Be Indian, be blessed

Most happiness rankings put India at the bottom of the list. The 2025 global poll, conducted by French research firm Ipsos is one with a difference, it places India at the very top!

It begs the question: how is that even possible?

First things first.

If anything is true about India, its opposite is equally true.

Nevertheless, we must stop believing foreigners who rate the happiness of others’ homes from the outside.

They need to recalibrate their happiness scales. They need to get that everything is subjective. 

Once upon a time there was a rich man. He had a servant. The servant did whatever the rich master ordered.

The master believed he was smart, while his servant had low skills, low aptitude, and weak survival instincts. He must be miserable, thought the master. 

By his measurement scale, the servant ranked low.

The master believed the servant couldn’t survive without him.

One day the master went boating on a pleasure ride at sea, with the servant rowing the boat.

An unexpected storm caught them by surprise and pushed them deep into the middle of the wild sea.

They spotted an island and took refuge on that uninhabited place.

It was all wilderness.

The master couldn’t figure out anything in this new place.

The servant, however, could climb trees for fruit, catch fish with his bare hands, and cook on a fire started by rubbing stones.

Such was their fate that the servant became the master and the master became the servant on the island.

Roles reversed, and now the new master believed he was smart, while the newly minted servant had low skills, low aptitude, and weak survival instincts. The new master concluded that the former master-turned-servant must be miserable.

The former believed the latter couldn’t survive without him.

By his measurement scale, the erstwhile “master” ranked low.

And so Indian philosophy teaches us: your position doesn’t matter; your duties do. One must discharge those duties faithfully, in whichever avatar one presently dawns.

Do your duties well, or you will face karmic justice. The rulers of today will be held to account by the ruled whenever the karmic cycles wheel makes a turn. 

Coming back, any ranking of India by the West, good or bad, is like a blind man’s opinion of an elephant.

India’s many opposites live happily, and in close proximity.

Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood superstar, lives less than a kilometer from slums.

So, while America’s definition of maturity is reaching one’s heights, India’s is detachment; the ability to settle down. The former is ambition-driven; the latter is aspiration-based.

India’s unique proposition is this: good or bad is not a function of what is, but of one’s frame of mind. What is, is neutral!

Most of us miss this wisdom, and so we remain unsettled, tiring ourselves as we chase the heights.

This is the only land where Buddhas, Mahaviras, Rams, and Krishnas, royalty soaked in the comforts of wealth, but still used their whole intellectual selves to descend from the heights and move in the opposite direction to fulfill their dharmic duties.

That is why, despite a low standard of living, most people here are very happy. Their standard of life is fulfilling. 

Each wedding season, ladies travel from the wealthiest suburbs, pass the poorest slums of Dharavi, to attend weddings in Central Mumbai, and back, wearing glittering jewelry without skipping a heartbeat, even past midnight.

Poverty is plentiful. Crime in India is a rarity.

In the final reckoning:  

“Everything is subject to interpretation. The interpretation that prevails at a given time is a function of power, not truth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

Currently, the West is financially powerful, so it uses its influence to decide what happiness means.

I shudder to think how the West would behave if it experienced even a little scarcity.

During Covid, we saw how Americans turned into hoarders of toilet paper and vaccines alike.

In India, people came out and emptied their hearts and purses. No riots. No murders. No looting.

America has push-button comforts and plenty of personal space to enjoy them alone, yet many are restless; some regularly fire on innocent passersby for no reason at all.

Why doesn’t that happen in India?

The other USP of India is that Indians believe in reincarnation. So they bypass frustration and despondency associated from a single life’s unaccomplished goals. Shortfalls if any, are due to past Karma. Doing well in the present circumstances will lead to better times. And Indians carry this attitude wherever they go. 

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is an American offering.

India's is different: Lives, Duties, and the Experience of Bliss.

In fact, happiness can only be experienced by de-pursuing. And so Indians pace, not pursue!

Welfare State - The Bhartiya Way

The names of some of the non-democratic and notorious dictators that stand out are often associated with communist regimes: Think Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin.  

