racial segregation, schools and colleges heralded this important message. And while a perfect outcome may not have been achieved, cultural liberalism helped foster greater harmony between Whites and Blacks. In India, one way to reduce caste-based discrimination has been the encouragement of more inter-caste marriages, another exercise in cultural liberalism. The government, schools, media, corporations and the moral middle-class come together to shape the youth’s “acceptable” and “progressive” behaviour.

When two conservative Protestant Midwesterners got together or married in the ‘50s, there existed markers showcasing potential contours of their future relationship. These markers are clearer in the case of two Hindus marrying within their Jati-varna even today. The same is not the case when liberals come together.

This is because the former identities are inherited ones, whereas the liberal identity is necessarily a product of individual choice. Liberal individuals must constantly reinvent meaning and identity, as they attempt to shun prior binding beliefs or dogma in the process of psychological liberalism.

Liberal youths often carry hyphenated identities (it is unlikely that someone is a pure liberal and nothing else). There can be Indian-liberals and Pakistani-liberals, Hindu-liberals and Muslim-liberals, Liberal-capitalists and liberal-socialists, Black-American-liberals, Feminist- liberals etc. Except the “liberal” part, the other constituents of a person’s identity come with externalized meaning and inherited beliefs, although the liberal youth feels that they have chosen these identity-fragments as well. The “liberal” part thus remains a smoothing agent that allows the rough and jagged sides of the youth assimilate into polite society.

As the youth develops more human relationships with a diverse group, it is the “liberal” portion of their hyphenated ego-identities that grows; other portions shrink or take the back seat – a classic conflict-avoidance hack.

Between friends and lovers, the value-elements of each individual that display themselves despite the liberal smoothening come to determine the future contours of the relationship. Thus, a Muslim and a feminist can together create a Muslim-feminist-liberal identity – where the man and his son go to Friday prayers; the family eats only halal and doesn’t drink; the woman of the house nourishes her career; and the family doesn’t think of their atheist neighbours as “kaafirs”. An Indian and an Ethiopian liberal can co-create a Global-south-liberal kind of identity – they actively see discrimination and one-upmanship in western initiatives; converse in English but see the language and their knowledge-structures as a product of colonialism; and dream of a welfare-state where equality doesn’t stop just at opportunity.

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It is thus an important exercise to identify the provenance of each liberal youth’s identity-fragments. Is it chosen from a platter like in a buffet? Is it handed down by their parents and deeply internalized in early childhood? Is it a mimetic repetition of what is available and popular?

Failure of inheritance (parents & children)

Even after decades of liberal reform, many traditionalist parents believe in teaching their children ideas that they learned in childhood. Thus, the home remains a place of moral continuity, inherited values and defined social roles. In many of these homes too, progressive values like tolerance, individual rights and consent are subtly communicated. This often prepares the child for interacting with the broader world that may not share the ideas they learned at home.

Traditionalist parents may thus create a mosaic of old-traditional as well as new-progressive values for their child, seamlessly blending both until the end of one and the beginning of the other are no longer perceptible. They may also recast liberal values in a way that they flow seamlessly from traditional teachings, thus adapting their old knowledge-schools to the needs of the modern world. In such homes, beliefs that carry a certain weight are actively transmitted from parent to child.

Liberal parenting, on the other hand, emphasizes open-mindedness, curiosity and exploration, and stays away from externalized meaning and inherited values. As parents remain constant producers of self-identity, every parenting choice or act is also seen as a deliberate choice. The burden of authorship that the parents earlier felt as individuals, now extends to their child too. And this poses a unique problem.

Psychological liberalism places intensive focus on the individual and has an inside-out value creation paradigm. Within such a framework, influence feels illegitimate. Introducing another person to a new habit or behaviour may feel like coercion. Like a transgression of boundaries. Since parenting is mostly about influence and making choices for another, liberal-parenting may turn into a complex exercise of digesting internal contradictions.

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Often it is the other parts of the hyphenated parental identities (e.g. “gay” in gay-liberal, which leads to an emphasis on the value of sexual freedom) that creates inherited value-weights for the child, because liberalism itself carries no forward weight. Liberalism is like a weightless scaffolding that can carry the weights of any, all or no other beliefs. The individual actively decides how they use their massless framework.

In the absence of another strong parental identity fragment, the values that stick in a liberal household are those that are socially rewarding and popular. The framework is desperate to carry weight, and if they cannot be found at home, it will attract values from the outside world until it is adequately loaded.

External loading of value (platforms & algorithms)

Like with all great ideologies, the chink in liberalism’s armour is its greatest strength: everything is a legitimate choice (as long as it doesn’t directly hurt another human being), and no such choice is termed wrong. In a world where it is the dominant ideology, how to encourage or dissuade an individual from thinking or doing in a certain way?

It is precisely here that liberal parenting and friendships can struggle. While they provided the weightless framework, they refrain from loading it with values as influence feels illegitimate. In such a world, individuals find themselves on platforms that boost some behaviours and beliefs and deboost others.

An individual may get more visibility, likes and comments on their picture in Mumbai-nightclub sipping sangrias, as compared to their photograph serving at their local temple’s annadaan (charity meal). Their thoughts on investing or politics may receive more traction than equally weighty thoughts on epistemology or motherhood.

Algorithms bypass liberalism’s handicap by never opposing the individual’s thoughts or motives. They simply make edgy and less-profitable beliefs invisible, while simultaneously amplifying the mainstream. The buffet of values that most people see and pick-from are thus algorithm-approved. This buffet itself isn’t permanent, and beliefs can be abandoned by the algorithm as well as individuals without much fuss. The abandonment of DEI-focused core values by Meta and several influencers on the platform is a recent example.

Algorithms themselves are designed to mimic the masses and culture-creators in most cases, thus creating a scenario where we are incentivized to be copies of copies of copies. And this process itself is mediated by the logic of power and capital. Power silently dictates what the algorithm rewards and punishes in the political space; free-markets and capital influence what the platform rewards in the economic and cultural spheres.

The end result: people feel autonomous, while becoming more of the same. Liberalism freed the individual from inherited authority. Algorithms now free the individual even from authorship.

“Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” Most readers would agree with this quote attributed to early twentieth century liberal democrats, who were in turn shortening John Stuart Mill’s “Harm Principle” into a pithy sentence.

It is likely that you, no matter where you were brought up (except maybe North Korea or in an isolated island tribe - in which case you won’t be reading this), have been brought up on a diet of such liberalism. Your society or government may not adhere to all its ideals, but the lack of liberalism is usually experienced as an imperfection to be fixed, or as a limited trade-off for valuable features specific to local cultures. To the modern mind, liberalism’s extended absence feels like an annoying itch.

If people are likened to fish swimming in an ocean (that represents their lived reality), then basic liberal values would be the ocean’s salt; modern humans cannot imagine a world bereft of these. Nowhere are these values put to test more than in multicultural societies.

How we got to this point

For a large part of history, humans evolved in tribes, dense agrarian settlements and close-knit communities that shared common values, beliefs and customs. Radical thought-rebels would be denounced, persecuted or banished, to preserve societal harmony. Groups that evolved differences in thinking had the opportunity to branch-off, and each group could go on to develop their own civilizational trajectory.

Clashes of civilizations happened at the borders, and these were as much about resources as they were about ideas and prestige. The great civilizational wars eventually took the form of colonialism of the past thousand years, where Islamic- and later European- colonialists exercised control over a majority of the world’s physical, intellectual, economic and political spaces.

Given the scale of the imperialist endeavour and the accelerating movement of people, goods and capital across the world, societies needed people from different cultures to coexist peacefully without harming one-another. Enlightenment-age philosophers provided an elegant answer to this difficult problem in the form of liberalism.

How do multicultural societies survive?

Unlike the societies that came before, multicultural societies exist without the assumption of a strong starting-base of shared values. In order to sustain itself without breaking into civil war (like Yugoslavia) or leading to the genocide of one or more groups (like Rwanda), the society must adopt one or more of the following methods:

a. cultural synthesis - an imaginative and influential cultural body must dissolve differences between various other groups and manufacture shared values, like the Brahmins in ancient and medieval India who assimilated various adjacent cultures under what we today know as Hinduism, or

b. violent suppression - one dominant group must coercively or violently suppress other identities until only the dominant one remains over multiple generations, like Han dominance in China and Christianity in Europe, or

c. ideological magnetism - a powerful idea as pursued by one group in society virally spreads until various other groups spontaneously renounce their prior values, like how the American Dream pursued by White European immigrants expanded to various other ethnic and cultural groups and turned America into a cultural melting pot, or

d. legal neutrality - a “neutral” intermediary in the form of a state establishes boundaries that override the internal rules of each group to enforce the Harm Principle, which is commonly observable in many countries today.

Of the four mechanisms described, only the last - legal “neutrality” - is replicable and formula-driven, rather than being an outcome specific to a time, place and set of circumstances.

In this last case, the state takes an active position and is not a reactive mediator. The state determines matters like:

• How loudly can the muezzin make his azaan?

• Can civilians carry firearms?

• Should abortion be allowed?

• Can cows be slaughtered?

The fist and the nose belong to individuals

In liberal societies, rights are held by individuals, not groups.

Let’s understand the dynamics of a multicultural society made up of two powerful groups - A and B. Within Group A that is culturally homogenous, people understand and agree upon what’s acceptable behaviour and what’s not. Going back to the Harm Principle, people within Group A understand the definition of acceptable nose-length and justifiable swing distance; so people can easily avoid bloodying each others noses. The same happens within Group B.

The problem occurs only in intergroup interactions, where people cannot agree on boundaries. Enter the state with its superior mediating powers and monopoly on violence to enforce law and order.

Here, it must be remembered that the groups that people inhabit are not permanent, and are often issue-based. So within Group A, there can be sub-groups A1, A2 and A3 that have their internal differences, but appear as a unified block when faced with demands of Group B. Over time, the sub-groups may grow apart and appear fairly different. Like (a) Śrī Vaiṣṇavas and Liṅgāyats (two major sects within Hinduism with very different beliefs and social practices), (b) Shias and Sunnis, or (c) feminists and TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).

Since groups are nebulous gatherings, resolution must ultimately happen at the level of the smallest indivisible unit - the individual. This is now the consensus in most liberal western societies. Thus, in our example, even though Groups A and B are dominant, they don’t enjoy rights in society as groups; only individuals have rights.

It thus becomes clear that each individual cannot swing their fist too far nor can they, like Pinocchio, extend their nose beyond a prescribed limit. The state won’t allow it. Political activism and lobbying thus aim to make the state shift these stated boundaries in a manner suitable for the respective interest-groups.

