Beside psychology, there is solid neuroscience behind happiness. I explore it here with reference to travel and the dance of hormones and neurotransmitters.

I first noticed the nuanced talk of this entrepreneur-turned-educator in Tiktok. Then I pursued him and chatted for more than an hour through Zoom.

In this wide-ranging conversation, first ever English podcast that I have posted here, you will find many of your own concerns about the evolving media ecosystem. Please feel free to write your own opinions in the comments.

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You can watch the video version of this article in Nepali here:

In Suketu Mehta’s acclaimed book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, there is a true story. One day, while there on some business, he visits the office of the city’s police chief. A teenage boy is being interrogated there — arrested on charges of murder.

After a few tight slaps from the police, the boy confesses to his involvement in the killing.

“How much did you get paid to kill him?” the officer asks.

“Fifty.”

“You killed a man for fifty thousand rupees?”

“No, sir. For fifty rupees.”

The boy made his living collecting scrap from garbage dumps. That income barely covered his food. His home was a tiny shack near the garbage heap — patched together with jute sacks. The monsoon was almost there. He couldn’t go without plastic sheeting to keep the rain out. He was struggling to scrape together even a few coins.

Around that same time, a woman had conspired with her lover to kill her husband. They needed someone to dispose of the body — and they called on this boy. For fifty rupees (~0.5 USD), he had spent hours cutting the body into pieces, packing them into two to three kilogram plastic packets, and dumping them into the drain.

This happened in the 1990s. Yet even today, this level of destitution exists in many parts of the world.

A series of cascading crises in recent years has pushed hundreds of millions more people into this kind of destitution. In India — home to nearly 1.5 billion people — the sheer number living in such poverty is the highest on earth.

And tragically, in the coming year or two, even more people in India risk being pushed into extreme poverty. The middle class risks becoming poor. The poor risk becoming destitute.

You may have recently heard or read about the Cockroach Janata Party — a group that sparked a storm in India’s public discourse. The party, set up as a satirical critique of India’s ruling establishment, attracted 21.7 million young people on Instagram within just a few days. The Indian government was so alarmed that within days — despite operating fully within the law — the social media accounts of the party had been shut down or disabled.

Now many of them are back online and the party just held a landmark street demonstration in Delhi but the cloud of repression hangs heavy above the heads of youngsters daring to ask Modi the tough questions.

Few of those young people drawn to the Cockroach Party have probably read the story of that Mumbai teenager who cut up a body for fifty rupees.

But the number of young Indians turning to economic crime just to survive — for food, shelter, and clothing — is not small. According to India’s central bank, digital financial fraud in India grew fivefold between March 2023 and March 2024 alone, reaching 14.5 billion rupees.

Crime and hunger are one thing. But here is the deeper and wider crisis: the youngsters see no path to prosperity for themselves in an economy so heavily tilted against them as I elaborate in this essay.

Indian society today is clearly passing through a terrible tragedy. How deep it will go — and where it will end — no one can say for certain. And then there is the separate question of how long India’s current political order can survive it.

Recently, economist Surjit Bhalla wrote a piece in The Indian Express titled: “BJP Is Winning Elections, But Losing the Economy.” Bhalla is not a known critic of the BJP government. During Modi’s second term, he was a member of the government’s Economic Advisory Council.

In the article, he lists four causes of India’s declining economy. The Modi government comes first.

The coming economic tsunami in India is deeply relevant to Nepal — for several reasons.

First, our economy is tightly linked to India’s. India remains, even now, the only labor market for many Nepalis — especially the poor. Second, our currency is pegged to the Indian rupee, so any fluctuation in India’s currency directly affects ours. Third, many of the economic blunders India has made to reach this point are blunders Nepal risks repeating.

Given that Nepal is already behind India — and our social safety net is far weaker — repeating India’s mistakes could hurt us even more.

1. Statistics vs. Reality: The art of cooking data

India’s GDP growth rate for the fiscal year 2025-26 was 7.7%. The World Bank’s projects that it will be around 6.6% in FY 2026-2027.

In 2019, Narendra Modi promised to grow India’s economy to $5 trillion by 2024 at the end of his second term. That target was missed. But by end of 2025, the Indian government claimed the economy had reached $4.18 trillion, overtaking Japan to become the world’s fourth largest. It also projected that Indian economy would grow to $7.3 trillion by 2030.

