I simply wanted a place to write — about India, institutions, ideas, places I travel to, and sometimes about life itself.

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• Vinay

“This is India. What else do you expect?”

A very senior retired civil servant said this to me last week at the India Habitat Centre after I complained about my stressful drive through Delhi traffic.

“Why do you say that?” I asked. “We have made substantial progress.”

“What progress?” he replied. “Everyone is corrupt. Nobody is clean.”

I was amused, but also intrigued.

Here was a man who had spent 35 years inside the Indian state, rising to its highest levels. He had been part of the very system that governed India. Yet in retirement he seemed to speak about India as though he were an outsider looking in.

His comment made me wonder: why do some of our most educated and accomplished citizens seem to enjoy India-bashing?

I don’t mean criticism. India has plenty to criticise. Roads are chaotic, public services often disappoint, corruption remains a problem and many institutions work well below what they should.

But there is a difference between saying “our institutions don’t work” and saying “Indians are like this.”

The first is criticism.

The second is something closer to self-contempt.

The Indian abroad

I have had the opportunity to work in several countries in Africa and Asia. One thing that has repeatedly struck me is how Indians are regarded there.

People often speak appreciatively of Indians who work in their countries—their work ethic, professional competence, discipline and respect for rules. I have encountered much the same attitude in Western countries.

This has always puzzled me.

The person who supposedly cannot follow rules in India can follow them perfectly well when living in another country.

The person who is said to lack civic sense at home can be a responsible citizen elsewhere.

The person has not changed.

The environment has.

This does not mean Indians are secretly better than we think. Nor does it mean our problems are imaginary.

It suggests something simpler: people respond to the systems in which they live.

If rules are clear, enforcement is predictable and other people generally follow the rules too, most of us have a reason to follow them.

If rules are poorly enforced and everyone expects others to ignore them, behaviour changes.

So perhaps we should be careful before turning every institutional failure into a statement about Indian character.

The comparison trap

There is another problem.

We often compare an India still in transition with societies that are already finished products.

We visit the US and see orderly traffic. We go to Europe and see clean public spaces. We travel to Japan and marvel at punctuality and civic discipline.

All of this is real.

But we see the finished product. We don’t see the decades of institution-building, economic change and social adjustment behind it.

Then we return to India and ask:

Why can’t Indians behave like that?

That is where comparison can become unfair.

A better question would be:

What made that behaviour possible there, and what prevents it here?

The first question leads us towards institutions, incentives, history and social norms.

The second leads us towards national character.

And national character is a wonderfully convenient explanation. There is nothing to fix if the problem is simply Indians.

We can shrug and say:

This is India. What else do you expect?

The country we inherited

Perhaps there is a historical reason why we find it so difficult to answer the first question.

India began its democratic journey in 1947 under extraordinarily difficult conditions. The country was poor, largely uneducated, deeply hierarchical and economically weak. It also inherited a state and administrative system with deep colonial roots.

Yet the new Republic made an extraordinary choice.

It did not wait for prosperity, mass education or social equality before introducing democracy. It gave every adult the right to vote and adopted a modern Constitution that promised equality, liberty and justice.

We were trying to build a modern democracy while simultaneously building many of the social and economic foundations that such a democracy needed.

That was a huge undertaking.

It was bound to produce a gap between what the new India promised and what India could actually deliver.

And that gap is still with us.

We expect our institutions to behave according to modern democratic standards. We expect citizens to behave according to modern civic norms. But institutions and habits cannot be transformed simply by writing them into laws.

They have to be built.

That takes time.

And it is here that perhaps something happened to our self-image.

We became acutely conscious of the distance between the India we wanted and the India we had.

From disappointment to India-bashing

For an educated Indian, the gap can be particularly difficult to ignore.

We know what good institutions look like. Many of us have travelled, studied or worked abroad. We have seen societies where things that seem difficult in India are routine.

So we return home and notice the failures.

That is not a bad thing. Seeing what is possible elsewhere can be a powerful force for change.

But there are two ways of responding.

We can ask:

Why doesn’t this work in India?

Or we can say:

Indians are like this.

The first response demands curiosity.

The second provides an answer before we have investigated the question.

And perhaps there is even a small psychological reward in it.

If India is corrupt, chaotic and incapable, I can place myself outside that India. They are the problem. I am the person who has understood the problem.

India-bashing can then become a form of sophistication.

Cynicism sounds worldly.

Hope can sound naïve.

And saying “Nothing works in India” can sometimes make the speaker feel more intelligent than saying, “Some things work and some don’t, and I want to understand why.”

But there is an irony here.

The person saying “Indians have no civic sense” is also an Indian.

The person saying “Everyone is corrupt” is part of the society he is condemning.

We have somehow learnt to speak about India as though we are not part of it.

We need better criticism, not less criticism

I am not suggesting that Indians should stop criticising India.

Quite the opposite.

A country that cannot criticise itself cannot improve.

But criticism should lead to curiosity.

Why does this institution fail?

Why does this rule work on paper but not in practice?

Why do people behave differently when they cross a border?

What incentives shape their behaviour?

What can we learn from societies that have solved problems we still struggle with?

These are harder questions than “This is India.”

But they are also more useful.

Perhaps the greatest danger of India-bashing is not that it makes us pessimistic.

It is that it makes us lazy thinkers.

If corruption is simply in our blood, there is nothing to understand.

If Indians simply have no civic sense, there is nothing to investigate.

If India is simply India, there is nothing to change.

That is what I found most interesting about my conversation at the India Habitat Centre.

After 35 years inside the Indian state, the retired civil servant had every reason to be frustrated with India. He had seen its failures from close quarters.

But his conclusion was not “we need to fix these institutions.”

It was:

“This is India. What else do you expect?”

I think we should expect more.

Not because India is exceptional.

Not because India has no serious problems.

But because a country is not explained by its failures.

We need to understand why they occur.

And perhaps that is the difference between criticising India and bashing it.

Criticism says: something is wrong. Let us find out why.

India-bashing says: this is who we are.

The first leaves room for change.

The second closes the door.

Yet if there is one Chinese leader who shaped China’s transformation, it is Deng.

When I first began wondering how China had moved from being one of the world’s poorer countries to becoming an economic and technological giant, I had the explanation that many Indians probably share: China was authoritarian.

Its leaders did not have to worry about elections, opposition parties or public opinion. They could take decisions and implement them. India, with its democracy, federalism and bureaucracy, could not move with the same speed.

It sounded convincing.

The more I read about Deng, however, the less convincing it seemed.

If authoritarianism by itself produced economic success, dictatorships around the world would be full of economic miracles. They are not. Many have remained poor and dysfunctional for decades.

The interesting question is therefore not why an authoritarian China could reform.

It is what Deng actually did to make China work differently.

He did not transform China with one grand reform. He changed it piece by piece.

He gave farmers a reason to produce more. He allowed rural communities to create businesses. He created special zones where foreign investment could be tried. He gave enterprises and local governments greater autonomy. He changed the incentives of officials and gradually changed the people running the bureaucracy.

And when experiments worked, he used their results to make the next change possible.

To understand why he approached reform this way, however, we need to understand the man.

A revolutionary who became a pragmatist

Deng was born in Sichuan in 1904. As a young man he went to France under the Work-Study Movement, where he worked in factories. He later studied in the Soviet Union.

He returned to China and became a revolutionary, then one of the Communist Party’s most capable administrators.

But Deng also saw what happened when ideology overwhelmed economic reality.

The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, attempted to accelerate China’s transformation through collectivisation and mass mobilisation. It ended in economic disaster and famine.

The recovery that followed taught Deng another lesson. Agricultural decisions were decentralised, private plots were restored and material incentives began to play a greater role in motivating production. Agricultural output recovered.

Deng was already learning that people respond to incentives more reliably than to slogans.

Then came the Cultural Revolution.

Deng himself was purged, humiliated and removed from political life. His son Pufang was left paralysed. Deng eventually returned to power, only to be purged again in 1976.

After Premier Zhou Enlai died in January that year, crowds gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn him. The demonstrations soon became an expression of opposition to the Cultural Revolution and its radical leadership. Deng was blamed and removed from all his positions.

He was 72.

Yet within two years he was back.

By then Deng had experienced the Communist system from almost every possible position: revolutionary, administrator, victim and survivor.

It helps explain why he became less interested in ideological purity than in results.

He did not abandon communism. He questioned something more practical:

Why should a socialist system prevent people from doing things that made them more productive simply because those things did not fit orthodox ideology?

That question would change China.

He did not have a blueprint

When Deng emerged as China’s dominant political figure after Mao’s death, he inherited an economy that was heavily controlled and deeply unproductive.

Agriculture was organised through communes. Industry was dominated by state enterprises. Prices and investment were largely determined administratively. Private enterprise had little room.

The state tried to decide almost everything.

Deng did not arrive with a fully worked-out plan for replacing this system.

He experimented.

That is perhaps the most important thing to understand about him.

He did not first decide exactly what China should become and then issue instructions.

He created room for experiments.

If they worked, they produced evidence.

If the evidence was convincing, the experiment could spread.

And some experiments failed or produced problems. Inflation and other imbalances repeatedly forced the leadership to modify or slow reforms.

Deng was prepared to find out what worked.

Start with the farmer

The best place to see this is agriculture.

Under the commune system, farmers had relatively weak links between their individual effort and their individual reward.

The problem was not that Chinese farmers did not know how to farm.

The system gave them little reason to produce more.

In late 1978, farmers in Xiaogang village in Anhui divided land among households and agreed to take individual responsibility for production quotas. Anything produced beyond the quota could benefit the household.

It was a small and risky experiment.

But it changed the calculation.

If producing more improved your family’s circumstances, why wouldn’t you produce more?

The results were difficult to ignore, and the reform leadership gradually accepted and expanded the experiment.

By 1983, 94.2% of China’s rural households were covered by the Household responsibility system. The reform is estimated to have accounted for roughly 30–50% of the increase in agricultural output between 1978 and 1984.

The lesson went beyond agriculture.

Deng had demonstrated that if you change the relationship between effort and reward, behaviour changes.

He had not persuaded hundreds of millions of farmers to become more industrious.

He had changed the environment in which they made decisions.

From farmers to entrepreneurs

Agricultural reform created another opportunity.

Once farming became more productive, families no longer needed to devote all their labour to agriculture. Millions of rural workers could now look for other ways to earn an income.

But where would those jobs come from?

They began appearing in the countryside itself.

Township and Village Enterprises, or TVEs, took off.

Rural industry was not entirely new. What changed was the environment around it.

Farmers had more income and savings. Labour was becoming available. Administrative restrictions were being relaxed. Local governments had increasing incentives to encourage economic activity.

TVEs, often owned by townships or villages, could increasingly buy inputs, sell products, hire workers and expand production outside the old state plan.

This was an unusual compromise: not quite private enterprise, but no longer a conventional state enterprise either.

And it grew extraordinarily fast.

Between 1978 and 1992, TVE output grew at roughly 22% a year.

The important point is that Deng had not designed every detail of this system in Beijing.

He had removed some of the barriers that prevented rural enterprise from flourishing.

One reform was beginning to create the conditions for the next.

Shenzhen: prove it before you preach it

China needed foreign capital, technology, management skills and access to international markets.

But opening the entire country at once was politically risky.

Many within the Party feared that markets and foreign investment would bring capitalism through the back door.

So Deng tried something more cautious:

Create a few places where different rules could be tested.

The Special Economic Zones were born.

Shenzhen was the most famous.

It was next to Hong Kong and therefore close to capital, technology, trading networks, and managerial expertise. Within the zone, foreign investors received preferential treatment and greater freedom to operate. The Chinese state also invested heavily in infrastructure.

It was not laissez-faire. The state first built the roads, power, communications, and industrial infrastructure that made the experiment possible. Then it changed the rules so that investors and entrepreneurs could use that environment differently from the rest of China.

And then something happened that was more powerful than an ideological argument.

It worked.

Factories arrived. Jobs were created. Exports grew. Shenzhen began to change at astonishing speed.

During 1980–84 Shenzhen’s GDP grew at roughly 58% a year, compared with about 10% for China as a whole. In just four years, Shenzhen’s economy grew roughly sixfold.

The experiment had become evidence.

And evidence made it easier to expand the experiment.

The harder problem: the state itself

Agriculture was relatively easy compared with industry.

State enterprises were different. They were the backbone of the planned economy and employed millions of people. The state decided what they produced, supplied many of the inputs, and often absorbed their losses.

Deng did not try to privatise them overnight.

He began by changing the relationship between the enterprise and the state.

Managers were given greater autonomy. Enterprises could retain some profits and take greater responsibility for their performance. Over time, they were increasingly expected to live with the consequences of poor decisions rather than automatically relying on the state.

The question for a manager was gradually changing from:

“What does the plan require me to produce?”

to:

“What can my enterprise produce that somebody will buy?”

The transformation was slow and painful.

The aim was not to abolish the state sector.

It was to make state enterprises behave more like enterprises.

And then came the bureaucracy

This may have been Deng’s hardest task of all.

Imagine an official who had spent twenty or thirty years under Mao. His career had taught him to follow the plan, respect hierarchy, avoid deviation and, above all, avoid political mistakes.

Now he was being told:

Experiment. Take initiative. Attract investment. Produce results.

A speech telling him to change his mindset would accomplish very little.

Deng changed the environment in which officials operated.

Local governments were given greater discretion. Economic performance became increasingly important in evaluating officials. Younger and more technically trained cadres gradually replaced some of the older revolutionary generation. Local officials also acquired stronger financial and career incentives to promote growth.

The message was powerful:

If your province or city prospers, you prosper.

Deng did not need every official to become a believer in markets.

He changed the incentives under which the official operated.

Behaviour could change before the mindset did.

But it was never easy

This is where the familiar Indian explanation—that China could reform because it was authoritarian—really breaks down.

Deng had enormous political power.

But he did not have an uncontested path.

There were conservative elements within the Party who feared that markets would undermine socialism. There were officials whose careers and privileges were tied to the old system. There were repeated arguments over how far reform should go.

The 1980s were not a smooth march towards capitalism.

Reform moved forward, slowed, retreated and moved forward again.

He did not simply say:

I am the leader. Do it.

He often created a limited space in which something different could be tried.

If it worked, he had evidence with which to confront opponents.

If it failed, it could be modified or abandoned.

He did not always win the argument before starting the experiment. He allowed the experiment to produce an argument of its own.

Tiananmen and the great setback

Then came 1989.

The Tiananmen crackdown profoundly changed China’s political environment. Reformers were pushed aside, conservatives gained ground and economic reform slowed sharply.

For Deng, the reform project he had spent more than a decade building was suddenly in danger.

Then, in December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.

For China’s Communist leadership, this was an existential warning.

Had economic and political reform together destroyed the Soviet system?

Was China heading in the same direction?

Deng drew a different conclusion.

China could embrace markets, foreign investment and global trade while retaining Communist Party rule.

Economic reform did not have to mean political pluralism.

That distinction became fundamental to the Chinese model.

But there was a problem.

Deng himself was no longer formally in charge.

The 87-year-old who went south

In November 1989, Deng resigned as chairman of the Central Military Commission, his last major formal position.

By early 1992, reform was losing momentum.

Deng was 87.

So he went south.

He travelled through Wuhan, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Guangzhou and Shanghai, visiting places where reform had already produced visible results.

On the surface, it could have been an old man’s tour of the country.

It was nothing of the sort.

It was a political campaign.

Deng praised the achievements of the Special Economic Zones and argued that China should not be afraid of markets.

His message was simple:

Don’t stop now.

The extraordinary part was that he had no formal position from which to issue orders.

He had something more powerful:

the evidence of what his experiments had achieved.

Deng’s Southern Tour helped revive the reform-and-opening agenda, and later in 1992 the Communist Party formally adopted the concept of a “socialist market economy.”

Deng had reclaimed the reform process without reclaiming formal office.

That may be the most revealing episode of his career.

Buying time to build

There was another part of Deng’s strategy that is easy to overlook.

China was still weak. It needed capital, technology, skills and markets.

It also needed time.

Deng therefore pursued a pragmatic foreign policy, opening relations with the United States and the wider world while avoiding unnecessary confrontation.

The calculation was straightforward:

Open the door. Learn. Acquire technology. Build. Become stronger.

Foreign policy was therefore part of the environment in which economic reform could continue.

From experiment to transformation

This is why I think it is misleading to say that Deng simply “opened China” in 1978.

1978 was the beginning.

The transformation took a generation.

The 1980s were largely a period of experimentation. The 1990s brought a much more comprehensive expansion of market institutions and global integration.

Manufacturing expanded dramatically. Foreign investment grew. Infrastructure was transformed. Millions moved from agriculture into industry and services.

Not every reform worked.

Some produced new problems. Some were reversed. Others were modified.

What was remarkable was the learning process.

China kept discovering what worked.

And gradually, the economy moved away from a system in which the state tried to determine almost everything towards one in which incentives, competition and initiative increasingly shaped economic behaviour.

There was a price

None of this makes Deng a hero without qualifications.

The transformation produced enormous inequality.

It created new opportunities for corruption. Local officials gained control over land, investment and development decisions. The same incentives that encouraged growth could also encourage patronage and rent-seeking.

And China remained authoritarian.

Tiananmen demonstrated the limits of political freedom.

But authoritarianism alone cannot explain what happened.

The political system gave Deng the power to experiment. What mattered was how he used it.

The measure of the transformation

There is one statistic that captures the magnitude of change. In 1990, India’s GDP per capita was $371 whereas China’s was 318.5. In 2025, India’s GDP per capita became $2702.5 while China’s shot up to $13,862.

In 1990, India’s GDP per capita was actually higher than China’s.

By 2025, China’s was more than five times India’s.

The numbers do not explain the divergence.

But they tell us how extraordinary it has been.

What Deng changed

I began by thinking that China’s rise was largely a consequence of its political system.

I now think the more interesting story is Deng’s method.

He did not begin with a blueprint.

He experimented. He watched what happened. He kept what worked, changed what did not, and used successful experiments to make the next reform possible.