They claimed to pursue equality by redistributing wealth. In practice, they delivered poverty on an equal scale. 

They targeted religious and wealthy individuals and groups in the absolute without applying any mechanism to discern, blaming them for all social inequality, and systematically suppressed or eliminated them.  

The result was catastrophic. Faith and moral codes were weakened, millions of citizens were killed, and the economies of these nations collapsed into free fall.

And so the case for democracy. 

However, in my opinion, the long-term effectiveness of democracy in delivering public goods is open to question.

Did these dictators fail because they were non-democrats or because they hated God and wealth creators? 

The People's Republic of China is not a liberal democracy. Under Xi Jinping's leadership, the state maintains strict control over foreign media, promotes a market-oriented economy, and seeks to rejuvenate traditional Chinese civilization. A key policy objective is also the sinicization of foreign religions to ensure they conform to the local and cultural norms. The results are for anyone with an open mind to appreciate. 

America was accidentally discovered by Europeans. Its earliest settlers got a lot of land and resources with zero competition and very little resistance. The simple indigenous tribes of the land were almost wipped out by the new inhabitants. Being a clean slate with no legacy, it became the world's first nation that was formed without a king. It built the nation ground up, using slaves from Africa. 

Later, by another accident of geography, it escaped the evils of the world wars as not a single bomb fell on it, but did benefit from it as a supplier of arms and ammunition to the warring factions. It did drop the Atom bomb to prove and declare itself as the undisputed master of the world. It began to dictate the fate of other nations through alliances or sanctions. 

America believes that democracy must prevail across the world. 

However, America itself became what it did, on a model of gradually evolving and controlled democracy over 170 plus years. Unfortunately, India, even when not ripe,  became a full fledged democracy soon after getting its independence. That allowed all adult citizens to vote, including "all women," a decade before all Americans did. 

While we are very much of a democracy, frankly, even today, America is not. It runs on a two-party "regime," with huge overlaps, which it calls democracy. And it declares itself as a model for success.  

I think it simply has a higher standard of living, not life. It suffers from broken families, homelessness, high debt, crime, gun violence, deep racism, substance abuse, addiction, polarization, mental health issues, etc. 

But the world believes and accept what the Americans preach because of its economic and military might. It is America that decides what is good, bad, or mad. 

Everything is subject to interpretation. The interpretation that prevails at any given time is not a function of truth but power - Friedrich Nietzsche.

Only democracy serves, is just a childhood indoctrination spread through the American hard and soft power, a constant self-serving narrative building exercise. 

Many of us began with the conviction that democracy is the best form of government, only to later settle on the more pragmatic view that it is merely the least undesirable. 

Today I feel that compared with a benevolent dictator, democracy is appearing inferior. Yet it retains one crucial advantage: when no benevolent ruler emerges, citizens can at least remove a bad one through the ballot.

The difficulty, however, is that while we can't locate the good, the genuinely malevolent rulers do come to power; ironically through democracy. 

History offers several examples. Once in office, such leaders often learn how to manipulate institutions from within and extend their power well beyond the limits that democracy was meant to impose.

This raises an uncomfortable question: is a dictator always necessarily worse than a flawed democratic order? 

Leaders are often branded as tyrants by powerful foreign democracies, and by their media systems that pick up some inevitable frictions or lapses as spoken by rivals or opposition within a foreign country and then use that to amplify the problem. 

Media was supposedly created to keep power within its home country honest through truthful reporting and not an overreaching commentary on other countries' matters. 

Political reputation, in other words, is rarely neutral.

History also shows that public perception of leaders is deeply contested. 

Muammar Gaddafi was, for many, as beloved to his people as Mohammad bin Zayed Al Nahyan is to Emiratis, or Putin is to many Russians. 

Each of these leaders pursued welfare-oriented policies in his own way. Iran too complicates simple categories: it is not a straightforward dictatorship, and its democratically elected political leadership has long been viewed differently by Iranians and by the United States. 

The Shah, for example, was detested by many Iranians but admired by America.

The deeper problem is that humanity has not yet perfected the art of self-government. 