By that measure, Indian citizens should not just be satisfied — they should be proud. After all, India overtook Japan, once an economic superpower, and Britain, the colonial power that ruled India for over a century. Indians are famously loud in celebrating such milestones.

And yet, all across India today, there is deep anxiety, fear, and a creeping sense of dread about the economy.

How did this happen?

Just four months after the Indian government announced it had become the world’s fourth largest economy at $4.18 trillion, the IMF published a report placing India as the sixth largest — at $3.9 trillion. Instead of climbing to fourth, India had fallen from fifth to sixth. Not only had Japan overtaken it— Britain, which India had triumphantly claimed to surpass in 2022, had overtaken India again.

Why the discrepancy between the Indian government’s GDP figures and the IMF’s? Hereby lies a twist in the whole India-as-the-fastest-growing-large-economy saga.

Ever since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, his government has repeatedly been accused of manipulating economic data to inflate growth figures.

Arvind Subramanian — Modi’s own chief economic adviser during his first term — along with economist Devesh Kapur, addressed this in detail in their 2025 book A Sixth of Humanity. Their conclusion: India’s actual growth rate over the past decade has been significantly lower than the official 7–8%.

But the deeper reason ordinary Indians feel increasingly trapped in poverty — even as the statistics show rapid growth — is something else entirely.

According to leading economist Professor Arun Kumar, the author of half a dozen books on Indian economy, the reason is straightforward: the growth figures do not measure the informal sector, which provides livelihoods to 94% of India’s population.

The result: immediately after the 2016 demonetization, growth in the massive informal sector turned negative. The part of the economy that feeds 94% of Indians shrank. Yet the official data for 2017 showed India’s GDP growing at 6.8%.

In the years since, a chain of shocks — the chaotic rollout of the GST tax system, a banking sector crisis, COVID, the Ukraine war — have hammered India’s informal economy one blow after another. The backs of the poor haven’t just been twisted, they’ve been broken. None of this shows up in the statistics. Because none of it is being measured.

According to a 2021 CNN report, in just one year of COVID lockdowns, Modi’s close associate Gautam Adani’s wealth grew from $13 billion to $55 billion. In the five years since, Adani has grown his wealth to $92.6 billion — making him the richest person in Asia.

Here is the bitter truth behind India’s glowing growth story: Adani appears in the statistics but the boy condemned to dismember a corpse for fifty cents does not.

That is why, in an October 2025 podcast, Professor Arun Kumar argued — with evidence — that India’s economy was not $4 trillion but only $2.5 trillion. The remaining $1.5 trillion existed on paper only.

It is in that vast gap between paper statistics and lived reality that India’s young generation is suffocating today.

2. The Hormuz Shock

While poverty was deepening for the poor, Modi was still beating his chest — promising to make India the vishwa guru (world teacher), to move from fourth to third in the global economy, and through his Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, to grow the economy tenfold over the next twenty years — to $30–40 trillion.

Until a few months ago, things were holding together, at least on the surface.

Then the Iran war began.

The moment it did, shock waves spread across the world. From Thailand to Vietnam, Japan to South Korea, countries immediately began conserving fuel, cutting unnecessary consumption, and trimming spending. Some introduced fuel rationing from the very start.

But India had five state elections coming up. Modi needed to project not just that India was growing faster than anyone — but that even as the world was in chaos from the Hormuz crisis, as they call in a Hindi metaphor, “not a hair on our head has moved.”

To do that, petroleum prices were kept artificially frozen while they climbed up elsewhere. Modi’s extravagant campaign motorcades stretched many kilometers. Fuel imported before the Hormuz blockade — distributed by the state at enormous cost — went up in smoke for nothing.

For 73 days after the Hormuz crisis began, the Indian government and its propaganda machine pretended that everything was perfect. Eventually, oil prices remained elevated for so long that India’s foreign exchange reserves themselves began to feel the strain.

Only after the BJP had fraudulently won the West Bengal elections — removing millions of potential opposition voters from electoral rolls — and held onto Assam, did it finally acknowledge the Hormuz crisis. Modi publicly appealed to citizens: don’t buy gold, don’t travel abroad, conserve fuel.