He did not first try to change China’s mindset.

He changed the environment in which people made decisions.

And over time, behaviour changed.

Then expectations changed.

Then institutions changed.

Perhaps that is Deng Xiaoping’s most enduring lesson:

Sometimes you do not change a system by telling people to think differently. You change the conditions under which they think and act.

And then let reality do the rest.

For me to reflect about Indira Gandhi is like reliving my youth years. She died when I was twenty nine years old. I have lived through the Indira Gandhi years not only as a student of Indian politics in JNU but as someone who watched Indian politics closely. However, I was introduced to Indira Gandhi through her father.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by Jawaharlal Nehru. I had read much of his writings and was particularly drawn to his views on religion. Here was a man leading a country deeply steeped in religion, ritual and superstition, yet willing to question religion itself. He spoke of scientific temper, kept religion out of his political thinking and called himself an agnostic.

For a young Indian, this was remarkable. Even today, it is difficult to imagine an Indian political leader of comparable stature speaking so openly in this way.

So I had an expectation about his daughter.

Surely a woman who had grown up with Nehru, been exposed to his books and ideas and spent much of her life in the company of one of India’s most remarkable minds must herself have been intellectually formidable.

Yet that was not how much of the political establishment saw her.

For years, Indira was largely viewed as Nehru’s daughter. She was his hostess, companion and political associate. She travelled with him, received visitors and lived in the middle of the political world. People around Nehru knew her well enough to become familiar with her.

They had spent years seeing Indira Gandhi beside Nehru and assumed they therefore knew Indira Gandhi. They knew her position. They did not know her mind.

There were signs of an independent mind much earlier.

She chose Feroze Gandhi as her husband despite her father’s reservations. The marriage did not work. They eventually lived separately. Whatever else one may say about the marriage, Indira made her own decision and lived with its consequences.

She also showed political independence before becoming Prime Minister.

As Congress President in 1959, she led the charge against the Communist government of E. M. S. Namboodiripad in Kerala and got it dismissed. This demonstrated that she was capable of taking a political position of her own.

When Lal Bahadur Shastri died in Tashkent in January 1966, the powerful Congress leaders known as the Syndicate believed that Indira was someone they could manage. She had the Nehru name, national recognition and little independent political machinery.

Her opponents began calling her Gungi Gudiya, the “dumb doll”. They saw a woman who could be guided by the men around her.

They did not yet understand that she had spent much of her life learning to make her own decisions.

The decisive moment arrived in 1969.

The Congress leadership wanted Neelam Sanjiva Reddy to become President of India. Indira Gandhi supported V. V. Giri instead. She did not merely disagree with the party leadership; she asked Congress legislators to vote according to their conscience.

Giri won.

The Congress split.

The Syndicate had been defeated by the woman it had assumed it could control.

This was a turning point.

Indira Gandhi had taken a huge political risk and trusted her own judgment against a group of experienced politicians. She had won.

Then came 1971.

The Congress won a massive electoral victory. India went to war with Pakistan and Bangladesh was born. In 1974 came Pokhran, India’s first nuclear test. Bank nationalisation and the abolition of privy purses had already demonstrated her willingness to take on powerful interests.

These were very different decisions, and not all deserve the same verdict. But politically they had a common effect.

She kept being proved right.

That matters in understanding a leader.

If you take a difficult decision and fail, you become cautious. If you take one and succeed, you become confident. If you take several difficult decisions and succeed repeatedly, you may begin to believe that your instincts are unusually reliable.

By the mid-1970s, Indira Gandhi had accumulated a remarkable record of political success.

She had defeated the people who had thought they could control her.

She had won elections.

She had won a war.

She had strengthened India’s strategic position.

She had survived political challenges that would have ended many political careers.

Perhaps the most important change was not what others thought of her.

It was what she began to think of herself.

The problem of trust

There was another side to Indira Gandhi that was less visible.

She was a private and, by many accounts, lonely person. Her father was frequently away or in prison. Her mother was seriously ill for much of her childhood and died when Indira was eighteen. Her marriage failed. Political friendships could turn into political rivalries.

Over time, she seems to have developed an unusual combination: great confidence in herself and limited trust in others.

That is a potentially dangerous combination in politics.

A leader who trusts colleagues and institutions can be corrected when wrong.

A leader who trusts herself but increasingly distrusts those around her has fewer sources of correction.

Her circle became smaller.

Pupul Jayakar was one of the few people who could enter her private world. Her interest in Jiddu Krishnamurti suggests another side of her personality—a woman looking for quiet and perhaps some distance from the pressures of power.

Her sons became increasingly important to her.

Sanjay, unlike Rajiv, was drawn to politics. He was forceful, impatient and willing to act. During the Emergency, he acquired enormous influence despite holding no constitutional office. Indira Gandhi protected him even when his actions became deeply controversial.

Rajiv was different. He had chosen a quiet life as a commercial pilot and had shown little interest in politics. Yet after Sanjay’s death, he was drawn into public life.

This tells us something about Indira Gandhi’s political world.

Trust was becoming increasingly personal.

The Congress had once been a party of powerful leaders with their own political bases. Under Indira Gandhi, that changed. Chief Ministers increasingly depended on the central leadership. Party positions became more closely tied to personal loyalty. The organisation gradually became less autonomous.

The political system was becoming more dependent on one person.

And this was not simply a question of party organisation.

It affected the wider culture of government.

Power and its habits

Corruption had existed long before Indira Gandhi. It would be wrong to pretend otherwise.

But during her years in power, corruption became increasingly linked to political finance, patronage and the relationship between government and business.

Indira Gandhi famously described corruption as a global phenomenon.

The statement does not prove that she encouraged corruption. But it is revealing because it suggests a change in attitude. If corruption is simply a universal fact of life, then the political temptation is to manage it rather than fight it.

That attitude can be more damaging than one corrupt transaction.

Institutions do not always collapse dramatically. Sometimes they are weakened by the gradual acceptance of things that were once considered unacceptable.

The same was happening inside politics.

Personal loyalty began to matter more.

Central control became stronger.

Internal party democracy weakened.

The Prime Minister’s authority increasingly overshadowed the authority of the party.

The seeds of dynastic politics were also being planted.

None of this was created entirely by Indira Gandhi. Indian politics had always contained patronage and powerful personalities. But she greatly strengthened the model in which political authority flowed from the top.

In 1975, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked her about the difference between herself and her father. Indira Gandhi’s answer was revealing: “My father was a statesman, I am a political woman. My father was a saint. I am not.”

By then, she had certainly proved that she was a political woman. She had survived the Syndicate, split the Congress, won a decisive election, won a war and returned from every challenge stronger than before.

But the distinction she drew between herself and Nehru went deeper than political style. Nehru had believed in ideas and institutions, sometimes more than in the messy compromises of politics. Indira was increasingly comfortable with power itself—with using it, concentrating it and protecting it.

Within months, that distinction would be tested in the most consequential way.

The Emergency

The Emergency is where the story becomes much harder.

The usual account is familiar.

Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency. Civil liberties were curtailed. Opposition leaders were imprisoned. The press was censored. Elections were postponed. In 1977, the people threw her out.

All of that is true.

But it does not fully explain what happened.

The political crisis preceding the Emergency was real. Student protests had spread in Gujarat and Bihar. Strikes and political unrest were growing. Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement had begun to attract enormous support and called for Total Revolution. At one point, Narayan appealed to the police and armed forces to resist orders they considered unjust.

For a government, that was not an ordinary opposition movement.

At the same time, the Allahabad High Court had found Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice and set aside her election (on what she felt was a trivial issue), subject to appeal.

For someone who had spent her entire political life believing that she had served the country, this must have been a deeply threatening moment.

The woman who had survived political battles with the Syndicate was suddenly facing challenges from the streets, from political opponents and from the courts.

It is not difficult to imagine that she felt betrayed.

She may have thought: I have given my life to this country. I have taken decisions that others were afraid to take. I have defended India’s interests. And this is what I am getting in return.

We cannot know exactly what went through her mind.

But it is possible that she saw something larger than a threat to her own position.

Perhaps she genuinely believed that India was drifting towards chaos and that only strong action could stop it.

That does not excuse the Emergency.

But it may explain why she was willing to take such an extreme step.

And this is where her personality becomes inseparable from the political crisis.

A leader who has repeatedly been proved right can become convinced that her judgment is not merely one view among many, but the view most likely to save the country.

The Emergency was declared.

What followed cannot be defended simply as necessary discipline.

Political opponents were jailed. The press was censored. Civil liberties were curtailed. The constitutional balance was altered. Sanjay Gandhi acquired extraordinary power without constitutional responsibility.

There were also genuine administrative improvements. Government offices became more disciplined. Strikes fell. Some programmes moved faster. The 20-point programme produced results in some areas.

This is uncomfortable to acknowledge, but history becomes less useful when we remove facts that do not fit our preferred interpretation.

The more important question is what those improvements tell us.

Does democracy slow development?

A poor country trying to transform itself quickly needs a capable state.

It needs to build roads, schools and power systems. It needs to collect taxes, maintain law and order, direct investment and implement policy. It needs continuity. It needs a bureaucracy capable of doing more than issuing orders and maintaining files.

Democracy by itself does not create any of these things.

History also gives us examples of countries that developed very rapidly while political freedoms were restricted. South Korea and Taiwan industrialised under authoritarian governments. Singapore built an exceptionally capable state while maintaining tight political controls.

The lesson is not that dictatorship produces development. It clearly does not.

The lesson is simpler:

A country can develop rapidly without first becoming a liberal democracy. What it cannot do without is state capacity.

And this is where the distinction between a strong state and a strong leader becomes important.

A strong state is built on institutions.

A strong leader can sometimes bypass institutions.

The first can survive the leader.

The second depends on the leader.

India chose democracy from the beginning, when it was poor, largely illiterate and institutionally weak. That was a remarkable choice. But we did not always build the state capacity needed to make democracy deliver consistently.

Indira Gandhi seems to have understood the weakness of the state.

Her answer was to make the state stronger.

But the Emergency showed the danger of making the leader stronger instead.

The socialist India we believed in

The Emergency also coincided with a further move to the political left.

The Communist Party of India supported the Emergency. In 1976, the 42nd Amendment inserted “socialist” and “secular” into the Preamble and made much wider changes to the Constitution.

The economy also remained firmly under state control.

Bank nationalisation had already expanded the role of government. The licence-permit system remained deeply entrenched. Private enterprise needed permission for much of what it wanted to do. Investment, imports and industrial capacity were heavily regulated.

I was at JNU during those years.

And I remember how we rejoiced.

Our minds had been shaped by socialism. To us, more state control seemed like progress. We saw the state as the instrument through which inequality could be reduced and development accelerated.

We did not yet see the other side.

The same system gave the state enormous power over economic decisions. It also created inefficiency, rent-seeking and a culture in which getting permission could matter as much as producing something.

The opening up of the Indian economy did not happen under Indira Gandhi.

It came much later, after the system had run into a crisis of its own.

Looking back, I find my own reaction at JNU useful. I was part of the prevailing intellectual climate. I was not standing outside it with the benefit of hindsight.

Perhaps that is why I find the period so interesting.

What actually defeated Indira Gandhi?

This is where I think the standard story becomes too neat.

The Emergency certainly curtailed freedom. That cannot be disputed.

But did people vote against it primarily because they had suddenly become defenders of liberal democracy?

Perhaps not.

The electoral geography is revealing.

In 1977, Congress was devastated across much of North India but performed much better in the South.

One reason may have been the very different experience of the Emergency in different parts of the country.

The family-planning campaign became particularly coercive in North India. Sterilisation targets were pushed ruthlessly. For people who experienced that coercion directly, the Emergency was not an argument about constitutional rights. It was something that had entered their homes and bodies.

That may have mattered more than abstract concern about civil liberties.

Indira Gandhi herself called the election.

She did not have to do so.

If she believed that the people had completely rejected her, why take the risk?

Perhaps she genuinely believed that the country had benefited from the discipline of the Emergency and that voters would recognise it.

Perhaps she believed that the excesses had been contained.

Perhaps she had become too confident in her own reading of the country.

We do not know.

What we do know is that she lost badly in the North.

And three years later, the same electorate brought her back.

The Janata experiment had collapsed into quarrelling and political instability. The alternative had failed to live up to its promise.

So what was the electorate saying in 1980?

Perhaps it was saying something very simple:

We tried the alternative. It did not work. Bring her back.

This does not mean that Indians were asking for another Emergency. It would be absurd to claim that.

But it does make one thing clear.

The relationship between the Indian electorate and Indira Gandhi cannot be reduced to a simple story of people who loved her and then rejected dictatorship.

They admired her strength.

They resented her excesses.

They punished her.

Then they reconsidered.

That is much more interesting than the usual story.

The woman I met

I eventually met Indira Gandhi myself.

It was around 1981, after I had won a national essay competition on Nehru and India. The prize included an opportunity to meet the Prime Minister.

There was something almost circular about the encounter.

I had first come to Indira Gandhi through Nehru. Now I was meeting his daughter because I had written about him.

I had expected to encounter the formidable political personality I had watched from a distance.

Instead, she seemed surprisingly ordinary.

She was courteous and gracious. She spoke informally and spent time with us.

I remember the encounter because it made the public Indira Gandhi and the private woman seem almost like two different people.

But perhaps that is true of many political leaders.

Power creates a personality around the person who holds it.

The public sees the power and assumes that it explains the person.

It may not.

Perhaps power tells us less about who a person was than about what happens when that person acquires the freedom to act.

The second coming

Indira Gandhi returned to power in January 1980. The electorate had rejected her three years earlier, but the Janata experiment had collapsed, and she was back.

Her second term is sometimes treated almost as an epilogue to the larger Indira Gandhi story. It should not be.

She returned with much of the political system she had built before the Emergency still intact. The Congress remained centralised, personal loyalty remained important and the family was again at the centre of political life. After Sanjay’s death, Rajiv was brought into politics, reluctantly at first, and the succession of political leadership within the family began to look less like an accident and more like a pattern.

The final years were also marked by the increasingly violent crisis in Punjab. Operation Blue Star in June 1984, when the army entered the Golden Temple complex to remove armed militants, remains one of the most controversial decisions of her career. It was followed, four months later, by her assassination by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

Her death gave her life an almost mythic ending.

But it is worth resisting that temptation.

She had returned to power after the Emergency and demonstrated once again her extraordinary political resilience. Yet the questions raised by her first tenure had not disappeared. If anything, the events of her final years showed how difficult it had become for her government to separate the authority of the state from the authority of the leader.

What remains

Indira Gandhi’s legacy is therefore difficult to put into a single box.

She strengthened India’s strategic confidence.

She helped create Bangladesh.

She took decisions that changed the relationship between the state and powerful economic interests.

She showed that India could act independently in a difficult international environment.

She also weakened the internal democracy of her own party.

She centralised power.

She made political loyalty increasingly personal.

She helped normalise dynastic politics.

She presided over a period in which corruption became more deeply embedded in political life.

And she demonstrated how quickly democratic safeguards could be weakened when political power became concentrated in one person.

These things are not all the work of one woman. Indian politics had its own history of patronage, centralisation and corruption.

But under Indira Gandhi, they acquired a new scale and a new political logic.

And perhaps this brings us back to the question with which I began.

What did I expect to find when I first thought about Nehru’s daughter?

An intellectually accomplished woman shaped by an extraordinary father.

I did find that.

But I found something else as well.

I found a woman who had learned very early to make her own decisions.

A woman who was repeatedly underestimated.

A woman who discovered, through the experience of 1969 and the years that followed, that her judgment could defeat people far more powerful than she was.

A woman who became enormously resilient because she had learned not to depend easily on others.

And eventually, a woman who had accumulated so much confidence in her own judgment that the institutions meant to question her could begin to look like obstacles rather than safeguards.

Perhaps that is the real paradox of Indira Gandhi.

The quality that helped her become independent also made her increasingly unwilling to be constrained.

The courage that enabled her to take difficult decisions also made it easier to dismiss opposition.

The confidence that helped her overcome the men who underestimated her eventually made it harder for her to imagine that she might be wrong.

This is not to say that she was destined to become authoritarian.

Nor is it to say that every achievement contained the seed of its opposite.

It is simply to recognise something uncomfortable about power.

Success can be a dangerous teacher.

If a leader is repeatedly rewarded for trusting her own judgment, she may eventually stop asking whether someone else sees something she has missed.

That is why institutions matter.

Not because leaders are necessarily foolish or corrupt.

But because even exceptional leaders are capable of being wrong.

They need people who can tell them so.

They need courts that can stop them.

They need a press that can question them.

They need parties that can disagree with them.

And they need elections that can remove them.

Indira Gandhi understood the power of the state exceptionally well.

What she may have underestimated was the value of being restrained by something more durable than her own judgment.

That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of her life.

Not whether she was a hero or an authoritarian.

Not whether the Emergency was wholly good or wholly bad.

But what happens when an exceptionally capable person becomes exceptionally powerful—and begins to believe that the country’s future depends on her being right.

That is the question that makes Indira Gandhi worth remembering.

And worth questioning.

After the bustle of Budapest and the quiet elegance of Bratislava, we arrived in Altmünster on a pleasant summer afternoon.

Why Altmünster?

Some years ago, while visiting Switzerland, we made what seemed like a small decision. Instead of staying in the bustling resort town of Interlaken, we chose the tiny village of Iseltwald on the shores of Lake Brienz. We discovered that staying in a quiet village often reveals more about a country than staying in its most famous tourist centres.

That memory influenced us when we planned our Austrian holiday. Instead of choosing one of the famous tourist centres, we chose Altmünster.

Our family-run hotel stood on a gentle slope overlooking the lake. We had expected to be on the waterfront, but instead found ourselves a short distance away and on an incline that would make walking difficult for both of us. However, the hotel was nice and cosy. The balcony in our room looked across Lake Traunsee towards the Austrian Alps. A cool breeze drifted in throughout the afternoon. We unpacked, made ourselves tea and watched the changing light over the lake and began turning a hotel room into our home for the next six nights.