The lives of common people

Most people around us are living their lives, minding their business and paying their bills. They have little time for activism or practicing their convictions in the face of resistance.

“Agree to disagree” is their motto; they don’t change their mind on many matters but they won’t push the other person to either. This allows them to coexist with without violence or discomfort. The myth of harmonious-diversity lies herein.

No socialist really wants big-tech entrepreneurs to make billions of dollars when workers continue to struggle for jobs. No pious Muslim is truly happy about the increasing number of lesbian weddings in their city. No pure vegetarian likes it when another person eats meat on their table. No Kannadiga wants to see more Hindi signboards replacing Kannada ones in Bengaluru. But people learn to live with this tension and pain in their minds. They do not speak it out for the sake of tolerance.

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Of course, there is reciprocity involved here. Their own specific desires which may be repugnant to another are also permissible in this liberal society, as long as they too withhold objections against the actions of others that irritate them.

In a liberal society, people are expected to tolerate everything that doesn’t break the law. In democracies, politicians recognize this latent pain experienced by people and galvanize support to change the state’s rules on these matters (like Trump’s barriers on H1B visas). Activists, too, mobilize this pain to shift the lines of what is acceptable for society.

For someone to feel no pain or discomfort in a liberal society, they must have no beliefs or hold that everything is simultaneously true. This is a form of nihilism and complete erasure of one’s ego. In fact, this ideal liberal can paradoxically not even believe in the absoluteness of individual liberty. Such a person is thus inert, almost non-existent. Their presence itself cannot be felt by society.

Private lives of the liberal-minded

In a liberal society where almost anything goes, it is difficult and frankly pointless to try to change anyone’s mind on a disputed topic. Many companies thus have directives discouraging employees from discussing politics or religion. Over time, people learn not to wield their convictions strongly in their everyday lives. Many gradually move in the direction of the ideal liberal and stop overt display of their culture - in their attire, grooming, dietary habits, etc.

For many people, there develops a quiet shame associated with the public display of culturally distinctive elements - like wearing a hijab (in France), putting on a bindi, or abstaining from alcohol for religious reasons. Soon, this extends into their homes as well as the liberal-assimilation process approaches culmination.

In the early stages of liberal-assimilation, people learn to say that values are relative while they do not really practice this in their own lives. Unless another individual is morally and intellectually pre-aligned with them, they cannot speak about what they believe to be good or bad. They cannot explain why some things are desirable while others are not.

As years go by, liberal-assimilation deepens and it becomes important to state that values are relative in the confines of one’s home too. This creates strange dynamics in intimate relationships and sets these on a brand new course.

Modern technological advancements - specifically social media and AI - and accelerating globalization have combined with psychological- and cultural- liberalism we described earlier, to profoundly impact our most important relationships. I explore this aspect deeply in Part 2 of this series.

Thank you for reading. Stay tuned.

India is weighing two sharply different approaches to street dogs: continue with the ineffective Animal Birth Control (ABC: sterilize–vaccinate–release) program, or adopt a swift but brutal capture–relocate–do not release regime as recently prescribed by the Supreme Court. The debates have become emotional and two polarized camps have dug themselves into trenches.

The debaters are talking past one another, signaling their camp’s virtue and highlighting the opponent’s stupidity. This post aims to make both camps seem as smart as one can possibly see them. Let’s steelman all points of view. And see where it takes us.

But first, let’s understand this: the two camps are debating solutions. And we, as Indians, love to jump to solutions before the problem is nailed. We love jugaad. Kahneman called it the mind’s habit of turning scant information into confident conclusions - WYSIATI (“what you see is all there is”).

Before we choose a solution, we should be sure we agree on the problem we’re trying to solve.

The problem statement

1. Safe urban spaces: Children, elders, and people in general should be able to move about freely and safely.

2. Minimize human-animal conflict: Reduce bite incidents and bring human deaths from rabies to zero.

3. Protect human-animal bonds: Many people share deep emotional ties with animals; preserve these bonds wherever possible.

4. Respect India’s culture-nature continuum: We are an industrializing society with living traditions tied to nature - most of our festivals require us to interact with nature, to feed cows, squirrels and sparrows, to step into a lake or a river and make offerings, to pray in the direction of the sun. Policy should respect this ethos.

Part II - What this means in practice

If we can create safe spaces for people without killing, mass relocating, or permanently imprisoning animals that others care for, that’s vastly preferable. All except sociopaths should agree with this framing.

Now, from discussions and data, let’s see what realities emerge:

1. ABC has underperformed in India - largely due to execution. The concept is sound (if even 80% of dogs are captured young, neutered and released back into their neighbourhood, the overall dog-population will decline) but municipal capacity and quality have been appalling, eroding public trust and nudging opinion toward quicker, harsher fixes.

2. “People-safety vs. animal-lovers” is a false frame (of the debate and of the camps). Dogs are a subset of animals; no one “loves all animals equally.” Street dogs often rely on animal protein, which implicitly trades off against other animals’ lives. So “animal lovers” may feed their dogs with the meat of hens, goats and even cows. Paradoxically, fewer dogs could mean fewer farmed animals slaughtered. On the other hand, everyone wants safety for people; so “people safety” is not the prerogative of only one camp.

3. Dog numbers haven’t exploded. Estimates suggest ~17.1 million dogs in 2012 and ~15.3 million in 2019 (there could be some methodological errors, but an exponential increase is unlikely). Over the same period, India’s human population rose ~9% (1,278mil to 1,389mil). So the dog-human ratio has not changed a lot, even though the dog-menace problem feels more acute today - just like how potholes, waterlogging and garbage feel like bigger issues now than 10 years ago.

4. There’s a cultural-political undertone. This a Right Wing -vs- Left Wing debate, in disguise (with few people being forced to change sides): RW and trads in general have been anti-dog. Historically, Indian languages use “dog” as a slur (kutta in Hindi, naai in Tamil, patti in Malayalam all have insulting connotations); dogs weren’t usually upper-caste companions (certainly not inside the house), even though Hindu iconography offers counters to position the dog favourably (e.g. the dog as Bhairava’s vahana; Dharma taking the form of a dog while accompanying Yudhishthira on his final journey).
   Progressives tend to be more pro-dog - almost American in their thinking, but often with a desi emphasis on streeties.
   Historically, India’s trads have been staunchly vegetarian and against himsa (हिंसा). As parts of India “de‑Brahminize” their Hinduism, traditional vegetarianism is softening and dog diets feel less taboo - but that hasn’t translated into a pro-dog stance among the RW yet.

   

5. Bites and rabies in perspective. India sees ~3.7-8.0 million dog-bite cases annually (~2.5-5.7 per 1,000 people). Some high‑income countries record higher bite rates (e.g., UK ~18.7, USA ~13.5 per 1,000), while many LMICs report ~1-3. Rabies deaths per 100,000 are ~0.4 in India, 0.9-3 in parts of Africa, and much lower in Thailand (0.01), Vietnam (0.1), and the Philippines (0.2). The U.S. has near‑zero rabies deaths from dog bites despite higher bite counts - reflecting vaccination and control systems.

6. Shelters are already overwhelmed. In practice, “capture–relocate–do not release” risks becoming culling by another name. If shelters are overcrowded and underfunded, dogs fight, starve, or suffer. Many citizens appear comfortable with mass killing - as long as it’s out of sight. Dog‑care advocates sense this and react viscerally.

7. Critiques of mass removal. Groups such as PETA India argue that displacing dogs is chaotic and unscientific: it disrupts territorial balances, triggers starvation and conflict, and fails to reduce populations or rabies risk.

Part III - What other countries do (and why it differs)

Now that we have a better framed problem and some understanding of material facts on ground, we can think about solutions. But first, a study of this issue in other countries will be instructive.

Where you still see strays commonly (lower‑ to middle‑income regions, where there is patchy control or high cultural affinity for dogs):

• South Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern and Southern Europe and most of South East Asia fall in this list (shown in orange).

• Counties like Chile and Argentina have a large number of free-roaming and semi-owned street dogs. Human rabies in these countries is extremely rare. Chilean strays are well-fed and docile, supported by communities that provide food and shelter.

• Turkey is a country with high visibility of stray dogs, but it reports just 0-2 cases of human rabies each year (which also get treated through post-exposure prophylaxis). Istanbul’s tagged community dogs are world-famous. (Turkey is also having street-dog debates similar to India)

• In stark contrast, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, most African countries, Iran and Afghanistan have high visibility of strays and also high rabies load.

• Why strays persist

  • Weak/underfunded municipal animal control

  • High abandonment; poor enforcement of pet-ownership rules

  • Incomplete sterilization/vaccination coverage

  • Cultural tolerance of free-roaming dogs

  • Poor waste management creating easy food sources

  • Limited adoption culture for street dogs

Where you rarely see urban strays (high‑income or strict-control settings):

• North America, Western Europe and Scandinavia, Oceania, parts of East Asia (Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc) and the Gulf have almost no street dogs. (shown in blue)

• There are a list of transition countries where tourism hotspots and key areas in metropolises are kept clear of street dogs, while one can still see them in rural and suburban neighbourhoods: Qatar, South Africa, Brazil, Thailand etc. fall into this list.

• How they keep streets clear

  • Strict ownership rules: licensing, microchipping, serious penalties for abandonment.

  • Active animal control & sheltering: rapid capture, adoption/foster pipelines, and euthanasia if unadoptable (controversial but effective at keeping streets dog‑free).

  • Breeding controls: mandatory sterilization or registered‑breeder exceptions.

  • Public compliance & education: abandonment is socially stigmatized.

  • Better waste systems: fewer open food sources = fewer free‑roaming animals.

  • Low tolerance for loose dogs: swift reporting and removal.

Part IV - A humane, pragmatic roadmap powered by tech

A sustainable policy blends public safety with compassion and enforcement. The following measures flow from the realities above:

1. Adopt an anti-natalist stance for dogs. In a world where many cities don’t want free‑roaming animals, fewer births mean fewer conflicts. Lesser dog-births = Lesser dog-suffering.

2. Fix waste, fix strays. Aggressively curb open dumping to cut the food supply for rats, cats, dogs, crows, vultures and other scavengers. Hold municipal corporations and the local MLAs accountable.

3. Regulate breeding like a serious industry. Make breeders register; microchip and neuter all pups at birth (except those registered as future-breeders). Use microchips to track ownership and location of all dogs. Criminalize abandonment with strict fines and/or jail.