As I write these words on early June, the Hormuz crisis is still unresolved. Whether ships will ever again pass freely through the strait without paying a toll — no one knows. And right now, India’s economy faces a crisis that could push a huge number of Indians into protracted unemployment and potentially lifelong poverty.

3. Signing Your Own Death Warrant

A few months ago, at a multinational garment factory in Gurugram, India, unfamiliar people suddenly appeared on the factory floor. They literally ordered the workers to wear the cameras on their forehead forehead while working. The workers had no choice.

According to an investigation by the Indian independent outlet Scroll.in, some workers were given a packet of mango juice in return. But the purpose of those head-mounted cameras was ultimately to replace those very workers with robots — collecting all the data needed to train the machines.

India was already suffering from jobless growth. According to Azim Premji University’s Status of Working India 2026 report, 40% of university graduates under 25 are already unemployed. Now India is not just failing to create jobs — it is in the midst of a catastrophic destruction of existing ones.

The IT sector, which has been the spine of India’s economy for three decades and employs tens of millions, is rapidly hollowing out. As Western companies that came to India for cheap labor shift to AI, India’s $300 billion outsourcing industry is on the verge of collapse. This is one of the main reasons the Indian rupee is falling so sharply.

From the ordinary garment worker sewing all day to feed their family at night, to the IT engineer earning millions a year — the changing nature of the economy is delivering a brutal kick to the stomach of both. Even graduates from world-renowned institutions like the IITs are, for the first time in history, facing the prospect of unemployment.

The collapse in demand for goods and services that will follow all this new unemployment — and the newer wave of unemployment that will follow that collapse — is almost impossible to imagine.

4. A Terrified Young Generation

With all of this happening — why isn’t India’s youth rising up in protest? Why does Modi’s party keep winning urban elections?

In an episode of the Indian Business Podcast, Axis Bank’s Head of Digital Business, Samir Shetty, presents a striking and sobering statistic. Gen Z — which makes up 28–30% of India’s population — holds just 4% of bank savings. Yet this same generation accounts for 50% of personal loans.

Similarly, while around 58 million Indians invest in mutual funds, one single online gambling company alone has 260 million registered users. The vast majority are young people. According to various data sources, more than 90% — some 230 million Indians — lose money gambling on these platforms.

Writer and investment advisor Saurabh Mukherjea recently laid out some frightening facts in an interview about how India’s young generation is coping with the economic crisis.

According to him, the Indian middle class is responding to the rapid job destruction driven by AI and other forces in a few ways: First, borrowing personal loans from four, five, or as many sources as possible. Second, taking out or topping up on home loans, sensing that their jobs may soon disappear. Third, in the years just after COVID, the number of young people taking antidepressants has risen dramatically.

Mukherjea says: “India’s situation today is far more frightening than it was during COVID — because no one has an answer to when, or how, this economic crisis and job destruction will end.”

5. The Modi Government shoots at the nation’s feet

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as of June 8, 2026, Gautam Adani — with a net worth of $120 billion — ranks 17th in the world, one place above Bill Gates. From $13 billion before COVID, he has grown his wealth ninefold in six years. The overall Indian stock market, in that same period, has roughly doubled.

According to respected Indian financial journalist Ravi Sinha, even that stock market valuation is not healthy — it is inflated like a balloon, and could correct sharply at any time. Already, many foreign investors who brought dollars into India have been pulling out of the stock market in recent years, having made little or nothing — their returns eaten by the falling rupee. So while those close to Modi have seen their wealth soar, both domestic and foreign investors have earned little — or lost money.

Professor Arun Kumar has been pointing to a deeper structural crisis in dozens of interviews. According to him, India’s informal sector — though it contributes just under half of GDP — employs 94% of the workforce (officially, 90%). Since Modi came to power in 2014, every major policy has benefited only the formal sector — the 6–10%, roughly 50 million people, employed in organized industry.

On top of that, Modi-linked business houses like Adani and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance hold near-monopolies in the most profitable sectors. According to The Economist, the revenues of the two companies alone account for nearly 4% of India’s entire GDP.