The first evening was spent doing something every traveller recognises—figuring things out. The hotel served only breakfast. There were no app-based taxis. Local taxis were expensive. We needed to work out how to reach the railway station every morning and, more importantly, how to get back every evening. We had chosen a quieter life. Now we had to learn how to live it.

The following morning introduced us to Christian, the hotel manager.

He quickly became much more than someone managing a reception desk. When he learnt that the railway station at Altmünster was closed for repairs, he immediately reorganised our plans, explained how buses had replaced trains on part of the route, and offered to drive us to Gmunden station himself for a modest charge. Over the next few days, he would quietly look after us in countless small ways, often dropping us at the station or the lake before beginning his own work. His kindness set the tone for our entire stay.

Breakfast soon became another daily ritual.

Alongside fresh breads, cheeses, fruit and homemade specialities were generous bowls of fresh blueberries and delicate quail eggs—something we had never before been served at breakfast. It wasn’t an elaborate buffet. It was simply thoughtful, personal and prepared with care.

Every morning began in almost the same way. We woke early, sat on the balcony with black tea and a handful of almonds, watched the lake slowly come to life and then headed downstairs for breakfast before setting out to explore another corner of the Salzkammergut.

Our first destination was Salzburg.

The journey itself reminded us that travel rarely goes exactly as planned. A delayed replacement bus meant we missed our connecting train and reached Salzburg later than expected. Then, just as we entered the Old Town, the skies opened.

For twenty minutes, the city seemed to vanish.

Restaurant staff quickly turned their chairs upside down, diners disappeared indoors and the elegant squares emptied almost completely.

Then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped.

Within minutes, the chairs were back, waiters resumed serving coffee, street musicians returned to their favourite corners and artists reopened their easels. It was remarkable how effortlessly the city came back to life.

On the bus from the railway station we met an Austrian lady who asked where we were from. When we replied, “India,” she smiled and said she had trekked in Nainital many years earlier. She still remembered the magnificent Himalayan views. Thousands of kilometres from home, we found ourselves talking about a place where we spend part of every summer. Travel has a wonderful way of making the world feel unexpectedly small.

We lingered over coffee and cake at Café Tomaselli, wandered through the familiar streets, admired Mozart’s city once again and realised that we were enjoying Salzburg even more than during our first visit. This time there was no pressure to see everything. We were simply happy to be there.

Back in Altmünster, another surprise awaited us.

Christian was busy that evening and suggested we call a local taxi driver named Baci.

The moment he discovered we were from India, he broke into a broad smile.

“Raj Kapoor!” he exclaimed before reaching for his music system. Within seconds, old Hindi songs filled the car as we drove through the Austrian countryside. It was one of those improbable moments that travel occasionally gifts us. Long before we arrived in Austria, Hindi cinema had already made the journey.

Our days settled into a comfortable rhythm.

Some took us to Hallstatt, deservedly regarded as one of Europe’s most beautiful villages. It was crowded, but astonishingly well managed. We smiled on hearing Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi and Hindi echoing through its narrow streets. Others took us to St. Wolfgang, where flower-filled balconies, colourful houses, the lakeside promenade and the famous church created the relaxed charm of a classic Austrian village. We lingered over coffee, watched boats glide across the lake and enjoyed doing very little.

On our return from Hallstatt, we boarded a bus at Bad Ischl. As we approached our stop, the driver walked over and asked in Hindi, “Where exactly would you like to get down?” Both Neeta and I looked at each other in surprise. We later learnt that he was from Afganistan and had always felt close to Indians. When we offered to pay our fare, he smiled and refused. it was a small act of kindness that stayed with us long after the journey had ended.

One of the most enjoyable days was spent cruising on Lake Traunsee.

The boat stopped at little lakeside villages where passengers could hop off and catch a later service. We chose to get off at one of them, wandered through its quiet streets, enjoyed coffee at a local café and chatted with couples from Germany and Britain who were exploring the region just as leisurely as we were.

A little later I noticed a helicopter hovering almost motionless above the forest. Curious, I watched it carefully and realised it was lifting timber from the mountainside. Someone explained that using helicopters was often less damaging than building roads through difficult terrain. It was a typically Austrian solution—efficient, practical and respectful of the landscape.

As the boat moved across the lake, our attention was drawn to a curious stone lion on the hillside. The crew narrated the local legend of the sculptor who had never seen a real lion but confidently declared that the one he carved was even better than the original. Folklore, we discovered, survives remarkably well in Austria.

Travelling through the region also answered two questions that had intrigued me. I discovered that “Bad”, which appears in towns such as Bad Ischl and Bad Goisern, simply means a spa or health resort - a reminder of Austria’s long tradition of thermal springs and wellness tourism. I also realised that German is not merely Germany’s language. Austrian German has evolved over centuries, shaped by the country’s own history and the Habsburg Empire.

The journey also became richer because of the people we met.

We met a family from Kozhikode (Calicut), while enjoying gelato in a shop in Hallstatt and had a great conversation about Kozhikode in Kerala, its famous biryani and our forthcoming Ayurveda treatment in Kotakal. It was wonderful to meet an Indian family from a place we ourselves were about to visit a month later. On another bus journey to St. Wolfgang, we met a young researcher Neeta Bisht from Nashik pursuing a PhD in chemistry in Germany. Her excitement about research, life in Europe and future possibilities reflected the confidence of a new generation of young Indians making their mark across the world.

Some of our happiest memories, however, came from Altmünster itself.

One evening we discovered a modest lakeside restaurant that served only one dish - fresh char from Lake Traunsee. The restaurant was so popular that advance reservations were required to find a place. For the first time, we had the whole fish with bones rather than the fillets we usually preferred and enjoyed it with a glass of local Austrian wine. It was so memorable that we returned a second time. Michael, our young waiter, told us he had begun picking up a few Hindi words from the growing number of Indian visitors.

Another evening we wandered into a local summer festival. Music filled the square, children played happily while parents chatted with neighbours, and visitors blended effortlessly into the celebrations. We understood almost none of the language, yet never felt like outsiders.

Every evening ended in much the same way.

We returned to our balcony overlooking the lake. Sometimes with tea, sometimes with coffee and occasionally with a small peg of single malt, we reflected on the day’s experiences while daylight lingered until almost nine. It was there that I began writing the travel notes that many of you have been reading over the past few weeks.

Looking back, Hallstatt, Salzburg and the other lakes were the destinations we had planned. Altmünster was the discovery we had not.

It reminded us that choosing where to stay can be as important as choosing where to travel. The famous destinations gave us wonderful days, but this quiet village by Lake Traunsee gave us something far rarer. For six unforgettable nights, it did not feel like a hotel. It felt like home.

Of all the places we visited during our recent journey through Central Europe, our three nights in Bratislava remain among the most enjoyable. Perhaps that is because Bratislava isn’t a city that demands an itinerary. It simply invites you to arrive.

About 200 kilometres separate Budapest and Bratislava, a journey of barely two hours on an excellent motorway. It cuts through the beautiful Hungarian countryside, smooth enough that I barely noticed the passing kilometres. Long lines of trucks shared the road, yet the traffic never seemed to slow. The drive was smooth, fast and remarkably calm. What was remarkable was how they created a temporary lane for incoming traffic on the other side to ease traffic flow.

Our driver, Michel, was an affable Ukrainian with whom we quickly struck a great conversation. He had trained as an electrical engineer, but the Russian invasion had changed the course of his life. His father persuaded him to leave while he still could. He arrived in Slovakia as a refugee and is now a citizen. His wife, a Russian, joined him later after a much longer wait for residency. He was barely twenty-five and had been married for six years. I asked him, ‘Isn’t that too young’? He said, ‘It was not unusual in Ukraine. People marry early.’

What struck me wasn’t the hardship he described but the absence of bitterness. He spoke instead about the future. In just two years he had saved enough to buy the seven-seater Mercedes he was driving and had started his own business. His mother still visits from Ukraine whenever she can, though his father cannot leave because of wartime restrictions.

As we talked, Michel quietly looked after us in ways that never felt forced. Before we even asked, he offered us access to his mobile charger and even local Wi-Fi. At the hotel he insisted on carrying our luggage inside. He was unfailingly thoughtful and courteous throughout the journey, making it a pleasure from beginning to end. It was hard to imagine a better welcome to Slovakia.

The hotel stood opposite the Presidential Palace, just a short walk from the Old Town. We dropped our bags, resisted the temptation to rest, and headed out with no particular plan. It turned out to be the best decision we made.

Within minutes we were surrounded by cafés, restaurants, small shops, musicians and people strolling without any obvious destination. Everything seemed to be within comfortable walking distance. Fancy a coffee? There was a café around the corner. Craving a gelato? We hardly had to look. A street musician would appear unexpectedly, followed by an art gallery, a quiet square or another inviting restaurant.

A City That Lets You Wander

The Old Town is compact enough to explore without a map. Narrow cobbled streets suddenly open into lively squares, only to narrow again into quiet lanes lined with old buildings. Unlike many historic centres that feel preserved for tourists, this one still seemed to belong to the people who lived there. Office workers stopped for coffee, children ran and played in the squares, elderly couples sat on benches watching the world go by, while visitors like us simply blended into the rhythm of the city.

There was music almost everywhere. A violinist played near one square. A jazz trio entertained diners outside a café. Somewhere else, a young singer had gathered a small audience that applauded warmly at the end of every song. None of it felt organised for a festival. It simply seemed to be part of everyday life.

Over the next two days we ate wherever we happened to be. Slovak food one meal, Italian the next, followed by coffee and cake in a café that looked inviting. We never checked ratings or searched online. In Bratislava, choosing where to eat seemed almost effortless.

We soon noticed something unusual under our feet. Set into the pavements at regular intervals were small brass crowns. At first, we assumed they were decorative. Only later did we discover that they marked the route taken by Hungarian kings and queens after their coronation. When the Ottoman Empire captured Buda, now part of Budapest, the coronations moved to Bratislava, then known as Pressburg, making it the ceremonial capital of the Hungarian kingdom for nearly three centuries. History wasn’t confined to museums; it quietly accompanied you under your feet.

One of my most unexpected discoveries was a small plaque commemorating Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to Bratislava in August 1938. Seeing his name—and that of his young daughter, Indira—on a quiet Slovak street stopped me in my tracks.

Curious, I looked up the story later. Nehru had come to express solidarity with democratic Czechoslovakia just weeks before the Munich Crisis, when Hitler was threatening to dismantle the country. During the same European journey, he wrote that Europe was “a volcano on the point of bursting.” Within a year, the Second World War had begun.

For me, the discovery felt unexpectedly personal. I had grown up reading Nehru’s writings and finding his name here, far from India, was a reminder that history often connects places we never imagine are linked.

Bratislava also has a refreshing sense of humour. The most famous statue is Čumil, the cheerful worker peeping out from a manhole, apparently content to watch the world go by. Another, Schöner Náci, tips his hat politely to everyone who walks past. Visitors line up patiently to have their photographs taken with them.

Many places celebrate military heroes and political leaders. Bratislava seems equally happy celebrating ordinary characters who simply make people smile.

By late afternoon we had lost all sense of time. What we enjoyed most, however, was doing almost nothing at all—finding a bench in a square and simply watching life unfold around us.

When Less Becomes More

One afternoon we decided to take the little tourist train that winds its way up to Bratislava Castle. We could have walked, but the train looked too cheerful to resist.

The castle occupies the highest point in the city. From there Bratislava spread out below us—the red roofs of the Old Town, the broad Danube, modern neighbourhoods and, beyond them, the countryside stretching towards Austria and Hungary. Few European capitals sit so close to two international borders.

The castle itself is elegant rather than overwhelming. Rebuilt more than once after wars and fires, it stands today as one of the city’s best-known landmarks. Located on the grounds of the castle, stands an impressive monument to Saints Cyril, Methodist, and Gorazd. They are three of the most important personalities in the Slovak and Slavic history. They symbolise the arrival of Christianity in Great Moravia in 863 AD, the beginning of Slavic literacy and education and the recognition of Slavic language in worship, at a time when most of Europe allowed only Latin, Greek, or Hebrew in church services. July 5 is a national holiday in Slovakia as the feast of the Saints.

Looking down from above, the city confirmed what we had already experienced on foot. It was compact, unhurried and remarkably easy to live in.

Back in the Old Town, the rhythm changed almost imperceptibly.

During the day, many visitors had arrived from Vienna or Budapest on day trips. By evening they began to disappear. The streets grew quieter. The city seemed to belong once again to the people who lived there.

One thing we couldn’t help noticing, though, was the number of people smoking. Cigarettes seemed almost as common as coffee cups. It was one of the few reminders that, like every city, Bratislava has its own contradictions.

Another small curiosity was the paid public toilets. These were located in the basement of restaurants with several stairs down without an escalator. It was always a challenge especially at our age.

On our last evening we found ourselves doing what we had done since arriving. We walked without a destination. We stopped for coffee, watched people pass by, listened to another street musician and sat quietly in one of the squares.

It struck me then that Bratislava had given us something increasingly rare: the freedom not to think about logistics.

Perhaps that is why we enjoyed it so much.

Cities often compete by becoming bigger, taller or busier. Bratislava seems content to do something else. It offers convenience without chaos, history without grandeur, and enough life to keep you interested without ever making you feel overwhelmed.

As we left for the next stop on our journey, I realised that we hadn’t fallen in love with a monument or a museum.

We had fallen in love with the effortless rhythm of the place - a small town with the confidence of a national capital and extremely rich history.

The iconic Váci Street of Budapest

This was our second visit to Budapest. The first time, we had covered city’s celebrated landmarks including the night cruise. This time, we wanted something different. We wanted to experience Budapest as its residents did - not by ticking off monuments but by living the city for a few days. 

The blue sky, fresh air and gentle breeze lifted our spirits instantly. Stepping out of the terminal, we found the Uber stand right outside. The process could not have been simpler. We booked the ride on the app, received an OTP and were directed to the first available taxi. The driver checked the code, loaded our luggage and we were on our way within minutes.

As we drove towards our hotel near Astoria, I found myself looking out of the window instead of anxiously watching the traffic, something I instinctively do back home. The roads were spotless, traffic flowed calmly and, perhaps most strikingly, there was no unnecessary honking. The city appeared orderly without feeling rigid. By the time we reached the hotel, we were already in holiday mode. 

Next morning, after breakfast, we visited the Budapest’s Central Market Hall, one place my wife especially wanted to revisit. Built in 1897, it is one of those markets where locals and tourists seem equally at home. We wandered through stalls selling embroidery, handicrafts, dolls, spices and souvenirs before sampling some local food for lunch.

What fascinated me most was not what was on sale but the building itself. It was an enormous iron structure with remarkably few supporting pillars. There was no air conditioning, yet it remained pleasantly cool as fresh air circulated naturally through the hall and sunlight filtered gently through the high windows. More than a century after it was built, it still seemed an example of thoughtful design.

Before leaving, I realised that I had overpaid one of the handicraft vendors by a fairly substantial amount. We returned to her stall and explained what we thought had happened. She had been an affable and engaging shopkeeper from the beginning, patiently showing us her products. She listened, checked the bill, recalculated everything herself and smiled. We were right. Without the slightest hesitation, she returned the excess money.

The incident said something about the person. There was no argument, no defensiveness, just quiet professionalism. We carried home a few Hungarian handicrafts, but also the memory of a genuinely pleasant shopkeeper.

In the afternoon, we wandered down the Váci Street, one of Budapest’s most vibrant pedestrian avenues. Cafés spilled onto the pavements, young couples lingered over drinks, families strolled unhurriedly and elderly people occupied outdoor tables comfortably. There was music, conversation and laughter everywhere, yet nothing felt noisy or chaotic. It was lively without being overwhelming.

We settled into Anna Café, ordered coffee and shared a slice of their famous chocolate cake. Being a diabetic, I tried to exercise some restraint, though not very successfully. The cake was every bit as good as people claimed. Sitting there, we watched the city enjoy a warm summer afternoon, slowing down enough to absorb its rhythm.

The following morning our friends from India joined us for breakfast. The four of us had planned to travel together through Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Romania. We walked to the tram stop and boarded one of Budapest’s iconic yellow trams simply to experience the city.

At the station came our first pleasant surprise. Senior citizens travel free on Budapest’s public transport. We spent the next hour riding along the Danube, watching the city glide past through the tram windows—the Parliament building, elegant bridges, cyclists, joggers and commuters quietly going about their day. We weren’t trying to reach any particular destination. We were simply enjoying the journey.

That evening we visited the New York Café, often described as the most beautiful cafés in the world. Fortunately, we arrived before the long queues had formed. Inside, it felt less like a café than an art gallery, with soaring ceilings, magnificent paintings and elaborate chandeliers. We ordered their signature cappuccino and, inevitably, another slice of cake.

During the walk, one of our friends mentioned a slight pain in her knee. None of us thought much of it. She insisted she was perfectly capable of walking.

By the time we returned to the hotel, everything had changed. She could barely stand. The next morning, after speaking with their doctor in India and weighing the options, our friends made the difficult decision to return home.

That evening, we visited one of Budapest’s famous ruin bars, created in buildings that once formed part of the old Jewish quarter. Today they are among the city’s liveliest meeting places. Young people, middle-aged couples and older patrons shared the same space as soft music drifted through the rooms and conversations flowed easily over drinks.

There we met Arturas, a young designer from Lithuania. He was excited to know that we were planning to visit Lithunia, and that we had actually heard about his country. He was keen that we visited Lithunia and shared some beautiful pictures of the beaches and towns. He was on a sabbatical and touring Eastern Europe without being even sure of his next destination. When he talked about searching for happiness, I found myself sharing my own experience of Vipassana meditation and how it had changed my understanding of the Buddha’s teachings. Before we parted, I later sent him an essay I had recently written on living with the Buddha. I do not know whether our conversation helped him, but I hope he finds what he is looking for.

The evening was not quite over. Before returning to the hotel, I boarded Tram 47 for one last ride to the Danube. I simply wanted to see Budapest at night.