4. Disincentivize designer-pet purchases. Treat purchases from breeders as “sinful consumption” with 40% GST and end‑to‑end e‑tracking of sales. Huskies, Dalmations, Pitbulls, Retrievers, Great Danes, Poodles should all be heavily taxed.

5. Mandate registration for all pets. Require registration + neutering + microchipping. Levy heavy fines (e.g., ₹50,000) for non‑compliance.

6. Target high‑sensitivity zones for removal & adoption. Transport hubs (airports, railway stations, bus terminuses), tourist hotspots (India Gate, Qutub Minar, Red Fort, Chandni Chowk, etc. in Delhi), highways, and major arterials - should be targeted for capture of strays and moving them to an animal shelter. Here they should be microchipped and neutered, and offered for adoption.

7. Keep ABC within residential areas - force accountability. Empower municipalities and RWAs (with local dog‑care volunteers) to run ABC + microchip + track programs for community dogs. If RWA communities do not cooperate, then capture and relocate the dogs permanently. (Step 6)

8. Make Indian dog adoption the default. Big public campaigns to adopt Indian dogs instead of buying purpose‑bred pets. Zero‑cost adoptions, no GST, and digital tracking via microchip + Aadhaar.

The north star

Safe streets and zero rabies are non‑negotiable. The question is how we get there. A humane, data‑grounded program that reduces births, enforces responsible ownership, fixes waste systems, and channels strays into adoption - while allowing community‑managed dogs where feasible - offers a middle path between apathy and cruelty.

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Once every year, during the summer solstice, thousands of people gather at Yulin in China, to consume dog meat accompanied by lychees or other plants. In this modern festival that dates back to 2009, roughly 5,000 dogs are consumed over a ten day period. As expected, there is mass international outcry over the slaughter of dogs. Due in part to social media campaigns both in and outside of China, the number of dogs slaughtered has apparently decreased since 2013.

Once every year, on the last month of the Islamic calendar, millions of people gather in hundreds of cities on Eid-al-Adha, to consume the meat of goats, cows, sheep and camels. In this old festival that dates back over a thousand years, roughly 70,000,000 animals are consumed over three days.

Once every year, in November, millions of people join hands in the United States, to consume 46,000,000 turkeys on Thanksgiving. And in Nepal, citizens come together on Vijaya Dashami to consume 50,000 goats and 3,000 buffaloes, on a single day. And on Superbowl Sunday in Feb, Americans eat 730,000,000 chickens in front of their TVs.

None of these religious or secular celebrations involving mass animal-slaughter see widescale outrage or protests like the Yulin festival.

But anti dog-slaughter protests offer humans an opportunity to expand the dialogue and create a space for compassion for other sentient beings.

Vegetarians and Vegans usually write polemics about carnist behaviour and mass-slaughter, pointing to the hypocrisy of the masses, but such us-versus-them arguments create no change in the plights of the suffering animals. If anything, the anti-meat crusaders come out as ridiculous extremists (or, in India, upper-caste fascists) during these exchanges.

The psychology of eating meat

The fundamental belief remains that most humans would not hurt, maim or kill sentient beings without reason. In general, adult humans don’t go about their daily lives ripping out wings from butterflies, shoving hot rods into pigs’ faces or cutting off frog-legs because they are bored. And human empathy transcends species; we are all emotionally moved - even if for a few fleeting moments - by a hen that gets run over by a car, or a video of a baby cub that grieves the loss of its mother to some strange illness.

So, what enables the mass imprisonment, torture and slaughter of animals at such a vast scale on a daily basis? How do smart modern humans (with greater kindness than in past centuries) not only tolerate but also encourage the killing of animals that have the ability to suffer at an industrial scale?

We have thus arrived at what Loughnan, Bastian and Haslam called the “meat paradox”: there exists a conflict between one’s own eating behaviors, which are dependent on animal suffering and death in factory farms, and one’s cognitions regarding the life rights and welfare of non-human animals.

This conflict leads to cognitive dissonance, which people attempt to attenuate through psychic numbing.

Psychic numbing is a defensive, largely unconscious process in which our feelings, concern, and motivation to act diminish as the number of people harmed grows.

Instead of responding with more empathy to larger tragedies, we paradoxically feel less. Psychologist Paul Slovic summarizes it with a grim equation: “1 life = 1 life, but 1,000 lives ≈ 0.”

The second factor is cultural inertia and invisible beliefs. Even in a country that has produced enormous literature on Ahimsa, and served as the fountainhead of Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism - all of which have strong streams of philosophy that discourage meat-eating - vegetarianism is seen as a choice, and carnism (meat-eating) is seen as the normal state of existence.

One of the foremost modern thinkers on this topic, Melanie Joy, states, “We eat animals without thinking about what we are doing and why, because the belief system that underlies this behavior is invisible. This invisible belief system is what I call carnism.”

Will humans save the dogs, will humans save the pigs?

The Yulin festival allows humans to foreground the invisible act of killing animals. The image of a dog being fried and eaten is grotesque to most humans. And thus dogs, being the universally loved creatures that they are, can act as gateways to human empathy for all animal-kind.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Humans have historically categorized animals (like everything else) as edible, inedible, pets, vermin, predators, or entertainment animals. And this classification is determined only by our beliefs and desires. Dogs are thus meant to be saved, while pigs are meant to be killed. And as a Hindu friend once joked, “I eat beef in America. Only Indian cows are sacred.”

But the bridge between pets and non-pet mammals is a short one, and the rise of rational discourse and first-principles thinking will help more humans access this bridge easily. Over time, we will reconsider their categorization. And then, we may resolve our cognitive dissonance by reducing our animal consumption. That is, at least, my hope.

After all, slavery was once acceptable in this world; women were not allowed to vote; child labour was normal; untouchability was common practice; colonialism was okay; Muslim kings thought it normal to extract jizya tax from non-muslim subjects. The arc of rationality has brought about cognitive consonance on all these fronts, and the world is objectively a better place. Animals too will benefit as humans inevitably continue down this path.

How can we save more of our animal friends?

We are visual creatures. We must be able to see the impacts of our choices. In order to accelerate this change in society, can we have photo-journalism and video-journalism at these massive factory-farms? Can more people see the way the chickens are fattened, caged and tortured with their beaks ripped off? Can we see the way bulls are slain with a bolt to the brain? Can we see the goats bleeding to death in full-consciousness, the halal way? Then we may face our cognitive dissonance faster.

Can these images come up in our social media and mainstream media? Can we talk about this the way we talk about rape, child-abuse and school shootings? Can we encourage visits to the abattoirs (especially by children) where we can see the way “meat is produced”? Humans generally don’t like to eat identifiable body parts of animals like intact pig snouts, cow eyes and chicken heads; humans prefer meat in a depersonalized form. Should the process of converting the living conscious animal into a dead animal, and then into depersonalized meat not be mandatory viewing for humans who consume it?

People who sell meat naturally want to move consumers farther away from the act of killing, by neatly packaging animal flesh in vacuum pouches, making them bloodless and boneless, seasoning and flavouring them to rescue them from their violent pasts, and delivering them cold to our homes with stylish branding. Can we as a society put statutory messages on these packets and boxes showcasing how they were produced? A beheaded chicken, a dying goat, a grieving calf - would these make humans eat more responsibly? Maybe we will reduce our consumption of meat, and eat on fewer occasions? Perhaps, we will eat more plant-based proteins?

This is a complex topic, but with massive ethical ramifications. It thus deserves the time and energy of intelligent, energetic people who can drive the change.

Most importantly, we must address this issue together, as humans. Not as Vegans versus the others, or Muslims versus Non-Muslims, or upper-caste Hindus versus Dalits and OBCs. The moment this becomes about human-groupings, that takes precedence, tribalism sets in, old behaviours get more deeply entrenched, and animals suffer more.

We humans must come together and save the other animals.

Post 1/n

An honest assessment of a nation’s future eventually boils down to the assessor’s philosophical bent, political affiliations, and domains of knowledge and expertise. And people often get confused between what is and what ought to be, leading to strongly-worded prophecies not based on recent trends.

This essay is a painting - in ten shades - of India and the world ten years out, based on the key internal and external vectors shaping our times.

Shade 1: Grey

The world grows old fast, India gets to middle-age

1.2 billion people will turn 50 in the next 10 years. By 2035, the average person would be over 50 in Japan and South Korea, over 45 in much of mainland Europe, and over 40 in the US and UK. The average Chinese person would be 46 years old, and the average Indian, 33. The world will grey.

India, the subcontinent (Pakistan’s average age will be just 22) and the middle east, will export healthcare workers and nurses to richer countries. As these jobs require physical and emotional presence, and cannot be easily automated, youth will emigrate to cater to an aging global population in Europe, US and the global north.

Within India, the dependency ratio will remain in the 50-55% range, but the nature of dependents will change from the young to the old: from ~80% of dependents being kids today, to just about 65% of them being kids and the rest being the elderly. One out of 5 persons in Kerala will be a senior citizen in 2036; in Kerala and TN, senior citizens will outnumber children. Seniors will be numerically catching up to the number of kids in Karnataka, Punjab, Maharashtra, Andhra, Gujarat and West Bengal. UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana will remain the fountains of Indian children (expect their impact on politics to show up by 2050).

Due to this changed electorate composition and “turn-out gap”, the share of votes of people aged 50 years or older will be meaningful ~37% in India. In the USA, 50+ year old voters will clearly decide the election as they would cast 57% of the votes. As seniors become a very significant electoral block, politicians will promise stability and comfort in the known. Expect politics all over the world to move in more conservative directions, reinforcing rather than upending the status quo. And expect older and more reliable faces in politics, rather than hot-blooded revolutionaries. Most importantly, there will be more focus on pensions, geriatric healthcare, non-communicable diseases and urban infra retrofits.

The cost of the demands of this dependent population is bound to put more pressure on tax-payers at a time when AI is killing jobs. Anti-incumbency will be rife in politics as every politician is kicked-out after one term, once they fail to meet their impossible goals.

Shade 2: Crimson

AI-progress will kill jobs, and then stagnate

Even as more seniors get their knee-caps replaced, the world’s middle-aged work force will get kneecapped by AI. AI will finish-off 90% of digital, text- or code- based, rule-driven jobs across the world: customer support, data entry and clerical tasks, translation and proofreading, and junior coding jobs (boiler-plate functions, refactoring, unit-testing, cleaning data, summarizing research, documenting).