The informal sector — which provides work and income to 450 million Indian workers — was crippled by demonetization in 2016, and has been further weakened by every subsequent crisis having never recovered fully from the first shock. The result: 800 million people’s lives are sustained by 5 kilograms of wheat or rice per person per month distributed by the government.

All in all, more than a billion people are being forced to cut back on basic necessities like food and clothing — collapsing domestic demand, which was itself a major driver of unemployment long before AI arrived.

Meanwhile, Modi’s government keeps pouring energy into lifting the formal sector — dreaming of making India a Singapore or Malaysia. But industrialists can’t even run their existing factories at full capacity, because the 1.25 billion Indians crushed by stagnation have no purchasing power. The excess capital the industrialists receive from government largesse is being invested abroad.

According to a CNBC report published on May 20 of this year, India’s wealthy invested $35.8 billion overseas in 2025 — 2.6 times more than two years earlier.

Billions of dollars, had they reached India’s poor, would have been spent on food, rice, and clothing, keeping India’s own economy moving. Instead, that capital is now leaving the country. Ordinary Indians may thump their chests about Indian industrialists buying companies that build prestigious brands like Land Rover and Royal Enfield. But the economic ground beneath their feet has shifted so dramatically that large parts of the middle class are themselves sliding into unemployment.

On top of all this, massive subsidies for farmers on fertilizer and electricity, reckless cash handouts for election wins, and bloated wasteful schemes have left India unable to invest adequately in infrastructure — and with almost no capacity to absorb any economic shock.

The Hormuz crisis has just exposed all of this, brutally, for the world to see.

Now, cornered by the economic disaster he himself created through twelve years of blunders, Narendra Modi is left with nothing except lecturing citizens not to buy gold or travel abroad, and crushing anyone who dares raise a voice of dissent.

6. What Nepal must avoid at any cost

India’s economy is more than a hundred times larger than Nepal’s. Its per capita GDP is nearly double ours. So it is natural to feel that we have much to learn from what appears to be a more successful economy.

There are things to learn, I concur. But at the end of this essay, I want to focus on something different: what blunders, based on India’s experience, Nepal must avoid.

India is not short of experts. When demonetization happened in 2016, the Governor of India’s central bank was Raghuram Rajan, and the Prime Minister’s chief economic adviser was Arvind Subramanian — both world-renowned economists. Both warned Modi about the risks of demonetization and advised strongly against it. But Modi’s arrogance and narcissism made him believe that demonetization would transform the economy and proceeded with it. The rest is history

Nepal’s first lesson from India: a parliamentary majority does not automatically make a ruling party or its leaders wise or far-sighted. Even a leader with a landslide mandate can easily crash a country’s economy.

The second lesson for Nepal: good intentions alone are not enough for progress and prosperity. Before 2016, India had a fragmented, chaotic tax system — effectively 26 different tax regimes in one country. A unified national tax system had been needed for decades, and no one disagreed that a GST-type reform was necessary.

But the way Modi’s government rushed the GST into effect on July 1, 2017, a body blow was delivered to an already fragile economy. Small and medium businesses were hit hardest.

Third: propaganda that presents a bad situation as good can work for a while. It can even win elections. But in the end, it proves no warmer than the brief heat of urine.

Finally, to distract from India’s fragile economic reality, Modi’s BJP, its parent organization the RSS, and the other affiliated militia groups have cultivated a near-catastrophic division, hatred, and violence in Indian society. Given where such state-sponsored violence has led societies in the past, I find it hard, at this time, to rule out a Nazi Germany-level ethnic cleansing in a country of 1.5 billion people.

As the climate crisis intensifies and desertification spreads across India — and as the Modi government’s incompetence continues — I believe only a miraculous course correction can potentially halt India’s downward trajectory towards ruin. Given the divisions and hatred the state has already spread, the voices it has silenced, and the increasingly fascist character of the government, India’s social and political crisis is even graver than the economic one.

If India moves further down the hell of 20th century Germany and Italy, Nepal will have to work very hard to protect its democracy and pluralism.

As a Nepali citizen, this is my biggest concern right now. I hope you too are now besieged by concerns about the ‘world’s largest democracy’, regardless of your nationality because when a country of 1.5 billion goes rogue, the nightmare spreads far and wide.

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