The Parliament building, Buda Castle and the bridges glowed in golden light, their reflections shimmering across the river. River cruises moved silently through the darkness, tourists paused for photographs and couples sat quietly along the embankment. I stood there for a long time doing nothing more than watching the city.

One small detail continued to puzzle me. During our days in Budapest, I could scarcely remember seeing a policeman—not at the airport, not on the roads, not on the trams, not in the market and not outside the cafés. Yet everything seemed to function effortlessly. Traffic flowed calmly, people waited patiently, public transport ran with remarkable efficiency and public spaces remained orderly. It was difficult to reconcile this with my mental image of a country that had spent decades under communist rule with a powerful state apparatus. It became one of the questions that accompanied me as we travelled to Slovakia and later Romania. 

The following morning, we loaded our luggage into a taxi bound for Bratislava. Our driver introduced himself as Michel (or Mykhailo), a Ukrainian now living in Slovakia.

As Budapest quietly disappeared behind us and the motorway stretched ahead, I had no idea that another remarkable conversation—and another set of lessons—was about to begin.

Budapest had taught me far more than I had expected - not through its monuments, but through its everyday life. Michel’s story would remind me that the journey had only just begun.

This is the first essay in a series of reflections from my journey through Central Europe

When I shared with a few friends that I was planning to write an essay on Jinnah as part of my series,’Living with Ideas’, they shot back ‘Why Jinnah? What has he got to do with India’? Once I began reading him more closely, I realised that the real question was not why I was writing about Jinnah. It was why we had stopped asking about him. Like many Indians of my generation, I thought I already knew Jinnah’s story. He was the man who divided India. There seemed little reason to ask further questions.

Yet, after reading more of him, I found myself asking a different question.

How did the man once celebrated as foremost advocate of Hindu-Muslim Unity become the founder of Pakistan?

That question changed the essay I thought I was writing.

I realised that the history I had learnt in school was not wrong. It was simply incomplete.

The questions multiplied.

Why did some of the top Congress leaders hail him as one of the most promising political leaders of his generation?

How did a westernised lawyer, one of India’s finest legal minds and a constitutionalist come to embrace religion to achieve his political objective?

Was Pakistan always his objective, or did he reach that conclusion only after other constitutional possibilities had failed?

Gradually I realised that I was no longer trying merely to understand Jinnah.

I was trying to understand India.

Few individuals have influenced modern India as profoundly as Jinnah, although he never governed it. Partition reshaped India’s geography, transformed its strategic priorities, altered its relationship with Pakistan and left behind constitutional questions that continue to shape our politics. Debates over secularism, minority rights, the Uniform Civil Code and national identity still unfold in the long shadow of 1947.

That, I believe, is why Jinnah still matters.

Not because he founded Pakistan, but because it is difficult to understand contemporary India without understanding the political journey that culminated in Partition.

This essay is my attempt to retrace that journey.

Not to defend Jinnah.

Not to condemn him.

But to understand how one of the most admired constitutional nationalists of his generation came to believe that the country he had once worked to unite could no longer remain united.

The Man India Once Admired

Had Muhammad Ali Jinnah died in 1920, he would probably have been remembered as one of India’s most gifted constitutional nationalists rather than the founder of Pakistan.

That possibility alone tells us how incomplete history’s verdict can be.

Born in Karachi in 1876 into a prosperous merchant family, Jinnah was sent to London as a teenager to study law. He briefly flirted with the idea of becoming an actor before deciding that the law offered a more secure future. It was an unexpected beginning for the man who would later dominate the politics of the Indian subcontinent.

London shaped him profoundly. He absorbed the traditions of parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and constitutional government. Politics, he came to believe, should be conducted through reasoned debate, negotiated agreements and respect for institutions rather than through emotional mobilisation.

Returning to Bombay, then the commercial and legal capital of British India, he quickly established himself as one of the city’s leading barristers. Colleagues admired his meticulous preparation, precise arguments and remarkable self-control. He was known for the elegance of his Savile Row suits as much as for the discipline of his legal mind. Religion rarely defined his public persona. Law did.

Those instincts naturally carried into politics. Jinnah believed that words mattered because agreements mattered. Constitutions were not merely legal documents; they were instruments through which diverse communities could build sufficient confidence to live together despite their differences.

It was this constitutional temperament that impressed Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who regarded Jinnah as one of the most promising political leaders of his generation.

At that time, there was nothing unusual about belonging to both the Congress and the Muslim League. Jinnah did exactly that. He believed the two organisations could negotiate a shared constitutional future for India.

That belief reached its high point in the Lucknow Pact of 1916, when the Congress and the Muslim League agreed on a common constitutional approach. The agreement did not resolve every difference between them, but it demonstrated that compromise was possible.

No one captured that moment better than Sarojini Naidu, who called him the “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.”

It remains one of the great ironies of modern history.

The man later remembered for creating Pakistan was once celebrated for bringing India’s two principal political organisations together.

How, then, did that constitutional nationalist become the founder of Pakistan?

That question lies at the heart of this essay.

When Constitutional Confidence Began to Weaken

If the young Jinnah believed that India’s extraordinary diversity could be managed through constitutional negotiation, what caused him to lose confidence in that belief?

There is no single answer.

Jinnah did not wake up one morning and demand Pakistan. Nor was Partition the inevitable outcome of everything that had gone before. His political journey unfolded over nearly two decades, shaped by a series of developments that gradually narrowed the space for constitutional compromise.

The first war of India’s Independence in 1857 had profoundly shaken British confidence. One lesson many British administrators drew from that uprising was that a politically united India posed a greater challenge to imperial rule than a politically fragmented one. Over the decades that followed, constitutional reforms increasingly recognised different political constituencies. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, princes and other interests were often represented separately in constitutional negotiations.

Some of this undoubtedly reflected India’s genuine diversity.

Some of it also served British interests.

An empire negotiating with many voices inevitably possessed greater room for manoeuvre than one negotiating with a single national movement.

Jinnah did not invent this constitutional order.

He inherited it.

Indeed, he flourished within it.

This raised a new question in India’ political discourse. How could a permanent majority reassure a permanent minority that political power would never become political domination?

Every major leader answered that question differently.

Gandhi believed that a shared national movement, democratic institutions and mutual goodwill could sustain a united India.

Nehru placed his faith in a modern democratic state built on equal citizenship.

Jinnah increasingly looked to constitutional safeguards—written guarantees that would outlive individual leaders.

To Jinnah, democracy without constitutional safeguards risked becoming majoritarianism.

His Fourteen Points of 1929 deserve far more attention than they usually receive. He was arguing for federalism, provincial autonomy and constitutional safeguards that, in his view, would give Muslims sufficient confidence to remain equal partners in an independent India. Historians continue to debate whether those proposals were practical or politically achievable. What matters for our purpose is that they were an attempt to provide sufficient constitutional safeguards to the Muslims.

It also reminds us that separation was not Jinnah’s first answer to India’s constitutional dilemma. It became his answer only after other possibilities appeared to him to be closing.

At almost the same time, Indian politics itself was undergoing a profound transformation.

No leader changed it more than Mahatma Gandhi.

Before Gandhi, politics had largely been the preserve of lawyers, legislators and educated elites. Gandhi took it into villages and made millions of ordinary Indians participants in the struggle for Independence. It was one of the greatest political transformations of the twentieth century.

Yet every transformation also changes the assumptions on which politics operates.

Jinnah belonged to an older constitutional tradition. He believed durable agreements were built patiently across negotiating tables and embodied in constitutions. Gandhi believed that politics ultimately rested on moral legitimacy and the awakening of public conscience.

Neither approach was irrational.

Indeed, each addressed a different weakness in Indian public life.

Gandhi asked how a nation could be united.

Jinnah increasingly asked how that unity could endure after power changed hands.

For Gandhi, trust between communities made constitutional safeguards possible.

For Jinnah, constitutional safeguards made trust between communities possible.

That, I believe, was the heart of their disagreement.

Jinnah was not asking whether Congress leaders intended to treat Muslims fairly. He was asking a different question.

What would happen when future leaders were less generous than the present ones?

Constitutions, after all, are written not for today’s leaders but for tomorrow’s.

As power gradually shifted from the British to Indian hands, that question assumed growing importance.

Events within the Congress may have reinforced Jinnah’s concerns. The resignation of Subhas Chandra Bose after his election as Congress President, and later Gandhi’s decisive influence in Jawaharlal Nehru’s emergence over Vallabhbhai Patel in 1946, may have suggested to Jinnah that personal authority could, at times, outweigh formal procedures within the party.

Whether Jinnah interpreted those episodes correctly remains open to debate.

What matters is that they appear to have strengthened his conviction that constitutional guarantees had to be strong enough to survive even the most influential personalities.

If that conviction explains Jinnah’s thinking, the provincial elections of 1937 explain why it found a wider political audience.

From Anxiety to Separation

The provincial elections of 1937 marked an important turning point—not because they settled the constitutional debate, but because they changed the way many Muslims viewed the future.

Congress won convincingly and formed governments in several provinces. To Congress, the elections confirmed that it had become India’s principal national movement. To many Muslims, however, they raised a different question.

What would happen when Congress governed all of India?

Historians continue to debate whether the Congress ministries actually discriminated against Muslims. Some believe the allegations were exaggerated by the Muslim League. Others argue that Congress failed to appreciate how its actions were being perceived.

For me, that debate misses the larger point.

Politics is shaped not only by reality. It is also shaped by perception.

Once a community begins to doubt what the future may hold, those doubts themselves become political facts.

Jinnah recognised this.

Increasingly, he spoke not simply as a constitutional lawyer but as the spokesman for a political constituency seeking stronger assurances about its future. At the same time, the Muslim League itself was changing. As negotiations repeatedly failed, opinion within the League hardened. Jinnah was no longer only shaping the movement; the movement was also shaping him. He gave constitutional expression to Muslim anxieties. Those anxieties, in turn, narrowed the range of constitutional solutions he believed possible.

The Lahore Resolution of 1940 marked another important stage in that evolution. Although later remembered as the demand for Pakistan, it actually spoke of “independent states” in the Muslim-majority regions rather than setting out a detailed blueprint for a single sovereign nation. The constitutional destination was still evolving.

The Second World War accelerated the process. As Britain’s ability to govern India weakened, the urgency of deciding India’s constitutional future increased. Negotiations followed one another in rapid succession, but agreement became ever more elusive.

Even then, Pakistan was not necessarily the only possible outcome.

That is why the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 deserves far more attention. It represented the last serious attempt to reconcile India’s unity with its diversity through constitutional design.

What struck me most was not that the plan ultimately failed.

It was that Jinnah accepted it.

If Pakistan had always been his objective, why agree to remain within a united constitutional framework?

My own reading changed at that point.

For much of his political life, Jinnah sought constitutional safeguards within a united India. Pakistan became his preferred option only after he concluded that those safeguards could no longer command sufficient confidence.

Reasonable historians may disagree with that interpretation.

But understanding how he reached that conclusion is, I believe, essential to understanding Partition itself.

When the Cabinet Mission collapsed, more than a constitutional proposal disappeared.

The last shared vision of a united India disappeared with it.

Within a year, the subcontinent was partitioned.

When Maps Became Real

For nearly three decades, India’s future had been debated in the language of constitutions, federal arrangements and minority safeguards. Leaders argued over the distribution of power, provincial autonomy and political representation. Proposals were drafted, revised and debated. Maps were studied. Compromise still seemed possible.

Then history left the conference room and entered ordinary homes.

Families in Lahore, Amritsar, Karachi and Dhaka suddenly faced questions they had never imagined.

Should they stay?

Should they leave?

Would they ever return?

The decisions taken by political leaders now had to be lived by millions of ordinary people.

Some crossed newly created borders carrying little more than what they could hold in their hands. Others locked their doors believing they would return within weeks.

Many never did.

Partition is often described in numbers—millions displaced, hundreds of thousands killed and entire populations uprooted. Yet statistics tell us surprisingly little about what it actually meant.

Its deepest impact lay elsewhere.

In memories carried across borders.

In homes abandoned forever.

In family stories passed from one generation to the next.

Travelling through the countries of the former Yugoslavia and Central Europe, I often found myself thinking about those invisible inheritances.

The histories were different.

The causes were different.

Yet one truth seemed universal.

Borders are drawn by states.

They are lived by ordinary people.

That, perhaps, is the enduring human lesson of Partition.

The Long Shadow of Partition

Partition did not end in 1947.

In many ways, it was only beginning.

Pakistan faced the immense challenge of building a new state.

India faced a different challenge.

How could a country that had just witnessed one of history’s largest communal migrations reassure the millions of Muslims who had chosen to remain?

India’s commitment to secularism emerged in that historical context. It was not simply a constitutional ideal. It was also a moral and political response to the trauma of Partition.

Over time, however, difficult questions emerged.

How should a secular state engage with religious communities?

Should different personal laws continue indefinitely?

Where should the balance lie between cultural autonomy and equal citizenship?

Successive governments answered those questions differently.

Supporters argued that protecting minority institutions was essential to preserving India’s plural character.

Critics increasingly contended that some policies evolved into vote-bank politics, delayed legal reform and weakened the principle of equal citizenship before the law. Whether one views that history as protection or appeasement depends largely upon one’s political perspective.

What cannot be disputed is that these debates have shaped Indian politics for decades and continue to do so today.

In that sense, Jinnah’s influence extends far beyond the creation of Pakistan.

His political journey continues to cast a long shadow over India’s own constitutional journey.

Conclusion

Nearly eighty years after Partition, we still live with many of its political and emotional consequences. Our debates over secularism, citizenship, minority rights and national identity continue to unfold in its long shadow.

That is why I found myself thinking about Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Not because history demands that we admire him.

Nor because it requires us to condemn him.

But because understanding how a constitutional nationalist came to lose confidence in a common constitutional future may help us better understand one of the defining events of modern South Asian history.

The older I grow, the less interested I become in deciding who won history’s arguments.

I find myself asking different questions.

How do intelligent people, acting from deeply held convictions, lead their societies to outcomes that none of them fully intended?

How does political trust gradually disappear?

Can constitutions alone hold diverse societies together when confidence between communities begins to erode?

Those questions extend far beyond the history of British India.

They confront every diverse democracy.

Perhaps that is the real reason Jinnah still matters.

Not because he belongs to the past.

But because the questions his life raises continue to shape India’s present—and may yet influence its future.

For almost fifty years, I thought I understood Buddha.

I was wrong.

Like millions of Indians of my generation, I had grown up with the familiar story of Prince Siddhartha. Our school textbooks described him as the young prince who gave up his palace, his family and every worldly comfort in search of truth. The lesson I carried with me was simple: Buddha represented renunciation.

For decades, I never questioned that understanding.

Looking back, I realise that I had learned the story of Buddha, but not the question that shaped his life. I knew what he had done. I had never really asked why he had done it.

That changed unexpectedly when I was about fifty years old.

I enrolled for a ten-day Vipassana meditation course at Dhamma Giri in Igatpuri, Maharashtra. Dhamma Giri is among the world’s best-known centres for Vipassana, an ancient meditation technique that traces its origins to the Buddha and was revived in modern times by S. N. Goenka. The word Vipassana literally means to see deeply or to see things as they really are. That description appealed to me. It suggested that the journey was not about accepting another belief, but about observing one’s own experience more closely.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that the word appealed to me. For years I had tried to look closely at people, institutions and societies. Buddha was inviting me to do something far more difficult—to look closely at myself.

I went out of curiosity.

I returned with a completely different understanding of Buddha.

Today, when I think of him, I no longer see him primarily as the prince who renounced the world. I see him as one of history’s greatest explorers of the human mind.

That, I believe, was his real revolution.

The Question That Changed Everything

The story of Siddhartha leaving his palace is one of the best-known stories in human history.

Sheltered from the harsher realities of life, he encountered old age, illness and death. Those experiences disturbed him profoundly. They forced him to confront a question that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid.

Why do human beings suffer?

Most rulers try to make life more prosperous.

Most philosophers try to explain the world.

Most religious teachers tell us what we ought to believe.

Buddha chose a different path.

He began by observing the human mind.

Why do we keep wanting more even after our desires are fulfilled?

Why does fear arise so effortlessly?

Why do anger and jealousy take hold of us so quickly?

Why do success and comfort fail to bring lasting contentment?

These questions fascinated him twenty-five centuries ago.

They remain our questions today.

We may describe them differently. We speak of stress, anxiety, burnout and mental health. We have smartphones, social media and endless distractions. But the mind that Buddha set out to understand is still recognisably our own.

I did not appreciate any of this when I arrived at Dhamma Giri.

Ten Days of Noble Silence

The first surprise was silence.

Not simply the absence of conversation.

Participants were expected to observe what the organisers called Noble Silence. We did not speak to one another. We were not even expected to communicate through gestures. Men and women stayed separately. Even though I shared a room with another participant, we lived together for ten days without exchanging a single word.

There was no television.

No newspapers.

No books.

No mobile phones.

No music.

Nothing with which to distract ourselves.

At first, it felt strangely unsettling.

We have become so accustomed to constant stimulation that silence itself can feel uncomfortable.

Yet something unexpected happened.

Time passed remarkably well.

The day began before dawn and followed a carefully designed rhythm of meditation, simple meals and rest. There was very little opportunity to become bored.

Instead, another discovery awaited me.

As the noise outside disappeared, the noise inside became impossible to ignore.

For the first time, I found myself face to face with my own mind.

Meeting My Own Mind

The third day was the hardest.

Until then, I had imagined that meditation meant sitting quietly with one’s eyes closed. I soon discovered that there was nothing quiet about my mind.

We sat cross-legged for long periods, observing the natural rhythm of our breathing without trying to control it. We were encouraged not to move, not even to change our posture.

Within minutes my knees began to ache.

Every instinct urged me to shift my position or scratch an itch.

The physical discomfort, however, turned out to be the easier challenge.

The real struggle was the mind.

It wandered constantly.

One moment I was thinking about work.

The next about my family.

Then an unfinished conversation.

Then a journey I had made years earlier.

Then tomorrow’s plans.

The teacher’s instruction was remarkably simple.

Whenever the mind wandered, gently bring it back to the breath.

Again.