Firms will automate first where models are cheap relative to wages (low-level services) or where revenues per worker are high (coding), leading to a barbell-shaped impact - where the highest and low-level services jobs are worst hit, sparing the middle-levels for the time-being. Your friendly EA, average procurement guy and site supervisor will survive AI’s scourge, but all your data entry interns, entire buildings of call center executives, and a bunch of 20-something programmer bros will “be forced to reskill”.

The world’s top entrepreneurs and media will continue to extol the virtues of AI even as tens of millions of jobs die. Darwinist reasoning will prevail: “if you lose your job, it’s because you didn’t learn to make AI your friend.”

The world’s biggest companies will push their Global Capacity Centers to upgrade their value-addition or perish, meaning the same work will require lesser but more skilled persons in countries like India, Poland, Mexico and Philippines. Low-skill folks in these countries could be pushed into unemployment or back to their farms. This will put pressure on India as it tries to lift millions of Indians out of low-productivity agriculture into the services sector.

Trump’s barriers on legal immigration, especially the H1B visa, pander to his white, rural vote-base who have been excluded from America’s tech-driven growth. However, over time, his government will have to prove that lesser jobs for Indians means more jobs for Americans. In reality, lesser American jobs for Indians may just mean lesser jobs. Thanks to AI. And that’s a hard problem for a politician.

AI’s promise of supercharging productivity and solving the world’s big problems (climate change, poverty, death and disease, war) will keep the builders building. They will be driven by the primal excitement of inventing a better future for humanity, as well as the fear that someone else will develop AGI if they stop. In all likelihood, AI’s progress based on LLMs will plateau after a surge of great results in the 2020s: due to a combination of model constraints (they are not grounded in real world sciences and only “interpret” the world through textual training data), energy shortages (energy is the currency of AI, and the cost of goods/services will massively depend on the cost of energy) and political pushbacks.

But AI’s plateau (whenever it happens) will be like Tibet, high above the known world. So the world of jobs and careers will bleed crimson and never be the same again.

Shade 3: Pink

Women will get more jobs, India will have fewer babies

To squeeze out “India’s demographic dividend” (to make Indians grow rich before they grow old), policy-makers have identified women as one of the most impactful cohorts. India’s Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR) is around 34%, contrasted with Bangladesh’s 44%, China’s 60% and Vietnam’s 68%.

Higher FLFPR is even more important in the light of de-globalization trends and the AI-impact. India’s women workforce will participate more, especially because (1) jobs will be taken closer to their homes in Tier-II and Tier-III cities (women don’t migrate for work as much as men do), (2) UPI/Aadhar and gig-work platforms will formalize their work and make them “visible”, and (3) feminism will percolate deeper into Indian culture, making sections of women shun the role of “just a home-maker”. As a result, India’s FLFPR in 2035 may be above 40%, close to where Bangladesh is today. India will also export female labour to aging developed countries (like how Malayali nurses travel out of Kerala), as females are better suited for care-tasks.

Within India, this will trigger broader discussions on gender parity (the very association of women with pink will be challenged), sharing the load, and the role of men in care-related tasks (home-care, child-care, caring for aged parents, etc.). This discourse is bound to turn political, as parties try to mobilize a growing aspirational female working class as a vote-bank. Globally, the warlike male-vs-female milieu of the 2020s will begin to calm, as countries try to increase fertility rates in an act of societal self-preservation.

With women entering India’s workforce in larger numbers, there will be a sharp drop in TFR, felt most in urban areas and in the southern states. India’s urban fertility rate will drop off a cliff (much below 1.72 in the NHM 2011 report, which assumes a high floor rate), and median age of marriage will get pushed up to 27yrs for males and 22yrs for females (24 in urban areas). While India will remain a country with one of the highest marriage rates, 1 in 20 women (more in urban settings) will be unmarried and the number will be similar for men (more by force, than by choice).

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Shade 4: Earth

Farmers will try to get to the city, but not at a pace they’d like

India is the largest employer of kisaans in the world, and will retain this unenviable pole-position in 2035.

India’s primary-sector currently employs 45-50% of people while contributing to 15-18% of GDP; in 2035, the sector will employ 30-35% people while contributing to 10-12% GDP. China’s primary-employment is already at 22% and its GDP contribution is just 7%; this will change to 15% employment and 5% GDP (on a high base) by 2035. All developed economies (US, Japan, UK, Germany) have less than 1% primary-sector employment as well as GDP contribution.

India will thus reduce primary-sector employment but not at the pace it desires, mainly because there will be no jobs matching the skills of the masses. Low-quality jobs, gig-work, and growing informal economy will make headlines. Zero-sum platforms will continue to reclassify work and centralize power without creating many “new jobs” - kiraana shops will be replaced by 10-minute delivery platforms with dark stores, only to later launch the platforms’ own branded kiraana shops (in search of profits at scale); old low-hygiene restaurants will turn into new cloud-kitchens (with formally employed cooks) where one cannot easily assess cleanliness.

But the hope for a better future, and cities’ superpower of connecting people, will continue to draw millions of Indians (largely from farming families) into its biggest cities (for low quality work), as these urban agglomerations continue to expand and sprawl. People in urban areas will total 45% of the population in 2035, up from 35% in 2025. Urban population will increase by nearly 133 million people over the decade, while the rural population will decrease by 33 million.

South Indian cities (Tier-Is and Tier-IIs) that have a fast aging population will become exceptionally labour-hungry. North Indian farming households will produce the raw Hindi-speaking youth who will fill up job- and gig- vacancies in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Farm-rooted, first-gen knowledge workers with modest skills will struggle to emigrate in a world tightening borders to labour. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh will face the brunt of this impact as their primary destination countries raise their fences. Unskilled labour (construction, delivery) from UP and Bihar will face no such barriers. Care-labour, especially that catering to the aged, will also move freely across borders.

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Even as these massive shifts happen for the people of India-2 (and parts of India-3), the old-rich of Indian cities will lock themselves up in gated societies, so as to remove themselves from this India that is going to the dogs (doggies are pets) downhill. The mounting issues of water and pollution will make the affluent 1% seek out well connected Tier-IIs with the good bits of the metros, without the congestion, pollution, and weather issues. Chandigarh, Dehradun, Indore, Nagpur, Baroda, Surat, Mysore and Coimbatore will flourish.

Shade 5: Black

Degrees die as learning-modules gain value

People will learn at “internet speed”, forcing others to keep up or become obsolete. The traditional K-12 + graduation system will be turned upside down, as skills matter and not degrees. The black graduation cap will be tossed more in AI-generated videos than in reality as it turns into a symbol with limited real-world value.

Syllabuses and recommended reading may start making no sense to students, as they can generate a book about the specific topic they care about with the push of a button. In this world, students will be limited only by agency and the teacher’s primary role will be to motivate children to explore and creatively exercise their curiosity.

As data storage costs plummet and information retrieval becomes ultra-quick, there will be no need to memorize anything. The new generation will laugh at the need to remember the date and names of the generals who fought the Third Battle of Panipat, the exact sequence of the Diels-Alder reaction, the wordings of the Constitution’s preamble, or even the ambience of the restaurant of one’s first date. This freed up memory may not serve more useful tasks immediately, and the end of memorization will come with its own cognitive consequences when the 2020s generation reaches middle-age.

“He got that job because he is from IIT” won’t be heard as often in 2035. Top institutions like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, the IITs and NUS will no longer be gatekeepers of great jobs, as micro-credentials and easily accessible skill-modules will gain currency with employers (it will drop their cost of hiring too). These top institutions will remain exceedingly important for research and cutting-edge work as they have access to capital, frontier knowledge and exceptional people.

In a strange way, the block-and-tackle on DEI in the US universities, as well as India’s supercharging of college reservation-quotas will matter little. Politicians will signal victories to their vote-banks, while the real world implications of their decisions will be miniscule as the internet and AI completely change the education system.

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Shade 6: Saffron

Reservations will entrench caste while mass-Hinduism moves beyond it

Representation and identity politics based on caste, religion and language will solidify over the next decade. Reservations will almost certainly go up from 50% based on caste + 10% EWS (Economically Weaker Sections) quota to a 70%+ quota based on caste, religion, income and domicile. Each caste and language group will fight for college quotas but the knowledge economy will be about continuous learning that has little to do with college.

But caste-groups will have reason to celebrate their increased reservations in public sector jobs. Reservations in India are no longer about historical injustices faced by any community, and have simply become a front for the “Jitni Aabadi Utna Haq” (proportional representation) logic. So there will be increased demands to count castes and jatis in states.

Caste censuses will entrench caste-identity in the Indian mind for practical, economic and political purposes. At the same time, popular Hinduism will free itself further from its jati-varna based requirements, and a stronger strain of post caste Hinduism will emerge. Iyengars will visit the Mahakal temple at Ujjain; Rajputs, Ahoms and Jats will visit Shirdi; all Hindus will visit Ayodhya. Hindus will simultaneously grow politically diverse and spiritually similar, uniting under a saffron flag that says Jai Shri Ram.

Within religious matters, Indians will only become post-caste in spiritual thinking, not in marriage. Inter-caste marriages have remained stable at 4-6% over the past 40 years, and may show a marginal increase to 8-10%, mainly driven by educated, well-off, later-marrying, urban Indians and the diaspora. Defining caste-quotas of their lineal descendants will become increasingly hard as tens of thousands of inter-caste categories will emerge. Inter-religious marriages will remain at 2% level (mainly Sikhs, Christians).

Shade 7: Blue

US power retreats from Asia in a world full of limited wars

In South Asia, Pakistan will add 20% more people, Afghanistan will add 29%, Bangladesh 12% and India 10%. AI’s assault on jobs, barriers on trade and labour, and a generally unstable political environment may lead to internal instability and a number of cross-border conflicts (involving India). And all wars over the next decade will be influenced by the rising Chinese superpower.

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After multiple proxy-skirmishes in South Asia between India (directly) and China (indirectly), there may be more stable and longer-lasting India-China relations. Skirmishes in the South China sea, the chronic low-intensity Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, and the Iran-Israel engagement (direct and proxy) are bound to escalate. The Russia-Ukraine war will turn into a situation similar to 1990s-Kashmir: highly militarized lines-of-control, both sides not recognizing the others’ borders, regular shelling, acts of terrorism, and perpetual unrest.

The USA’s distinct accidental advantage that it is “blessed with fish on both sides” will start losing relevance. The Pacific and the Atlantic have historically acted as natural buffers for America against external threats and invasions, but its newest threats are either internal - where two mutually-exclusive ideas of the USA threaten to pull it apart from within - or undeterred by geographical inconvenience - using information-warfare, cyber-attacks, or space.

