Kal, Aaj, Kal: An Independence Day reflection

INDEPENDENCE DAY

By the lottery of birth and the choice of conviction, I am an Indian — and proud of it. There was a time when the navy blue passport meant very little in the world - little respect, little privilege, and even less presumption of competence. Today, it carries more weight. It reflects what we, as a nation, have clawed back into our collective identity - a presence in the world, not just for being one sixth of all humans.

Over the years, I have travelled extensively - to boardrooms, policy forums, classrooms, and the corridors of the corporate world and intersecting stakeholders in many parts of the world. And every flight back to India has been a return not just to geography, but to a deeper grounding. To language, memory, scent, and paradox. But also increasingly, to frustration.

Growing up, India was poorer, as much as my own upbringing. But in some ways, we were richer - in friendships, camaderie, in dreams, in a belief that we were all rising together. We didn’t ask our friends their surnames. Friendships were forged in playgrounds and public schools. There was a simplicity, an equality of aspiration. Somewhere, that innocence has evaporated. Today, children ask questions we never did - often with eyes already conditioned to wealth, caste, class, postcode, or perceived “merit”. After all, have any of us given up on our surnames that denote these?

Cities have become a metaphor for much of what gnaws at us. Growing up, we thought our cities were grand - naïve, maybe nostalgic, but we believed in their promise. Decades later, with wider eyes and global exposure, we stare at the debris of broken infrastructure, fractured planning, corruption and unliveable congestion. We didn’t dream of gated communities. We dreamt of public parks, footpaths, clean air, liveable cities. When did that become too much to ask?

Incomes have risen, but so have the number of filters we need just to breathe, drink, and sleep. In our cities, clean air is a luxury, silence an accident, and civic sense a dwindling virtue. Loudspeakers wage nightly battles against sleep, political sycophants’ posters spills over with entitlement, and our streets - however swanky the skyline - still buckle under the weight of our apathy. It’s that we’ve normalised the idea that someone else will fix it, clean it, silence it.

From joint families to nuclear units to the silent solitude of single-person flats, the shift has been profound. From the disappearing neighbourhood doctors to the roulette of healthcare that is often expensive, inaccessible, or simply indifferent. Who bears that cost - financially, emotionally, morally?

Some reflexes never quite leave us. Even today, in homes across India, the first response to a power cut is not to check the fuse, but to step out and scan the neighbourhood - just to confirm that others are also suffering. There’s a peculiar comfort in collective inconvenience. It’s the same spirit that makes us feel quietly vindicated when initial reports showed that US tariffs on India are marginally lower than on a few other countries. As if the real prize is the knowledge that someone else is slightly worse off. And yet, this odd calibration of progress is what often passes for satisfaction in our public discourse.

Education was meant to be our great leveller, the bridge between potential and opportunity. Yet decades on, it stumbles under the weight of outdated syllabi and broken education, politicised agendas, and a refusal to match skills with the century we live in. We once dreamt of schools as launchpads for the future. Look around, and you’ll see the quiet, painful truth that most middle-class and upper-middle-class families now nurse. Despite their pride in India, they quietly hope their children will go abroad. To study, to settle, to breathe.

And those who stay? Many aspire towards the power corridors of India’s public influence, from a belief that power brings immunity, influence, and inevitably, wealth. “PM bano, CM bano, ya DM bano” - the popular slogan in many parts of the country - is no longer aspirational for what one does in those roles, but for what one gets from them. That inversion of public service into private gain should concern us far more than it does. After all, the street-level political skirmishes and increasing number of ‘social-worker’ synonym of local political ‘dadas’ simply denotes corruption as a career.

They are signals. Signals that we need more than GDP growth or unicorn counts. We need a moral and institutional renewal. Our class system has not vanished. It has merely mutated. The old caste lines may have blurred in some pockets, but the new divide - of access, of influence, of accumulated privilege - is every bit as corrosive. Nepotism has not disappeared. In some cases, it has simply professionalised itself, wearing the garb of legacy, network, or “fit”.

Reforming the Indian bureaucracy is not just overdue - it is the Everest our democracy has kept walking past. Without it, every policy promise risks being swallowed by a labyrinth of procedure, powerplay, and institutional fatigue.

A fair justice system too remains a distant horizon. The legal system groans under pendency that can outlast lifetimes, procedures that punish persistence, and costs that make fairness a privilege for the few. Trials become tests of stamina rather than truth.

Yes, we are now a nation fluent in digital. From identity to payments, from dashboards to delivery, the infrastructure of data is everywhere. But the deeper shift - of decisions no longer hinging on Delhi, of opportunity no longer orbiting around a few centres of power - is still some distance away.

Citizens continue to face subtle and overt barriers when they move within India - for education, for employment, for opportunity. The discomfort may not always be codified, but it is felt. In housing forms, in local hostilities, in whispered slurs about language or identity. What makes it harder to accept is that those who take oath to uphold that Constitution often stand complicit in its selective application. The free movement of citizens is routinely politicised in the name of language, nativity, culture, or other invented -isms. When belonging becomes conditional on regional conformity, we hollow out the very fabric of a democratic union.

And yet, our nation - maddening, magnificent, malfunctioning, still makes me believe.

We are democratic, argumentative, adaptive. We have survived many odds. We have regenerated before. But regeneration without ambition is not enough. No nation ends poverty by merely aiming to end poverty. Poverty is banished only when we aim for prosperity - for excellence, for leadership, for dignity. That, to me, is the unfinished task of freedom.

This Independence Day, I do not want easy pride. I want honest reckoning.

Let us not mistake achievements so far, for transformation.

Let us not confuse grand narratives, with ground realities.

And let us never forget. We are at a demographic turning point.

Because if we fail to invest in meaningful governance, urban resilience, equitable growth, and institutional justice - what is a dividend today may become a demographic knife tomorrow.

Nations, like people, are not born whole. They become.

And India, for all its noise and knots, carries within it the quiet, indestructible rhythm of becoming. For all its imperfections, it is home, where hope is not naïve — it is necessary. India ahead will be wiser for its stumbles, stronger for its struggles, and more certain of the road it must take. For in the clamour of our contradictions lies the resilience to shape it - and in the hands of our youth rests that hope, and the responsibility in each of us, of the lives still to be lived.

The story of our India is far from done.

Picture abhi baaki hai.