And again.

And again.

For hours it felt like failure.

Then, sometime during that difficult third day, something changed.

The breakthrough did not come because my mind had become silent.

It came because, for the first time in my life, I realised how restless it had always been.

That realisation has stayed with me ever since.

It also helped me understand Buddha differently.

He was not asking people to escape from the world.

He was inviting them to observe the mind through which they experienced the world.

That is a very different proposition.

It was also the beginning of my own conversation with him.

The more time I spent at Dhamma Giri, the more I realised that Vipassana was not teaching me a philosophy.

It was inviting me to conduct an experiment.

The experiment was on my own mind.

No one asked me to become a Buddhist.

No one tried to persuade me to accept a doctrine.

The teachers simply repeated one instruction.

Observe.

Observe your breathing.

Observe the sensations in your body.

Observe your thoughts.

Observe your reactions.

Observe without judging.

At first, it sounded almost too simple.

Only later did I realise that observing without reacting is one of the hardest things human beings ever attempt.

Slowly, another lesson emerged.

Not because someone explained it.

Because I experienced it.

An itch appeared.

If I simply observed it instead of scratching it, it disappeared.

Pain arose in my knees.

It changed.

Even pleasant sensations did not last.

They too faded away.

The same was true of thoughts.

They came.

They lingered.

Then they disappeared.

Nobody stood before us delivering a lecture on impermanence.

Nobody asked us to memorise it.

They simply created the conditions in which we could discover it ourselves.

That, I realised, was the genius of Buddha.

He trusted experience more than authority.

They did not tell us this.

They instilled it into our being.

Perhaps that is why Vipassana appealed to me more deeply than I had expected. For years, I had tried to look closely at people, institutions and societies. Buddha invited me to do something infinitely more difficult—to look closely at myself.

One lesson from those ten days has remained with me ever since.

Change is permanent.

We all know that intellectually.

Vipassana made me experience it.

Every sensation changed.

Every thought changed.

Every emotion changed.

I gradually realised that much of our suffering comes not because life changes, but because we keep wishing it would remain the same.

Whenever life has become uncertain since then, I have found myself returning to that simple insight.

Change is not the exception.

It is the rule.

Another idea quietly entered my life.

Until then, I had assumed that meditation meant withdrawing from the world.

I now realised that Buddha was suggesting something altogether different.

The aim was not to suppress emotions.

Nor was it to become indifferent.

The aim was to become what Indian philosophy calls a drashta—the observer.

For years, I had understood that word only intellectually.

At Igatpuri, it acquired a different meaning.

The world continues exactly as before.

People praise us.

People criticise us.

Success delights us.

Failure disappoints us.

None of that changes.

What changes is the small space between what happens and how we respond.

Vipassana taught me that there is a moment—a brief pause—between an event and our reaction to it.

In that small pause lies freedom.

I cannot pretend that I have mastered it.

Even today I become impatient.

I still lose my temper.

I still worry unnecessarily.

But every now and then I remember to pause.

To observe before reacting.

That, perhaps, has been Buddha’s greatest gift to me.

One aspect of the course surprised me deeply.

My room partner happened to be the Chief Executive Officer of a large company in Mumbai.

I recognised a few ministers from the Maharashtra government because I had seen their photographs in newspapers.

There were undoubtedly many other accomplished people whom I never identified.

It simply did not matter.

For ten days there were no introductions.

No discussions about careers.

No designations.

No visiting cards.

Everyone occupied similar modest rooms.

Everyone ate the same simple vegetarian meals.

Everyone struggled with the same wandering mind.

Inside the meditation hall there were no CEOs.

No ministers.

No retired development professionals.

There were only human beings trying to understand themselves.

I found that quietly moving.

It also helped me appreciate another aspect of Buddha that we rarely emphasise.

He lived in a society deeply divided by caste and hierarchy.

Yet he welcomed people from every background into his community.

He judged people not by birth but by conduct.

Even women, despite considerable resistance in those times, eventually became part of the Sangha.

For the sixth century BCE, these were extraordinary ideas.

At Dhamma Giri, I saw a glimpse of that same spirit.

Not through speeches.

Not through slogans.

Simply through the way people lived together.

Trust Instead of Transaction

Another feature of the course has stayed with me ever since.

There was no fee.

The food was simple but nourishing.

The accommodation was modest but comfortable.

The surroundings were peaceful without being luxurious.

I wondered how such a place sustained itself.

The explanation was disarmingly simple.

If participants paid in advance, they would naturally begin to think of themselves as customers.

Customers expect services.

They compare.

They complain.

Vipassana, the organisers believed, should never become a commercial transaction.

Those who benefited could, if they wished, contribute afterwards according to their own means, so that someone they would never meet could attend the next course.

There was no pressure.

Only trust.

I found that quietly beautiful.

The worldwide spread of Vipassana owes much to S. N. Goenka. Suffering from severe migraines for many years, he learnt the technique in Myanmar and experienced profound relief. He devoted the rest of his life to making this ancient practice accessible to ordinary people across the world.

His contribution deserves enormous respect.

Yet one small question stayed with me.

Human beings seem remarkably eager to turn great teachers into objects of reverence.

At times I sensed that tendency not only towards Buddha but also towards Goenka.

I found myself wondering whether Buddha himself would have been entirely comfortable with that.

The Buddha I had come to admire did not ask people to worship him.

He invited them to observe.

To question.

To discover truth through their own experience.

Perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay him is not reverence.

It is practice.

When the Meditation Hall Meets Real Life

It is one thing to spend ten days in silence.

It is quite another to carry those lessons into ordinary life.

Meditation halls are peaceful.

Life rarely is.

For me, the real test came several years later.

After leaving PATH, I found myself without another job to go to. It was one of the more uncertain periods of my professional life. I had enjoyed my work immensely, but the chapter had ended and the next one had not yet begun.

Ordinarily, such moments create anxiety.

They certainly would have done so earlier in my life.

Yet somewhere in the background was a quiet reminder from those ten days at Dhamma Giri.

Everything changes.

This situation too would change.

I cannot claim that I was free from worry.

I was not.

But I found myself accepting uncertainty with far greater equanimity than I might once have done.

My wife was a source of quiet strength during that period. She never allowed uncertainty to become fear. Looking back, I realise that equanimity is easier to practise when someone close to you shares it without making a display of it.

Before long, new opportunities began to emerge.

I was invited by the Ministry of Science and Technology to help establish what later became the Clinical Development Services Agency (CDSA), now India’s apex institution for strengthening clinical research. The remuneration was modest, but the work was meaningful.

Around the same time, I also began assisting a young organisation called Digital Green. It was little more than an ambitious idea then. Today it works across more than two dozen countries, using technology to improve the lives of smallholder farmers.

Looking back, I do not think Vipassana found me those opportunities.

It changed how I responded while waiting for them.

That, perhaps, was its greatest gift.

It taught me that uncertainty is not an interruption to life.

It is life.

Why Buddha Still Matters

More than twenty years have passed since those ten days of Noble Silence.

Life has moved on.

I returned to work, travelled widely, took on new responsibilities and eventually retired. Along the way I visited nearly a hundred countries and met people from every walk of life—ministers, entrepreneurs, development professionals, farmers, taxi drivers and monks.

One observation has stayed with me.

Prosperity and peace of mind are not the same thing.

Some of the wealthiest people I have met carried enormous anxiety.

Some with very modest means possessed remarkable contentment.

Material comfort undoubtedly matters. Poverty can be cruel and deeply degrading. Yet somewhere beyond our basic needs, happiness seems to depend less on what we possess than on how we respond to what happens around us.

I suspect Buddha would not have been surprised.

He understood that suffering does not arise only from poverty or misfortune.

Much of it arises from the way the mind clings to success, resists failure and seeks permanence in a world that never stands still.

That insight feels even more relevant today than it must have been twenty-five centuries ago.

Never before have human beings had so much information, so many choices and so many distractions.

We scroll endlessly.

We compare endlessly.

We desire endlessly.

The technology is new.

The human mind is not.

Perhaps that is why Buddha continues to speak to each generation in its own language.

A Conversation Across Time

As I reflected on the thinkers I have written about in this series—Marx, Ambedkar, Chanakya and Narasimha Rao—I noticed something that had never occurred to me before.

Each of them wanted to change the world.

Marx wanted to change society.

Ambedkar sought to build a more just India.

Chanakya thought deeply about power and the state.

Narasimha Rao quietly transformed India’s economy.

Buddha began somewhere else.

He believed that before trying to change the world, we must first understand the mind through which we experience it.

For years I had assumed that this was a retreat from life.

I now think it was a preparation for life.

The calmer our minds, the wiser our judgments.

The more aware we become of our own fears, ambitions and prejudices, the less likely they are to control us.

Perhaps lasting change in society begins with change in the individual.

I am no longer certain that Buddha and the others were asking different questions.

Perhaps they were simply beginning at different points.

Living with Buddha

To live with Buddha is not to withdraw from life.

It is to engage with it a little more consciously.

More than twenty years have passed since those ten days at Dhamma Giri.

I cannot claim that they transformed me overnight.

I still become impatient.

I still worry.

I still react before I observe.

I still have much to learn.

But every now and then I remember to pause.

To watch my thoughts instead of immediately obeying them.

To remind myself that change is not an interruption to life.

It is life itself.

Looking back, I no longer think of Buddha as the prince who renounced the world.

I think of him as one of history’s greatest explorers of the human mind.

For years, I have tried to look closely at people, institutions and societies.

Buddha invited me to do something far more difficult.

To look closely at myself.

And that journey, I suspect, has only just begun.

This essay is part of a series I call Living with Ideas—reflections on individuals, moments and decisions that continue to shape how we think about leadership, policy and public life.

These are not biographies in the conventional sense. They are attempts to understand how ideas are lived, tested and translated into action—often quietly, often imperfectly, but sometimes with lasting consequence.

I begin with P. V. Narasimha Rao, a leader whose influence on India’s trajectory is profound, yet whose style of leadership remains deeply understated.

There are some people you meet only once, yet they stay with you for decades.

My own memory of P. V. Narasimha Rao goes back to my M.Phil. days in International Relations at JNU. Rao was then India’s External Affairs Minister and had come to release a book.

I expected the customary ceremonial remarks.

Instead, he surprised me.

It was obvious that he had actually read the book. He discussed its arguments thoughtfully, appreciated its strengths and then, almost gently, turned to the author and remarked:

“When you write your next book, sing a slightly different song.”

The audience smiled.

So did the author.

Rao had conveyed his disagreement without diminishing the writer. He had made his point while preserving the other person’s dignity.

Looking back, I realise that those few minutes revealed something fundamental about the man. He preferred persuasion over confrontation. He valued substance more than performance.

At the time, however, I had no idea that this quiet, scholarly politician would one day lead India through one of the most important turning points in its modern history.

The scholar behind the politician

Most Indians remember Rao as the Prime Minister who initiated economic reforms.

Far fewer remember the scholar.

He was fluent or conversant in an astonishing number of languages. He translated literature, wrote the political novel The Insider, read widely in philosophy and history, and remained intellectually curious throughout his life. Friends often remarked that he was as comfortable discussing classical Sanskrit texts as he was modern economics.

It is tempting to see these simply as personal accomplishments.

I see something more.

Readers know that every difficult question has more than one answer.

Rao governed like a reader rather than an ideologue.

Perhaps that explains his patience, his willingness to listen, and his reluctance to reduce complex problems to slogans.

The India he inherited

To understand Rao’s achievement, one must remember the India of the late 1980s.

This was a country where licences governed enterprise, foreign exchange was tightly controlled and shortages had become a way of life.

One small memory captures that world for me.

In the 1980s, when I lived in an RBI officers’ colony, the entire colony shared a single public telephone in the caretaker’s office. If someone wanted to speak to you, they would first telephone the caretaker and ask him to fetch you. They would then call back fifteen minutes later, hoping you had reached the phone.

When my father retired from government service and became entitled to a residential telephone connection, it was installed in my house because he soon left on an overseas assignment. Almost overnight, our home became a neighbourhood communication centre. Friends and colleagues came to make calls or waited patiently for expected calls to arrive.

Today it sounds almost unimaginable.

That was the India Rao inherited—an economy where scarcity had become normal and permission often mattered more than initiative.

Necessity created reform. Leadership made it possible.

By 1991, India had reached a moment of crisis.

Foreign exchange reserves had fallen to dangerously low levels. The country had pledged part of its gold reserves. Seeking assistance from the International Monetary Fund was no longer a matter of choice.

Economic reform had become unavoidable.

But necessity alone does not explain what happened next.

Many countries have been forced into reform.

Few have managed the politics of reform as successfully as Narasimha Rao.

He led a minority government.

His own party had defended the Licence Raj for decades.

Trade unions were powerful. Bureaucratic interests were deeply entrenched. Suspicion of markets remained widespread.

The economics of reform may have been compelling.

The politics of reform were anything but.

Economic necessity opened the door.

Political judgment walked through it.

Quiet statecraft

What I admire most about Rao is not that he introduced reforms.

It is how he introduced them.

He did not seek ideological confrontation.

He quietly dismantled the machinery that sustained the old system.

Industrial licensing disappeared for most sectors. Controls that had shaped Indian enterprise for four decades were removed step by step, often without dramatic announcements or political triumphalism.

At the Reserve Bank of India, where I was then working, I saw how difficult even modest institutional change could be. The introduction of computers into banking faced fierce resistance. Many genuinely feared technology would destroy jobs. Others opposed change simply because it threatened familiar ways of working.

Those experiences taught me something that Rao seemed to understand instinctively.

Reforms rarely fail because the economics is wrong.

They fail because the politics overwhelms the economics.

One story about Rao captures this perfectly.

Whenever Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh worried that a difficult reform would provoke overwhelming political resistance, Rao would calmly reassure him, in essence: “You go ahead. Leave the politics to me.”

Whether those were his exact words matters less than what they reveal.

Manmohan Singh designed many of the reforms.

Rao created the political space that allowed them to survive.

Economists write policy.

Statesmen make policy possible.

Leadership beyond the next election

One aspect of Rao’s leadership continues to impress me.

The reforms of 1991 were never likely to produce immediate political rewards. Their costs were visible almost at once. Their benefits would take years to become apparent.

He could have chosen the easier path. He could have postponed difficult decisions, embraced familiar populism and left the crisis for another government.

Instead, he spent his political capital on changes whose greatest beneficiaries would be future generations.

That is a rare quality in any democracy.

A complicated legacy

None of this makes Rao an uncomplicated hero.

His tenure remains shadowed by the demolition of the Babri Masjid, allegations of political corruption and legal battles that followed his years in office. These controversies deserve neither dismissal nor whitewashing.

Great leaders should not be judged only by their achievements.

Nor only by their failures.

They should be judged by the totality of their contribution.

History’s quiet verdict

History has an odd habit of overlooking those who do not seek attention.

Rao was never a charismatic mass leader.

He did not dominate public life through stirring speeches or dramatic gestures.

He quietly changed the rules by which India functioned.

Today, millions of Indians take for granted opportunities that scarcely existed before 1991.

A more competitive economy.

Greater entrepreneurship.

A globally connected India.

An expanding middle class.

These achievements belong to many people and many governments.

But they would have been difficult to imagine without the political courage and statecraft of P. V. Narasimha Rao.

As I think back to that afternoon in JNU, I realise that the courteous Foreign Minister who advised an author to “sing a slightly different song” governed India in much the same way.

He persuaded more than he proclaimed.

He listened more than he lectured.

He changed more than he claimed.

To live with Narasimha Rao is to recognise that the deepest transformations in a democracy are often led not by its loudest voices, but by those with the patience, wisdom and courage to quietly change a nation’s direction.

I came to Nainital this summer to escape Delhi’s relentless heat. Like thousands of others, my wife and I were looking forward to cool evenings, leisurely walks by the lake and a few weeks away from the pace of city life.

Nainital was as beautiful as ever.

Each morning the lake lay still beneath the surrounding hills. By evening it came alive with boats carrying families across the water while lights slowly appeared on the opposite slopes. It was easy to understand why this little town has remained one of India’s favourite hill stations for generations.

What struck me most, however, was not the landscape.

It was the people.

Every evening the Mall Road resembled a miniature India. Families from every corner of the country strolled along the promenade, children tugged impatiently at their parents for boat rides, street vendors did brisk business and restaurants overflowed with customers. There were moments when it was difficult to move more than a few steps without stopping.

My first instinct was to complain about the crowds.

Then I caught myself.

Why should I?

Surely this was what development ought to look like. For decades, holidays in places like Nainital were a privilege enjoyed by relatively few. Today millions of Indian families can afford to travel, stay in hotels, eat in restaurants and create memories together. Watching the crowds, I realised that what I was seeing was not simply congestion. It was also evidence of rising prosperity.

And yet, another thought quietly accompanied that feeling.

The challenge was not the number of people.

It was how we shared the space.

Drivers leaned continuously on their horns although traffic could scarcely move. Cars squeezed into places where they clearly did not belong. Young men stood through the sunroofs of moving vehicles singing loudly while friends recorded them on their phones. Everyone appeared to be seeking just a little more room, a little more attention, a little more convenience.

Perhaps I would have forgotten those passing moments had it not been for something that happened a few days later.

One evening we attended a musical programme at the Boat House Club. The setting was idyllic. The lake formed the backdrop while singers from different parts of the country performed before a packed audience. Waiters moved quietly through the crowd serving refreshments. People searched for vacant chairs wherever they could find one.

Near the front sat a family of four.

Around them were almost ten chairs.

Most remained empty.

Whenever someone politely asked whether a chair could be used, the reply was gentle but firm.

“We’re expecting friends.”

For almost two hours those chairs remained unoccupied while elderly guests stood throughout the performance, others wandered in search of seats and a few simply walked away. Their friends eventually arrived towards the end of the evening.

It was a trivial incident.

Nobody quarrelled.

Nobody broke any rules.

Yet it lingered in my mind long after the music had ended.

I kept asking myself why.

Perhaps because the incident seemed to reveal something larger than itself.

The chairs did not belong to the family.