With the USA’s growing inward-looking focus, its decline as a global influence especially in Asia will accelerate. The blue team will retreat, and the red team will advance. India may accept Chinese hegemony in specific domains to gain to cheap Chinese technology and alternative trade channels. Europe will act more independently with every passing year, although their long alliance with the USA will not end overnight.

The imminent multi-polar world order will not mean the formation of 2-3 blocks like in the Cold War era, but a web of complex, tactical bilateral and multilateral alignments that are limited in scope and time.

America’s friend-shoring of trade and decoupling from China will be a jumpy, unsettling process with limited success. The closer we get to an AI singularity, the better it is for America. When AI-growth cools off, America will present itself as a messy complicated democracy, no longer able to deliver on “the American dream” to its citizens, and on the brink of civil war.

Expect intellectuals to blame democracy, and look east towards Dubai, Singapore and Beijing - as examples of states that have used central-control and benevolent dictatorship to deliver growth and prosperity to their citizens. The Indian government (which has always had an command-and-control instinct) will also tilt towards more centralization and authoritarianism.

Even with the USA’s fade, 2030s-China will be unable to force a new unipolar world, as their aging population, suppressed growth and lack of market-oriented reforms act as baggage.

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Shade 8: Gold

Gold gains from the US Dollar’s losses

With the fragmentation of the unipolar world, top economies are bound to diversify their reserves and their trade from the US Dollar. The fear of tariffs, sanctions and the USA’s disregard for debt sustainability will undermine global trust in the greenback, opening room for a more multipolar reserve-currency system. As of 2025, Japan holds over 1.2 trillion USD of US treasuries (USTs) - stable since 2015; China holds 800 billion, even after dumping 300 billion dollars’ worth in the past few years.

China’s fear of US sanctions (similar to how sanctions affected Russia) is pushing them to remove their dependency on USTs but if they dump too fast, the value of the Yuan gets pushed up, making their exports less affordable. So in a world of already higher tariffs, China cannot drop USTs too quickly. They are thus walking that thin-line and increasing their gold holdings.

In the meanwhile, the US is putting more trade-controls in place to boost American jobs and relatively weaken the Chinese economy. Sure, trade will get de-risked from overdependence on China, but prices will rise as the efficiency of globalization gets eroded. US is likely to face inflationary shocks in the 2025-2030 period (that they will aim to prevent by rapid deployment of AI to boost productivity).

All these actions point to gold being crowned prince of the decade. In the last four years, central banks have been buying more than a 1,000 tonnes of gold annually. That has pushed official holdings to ~35.9 kt, equal to roughly 20 % of all the gold ever mined and almost on par with the historic 1960s highs.

While the RBI owns 880 tonnes of gold, Indian households own over 28X this amount, roughly 25 kt. That’s nearly 12% of the goal ever mined on Earth; this could be a major tailwind for India in the coming years.

Shade 9: Yellow

An energy-hungry world pushes out climate goals further

In the most environmentally optimistic scenario, the world’s consumption of coal-, oil- and gas- based energy will increase from 517 EJ to 537 EJ (1 EJ = 10¹⁸ Joule) over the next ten years, an increase of 4%. More realistic estimates say fossil-fuel consumption will go up 6-8% during this period. This is at a time when the overall energy demand shoots from 670 EJ to 740 EJ (+10%).

40% of the world’s incremental energy demand will be from India, 31% from China, and changes in other countries will be footnotes in front of these giants. India and China remain very energy hungry (and rightfully so!). Unless they transition heavily to renewables, the world’s climate goals are bound to be pushed out, especially with geopolitical risks creating a fear of “transitioning too fast” in the developed world.

Renewables will grow during this period, from 1/6th of our total need to 1/4th of our total need. Nuclear - even with all the Small Modular Reactor (SMR) hype, will remain flat in its contribution: 4%.

All this means that the world will burst beyond the wishful +1.5°C (above the 1850-1900 baseline) climate target for the year 2100. In fact, we’re likely to land at close to +1.45°C by 2035. South Asia and the Gulf are going to get hit by extreme heat waves. Glacier, biodiversity, coral-reef and Arctic-ice losses are imminent. Paradoxically, we will become more energy-hungry (accelerating the crisis) as temperature goes up, because we will need more air conditioning to keep cool.

Thanks to recentness bias and due to the nature of geopolitics, India and China will receive most of the blame for global warming in popular discourse. Our hot yellow sun can force all humans to join hands and act together, but it’s just as likely to get tempers flaring as temperatures rise.

Shade 10: Green

Global religions revive, and Islam leads the pack

Nature’s fury and AI’s wrath will come together in a world that can no longer be easily understood or explained. Ever since the Enlightenment, humans have thought they will get a deeper understanding of the universe and better control over their own existence. For the first time, this trend may reverse. If low probability natural catastrophes become common, and the world becomes governed by black-box machine-intelligence, humans will once again feel animal-like.

Faced with AI deep-fakes, fake news, pseudo-science and high-frequency conflicting information, the masses will question their very senses. What is knowledge? What is truth? All these answers can be answered by a GPT-guru or the world’s old religions. Religious revival is imminent - Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam in Asia; Christianity and Islam in Europe and Africa; Christianity in Latin America and the Pacific islands; a mix of religions in North America.

Islam will undoubtedly lead the pack (although still second to Christianity in headcount). Not only is there high fertility in the Islamic belt leading to a higher percentage of Muslim youth in the world, Islam also has the most overtly devout believers. In a world where truth is just a public narrative, the Islamic narrative(s) will take strong root. Halal food, Sharia law, the Umrah/Hajj, green flags, the skull cap and the hijab, and azaans from masjid rooftops are bound to become more commonly seen. And once Islamic religious symbolism regains acceptance in secular society, expect other religious symbols to follow as well: crosses as necklaces; more baptisms; tilaks and bindis on the forehead; tirth yatras; Sunday masses; religious fasting practices; Hanuman chalisa and Sunday masses on loud speakers; a growing number of monks.

Even the religiously unaffiliated will find their lucky charms, tarot readers, astrologers, gemstones or shamanic rituals. There will be space for hybrid practices (yoga-plus-astrology-plus-science podcasts) too. In general, rationalism will face severe headwinds for the first time since the Enlightenment.

Ten Shades for Ten Years

The world is becoming harder to predict. Our information environment makes it incredibly hard to observe and understand the massive, unchanging, slow moving vectors underneath the noisy surface. These have clear direction.

These ten shades aim to capture where we’ll land up in 2035. Save this note, and let’s see how it ages over the coming decade. Until 2035, then. Take care.

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So, this is an attempt to understand the Indian economy from 1970 until 2024 through its equity markets, using market capitalization (market cap) as our primary analytical tool. A company’s market cap is an estimate of its “size” based on how much its outstanding shares are worth; thus, the total market cap of all companies in a country or in a sector is an estimate of how much that country’s economy or sector is worth from an investor’s lens.

Growth, confidence and maturity of markets (1970-)

The total market cap of listed companies in India was under 5 billion USD in 1970, when the country’s GDP was ~60 billion USD, viz. market cap was 8% of GDP. The trend began to change rapidly after liberalization in 1991, and today India’s GDP is 3.5-4 trillion USD, and its total market cap is at over 5 trillion USD (130% of GDP).

A “Market Cap to GDP ratio” (Buffett Indicator) less than 50% is indicative of a highly undervalued market, whereas a number greater than 100% suggests that the stock market is overvalued compared to the underlying economy - an effect of highly bullish sentiment. For comparison, the Buffett Indicators for various countries are as follows:

Growth in market capitalization often leads to GDP growth, as companies are valued based on their future prospects and investments that will drive the next waves of growth (and therefore growth of the underlying economy). The below graph shows how market played catch-up to the underlying economy until ~2000 (callout in chart: Undervalued market). After this period, market growth has continued to outpace real GDP growth.

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The 2020-2024 numbers for GDP growth would have possibly been even higher, if not for the Covid-19 impact. As it stands, the market continues to run considerably faster than the broader economy, which is seen as the concerning K-shaped recovery.

Small, big and giant companies (1970-)

As India’s equities market has grown, it has matured and become more broad-based. From 1970 until about 2000, all stock-market wealth was concentrated in less than 100 companies. In fact, the top 10 private companies accounted for more than 70% of India’s market capitalization in 1970; this came down to 60% by 1990 and 25% by 2010. During Covid-19, investors doubled down on companies they felt were “too big to fail” and hence their contribution to market cap rose slightly, but the contribution of the 10 biggest companies is at an all-time-low of ~20% today.

This shows how the market is getting more broad-based, and wealth is being spread out in more hands rather than getting more concentrated: a result of free-market capitalism.

Companies in India’s Nifty 50, Nifty 100 and Nifty 500 indices contribute to 65%, 78% and 96% of the country’s total market cap respectively.

Large Caps (market cap > Rs 20,000 cr) contribute to 70% of total market capitalization, Mid Caps (between Rs 5,000 cr and 20,000 cr) contribute 20% and Small Caps (<5,000 cr) 10%. The split in almost identical in the USA, where large-caps have a market cap of $10 billion or more, and mid-caps are between $2 billion and $10 billion. The 70:20:10 representation is also seen in other major economies like the UK and Germany.

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State-owned to Public: India’s disinvestment story (1991-present)

The Indian government's disinvestment agenda began in 1991, when the focus was on reducing the fiscal burden of public sector enterprises (PSEs) and improving their efficiency through privatization and stake sales. BPCL, Hindustan Zinc, VSNL, MTNL, SAIL, etc. were part of this first wave of privatization.

But progress was slow until 2014, when the Modi-government emphasized a more aggressive approach to privatization. The Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) was established to oversee these efforts. Since 2014, disinvestment receipts have exceeded ₹4.3 lakh crore (over $500 billion). IPOs and share sales in LIC, Air India (privately held, no market cap), REC, Power Finance Corporation, Hindustan Aeronautics and SBI Life Insurance are some of the successes of this period.

Disinvestment has generally contributed to an increase in India's total market capitalization by allowing public sector undertakings (PSUs) to list on stock exchanges. These listings have facilitated greater public participation in the equity markets, which can lead to a broader base of investors contributing to market capitalization growth.

As of 2024, ~20% of India’s total market capitalization is contributed by erstwhile PSUs.

Rise and fall of sectors (1991-present)

A sectoral study of India’s markets results helps us clearly visualize three distinct phases: (I) the period until economic liberalization in 1991, (II) early gains and subsequent plateau in the 1991-2020 period, and (III) growth phase post 2020.