Compared with the great empires of ancient Bharat, modern democracy has often produced only limited pockets of welfare-state success. This is especially striking in an era when territorial disputes are largely settled, yet many leaders still struggle to survive even a second term. Some, facing likely defeat, are tempted to weaken the electoral process itself rather than accept a rightful exit.

Today’s conflicts are no longer mainly about land. They are about markets, resources, and influence. 

That makes external intervention a persistent feature of political life, often aimed at weakening a nation’s standing in global trade and commerce. In such a world, political freedom without economic strength can leave a country vulnerable.

For this reason, I believe a nation should first attain at least middle-income economic strength before being granted full democratic freedom. Economic maturity gives society the resilience needed to resist narratives that undermine its people and its leadership. 

In India’s case, our tragedy has been to expand democratic freedoms before building durable economic foundations. The result is that voters are too often offered short-term handouts instead of governance that breaks dependence on election-time doles.

Once economic strength is secure, a gradual transition to a more disciplined political model, such as a single-party democracy like Singapore’s, may be worth considering. 

Even then, the public must retain the power to remove the top leader at the end of a term if performance is poor. 

Alternatively, a party-state system in which elections occur within the party rather than directly among the public may work, provided it is guided by Dharmic principles.

Why should such a model be taken seriously? Because human beings are naturally drawn toward adharma when self-awareness weakens, imagination runs unchecked, memory fades, conscience slackens, and willpower fails. 

Governance, therefore, cannot rely on idealism alone. It needs modeled restraint, institutional discipline, and a clear sense of duty towards the state and the subjects.

That is why the equivalent of Chanakya–Maurya model deserves revival, one where a Brahmin-led moral counsel could serve as a reminder to the mightiest Kshatriya rulers, that to rule the world, one must first serve it. Here God is not the enemy of the state but solace for anyone when misfortune strikes. 

Only a civilization as ancient as Bharat and a country as young as India, rooted in its past and committed to its future, can attempt such a long-term project with seriousness. 

If it succeeds, India need not merely govern itself well; it can become an example for the world to follow.

Ind-yeah is excitin!

From the outside, that caption captures the typical Westerner’s impression. 

Yet many outsiders fail to see that India is neither monochromatic in character nor monolithic in structure. Its vast landmass and people are the most diverse in the world - socially, culturally, economically, historically, including by geography and terrain. 

Sadly, many Indians miss thiz too. They often prioritize democracy over development, secularism over survival, freedoms over duties, and human rights over human dignity. 

They admire the economically successful West without testing its relevance for civilizational Bharat, which has a very different cultural context. 

Unlike much of Western history — shaped more recently by crusades, conquests, and colonization — India’s civilizational arc is ancient and distinctive; the Western constitutional psyche often springs from a different set of historical experiences, including guilt.

Ironically, India’s founding fathers borrowed heavily from Western models when drafting our Constitution. 

Governing India requires choosing the path of least resistance among many competing demands. 

Laws and policies must be constitutionally sound, socially acceptable, culturally appropriate, economically feasible, technologically viable, parliamentarily passable, legally defensible, and geopolitically prudent — all at once!

Leadership therefore matters more in India than in most countries, because ruling here is exceptionally difficult. 

Unrest can smolder in multiple regions at the same time, and yet a leader must still win a national majority from people who, less than a century ago, lived under more than 560 separate princely states. 

To succeed, a leader must be ambidextrous: able to connect with diverse, often disconnected groups across the subcontinent.

In the end, only a government that is philosophically plural, ideologically patriotic, socially engaged, culturally conservative, fiscally liberal, technologically experimental, and disciplinarily restrained can somewhat keep the society cohesive and hope to deliver steady reforms that bring long-term transformation. 

The current BJP dispensation is cadre-driven and comes closest to that ideal.

The results are visible: India is rising in wealth and respect. It is delivering social aims through market-led dynamics.

Congratulations to Narendra Damodardas Modi for being the most effective and longest-serving Pradhan Mantri of India cum Pradhan Sevak of Bharat; it is he who made India exciting!

Bolo Bharat Mata Ki .... Jai Okay Please! 🇮🇳