Nor did they belong to the people standing nearby.

They belonged, for that evening, to everyone.

Somehow we had come to see shared space as something that could be privately claimed.

The thought returned a few days later when traffic on the Mall Road came to a complete halt. A senior dignitary was expected to pass. Hundreds of people waited patiently while a convoy swept through before life returned to normal.

Again, I found myself wondering.

When did we become so comfortable with the idea that some people’s convenience naturally outweighs everyone else’s?

Around the same time, the debate over Delhi’s Gymkhana Club filled newspaper columns. I found myself reading the arguments with rather different eyes.

Perhaps the real question was not whether old institutions should survive or disappear.

Perhaps it was this.

Who are the people we choose to admire?

Those who enjoy privilege?

Or those who quietly set standards for everyone else?

The more I reflected on my days in Nainital, the more I felt that these questions were somehow connected.

Money can buy a holiday.

It cannot teach us how to share one.

Nor, I suspect, does courtesy belong to any particular social class. Most of us have encountered generosity from complete strangers and thoughtlessness from people of privilege. We have also seen the reverse. Human behaviour is rarely so simple.

That is why I hesitate to draw easy conclusions from what I saw.

Perhaps I am expecting too much from a society that is changing at extraordinary speed.

Perhaps these habits take time.

Or perhaps they emerge only when families, schools, institutions and public figures consistently demonstrate them.

I do not know.

What I do know is that I returned from Nainital thinking less about the crowds than about those empty chairs overlooking the lake.

They seemed to ask a question that has stayed with me ever since.

As India becomes more prosperous, what habits will help us enjoy that prosperity together?

Meena Baghel of Bakawand Block, Bastar district, Chhattisgarh. Starting with just five goats, she gradually built a herd of forty, transforming livestock into a source of income, confidence and economic independence

The goats were spread across the field when we met Meena Baghel in Bakawand Block of Bastar district in Chhattisgarh.

A few years earlier, she owned just five of them.

Today, she manages a herd of forty.

We asked what difference the goats had made to her life.

She smiled and replied:

“Apni marji se ise kharch kar sakti hu.”

“I can spend it as I wish.”

It was a simple answer. Yet it captured something profound. The income from the goats was hers. It contributed to the family economy, helped meet household expenses, and reduced dependence on uncertain agricultural incomes. But it also gave her something that rural development programmes often struggle to measure: confidence, independence, and a stronger voice in family decisions.

Meena’s story may appear to be about livestock. In reality, it is about something much larger. It is about how rural families create opportunity, build resilience, and navigate uncertainty.

It is also a useful starting point for understanding one of the most important yet underappreciated sectors of the Indian economy.

Livestock contributes nearly one-third of India’s agricultural Gross Value Added. More than two-thirds of rural households own some form of livestock. India is the world’s largest milk producer, accounting for roughly a quarter of global milk production. Goats occupy a special place in rural livelihoods. India is home to the world’s largest goat population, estimated at more than 160 million animals. For millions of smallholders, particularly women, goats represent a low-risk, high-value asset that can be sold quickly to meet household needs, finance education, or cope with emergencies.

Yet despite its importance, livestock often receives less attention than crops in public policy discussions. When it does receive attention, the focus is usually on milk production, breed improvement, or disease control.

These are important issues. But they tell only part of the story.

The experiences of Meena in Bastar, Sunaina Devi in Bihar, and Sukhadai Maurya in Chhattisgarh suggest that livestock is not merely an agricultural activity. It sits at the intersection of livelihoods, technology, markets, gender, and institutions. Understanding why some livestock farmers prosper while others struggle helps us understand broader questions about development itself.

The Productivity Puzzle

India’s livestock sector presents an interesting paradox.

The country has one of the world’s largest livestock populations. It is the world’s largest producer of milk. Demand for dairy products, meat, eggs, and animal-based foods continues to grow steadily. Government programmes support breed improvement, vaccination, infrastructure development, and farmer organizations.

Yet productivity remains well below global benchmarks.

Average milk yields in India are significantly lower than those achieved in countries such as Israel, the United States, or the Netherlands. Feed and fodder shortages continue to constrain growth. Veterinary services remain uneven in quality and reach. Market access is often fragmented.

Why does this gap persist?

The easy answer is that farmers need better breeds, better feed, and better technologies.

All of these matter.

But after decades of work in rural development, public health, livelihoods, and agriculture, we have come to believe that India’s challenge is not a shortage of technologies.

It is a shortage of systems that help farmers use those technologies effectively.

Looking Beyond the Animal

Discussions about livestock productivity often focus on the animal itself.

How can milk yields be increased?

How can better breeds be promoted?

How can diseases be controlled?

These are important questions, but they miss a larger reality.

A productive animal requires much more than good genetics.

It requires access to quality feed, timely veterinary services, affordable medicines, reliable information, working capital, and markets that reward higher productivity.

A farmer may adopt an improved breed. But if quality feed is unavailable, the benefits are limited.

A vaccination programme may reduce disease risks. But if veterinary services are distant or unreliable, farmers remain vulnerable.

A new technology may improve production. But if market prices do not justify the investment, adoption will remain low.

In other words, livestock productivity is not simply about animals.

It is about systems.

And systems succeed only when their different parts work together.

Technology Exists. Adoption Remains the Challenge

One of the striking features of India’s livestock sector is that many of the technologies needed to improve productivity already exist.

Artificial insemination can improve genetics.

Vaccination programmes can reduce mortality and disease losses.

Balanced feed and mineral mixtures can increase productivity.

Improved fodder varieties can address nutritional deficits.

Digital advisory platforms can provide timely information.

Tele-veterinary services can improve access to expertise.

The challenge is not invention.

The challenge is adoption.

This is a lesson that extends well beyond livestock. Whether the issue is vaccination, sanitation, digital agriculture, or livestock management, development practitioners repeatedly encounter the same reality. Technologies rarely fail because they are ineffective. They fail because the systems needed to support adoption are weak. Farmers adopt innovations when they can see them working, trust the source of information, and believe that the benefits outweigh the risks.

This became clear during a conversation with Sunaina Devi, a 55-year-old farmer from Minapur Block in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar.

Standing beside her dairy animals, she made an observation that captures the changing reality of rural India.

“Pashupaalan ek shauk nahi, aajeevika ka mukhya sadhan ban gaya hai.”

“Livestock rearing is no longer a hobby; it has become a primary source of livelihood.”

Sunaina manages eight cows alongside approximately eight acres of cultivated land. Her family grows paddy, maize, and vegetables while maintaining an integrated farming system that combines crops and livestock.

Her experience highlights something that many technology-focused discussions overlook.

Farmers do not evaluate technologies in isolation.

They evaluate them in the context of risk.

A scientist can afford a failed experiment.

A small farmer with two cows often cannot.

An improved breed may promise higher milk yields. But can the farmer afford the additional feed costs?

A new feed formulation may increase productivity. But will higher production translate into higher income?

A digital advisory platform may provide useful information. But can farmers access the services needed to act on that information?

These questions shape adoption decisions every day.

Farmers are not resistant to innovation.

They are careful managers of risk.

Technology succeeds when farmers can see clear benefits, trust the source of information, and believe that the rewards outweigh the risks.

That lesson applies not only to livestock but to development more broadly.

Sunaina Devi of Minapur Block, Muzaffarpur district, Bihar. Her integrated farming system highlights the role of livestock in generating income, improving soil fertility and strengthening resilience.

The Hidden Economics of Livestock

When policymakers discuss livestock, they usually focus on milk yields, meat production, or animal numbers.

Farmers often see things differently.

Sunaina explained that while milk sales generate income, much of the real value of livestock lies elsewhere.

Every year, her animals produce substantial quantities of manure that are converted into vermicompost and organic soil amendments. Crop residues become fodder. Livestock waste becomes fertilizer. Better soils produce better crops.

The system reinforces itself.

This circular relationship between crops and livestock has existed for generations, yet it is rarely reflected in productivity statistics.

Sunaina has also begun experimenting with the collection and processing of goat droppings into high-quality compost. What many households once regarded as waste has become an economic resource.

Her experience highlights an important point.

Livestock contributes to rural livelihoods in ways that are often invisible.

It provides milk and meat.

But it also provides manure, soil fertility, savings, nutrition, and resilience.

Many of these benefits never appear in official accounts.

Yet they play a critical role in sustaining rural livelihoods.

This broader perspective changes how we think about productivity.

Productivity is not simply about producing more.

It is about improving the overall performance and resilience of farming systems.

A farmer whose milk production increases by twenty percent but whose costs increase by thirty percent may not be better off.

Conversely, a farmer who reduces fertilizer expenses, improves soil health, and stabilizes income may achieve greater long-term prosperity even without dramatic increases in output.

Farmers understand this instinctively.

Policy discussions sometimes do not.

Sukhadai Maurya of Murkucchi village, Bastar district. Access to collective marketing, market information and institutional support helped improve her income and bargaining power.

Why Markets Matter as Much as Production

Even when farmers improve productivity, another challenge remains.

Can they sell what they produce at a fair price?

This question takes us back to Bastar and the experience of Sukhadai Maurya.

For years, Sukhadai cultivated crops such as maize, gram, wheat, sorghum, and mustard. Like many women farmers, she possessed deep practical knowledge of agriculture but had little access to information about pricing, measurements, or market opportunities.

“We did not know how produce was measured or how prices were determined,” she recalled.

The consequences were predictable.

Middlemen dominated transactions.

Payments were delayed.

Farmers had little bargaining power.

Much of the value created by producers was captured elsewhere.

Three years ago, Sukhadai joined the Bhumgadi Mahila Krishak initiative, a collective effort designed to improve women’s participation in agricultural value chains.

The intervention combined training, aggregation, procurement centres, market access, and financial inclusion.

The results were striking.

Her monthly income increased from approximately ₹3,000–4,000 to around ₹9,000–10,000.

Just as importantly, payments became more reliable and transparent.

For the first time, many women felt confident that they were receiving a fair return for their labour.

The lesson extends well beyond Bastar.

Improving production is only half the challenge.

The other half is ensuring that farmers can participate in markets on favourable terms.

India’s livestock sector continues to face significant market inefficiencies.

Milk producers often receive only a fraction of the final retail value.

Quality-based pricing remains inconsistent.

Cold chains are inadequate in many regions.

Small producers struggle to access larger buyers.

Without fair and transparent markets, farmers have little incentive to invest in productivity-enhancing technologies.

Markets do not simply reward productivity.

They shape it.

Why Institutions Matter

The stories of Meena, Sunaina, and Sukhadai point toward a common conclusion.

People matter.

But institutions matter as well.

Over the years, development practitioners have repeatedly learned the same lesson across sectors as diverse as health, education, sanitation, and agriculture.

Individuals rarely succeed alone.

They succeed when supported by effective institutions.

In livestock systems, these institutions include veterinary services, extension networks, self-help groups, producer organizations, cooperatives, financial institutions, and market platforms.

When these institutions function well, they reduce risk, improve access to information, and facilitate technology adoption.

When they function poorly, even well-designed programmes struggle to produce results.

Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) illustrate this principle particularly well.

The idea behind FPOs is straightforward.

Individual farmers often lack scale.

Collectively, they can negotiate better prices, purchase inputs more efficiently, access markets, and invest in shared infrastructure.

Yet experience shows that creating an FPO is much easier than building a successful one.

The strongest organizations combine professional management, transparent governance, strong member participation, financial discipline, and market orientation.

The weakest become dependent on project funding and struggle to survive once external support ends.

The goal, therefore, should not simply be to create more institutions.

It should be to create stronger institutions.

Women at the Centre of Rural Transformation

One of the most striking features of all three stories is the central role played by women.

This is not accidental.

Women perform much of the labour associated with livestock management across rural India. They feed animals, collect fodder, maintain sheds, monitor animal health, and manage day-to-day operations.

Yet their contributions often remain invisible.

Policy discussions continue to describe women as beneficiaries.

Field realities suggest something quite different.

Women are increasingly entrepreneurs, managers, innovators, and leaders.

Meena transformed five goats into a thriving enterprise.

Sunaina developed sophisticated approaches to integrated farming and organic soil management.

Sukhadai demonstrated how collective action and market access can increase incomes and strengthen bargaining power.

These women are not passive recipients of development programmes.

They are active economic actors shaping the future of rural India.

Recognizing this reality is essential for effective policy design.

What Needs to Change?

India does not need a completely new livestock strategy.

Many of the required technologies, programmes, and institutions already exist.

The challenge lies in making them work together more effectively.

Five priorities stand out.

First, policymakers should focus on farmer incomes rather than programme outputs. Counting vaccinations, artificial inseminations, or training sessions is useful. Measuring improvements in household incomes is more important.

Second, investments in markets deserve as much attention as investments in production. Better animals alone cannot improve livelihoods if farmers cannot sell profitably.

Third, technology adoption should become a central objective. The challenge is no longer generating innovations but ensuring that farmers can access, trust, and use them.

Fourth, veterinary and extension systems require strengthening. Technologies have little value if farmers cannot obtain timely support.

Finally, women should be treated as entrepreneurs rather than beneficiaries. Programmes that strengthen women’s control over assets, information, and markets often generate benefits that extend far beyond individual households.

Conclusion

The future of India’s livestock sector will not be determined solely by better breeds, improved vaccines, or larger budgets.

It will depend on whether millions of small farmers gain access to the knowledge, technologies, services, markets, and institutions needed to convert effort into opportunity.

Meena’s story is about agency.

Sunaina’s story is about resilience.

Sukhadai’s story is about opportunity.

Together, they reveal something important about development itself.

Technology matters.

Markets matter.

Institutions matter.

But development ultimately succeeds when ordinary people are able to use these tools to improve their lives.

Over the years, we have worked on programmes involving public health, livelihoods, agriculture, digital technologies, and community institutions. The lesson has been remarkably consistent. Success rarely depends on technology alone. It depends on whether institutions, incentives, and people work together.

India already possesses many of the tools needed to transform its livestock sector. Better breeds exist. Effective vaccines exist. Digital technologies exist. Producer organizations exist.

The challenge is ensuring that these tools reach farmers in ways that reduce risk, increase opportunity, and improve livelihoods.

Ultimately, the story of livestock in India is not really a story about animals.

It is a story about people.

And about their remarkable ability to build better lives when given the opportunity to do so.

_________________________________

The authors are grateful to Meena Baghel, Sunaina Devi and Sukhadai Maurya for sharing their experiences. Their stories are used with permission.

I have been thinking, off and on, about something we rarely pause to examine.

In most conversations, and certainly in the way we were brought up, the man is described as the “head of the family.” It is said so routinely that it almost feels unnecessary to question it.

And yet, when I look back at families I have known—and at my own over the years—I find myself wondering what that phrase really captures.

Perhaps it describes something formal. But does it describe what is actually lived?

I should add here that much of what I am reflecting on comes from my own exposure to Indian middle class settings. That may well shape what I see—and what I miss.

A Thought About Marriage and Mobility

One of the first patterns that comes to mind has to do with movement—social and economic.

When I look back at my own extended family, a certain pattern becomes difficult to ignore. Many of my uncles including my own father - particularly those who entered the civil services or other government positions—married into families that were noticeably better placed, both socially and economically.

It was, in a way, a mutually reinforcing arrangement. A young man with a secure and prestigious government position—at a time when such roles were scarce and deeply valued—brought status and access. The bride’s family, often better endowed in resources or social standing, brought with them a different kind of cultural and economic capital.

Almost without announcement, one could see a shift. The man’s social location seemed to move upward; the alliance itself became a bridge between two worlds.

It makes me wonder whether the expansion of government employment in the early decades after independence did more than create jobs—it may well have helped shape the first broad wave of what we now recognise as the Indian upper middle class, with marriage quietly playing its part.

By the time one comes to the next generation, however, the ground appears to shift.

Having grown up in households that had already achieved a certain stability, many of us did not seem to carry the same preoccupation with moving upward through marriage. Compatibility began to matter more, and in many cases, choices became more individual than family-driven.

The move toward nuclear families—partly initiated by transferable government jobs—also became more pronounced.

In the generation that followed, this movement seems to have gone even further. Growing up in smaller, more self-contained families—with fewer siblings and looser ties to extended kin—there is a noticeable ease with independence. As parents, we have not only accepted this but, in many ways, encouraged it.

The contrast with business families is instructive. There, despite rising education and affluence, marriages often continue to be arranged within known circles. Family remains central—not just emotionally, but economically. The next generation is expected to inherit, sustain, and expand what has been built.

In such settings, kinship retains a different kind of cohesion, and marriage continues to reinforce it.

At some point in reflecting on this, I was reminded of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote about how families tend, often unconsciously, to reproduce their social position across generations. Marriage, in that sense, is not just personal—it quietly participates in that reproduction.

Something About the Mother’s Side

There is another impression that has stayed with me over the years, though I arrived at it almost without noticing.

Growing up, I remember being far more at ease with my maternal cousins. We would spend entire summer vacations together, and over time, they came to feel less like relatives and more like siblings.

In contrast, my interactions with my father’s side of the family were far more limited. They were present, of course, but not part of the same everyday familiarity.

At the time, I did not reflect on why this might be so. But looking back, a few factors seem to stand out.

My mother’s family was relatively more comfortable, and there was an openness—both emotional and material—in the way they engaged with us as children. Time, attention, and even small indulgences were given freely, and that created a certain ease.

There was also, perhaps, a broader social context at play. In many families of that period, the wife’s side was expected to remain somewhat in the background, deferential to the husband’s family. That expectation, while rarely articulated, may have shaped interactions in subtle ways—sometimes creating a certain distance on one side and a corresponding warmth on the other.

Over time, these small differences seem to accumulate. Familiarity deepens where engagement is more frequent, where interaction is less encumbered, where one feels both welcome and at ease.

What I have found interesting is that this pattern does not always remain confined to childhood. Even later in life, interactions with my wife’s side of the family often feel easier, more natural. Conversations seem to sustain themselves without much effort.