In the first phase, old industry such as cement, steel, textiles and heavy machinery flourished and made up over half of the market. Tata Steel, Bombay Dyeing, Century Textiles, L&T and United Spirits were dominant players in this period; large government-controlled enterprises were kept away from the stock market (hence no market cap).

In the early ‘90s, the economy found a new gear with liberalization, deregulation and privatization: the IT boom took place and catapulted Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, HCL and TCS into multi-billion-dollar orbits. Banking and finance began to mature, and private banks like HDFC Bank and ICICI strongly established themselves. The third aspect of this phase was the consolidation of conglomerates - India was no longer just about Tata and Birla; Reliance, Adani, Bajaj, ITC and others were here to stay.

In its most recent phase that saw the impact of Covid-19 as well as the post-pandemic years, the markets have seen growth in new-age sectors such as aviation (via Indigo), hospitality, and internet-services (such as Zomato, Nykaa, Policybazaar, Delhivery, Paytm, etc). There has also been a massive growth in the banking, insurance and financial services sector, which now contributes to nearly 30% of the market.

Today, India’s biggest sectors are Banking & Financials (30%), IT (15%) and Consumer Discretionary* (12%). In the USA, the three biggest sectors are Technology (20%), Financials (15%), and Healthcare (15%). China’s top three sectors (as per market cap) of Financials (30%), Consumer Discretionary (15%) and IT (12%) bears some resemblance to India’s market. Japan’s and Germany’s markets are dominated by Industrials (25-30%).

* Consumer Discretionary comprises of industries such as Automobiles & Auto-parts, Jewellery, Durables & Furniture, Electronics, etc

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Change management, survival and growth: the big successes

In a constantly changing market where sectoral preferences change and new competitors enter tightly contested spaces, eleven large business houses contribute nearly one-third of all market cap. How is this possible?

Their secret lies in strengthening of core areas, diversification and doubling down on new opportunities. The Tata group has Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Tata Motors, Tata Steel, Tata Power, and Tata Chemicals as its key portfolio companies; Reliance has Reliance Industries, Jio Financial Services and Reliance Retail; Adani has its holding company Adani Enterprises, Adani Ports, Adani Green Energy, and Adani Power.

Many of these groups started out in sectors which are no longer relevant to them: the Tatas started in trading and textiles, Reliance also started in the textile trade, and Birlas in cotton, jute and opium. The Aditya Birla group is still connected to textiles via Grasim Industries, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail, and Century Textiles, but their cement business (UltraTech) is worth more than all these put together.

Billion-dollar companies that have failed

There is a sense of invincibility as large companies grow and cross a billion dollars in market cap. But not all of these successes go on to become corporate behemoths like Reliance or Adani. Some of the notable failures in the recent past have been Reliance Communications (telecom), Kingfisher (aviation) and the UB Group, Jet Airways (aviation), Satyam (IT), Binani Cement, Jaypee Infra (real estate), and Essar Steel.

Bets that went wrong, poor corporate governance, overleveraged balance sheets and inability to service debt are the usual reasons for failure. The wider insight is almost cliche but is still worth calling out: what takes a company from 0 to 1 (billion), is not what will take it from 1 to 100.

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Brave new market

Every day, India inches out of its socialist past into a more market-oriented future. The old approach of state-control on key sectors failed to product the intended outcomes of equitable growth, food security and poverty alleviation. Today, the government ostensibly wishes to play a smaller role in big industry, but state-owned enterprises still dominate sectors like energy and banking. While substantial progress has been made in liberalizing the economy and fostering growth, the challenge remains to balance market dynamics with social equity.

P.S. All data used in this post is from publicly available information about current and past market cap of various companies. Send me a message if you would like to get the spreadsheet I made while researching this post.

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It can be argued that Indians have been poor historically, and current trends are driven by aspiration and pent-up demand, simply a result of rising disposable incomes. But the truth is that the same amounts of disposable income in the hands of people mentally wired like our predecessors would have resulted in a different sort of development and progress.

India’s disconnect with Nature

The Sanskrit word “dharma” (धर्म) can be interpreted as “righteousness” or “duty”, but also refers to inherent nature of things and the natural order of the universe. Observing one's dharma means living in harmony with this natural order, fulfilling one's role in the cosmic web of life. This unique concept allowed Indians to think of themselves as part of, and one with the great universe; it avoided the narcissistic urge to place Man at the center of creation. In India, the world was not created for Man, at least until recently.

Today, nature has become a tool and a means to accumulate material wealth and signal social status. The Gangotri - source of the sacred Ganga - is receding, but most Indians do not know or care. Rishikesh, once an abode of serene ashrams, is now a crowded, drug-filled, soulless, capitalist mess. Millions of cows, revered in Hindu scriptures, are abandoned to roam the roads and eat garbage when they can no longer give milk; they would go to the slaughterhouse if more states allowed owners to sell their go-mata (गौमाता) for beef. For a land that told the world about Ganesha and produced timeless animal-centric works like the Panchatantra, Jataka tales and Hitopadesha, India seems to care little about its fauna today.

India is now the home to 80% of the world’s most polluted cities. Unplanned urban sprawl, encroachment and over-extraction has led to wide-spread water scarcity in metro cities: residents were urged to take fewer showers and use disposable cutlery in Bengaluru this year.

Bhumi (भूमि) Devi, the goddess personifying the Earth, has been revered in India for centuries but has fallen to practical irrelevance today. And while the dharmic view of nature has been lost, the scientific rationalist lens - that values the environment greatly from a self-preservation standpoint - hasn’t been adequately developed. Thus, in a cognitive void, we charge headlong into an unsustainable future.

India’s new soulless, self-destructive tendencies

Our intellectual class seems unable to bridge the gap between modernity and tradition. This lack of guidance leaves us vulnerable to adopting ideas and practices that are disconnected from our roots and potentially harmful to the long-term well-being of our society. The land of rishis, dhyāna, Brahman, guru-sishya parampara, deep family ties, and ahimsa, has become the land of corruption, exploitative gig work, impatience, porn-watchers, and environmental disaster.

The pursuit of instant gratification has shattered the ancient Indian ideal of self-realization. We've traded the wisdom of the ages – finding peace in our insignificance – for the modern therapy mantra: obsess over yourself to find happiness. And so, we nurture anxiety instead of ātman.

The Indian cultural project is dead, and all talk about India’s soft power is now about monetizing and propagating old practices. The creative zeal that gave the world important original ideas, hundreds of languages, tens of thousands of literary works, and several powerful religions has been fading since medieval times. Now, Indians feel angry and embarrassed at having lost their cultural engine, but anyone working to create a new one?

Literary works in Indian languages dwindle, while chest-thumping happens online and on the streets with goondas with the aim to prove "my language is better than yours". Tamizh speakers on TV can no longer pronounce the ழ ("zh" in Tamizh) but will nonetheless tell you their language is the oldest and the best, and that no other language should be spoken in their land.

Compared to its historical contributions, India's contemporary output in fields like philosophy, literature, and scientific thought lacks originality and global impact. Even religious discourse - India’s domain of historical expertise - now lacks vitality and constructive energy. It is combative and defensive, fighting for its survival.

While Modern India appears religious, much of this is performative. The lack of true belief has created a giant vacuum outlined by a lack of discipline, self-regulation and sound principles. Zomato and Swiggy have an incognito mode to order meat during Navratri, because many 21st century Hindus want to appear vegetarian during this period but cannot go with a week without indulging their tastebuds. Urban Indians fight for higher loudspeaker volumes for azaan, Sunday mass, or retaliatory Hanuman Chalisa to signal their religious credentials. Religion is losing its transformative power and becoming more a source of division and conflict.

Status-driven and Unethical India

Status games are zero sum: in order to climb up, you must pull another down. India has historically been a status-driven society, but kings and priests created a framework to mediate these status-driven interactions.

Modern India is not reinventing itself as a wealth-driven society of positive-sum games like the United States or Hong Kong, or as a knowledge-driven society like Sweden or Japan. Instead, we remain trapped in a zero-sum status game, where advancement often comes at the expense of others. Without a strong moral compass, whether rooted in ancient wisdom or modern rationality, this creates a fertile ground for corruption and unethical behavior.

Opportunists, waiting to trample their fellow citizens for an easy way forward, fill our society. Indian workers are happy to ignore misdeeds, transgressions and unethical acts of their colleagues as long as they are not materially harmed by these acts. And if they stand to gain, these acts turn into codified practice - culture.

Signaling and conspicuous consumption run rampant. Massive Mahindra Thars clog our crowded, jammed roads, because Indians don't seek utility from their vehicles; they seek visibility and status. The bigger and grander your son’s or daughter’s wedding, the more people you invite, the higher up you are in the social ladder.

It is true that kings, ministers and nobles consumed conspicuously and lived lavishly in the past, but many we read about in history still believed in ideas like upholding dharma, wiping clean their karmic slate, and furthering a certain sort of societal morality. After God’s death, today's wealthy seem solely driven by material pursuits; there is no karma or afterlife for the wealthy, and religion is just a tool to control the poor masses. Cordoning themselves off in high societies that are closer to the US than to the nearby basti, India’s wealthy live in guilt-free luxury, detached from the realities of the majority.

Glowing Embers and a Call to Action

Despite the bleakness of the present, the embers of our ancient heritage still glow within us. Many great powers of modern science and technology, and learnings from the developed world are available to us at a click.

Perhaps, amidst the chaos and disillusionment, a new generation will rise, one that seeks to reconcile tradition and modernity, to build a future that honors both progress and our timeless values. The path ahead will be arduous, but the possibility of renewal remains, a flickering flame in the darkness.

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Deepavali, after all, is a festive expression of Indian culture. And Indian (Hindu*) cultural logic has shown immense capacity over three thousand years to absorb and assimilate all sorts of philosophies, languages, and practices. Each assimilation has usually added new elements to the locally dominant culture, and has also preserved the ways, languages, gods and philosophies of absorbed peoples as unique subcultures within the “Hindu” framework. This cultural logic ensured India didn’t turn into a melting pot (where prior identities of the subsumed people are erased and replaced by a new, uniform identity) but into a salad bowl, or as the Pew Research piece recently claimed, an Indian thali.

One core element of Indian culture, that has been repeatedly shaped and formed by numerous thinkers from various regions, backgrounds and philosophical/theological traditions (sampradayas), is the prayer. Prayers have been integral to the Indian way of life; they are practiced during worship (puja) and are an expression of devotion (bhakti).