It would be simplistic to attribute this to any one factor. But one does get the sense that the continuity of these relationships is, in many cases, quietly shaped within the home—through the frequency of contact, the warmth with which one set of relationships is spoken about, and the small cues about where one is more at ease.

The American sociologist Arlie Hochschild speaks of what she calls “emotional labour”—the often invisible effort that goes into sustaining relationships. It offers one way of understanding what is otherwise easy to overlook.

Of course, this is not universal. In business or joint families, the centre of gravity can remain firmly with the paternal side. But outside such contexts, the drift—if one may call it that—seems visible.

How Influence Shifts, Quietly

All this then leads me to a more difficult question.

Within a marriage, how does influence actually take shape over time?

It does not seem to follow a fixed script.

In the early years, roles often appear clearer—sometimes shaped by habit, sometimes by expectation. But as one watches more closely, especially over time, the picture becomes less defined.

Decisions are not always made in formal ways; they seem to gather around the person most engaged with the everyday life of the household.

I have often noticed that the person who keeps track of the small but continuous details—children’s needs, family obligations, social ties, the innumerable things that do not announce themselves—gradually comes to occupy a central place in how the home functions.

In many homes, this turns out to be the wife.

This is not necessarily a matter of assertion. It is, more often, a function of attentiveness and continuity.

Through emotional, social, and at times psychological channels, an influence seems to build gradually. It is not always visible, and perhaps not always intentional, but it can be quite real.

When this is accompanied by financial independence, the nature of that influence appears to shift further—becoming more explicit in decisions that shape the household.

I am not entirely sure how to characterise this. It does not feel like a simple transfer of authority. It feels more like an accumulation—of presence, of engagement, and of quiet centrality.

Where Does That Leave the Old Idea?

Which brings me back to where I began.

If the man is described as the “head,” what exactly does that signify? A formal position? A cultural inheritance? Or something that once had meaning but now sits somewhat uneasily with lived reality?

I do not have a definitive answer.

But the longer I observe, the more it seems that a home is shaped less by who is named to lead it, and more by who remains most closely engaged with its inner life.

And that, more often than we acknowledge, appears to be where the woman stands.

Not in opposition, not in replacement—but simply at the centre of what keeps a family going.

A belief we rarely question

All my life, I have heard—and to a large extent believed—that if you are good to others and maintain a positive attitude, life will reward you with peace, especially in your later years.

It is a reassuring thought. Almost like a quiet promise life makes to you: be kind, stay positive, and things will settle gently.

But over time, I have begun to wonder if this is really the whole story.

What really keeps us going?

I remember a close friend of my father’s. He seemed to spend a lifetime in courtrooms, moving from one case to another. Dates, adjournments, documents—an endless cycle. To me, it looked exhausting. I often wondered why he didn’t just let go and find some peace. But that was my lens, not his. Whenever he spoke about his cases, there was a certain energy in him. He followed every detail, discussed every turn, and seemed most alive when he was in the middle of it all. What looked like a burden to me was, for him, a source of engagement.

Then there are some of my uncles. Over the years, they have kept certain family disputes alive with remarkable persistence. One would imagine such things would drain people. And yet, they seem to derive a strange sense of purpose from it. The past is not something they have left behind; it is something they continue to engage with, almost as if it gives structure to their present.

And then, a different kind of example. Another uncle of mine, well into his later years, still runs his business with full intensity. He spends most of his time at the office, and even at home, he is constantly on the phone, talking business. He is diabetic, takes insulin before every meal, and has every reason to slow down. But he refuses to. When I once asked him why he pushes himself so much, he said something very simply: “This is where I get my energy from. Not for money—for my passion.” Watching him, one gets the sense that work, for him, is not a burden but a lifeline.

Closer home, I see something similar in a different form. My wife has her share of ailments, as most people do with age. But the moment travel is mentioned, everything changes. There is excitement, planning, movement—and somehow, the ailments recede into the background. It is not that they disappear; they just seem to matter less in the presence of something she loves.

Lives that don’t fit the pattern

When I put all these together, I find myself asking: is it really “positivity” that sustains people, or is it something else—something more personal?

We often speak of a positive attitude as if it is the key to a good life. And it certainly has its place. It makes relationships smoother, reduces friction, and perhaps helps us cope better. But over time, it can also become a kind of prescription we feel obliged to follow.

Take the idea of forgiveness. We are told not to react, not to return hurt with hurt, to let go. There is wisdom in this, no doubt. But in practice, it is not always so simple. Sometimes, when we suppress our natural response too quickly in the name of being “positive,” something unresolved remains within us. Outwardly, we may appear calm; inwardly, there can be a quiet tension.

It is not that “giving it back” is the right answer. Often, it is not. But neither is forced calmness always genuine peace. There is a difference between arriving at peace and performing it.

Attachment and its other side

The same complexity shows up in our closest relationships. We are encouraged to love deeply, to stay closely connected. And rightly so. But there is also another side to this. The deeper the attachment, the greater the vulnerability—to hurt, to disappointment, to loss. Sometimes, what we call love quietly carries expectations, and those expectations can weigh heavily on both sides.

Over the years, I have also noticed that a certain distance—whether created by time, circumstance, or even loss—can bring its own kind of balance. Relationships sometimes become gentler when they are less entangled in everyday demands. This is not to say that distance is better, but only that closeness and ease do not always go hand in hand.

All this leaves me with a simple, if slightly unsettling, thought: perhaps there is no single formula for a peaceful or fulfilling life.

The quiet cost of being “positive”

Positivity is valuable, but it is not the only way people find energy or meaning. For some, it comes from calm acceptance. For others, it comes from pursuit, from engagement, even from conflict. What looks like restlessness from the outside may actually be a form of aliveness from within.

Maybe the real question is not whether we are positive enough, but whether we are connected to something that truly engages us.

And perhaps positivity becomes a problem only when it turns into a kind of fetish—something we feel compelled to display, rather than something that arises naturally

So what really matters?

A good life, then, may not be about holding on to a particular attitude, but about finding that alignment—however different it may look from person to person—between what we are and what keeps us alive to the world.

So I find myself wondering: is a good life really built on being consistently positive, or on staying connected to whatever gives us a sense of aliveness—however different that may look from one person to another?

And when we speak so easily of peace, do we mean the absence of conflict, or simply a life that feels, in its own way, fully lived?

I do not have a clear answer. But I suspect it may not be the same for all of us.

The taxi ride from the airport to our hotel was our first introduction to the economics of paradise. We were charged 40 Euros for a distance that could hardly have been more than a kilometre. Uber was asking for nearly 59 Euros. Santorini was beautiful, yes, but also unapologetically expensive.

We checked into Panorama Boutique Hotel in Fira, centrally located and overlooking the caldera. The first sight from the balcony was almost unreal — white buildings flowing down volcanic cliffs into the deep blue Aegean Sea. Santorini looked less like a town and more like an elaborate stage set suspended between sky and water.

The main pedestrian lanes of Fira were overflowing with tourists from across the world, though predominantly from Europe and North America. Several cruise ships released thousands more visitors into the narrow streets. Yet despite the crowds, there was a festive atmosphere everywhere. Loud music drifted from rooftop bars, restaurants glowed against the cliffs, and every few steps people paused to photograph the sunset as though it were a sacred ritual.

That evening we settled for dinner at Niki Restaurant overlooking the caldera. The sunset was magnificent, the mood celebratory, and the sea below reflected the fading orange light. A modest dinner for four cost around 150 Euros, but by then Santorini had already taught us that beauty here came with a premium.

The next morning we took a five-hour island tour covering Oia village, the famous black beach and the striking red beach created by volcanic formations. Oia, with its whitewashed houses and blue domes, looked exactly like the postcards and Instagram images that have made Santorini globally iconic. Every turn seemed designed for photography.

Yet travel has its own way of altering plans. That same morning, while stepping out of the jacuzzi in our room, I slipped and injured my left foot badly. The injury restricted my movement for the rest of the trip. While the others continued exploring, I increasingly found myself slowing down, sitting longer, observing more.

Unexpectedly, the injury changed the nature of the journey, at least for me. I ceased being merely a tourist trying to cover attractions and became more of a watcher of people, spaces, moods, and rhythms.

One noticed then how astonishingly dependent these tiny islands are on tourism. Santorini has a population of barely thirty thousand people, yet it hosts millions of visitors annually. Entire economies, moods, and landscapes now revolve around the global tourism industry. The contrast between costs was revealing: the private island tour cost nearly 200 Euros, while the public bus to Oia cost barely 4 Euros per person.

The cable car ride down to the old port was pleasant but not particularly memorable — perhaps because after the overwhelming beauty of Santorini itself, ordinary attractions struggled to compete. What remained unforgettable was not a single activity but the cumulative visual experience: white architecture, volcanic cliffs, sunsets, sea light, and the constant movement of humanity through impossibly narrow lanes.

From Santorini we travelled by ferry to Mykonos. The ferry ride itself was uneventful, though the ports told their own story about the scale of Mediterranean tourism. Hundreds of passengers carrying suitcases rolled into and out of ferries with remarkable efficiency, as though entire island functioned as giant seasonal transit terminal.

Our hotel in Mykonos, Boheme, was aesthetically very different from Santorini. Stylish and elegant, it combined modern comfort with touches of nostalgia. The rooms had old rotary telephones and transistor-style music systems that could nevertheless connect via Bluetooth. It was tradition wrapped carefully inside modern luxury.

The hotel balcony offered magnificent sunset views, but reaching the old town was not easy for me because of the foot injury. The distance to Little Venice and the Matoyianni area was barely a kilometre, but since vehicles are restricted in much of the old town, every walk became physically demanding.

Yet Mykonos rewarded effort generously.

The Narrow Lanes of Matoyianni, Mykonos

Matoyianni lanes felt almost theatrical — white pathways edged with boutiques, cafés, luxury stores, flowers, and carefully curated beauty. What strikes you about Mykonos is not only the sea or the famous windmills, but the narrow pedestrian lanes that seem designed less for traffic and more for wandering. Every corner resembled a postcard. Unlike Santorini’s dramatic volcanic grandeur, Mykonos offered intimacy and charm.

The lanes are surprisingly alive. At one turn you encounter silence and soft light; at another, laughter, music and crowds from across the world. Every few metres, the setting changes — coloured dresses hanging outside a shop, a hidden café, handcrafted jewellery, or a sudden opening toward the sea.

Unlike many tourist destinations that eventually begin to feel repetitive, these streets retain charm because they are human in scale. One does not merely “see” Mykonos; one walks through it slowly.

For me, the injury on my foot changed the rhythm of this experience. The distances were short, but every uneven stone pathway demanded care. Yet perhaps because of that slower pace, I noticed more — textures of walls, shadows on white stone, conversations outside cafés, and the relaxed rhythm of island life.

The lanes of Mykonos are not monuments. They are experiences.

The shopping district carried global luxury brands, but what struck me more was how tourism today increasingly blends commerce, aesthetics, entertainment, and performance into a single experience. One afternoon, sections of the town had been barricaded because shooting was underway for what locals said was the next season of Emily in Paris. Tourists gathered excitedly simply hoping to catch a glimpse of actors they could barely see.

It felt strangely appropriate.

Mykonos itself often resembles a film set created for the global imagination — beautiful, photogenic, aspirational, and endlessly consumable through social media.

At Nammos Village and Beach Club, one could see this transformation most vividly. Luxury shopping, curated leisure, beach culture, music, and spectacle merged seamlessly into a carefully designed experience economy. And yet, despite the commercialisation, there remained moments of genuine pleasure — Greek yogurt at a café, quiet conversations, evening walks, and sea winds carrying the smell of salt and summer.

Perhaps what stayed with me most was the contrast between movement and stillness. The islands were constantly moving — tourists arriving, ferries departing, cameras clicking, music playing — while the sea itself remained calm and timeless around them.

Injury slowed me enough to notice that contrast.

Without intending to, I had moved from consuming the experience to reflecting upon it.

After the islands, Athens felt almost grounding.

Santorini and Mykonos seemed designed for the camera — dazzling, curated, endlessly photographed. Athens, by contrast, felt inhabited. There was traffic, graffiti, ordinary cafés, tired commuters, and the Acropolis standing quietly above modern disorder. After days of spectacle, there was something comforting about returning to a city where history and ordinary life still coexisted untidily.

Long after the sunsets fade from memory, what may remain is not merely the beauty of Santorini or the glamour of Mykonos, but the realization that entire islands now perform continuously for the imagination of the world. And yet, amidst all the performance, one still occasionally discovers moments that are personal, quiet, and unexpectedly real.

After a long 14 hour journey through Warsaw, we landed in Tirana expecting Mediterranean warmth. Instead, immigration officials questioned us at length, our passports moved from one person to another before finally being allowed entry with visible reluctance. Nearly an hour passed before the luggage appeared on the carousel.

It was not the welcome one associates with tourism campaigns and glossy travel brochures. Yet, over the next several days, I would discover that Albania is a country that does not reveal itself easily. Beneath its growing popularity lies the memory of isolation, suspicion, hardship, and a fierce determination to reinvent itself.

A Country Emerging from Its Shadows

Tirana surprised us almost immediately. Construction cranes dominated the skyline. Bold contemporary buildings stood beside austere communist-era structures. The city felt restless, eager to move forward.

Everywhere, one encounters the memory of Skanderbeg, Albania’s national hero who resisted the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century and remains deeply revered. In the city’s main square stands a striking modern building designed to resemble his face — an unusual blend of architecture and nationalism that captures modern Albania’s desire to root its future in its past.

Conversations with drivers and guides revealed another recurring theme: communism. Many spoke of the period with bitterness. Albania’s longtime ruler, Enver Hoxha, had transformed the country into one of Europe’s most isolated states, suspicious of both the Soviet Union and the West. Across the country, more than 170,000 bunkers were built in preparation for imagined invasions and nuclear attacks.

The psychological scars, one senses, have not entirely faded.

The Price of Reinvention

At the same time, Albania is changing rapidly. In 1992, its per capita income was under six hundred dollars. Today, it has risen dramatically, tourism is booming, and new hotels, apartments, and roads appear everywhere.

One hears frequent complaints about corruption. Even the government’s much-publicized appointment of an “AI minister” to improve transparency is met with skepticism by locals. Yet the transformation is undeniable. Prices remain far lower than in much of Europe, and tourists are arriving in growing numbers.

Still, tourism here has not yet acquired the polished ease of Western Europe. Drivers argued over tips. Guides occasionally appeared impatient. Warmth came slowly rather than automatically. Albania sometimes feels like a country still negotiating its relationship with outsiders.

Berat: The Stone City

The road to Berat was narrow, uneven, and slow. But the destination justified the journey.

A UNESCO World Heritage site, Berat rises in layers of stone and whitewashed walls beneath an ancient hilltop castle. Known as the “city of a thousand windows,” it appears almost geological — as though the mountain itself had learned architecture.

Walking through its steep lanes, one senses centuries compressed into a single landscape: Ottoman houses, Byzantine churches, old stone streets, and quiet courtyards overlooking the valley below.

The town possesses none of the artificial perfection of heavily curated tourist destinations. It feels lived in, weathered, and authentic.

Ohrid: Where the Journey Softened

Crossing into North Macedonia, the mood of the journey changed almost immediately.

If Albania felt energetic and unsettled, Ohrid felt timeless.

Lake Ohrid — believed to be among Europe’s oldest lakes — stretches out like polished glass beneath mountain ranges and drifting clouds. Ancient churches stand above impossibly blue water. Cafés spill gently onto the lakeside promenade. People linger rather than rush.

For the first time in several days, the journey slowed down.

Lunch by the Water

One afternoon, we sat beside the lake eating freshly grilled fish while small boats drifted lazily across the water. The air was cool, the mountains reflected softly in the lake, and conversations seemed to lower themselves naturally to the rhythm of the place.

Travel sometimes offers excitement. At other times, it offers release.

Ohrid belonged to the second category.

Nearby, we visited the reconstructed prehistoric lakeside settlement believed to date back several thousand years. Civilizations have lived beside these waters for millennia, and the continuity is strangely calming.

Mother Teresa and the Balkans’ Layered Identity

Another reminder of the Balkans’ layered identity appeared unexpectedly in the form of Mother Teresa, whose Albanian roots remain a matter of pride across the region.

In these lands, history is never fully past. Empires, religions, wars, communism, nationalism, and migration continue to shape everyday conversation and identity.

What Remains

As we left Ohrid behind and prepared for the next leg of our journey toward Greece, what stayed with me was not merely scenery, but contrast.

Albania felt like a country sprinting toward reinvention while still carrying the emotional weight of its past. Ohrid, by contrast, seemed untouched by urgency — content to remain suspended between water, mountains, and memory.

The Balkans are often spoken of through politics and conflict. Yet traveling through them reveals something quieter and more human: societies still learning how to carry history while opening themselves to the world.

Can moral idealism alone sustain governance?

Discovering political realism

My first serious encounter with political realism came not through Chanakya, but through Niccolò Machiavelli.

During my studies in political science, much of our engagement with political thought revolved around Western thinkers and their philosophies. Machiavelli’s The Prince stood out because it stripped politics of moral pretence.

He wrote about power not as philosophers wished it to operate, but as it actually operated.

For young students exposed largely to idealistic visions of politics, this was unsettling. Machiavelli appeared to suggest that rulers could not afford to remain bound entirely by conventional morality if they wished to survive.

At the time, there were occasional references to Chanakya and the Arthashastra. But they remained peripheral. Only later did I realise that India had produced a thinker who, centuries before Machiavelli, had arrived at many similarly hard conclusions about politics and statecraft.

More than cunning

Like many Indians, I knew Chanakya more as a powerful cultural image than as a deeply studied thinker.

His name was associated with intrigue, strategy, and political cunning. But the more I reflected on him over the years, the more I realised that Chanakya was concerned with something much larger than clever manipulation.

He was concerned with the survival and stability of the state.

The world in which Chanakya lived was unstable and violent. Kingdoms rose and fell rapidly. In such a world, moral idealism alone could not preserve political order.

Chanakya understood something uncomfortable:

noble intentions are irrelevant if one lacks the power to act on them.

That realism continues to give his thought contemporary relevance.

The architecture of power

Chanakya is often reduced to plots and espionage. But the Arthashastra is remarkably sophisticated in its understanding of governance.

It discusses taxation, trade, agriculture, mining, diplomacy, intelligence systems, anti-corruption measures, and public administration. Economic strength, Chanakya believed, was the foundation of political stability.

One of his most quoted observations captures this clearly:

“In the happiness of the people lies the happiness of the king.”

This complicates the popular image of Chanakya as merely ruthless. He understood that durable power ultimately rests on public stability and economic well-being.

Interestingly, although he helped build one of the most powerful empires of ancient India under Chandragupta Maurya, Chanakya himself is said to have lived austerely.

Whether fully historical or partly legendary, the contrast is revealing: a thinker deeply immersed in power, yet personally detached from luxury.

Movements and governments

The more I reflected on politics, the more I realised that there is an important difference between leading a movement and governing a state.

Movements are often sustained by moral passion and idealism. Governments operate under constraints—institutions, security threats, economic pressures, and electoral realities.

This distinction becomes visible across history.

Mahatma Gandhi mobilised India through moral authority, but he never had to run the machinery of government.

Similarly, Nelson Mandela spoke the language of resistance during the anti-apartheid struggle, but governed with far greater pragmatism once he became President of South Africa.

Even Abraham Lincoln, remembered today as the emancipator of slaves, governed with strategic caution during the American Civil War. He delayed decisions until conditions were favourable and used every instrument available to preserve the Union and pass the legislation abolishing slavery.

Chanakya’s realism begins precisely where moral aspiration encounters the constraints of governing.

The limits of idealism

The tension between morality and realism is visible in many phases of modern Indian history as well.

Jawaharlal Nehru brought immense idealism to the leadership of newly independent India. His faith in international institutions and post-colonial solidarity reflected a moral vision of world politics.

Yet critics have long argued that this idealism sometimes underestimated the harsher realities of power. His decision to take the Kashmir issue to the United Nations and his faith in friendship with China are often cited as examples where moral optimism may have collided with geopolitical reality.

The Sino-Indian War profoundly shook that vision.

Chanakya would probably have viewed such optimism with caution. For him, states survived not through goodwill alone, but through constant attention to strategy, security, and the balance of power.

Modern politics and Chanakya

The more one observes contemporary politics, the more one senses traces of Chanakya’s realism across parties and ideologies.

The Congress movement under Gandhi drew enormous strength from moral legitimacy. But by the late 1960s and 1970s, Indira Gandhi displayed a far sharper instinct for political consolidation and control. Populist slogans, centralisation of authority, and strategic manoeuvring became central to governance.

Later, P. V. Narasimha Rao governed with a quiet strategic finesse that was often underestimated at the time. His ability to manage political contradictions while pushing through major economic reforms reflected a distinctly realist understanding of politics.

Across parties today, democratic politics increasingly appears to reward organisational discipline, narrative control, and electoral strategy.

The contemporary rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party also reflects aspects of this realist understanding of politics. Its emphasis on organisational discipline, narrative control, electoral machinery, and the consolidation of political power suggests a recognition that governance in a democracy first requires the ability to consistently win and retain public support.

Supporters view this as strategic clarity and effective leadership. Critics worry that excessive focus on political dominance may weaken institutional balance and dissent.

Chanakya would probably have recognised both the effectiveness—and the risks—of such an approach.

The danger of realism

Yet Chanakya’s realism also leaves us with difficult questions.

Can politics become too transactional? Can the pursuit of power slowly erode moral restraint?

This is where the tension between Gandhi and Chanakya becomes particularly important.

Gandhi believed politics must remain anchored in moral truth. Chanakya viewed politics primarily through the lens of state survival and effectiveness.

Modern democracies continue to oscillate between these two impulses:

• the desire for ethical politics,

• and the practical demands of power.

Neither disappears completely.

Final reflection

To live with Chanakya is to recognise that politics cannot function through idealism alone.

But his realism also forces us to confront an enduring question:

How much moral compromise can a society accept in the pursuit of power, stability, and effective governance?

This reflection draws on experiences from a few organizations I have worked with over the years in the development and corporate sectors.

For a long time I assumed that good leadership was the main reason organizations succeed. That is what most management books suggest.

But over the years my own experience has made me less certain.

I have seen several organizations grow rapidly under leaders who were difficult, insecure, or even toxic. At the same time, I have also seen capable and decent leaders struggle to build institutions.

These observations come from many years of working across very different kinds of institutions. And they have often left me wondering: how much do leaders really matter in organizations?

Early Lessons

When I moved into the development sector, I joined a consulting organization whose founder had built an extraordinary network among senior civil servants and international agencies. Because of those connections, assignments came regularly.

Inside the organization, however, the atmosphere was quite unpleasant. The founder trusted very few people. He micromanaged constantly. The work environment was tense and often toxic.

Yet the organization grew rapidly. During the years I was there it expanded almost tenfold.

Later I worked with a development organization trying to apply technology to agriculture. The founder was exceptionally bright and deeply committed to the cause. But he also wanted to control almost everything. Strategy, partnerships, even routine decisions.

People gradually became frustrated. Many capable professionals left.

But the organization kept growing. The idea itself was powerful. Technology for agriculture was attracting attention and support. Networks were strong and the sector was expanding.

I encountered something worse while consulting for a rural development organization. Its leader was intellectually formidable and widely respected. Yet he treated colleagues with a degree of disdain that made it difficult for many talented people to stay for long.

Still, the organization continued to grow.

The Same Pattern Elsewhere

Even in the corporate world the pattern is not unusual. A relative working as a director in a large business house once told me that most important decisions were simply attributed to “Lalaji,” the owner. Authority flowed from the individual rather than from institutional processes. My wife had a similar experience early in her career in another business group where abusive language from the owner was not unusual.

And yet these organizations prospered.

The Leadership Puzzle

Experiences like these make me pause whenever leadership is described as the decisive factor behind organizational success.

Sometimes organizations grow simply because they are in the right sector at the right time. Sometimes strong networks bring a steady flow of opportunities. Sometimes capable professionals within the organization keep things moving despite the culture at the top.

But there is another side to this story.

Organizations that grow under domineering or insecure leaders often pay a hidden price. Talented people leave. Initiative declines. Decisions become centralized. The institution becomes dependent on the personality at the top.

Growth happens, but maturity does not.

From Organizations to Institutions

This is where leadership truly matters.

A good leader gradually builds systems that outlast him. Authority shifts from the individual to the institution. Decisions become more distributed. Professional competence begins to matter more than proximity to the founder.

Many family-owned or founder-led organizations struggle to make this transition. Some remain extensions of the founder’s personality for decades. Others evolve into professional institutions with stronger cultures and deeper capabilities.

The difference between the two often lies in the leader’s ability to step back and allow the organization to grow beyond himself.

So perhaps leadership does not always determine whether an organization grows.

But it often determines whether the organization eventually becomes a mature and enduring institution.

In the end, leadership is not only about building organizations.

It is about building institutions that can eventually function without the leader.

Organizations may grow through opportunity and circumstance. Institutions are built through leadership.

(This article is published today’s edition of Countercurrents: https://countercurrents.org/2026/04/horn-please-and-the-sound-of-our-roads/ )

A few weeks ago, while driving through Delhi with my friend and his five year-old grandson — visiting fro USA —sat quietly in the back seat, taking in the swirl of traffic, colour, and constant noise around him.

Then he asked, with disarming simplicity: “Dadu, why is ‘Horn Please’ written behind every truck? Is honking allowed in India?”

A Question We No Longer Ask

It was an innocent question, but it revealed something we have long stopped noticing.

To him, roads are largely silent, governed by rules that people follow without thinking. To us, noise is part of navigation. We honk to overtake, to warn, to hurry, to express irritation—sometimes simply to announce our presence. The words Horn Please, painted in bold on the back of trucks, feel less like an instruction and more like a philosophy of movement.

From Necessity to Habit

These words were born in a different India. In the decades after Independence, when highways were narrow, visibility was poor, and rear-view mirrors unreliable, drivers depended on sound to negotiate overtaking. “Horn Please” was not decoration; it was a safety mechanism.

But like many practices born of necessity, it has outlived its context.

When Rules Become Optional

Delhi’s traffic mess is often blamed on inadequate infrastructure or rising vehicle numbers. But the core problem is much simpler: rules mean nothing because consequences mean nothing.

You can see it everywhere—cars driving against the flow of traffic, relentless honking, high-beam headlights blinding oncoming drivers, and parking on the road as if it were a birthright. Even in the heart of the capital, lane discipline is treated as optional and red lights as advisory.

The numbers are sobering. India records over 1.68 lakh road fatalities annually, among the highest in the world. Congestion alone costs Delhi an estimated ₹60,000–70,000 crore each year in lost time, wasted fuel, pollution, and reduced productivity. But statistics do not fully capture the lived reality: a system where order is negotiated moment by moment, and noise becomes the default language of movement.

Chronic noise, of course, is not just an irritant—it is a public health issue. The World Health Organization has long warned that sustained urban sound levels above recommended limits can affect hearing, sleep, and cardiovascular health. In India, an estimated 60 million people live with some degree of hearing impairment, with noise pollution emerging as a significant contributor.

The Language of Noise

The culture of honking illustrates this shift. What began as a functional signal has become reflex. A study once observed a scooter rider in Kolkata honking over a hundred times in an hour. Trucks still carry “Horn Please” as if it were essential to survival. In reality, much of this noise now reflects impatience, not necessity.

You see it in small, everyday moments. Just the other afternoon, while driving back from the library, the car behind me kept honking repeatedly—not because I had done anything wrong, but because the driver wanted to change lanes and seemed to believe that constant honking would somehow secure his right of way. It was unnecessary, but entirely unselfconscious.

In many countries, a honk makes you pause and wonder if you have made a mistake. Here, it is often the other way around—the person honking assumes he is entitled to be heard.

Chaos at the Intersection

The same pattern holds across behaviours. Not far from my home, there is a busy traffic signal where one has to take a U-turn to enter the neighbourhood. It is a simple intersection, but almost every evening it descends into chaos. Vehicles move even when the light is red, others approach from the wrong side, and lanes dissolve into a free-for-all. There is no visible enforcement—no traffic police, no functioning camera—and the system quickly reverts to improvisation.

None of this persists because people do not know the rules. It persists because there is no cost to breaking them.

This is where the issue shifts from behaviour to governance.

Contrast this with many developed countries, where police presence is minimal but compliance is high. The difference is not culture; it is certainty of consequence.

One Penalty, A lifetime of Discipline

I was reminded of this through my own son. When he was a student in the United States more than twenty years ago, he was stopped during a routine check. He had simply forgotten to carry his driving licence. Nothing dramatic—just a small lapse.

But the response was immediate. His licence was suspended for six months.

There was no argument, no discretion, no way around it. And that was that.

What stayed with me was not the penalty itself, but its effect. Even today, more than two decades later, he follows every rule meticulously. He carries his documents, respects the law, and drives as if he is accountable—even when no one is watching.

It took just one consequence to shape a lifetime of behaviour.

Delhi today is not lacking in tools. The city has thousands of cameras, an expanding ANPR network, and an e-challan system. Yet enforcement remains uneven. Millions of challans are issued, but often for minor violations, while dangerous behaviours—wrong-side driving, reckless overtaking, high-beam misuse—frequently go unchecked. Worse, visible indifference erodes legitimacy. When citizens see violations ignored in plain sight, compliance becomes irrational.

The solution does not lie in more laws or larger budgets. It lies in credible enforcement.

Enforcement Without Fear or Favour

A short, sharp, politically backed 90-day drive—focused on a few high-risk behaviours—can reset norms. Zero-tolerance zones, strict penalties for repeat offenders, and consistent use of camera-based enforcement can create immediate impact. Unpaid challans should block insurance, registration renewal, and vehicle fitness certification. Technology already exists; what is missing is resolve.

Parking reform must follow the same principle. Idling on the road should be treated as an offence, whether or not the driver remains inside. Tow-away zones and wheel-clamping must become routine. Additional parking capacity is necessary—but without enforcement, even new infrastructure will be ignored.

Noise, too, demands attention. Cities like Mumbai have experimented with decibel-linked enforcement systems. Such measures need to be scaled. Honking should return to its original purpose: a warning, not a habit. The continued presence of “Horn Please” on vehicles is a reminder of how far behaviour has drifted from need.

Most importantly, enforcement agencies must be protected from interference. When violators can make a phone call and escape penalties, the system collapses from within. A clear political message—that no one is above the law—is essential.

Beyond “Horn Please”

Traffic is often dismissed as a routine civic nuisance. It is not. It is a reflection of state capacity and civic discipline. A society that cannot enforce basic rules struggles to enforce anything else.

As for my friend’s grandson’s question, I offered him a partial answer—about history, about different conditions, about why honking once mattered.

But the fuller answer is harder.

The words Horn Please endure not because we need them, but because we have not yet outgrown the system that made them necessary.

Until we do, the noise will continue.

(This reflective piece is part of the series on ‘LIfe and Relationships’. It explores how relationships evolve over time, and how roles and influence within a marriage can shift gradually, often without being consciously recognised. Drawing on personal experience, the essay explores how partnership, dependence, and balance take on new meanings over the course of a long marriage. This was today published in Countercurrent: https://countercurrents.org/2026/04/how-my-wife-and-i-exchanged-places-what-changed-when-time-becomes-your-own/ )

A friend said something to me recently, half in jest, half in observation:

“You seem to have outsourced your life to your wife.”

We both laughed. But the remark stayed.

It is not entirely untrue. These days, even small decisions—what to wear, what to eat, when to travel—are rarely mine alone. If I find myself in a restaurant without her, I instinctively try to remember what she would have ordered, and go with that. It feels natural in the moment. But when I step back, I sometimes wonder when exactly that shift happened.

It certainly wasn’t how it began.

I was drawn to her first in the most obvious way—there was a strong physical attraction. Ours was a close relationship even before marriage, which, in those days, carried its own quiet defiance. She was younger, but bright, attentive, and deeply invested. Looking back now, I can see how much she shaped herself around what I liked, what I preferred.

At the time, I believed—at least in principle—that marriage was a partnership of equals. I would often say so. But belief, I have come to realise, does not always translate into practice as easily as one assumes.

There was a time when I was still uncertain about my career, when stability still felt some distance away. What stayed with me was her clarity—that uncertainty did not matter to her. She was willing to go ahead regardless. That conviction probably gave me more courage than I acknowledged then.

We married with the support of our families, and life quickly settled into its rhythm. Or so it seemed.

In reality, those early years had their share of strain. Living together after years of being in different cities, adjusting to new roles, navigating family expectations—these brought disagreements that were not always easy. Conversations sometimes turned into arguments, and arguments into stretches of silence. There were moments—unspoken, but real—when one wondered whether walking away might have been simpler.

We did not dramatise these phases. But they shaped us.

Through much of this, she adapted more than I did. When she became pregnant, she left her job to move and be with me. Later, she balanced teaching and corporate work alongside raising our son and managing the household—often within an environment that did not always acknowledge her effort.

If I am honest, in those years my word carried more authority than it should have—despite what I would have said about equality. Not asserted loudly, but present nevertheless. And she, more often than not, went along.

But relationships have a way of pushing back against quiet imbalances.

The shift did not come suddenly. It unfolded over time—through disagreements that lingered, through a certain accumulated fatigue, and through a growing awareness in both of us that something was uneven. As our professional lives expanded, and as the world around us began to speak more openly about women’s roles, I found myself re-examining what I had long taken for granted.

I began to see her not just as someone who adjusted—but as someone who carried.

There were moments that made this clearer. One of them came when we decided to send our son to the United States for his undergraduate studies. It was a decision that stretched us—financially and emotionally. We had only just begun our international assignments and did not quite have the resources for something of that scale.

I hesitated.

She did not.

It was she who steadied the decision—who held the anxiety when I wavered, who believed we would manage before I did. Looking back, I realise that some of the larger risks in our life were anchored more in her conviction than in mine.

There were other phases too—especially after I moved out of the Reserve Bank into development work—when uncertainty returned. Times when I was without a job. Through those periods, she remained steady. Not with grand reassurance, but with a quiet, matter-of-fact confidence that made it easier to keep going.

Somewhere along the way, respect deepened into reliance.

When our son left, the house grew quieter. We travelled more—initially to fill the space, later because we began to enjoy it. And in that phase, I became more aware of how much of our life she held together.

She brings order where I would allow drift. What we eat, how we live, how the household functions—she shapes these with care. She manages our finances, our taxes, the details that keep life running. Over time, I have stepped back from much of this.

From the outside, it may well look like I have “outsourced” my life.

From the inside, it feels more layered.

There are still moments of friction. She sometimes tells me—quite directly—that I do not contribute enough. When I try, I often find I cannot match her level of thoroughness, especially in matters of the home, and I retreat. What I see as stepping back can look, to her, like opting out. We are still, it seems, negotiating that space.

And yet, the balance has undeniably shifted.

Where I once led without thinking, I now find myself guided—often by her judgement, her instinct, her steadiness. It has not been a reversal so much as a slow turning. At some point, without announcement, we exchanged places.

There is comfort in that. And also a quiet unease.

I sometimes wonder whether, in leaning so much on her, I have allowed certain capacities to weaken—the habit of deciding independently, of managing the small practicalities of life. And there is the thought—unspoken, but persistent—of what happens if one of us is no longer there. If she were to go first, I suspect I would find myself quite unprepared.

And yet, alongside that thought, there is gratitude.

To have had a partner who stood firm when things were uncertain, who adapted when it was easier not to, who grew into strength rather than resentment—that is no small fortune.

If what looks like dependence from the outside is, in reality, the outcome of years of disagreement, adjustment, correction, and trust, then perhaps it is not something to be dismissed lightly.

Perhaps it is simply what a long relationship becomes.

Love, in the end, changes its language.

Not the certainty of being right,

but the willingness to yield.

Not the excitement of beginning,

but the quiet strength of having stayed.

I find myself wondering how this quiet shift has played out in other relationships.