The Importance and Plurality of Prayers in Indian Culture

Prayers are important for the adherents of Āstika faiths (most Hindu traditions that accept the epistemic authority of the Vedas), other Indian religions and philosophies (Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, etc) as well as the Abrahamic universal religions in India - Christianity and Islam.

M.K. Gandhi echoed millions of Indians when he thought of prayer as the essence of religion and said that “prayer is the very soul of religion, and therefore must be the very core of the life of man.”

In any community, multiple prayers are known to overlap and coexist. Some shlokas are grouped together and recited in sequence, while others are practiced during specific occasions (time of the day, day of the month, festive occasions, etc.) or while visiting specific tīrthas or pilgrimage spots. Persons adhering to different sampradayas may have multiple prayers in common, and people within a particular philosophical/theological school may show variations in their prayer-choices.

As a creative product of the people of a certain region speaking a certain tongue, prayers exist in nearly every known language- Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindustani/Hindi (incl. its dialects and predecessors), Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, and more.

The “movement of prayers” across geographies and social strata can mostly be attributed to (1) the preaching of wandering gurus and rishis, (2) the movement of pilgrims from one part of the country to another, (3) the marriage of women into families in other towns/kingdoms, (4) popular movements that cut across families and social classes (like bhakti), (5) assimilation of folk religious practices (like the assimilation of Chandi-devi or various gramadevatas into the Hindu pantheon), (6) debates between students of different philosophical schools, or (7) war/conquest of one people by another.

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Prayers remain only as strong as the will of the people who recite them. In this Darwinian struggle of prayers, only the strongest survive and propagate to the next generation. So by understanding the state of prayers in India today, we can begin to develop a picture of the subcontinent’s rich and diverse history.

Dating of Prayers in 21st Century India

Some cultures - like Islam and Christianity - appear to have rejected assimilation within the Hindu framework, and maintain a distinct set of prayers and practices outside the deeply intertwined Hindu-web. There are powerful examples of “syncretism” (some more successful than others) during the Sufi-age that showcase the gap between Indianized-Islam and Hinduism as narrowing, but this trend was emphatically bucked in the 1800s.

While the cult of Sai Baba (who is considered an avatar of the Hindu god Dattātreya, and has a favourite saying “Allah tera bhala karega”) is the most impressive example of assimilated culture, the Muslim, Christian, and Hindu worlds of prayer are today separated by sturdy walls. In this article, I have focused on the deeply intertwined Hindu-web of prayers, and have not studied the prayer-worlds of Indian Islam or Indian Christianity.

Like supermassive banyan trees that develop accessory trunks by dropping thousands of aerial roots and spread infinitely outwards to become a tremendous forest, prayers which took root in an ancient past now flourish - as old words and new - in the minds of a billion people.

A common Hindu prayer ritual today often juxtaposes ancient words three-thousand years old with “recent” language merely five hundred years old. It is not uncommon to hear radios in India play “Om Jai Jagadish Hare”, a 1870s composition, immediately after the Rg Veda’s Gayatri Mantra (composed prior to 1000 BCE). A gap of three thousand years turns into a pause of a few seconds.

The table below shows various popular prayers, chants and verses, along with their source/composer and approximate time-period of composition:

A few caveats, before we jump to any conclusions:

1. This list is certainly not exhaustive, and may carry some unavoidable bias owing to the limitation of my own knowledge and exposure (and I beg the reader’s pardon in advance for this). The objective of this analysis is to develop a directional, but not exact, understanding of the trajectory and broad timelines of Indian (Hindu*) devotional literature. For example, it was only while working on this post that I realized the Skanda Sashti Kavasam (கந்த சஷ்டி கவசம்), a devotional Tamil song on Lord Muruga (a.k.a. Skanda/Kartikeya) and a relatively recent composition, was composed over one thousand years after Ādi Śaṅkarācāryaḥ’s Śrī Subramaṇya Bhujangaṃ (श्रीसुब्रह्मण्यभुजङ्गम्) dedicated to the same Lord Kartikeya.

2. There are also difficulties in discerning religious- / prayer- texts from a “secular” or philosophical texts that are commonly read, recited, or listened to today. For example, I have left out Śrīmadbhagavadgītā, one of the most revered of Hindu texts, because its scope is much more than just prayer; it is a synthesis of dharma, bhakti, jñāna-, karma-, and rāja- yoga ideals, Samkhya-Yoga philosophy, etc. In the analysis, I have included only those shlokas, mantras, bhajans, kirtans, and other devotional chants and music that are considered devotional, or offer praise or thanks to god(s), deities, or any spiritual-/divine-forces. For the same reason, I have excluded the late-Sangam work Tirukkuṟaḷ (dated ~500 CE).

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3. This is not an exhaustive analysis of all devotional compositions over time, but only of those compositions that are most alive in the twenty-first century. There are, no doubt, magnificent lost works or works that are in limited circulation or use. The awareness that I wished to develop from this analysis is a directional understanding of Indian history through some of the most popular prayers in use today.

4. The number of unique prayers in the name of a particular god (or in a particular spirit) today may not be representative of the spirit of another time. For example, the Lokakṣemā prayer (लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनोभवंतु) may find its source in the Kaṭhopaniṣad (~450 CE) but may find some of its popularity attributable to the spirit of globalism in the modern age. So the mantra’s popularity may have waxed and waned over the ages; we can only know for sure that it is well known and widely used today, but we cannot know whether its usage was widespread in, say, 1000 CE. Similarly, “Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ” (ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँ) may have its roots in a 4th century text, but its usage would have been limited to Tibetan monasteries throughout the middle ages until the travel to these remote parts became cheaper, and until the West rediscovered Buddhism.

5. The number of unique prayers in the name of a deity doesn’t conclusively establish the popularity of the god. There is a chance I have included a larger portion of prayers/chants in the name of one god compared to another. It is also possible that the number of unique prayers in the name of a deity is quite low, but its usage is disproportionately high. For example, Tulsidas’ Hanuman Chalisa (1500 CE) is the only prayer to Hanuman in my list, but this particular Hariharan / Gulshan Kumar rendition of the song had over 2.7 Billion views on YouTube as of October 2022, making it one of the most popular devotional hymns online (and proving that Lord Rāma’s divine vānara companion is extremely popular with the people).

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Insights about Indian History & Culture From Prayers

• There are four (slightly overlapping) distinct periods in Indian history as seen through prayers:

  1. Age of Rishis (start - beginning of CE): The roots of Hindu history lie in the ancient world of rishis (ṛṣi). In this Vedic / post-Vedic period are rooted some of the most important mantras and shlokas in use today (in rituals and meditation practices): the Gāyatrī Mantra, the Mahā Mrityunjaya Mantra, the Śrī Rāma rakshā stotram, and the Buddhist Triśaraṇa. With the exception of the Buddhist prayer that is in Pali, all prayers of the age of rishis “were revealed” in Sanskrit.

  2. Age of Poets and Teachers (4th - 10th century CE): This period in the first millennium of the Common Era can be considered an Upaniṣadic / post-Upaniṣadic period. From this period thrive the prayers and teachings from Upaniṣads, and compositions and interpretations of great teachers. Ādi Śaṅkarācāryaḥ (the great Advaita Vedanta scholar who is now thought to have been born in the kingdom of the Chalukyas of Badami around 700 CE) is by far the greatest exponent of this period.
     
     There was also massive philosophical development in all six orthodox Hindu schools (Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta) as well as in Buddhist (Madhyamaka and Yogachara) and Jaina traditions. It is towards the end of this age of poets and teachers when various schools of Vedānta began to emerge as a powerful creative, social and philosophical force.

  3. Bhakti (7th - 17th century CE): Originating in Tamilakam during the 6th century CE, the Bhakti movement sought to bring religious reforms by adopting devotion to achieve salvation. It gained momentum through the works of Āndāḷ and the Āḻvārs (of the Sri Vaishnava tradition), and Mānikkavacakar and the Nāyaṉmārs (of the Shaiva tradition), before spreading northwards.
     Several 11th and 12th century writers - including Ramanuja, Madhva, Vallabha and Nimbarka - developed different philosophies within the Vedanta school of Hinduism, which were influential to the Bhakti tradition in medieval India. Bhakti prayers and compositions came to include the works of Basavanna, Kabir, Guru Nanak, Tulsidas, Purandara Dasa, Kanakadasa, Tukaram, Mirabai, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, as the movement swept over the entire subcontinent.
     This period saw increased usage of people’s languages alongside Sanskrit in prayers: Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Awadhi, and Rajasthani.

  4. Hindu Modernity (18th century onwards): Prayers from this period are usually bhajans and kirtans that have leveraged mass-media to gain ubiquity. Aarti songs like “Om Jai Jagdish Hare”, “Jai Ganesh Deva”, and “Jai Santoshi Mata” are from this latest period of prayer-history. These songs are in multiple languages, and most commonly, in Hindi.

• The gods in our prayers today speak of continuity as well as diversity. A web of philosophical strands take us back from today into the world of rishis, while the gods and languages have multiplied over the millennia.

  1. With some of the oldest words spoken today, the “Gayatri Mantra” may be seen as dedicated to the Vedic deity Savitr or to One Supreme Creator. Other prayers from our ancient history are dedicated mostly to Vishnu and Shiva.

  2. From the age of teachers and poets, we have prayers dedicated to Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga, Ganesha, and Kartikeya, apart from Vishnu and Shiva. Adi Shankaracharya is regarded as the founder of the Panchayatana Puja: the worship of five deities - Ganesha, Shakti (Durga), Shiva, Vishnu, and Surya. His compositions are used as prayers to these deities even today.

  3. The Bhakti age gives us a wide range of prayer practices dedicated to Maha Vishnu, his various avataras (predominantly Krishna, but including others like Rama, Hayagriva, and Vithoba), his consort Lakshmi/Shri, and his companions (like Garuda, and Hanuman). The forms of these prayers also turn more musical; Purandara Dasa, Tukaram, and Mirabai have given us many popular devotional hymns still in use today.

  4. The last 300 years of prayer-history have seen prayers becoming a political/social tools in the country. The philosophy of the modern Bhajans/kirtans don’t distinguish sharply between deities, and seem to implicitly accept that all gods are one, while being dedicated to any one deity at the outset.
     We also have new gods in the Hindu pantheon. Bhārat Mātā, who may be considered an avatar of Shakti, is often seen in a red-coloured sari and holding a national flag. Another Hindu goddess who gained immense popularity in the twentieth century is Santoshi Mata, for whom millions of women hold a Friday vrata.

Those are some thoughts on this interesting subject for now. Please let me know if you would like me to explore some of these topics further in future posts/threads. Thank you for reading!

Sources:

• Wikipedia - pages on various gods, mantras, shlokas, kirtans and composers/poets

• hinduism.stackexchange.com

• Speaking Tree

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P.S. I have used “Indian (Hindu*)” in a few places because the word “Hindu” is an exonym and originates as a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus. So all people who live in India are, in this limited sense, Hindus.

P.P.S. Adherents of many traditional schools may not agree with my dating of the Vedic age, the time when the Upanishads were written, and the dates when stalwarts like Adi Shankara, the Alvars and the Nayanmars lived. I have relied on the commonly accepted dating provided by academics today, and not on dates provided by various mathas.

• Should we not study empires in terms of their population, and not in terms of their expanse?,

• What has impacted modern culture and systems more - vast but sparsely populated empires, or dense but small kingdoms? Is there any way to quantify this?, and

• The Maratha empire at its peak had a lot more subjects than the Delhi Sultanate, but your analysis doesn’t capture this!

So during this Pitru Paksha (पितृ पक्ष, or “fortnight of the ancestors”) - known usually as Shraddh and Mahalaya, when millions of Hindus pay homage to their ancestors (Pitrus) - I attempt to address these questions by arresting the temptation to indulge in spatial thinking, and thinking in terms of our Pitrus instead.

So the question changes from “How vast was X empire?” to “How many of our ancestors lived in X empire?” The following example illuminates this kind of thinking.

While the subcontinent’s landmass has not changed in several millennia, its population jumped nearly 5X in the past century - from 290 million to 1,400 million. So when viewed through a demographic lens, the mighty British Raj was just 40% bigger than modern Pakistan.

Data tells us more strange stories: There were nearly the same number of people living in Pakistan and Bangladesh in 2000, as there were in the whole of British India in 1900. The population of the Delhi-NCR Metropolitan region roughly equals the population of the entire Indian subcontinent back in 1 CE (~40 million).

The study of historical Indian empires in terms of population and time can be summarized in three snapshots (as shown below).

(1) Ancient / Pre-Medieval Period (500 BC to 1300 CE)

(2) Medieval / Post-Medieval Period (1300 CE to 1900 CE)

(3) Modern Period (1900 onwards)

Before we begin drawing inferences from these plot, here is a brief note on the methodology used in drawing these up:

• Data regarding the total population of the Indian subcontinent at various points in history has been taken from the following papers:

  • “Historical Estimates of World Population: An Evaluation”, John D. Durand [1974]

  • “An Essay Concerning Mankind’s Demographic Evolution”, J.N. Biraben [1980]

  • Census of India - 1901, 1951, 2001

• Populations of specific empires have been estimated considering that they would be in approximately the same proportion as their land-area. Such proportionality is overruled when (i) the actual population of a state is available through some other estimate or extrapolation (e.g. we can estimate the population of Bengal in 1700 using later records and census data), or (ii) all the major cities in a particular period are known; in such a case, the population of a kingdom is estimated considering the number of major cities in the kingdom.

Based on this methodology and using the above plots, we can draw the following inferences:

1. There are three major periods of Indian history, based on demographics:

   • an Ancient / Pre-Medieval Period (500 BC to 1300 CE) which sees a relatively stable population and little population growth,

   • a Medieval / Post-Medieval Period (1300 CE to 1900 CE) where growth of population is mostly linear, and

   • a Modern Period (1900 to present) where there is exponential population growth.

2. Ranked in terms of population, the following are the most populous Indian empires in history:

   1. British Raj ~ 200 million

   2. Mughal ~ 110 million

   3. Marathas ~ 80 million

   4. Delhi Sultanate ~ 30 million

   5. Afghans (Suris) ~ 30 million

   6. Mauryas ~ 28 million

   7. Guptas ~ 26 million

   8. Ghurid Sultanate ~ 22 million

   9. Vijayanagara ~ 20 million

   10. Bengal Sultanate ~ 20 million

   11. Awadh (Nawab) ~ 20 million

   12. Sikh Empire ~ 20 million

   13. Bengal Subah ~ 20 million

   14. Hyderabad (Nizam) ~ 20 million

   15. Rajputana ~ 20 million

   16. Gurjara-Pratiharas ~ 18 million

3. During any period, except during periods of extreme chaos (Warring States periods), there are usually one to three dominant powers.

   • One Power: The peak of the Mauryan, Mughal and British empires, as well as modern-day India are the only periods when a single dominant power ruled over 75% or more of the subcontinental population.
     The Gupta empire and their Vakataka allies, as well as the Delhi Sultanate governed ~60% of subcontinental people and were the sole major power at their respective primes.

   • Two Powers: The periods that saw two dominant powers in the region include:

     • Satavahana-Saka period (1st-2nd centuries)

     • Ghurids/Mamluks (Delhi Sultanate) - Yadava period (13th century)

     • Maratha-Mughal period (18th century)

   • Three Powers: There have been multiple periods where three dominant powers have ruled over a majority of people in the subcontinent. The prominent periods include:

     • Vardhana, Kalachuri and Chalukya period (7th century)

     • Pratiharas, Rashtrakutas and Palas (Kannauj triangle) in the 8th-9th centuries

     • Cholas, Western Chalukyas, and the Ghaznavids (11th century)

     • Vijayanagara, Mughals, and Bengal Sultanate or Afghans (15th/16th centuries)

   If we analyze populations of these Indian empires over time (in 50 year time intervals) using basic statistics, the results interesting:
   

   

   The local maxima in the plot are points where there were 1, 2, or 3 dominant powers in the region. And the linear trendline clearly shows us how empires have gained efficiency - using processes and technology - over time (to rule over larger groups of people).

   Thanks for reading Arohana Avarohana! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

4. Finally, since we are talking about ancestors, it is interesting to think of which kingdoms our forefathers and foremothers were citizens. Assuming an average child-bearing age of 20-25 years throughout pre-modern history, we expect a human to be about 110 years younger than their great great great grandmother (5th generation ancestor).
   
   Using this math, let us consider a human X, a citizen of modern India. We learn the following about X’s lineage:
   

   

   I personally find it mind-boggling that my 100th Grandmother might have lived at the time in Chandragupta Maurya’s kingdom. And with some effort, might we be able to remember the names of our entire lineage, all the way back to Vedic times? (Of course, that’s impossible/impractical, but the thought experiment remains valid.)

That’s all for now! I look forward to engaging with your thoughts, opinions and questions in the comments.

Please let me know if you would like me to explore some of these topics further in future posts/threads. Thank you for reading!

This is an attempt to understand an aspect of this oneness by exploring the power-structures that have ruled over Indian peoples (and divided them), each adding in their time a unique aspect of what can today loosely be termed Indianness. This is a concise study of historical Indian empires in space and in time.

The graph above plots various empires in space (measured along the x-axis) and time (measured along the y-axis), and helps one build a mental picture of the influence of an empire on India in 2022.

Before we begin drawing inferences from the plot, a few caveats:

• The plot shows geographical extent with a least count of 2.5 lakh square kilometres i.e. the smallest boxes are approximately the size of Uttar Pradesh (2022).

• The plot measures progress vertically in 50-year pulses of time. So it may miss out developments that happen in shorter intervals, but one can argue that these tend to have a small impact on the big picture.

• The geo-extent maps don’t take into account the number of cities administered by a certain empire/dynasty, nor do they consider the population within the empire’s borders. The plot only shows spatial expanse of political powers along the x-axis.

• The cultural, religious, social, economic, philosophical, or political impact of dynasties/empires are outside the scope of this work. So an empire of small geographical expanse could have potentially exerted great influence on future empires and peoples (but such knowledge cannot be gleaned from this graph).

• I have tried to keep all entries from West to East (when read left to right), but this has not always been possible. I have broken this rule at such places where the legibility of the plot is enhanced by ignoring the West-to-East method. The last block (furthest right) usually clubs distinct geographies covering Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and a few states in India’s North East.

• I’m not a professional historian or a qualified data-scientist. And I did this for fun (I think it helps me understand history better). So kindly engage constructively, if at all :)

With the long list of caveats behind us, here are some interesting insights from the plot:

1. If a composite variable called Impact can be calculated as a product of spatial and temporal extent of an empire (IMPACT = AREA OF EMPIRE x DURATION OF EXISTENCE), then the top empires are:

   • British Raj: 123 (impact score)

   • Mauryas: 110

   • Mughals: 110

   • Delhi Sultanate: 105

   • Gurjara-Pratiharas: 95

   • Satavahanas: 73

   • Guptas: 70

   • Republic of India: 60

   • Cholas: 55

   • Marathas: 40

   • Chalukyas: 40

   • Rashtrakutas: 35

   • Note: All scores are useful only on a relative basis. Absolute values and units of scores do not carry any objective meaning.

2. We may further try to assign more importance to recent events (superimposing Impact on an exponential decay function) and arrive at a quantity called INFLUENCE TODAY = IMPACT x e^(NUMBER OF CENTURIES SINCE EMPIRE). The most influential rulers then turn out to be the following:

   • Republic of India: 39.4 (influence score)

   • British Raj: 16.6

   • Mughals: 2.0

   • Marathas: 2.0

   • Delhi Sultanate: 0.1

   • Others: 0.0

   • Note: Our current discourse revolves around these empires and their achievements/actions, and proves our hypothesis around their respective levels of influence on Indian modernity.

3. Most empires have historically achieved scale and power for a maximum of ~150 years i.e. not more than 4-5 generations of rulers. Medieval and modern empires have lasted slightly longer as processes have taken the place of people. So empires may retain a name but need not have rulers of the same bloodline. The longest running dynasties - like the southern kingdoms of the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras - understood this long before the rest.

4. Only four empires have held control over areas in excess of 30 lakh square kilometres: India, the British, the Mughals and the Mauryas. Four empires have conquered and held 20 lakh - 30 lakh square kilometres: Guptas, Gurjara-Pratiharas, Delhi Sultanate and the Marathas.

Those are some insights for now. Please let me know if you would like me to explore some of these topics further in future posts/threads. Thank you for reading!

Sources:

• Wikipedia pages of respective empires and dynasties

• https://www.worldhistorymaps.info/

• Wikimedia maps of the world at various points of time

P.S. This post was initially published on 15th August 2022, as millions of Indians celebrated the 76th Independence Day (75 years since 15th August 1947) of the latest version of their motherland, with the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign. This edit is dated 9th October 2022.