This is one of the best articles I have ever read about INDIA. Despite my weak attention span, you managed to make me stick to the post till the very end.
Thank you. I appreciate the kind words. My plan for series is to try to explain India, warts and all, no BS, and still be amusing. Because India without humor will just make your head explode!
I have to say I’m so glad I read this article, I’m definitely going to check more of what you’ve written, I would love to read more of your thoughts. Thank you!
Well written. Diversity and living with contradictions comes naturally to us. India is country of immigrants(long before US). People came from multiple religious background like Jews, Parsis, Muslims, Christians etc. They came to India and integrated. People from europe, greece, china etc came and integrated. I think except, british every set of people came to india, integrated and became Indians. I strongly feel foundation of that attitude comes from Hinduism, which is truly plural, accepts diversity, doesn’t expect 100% compliance, which teaches to co-exist with others! Infact India gave birth to 4 religions as well. India is truly unique that way…
Yes. If the British had come to stay, like everyone else, history would have been different. But they came to trade, and Indians were foolish enough to let them make one king fight against another… [and finance the British too!] and that ended the trade and started the colonialism. Which was enforced by Indians as well! It is quite a bizarre story. The Indian attitude seemed to be, “meet the new boss, same as old boss.” Which, if you believe Daron Acemoglu, isn’t unreasonable from the point of view of the common man—most institutions were “extractive.”
I think, British was 1st group which exploited our diversity( religion, ethnicity, caste etc) and created divisions among us so that they can plunder as much. While Muslim invaders committed looting and killings, kind of damage British inflicted was at different level. It was pure evil in terms breaking our confidence in values, customs, religion etc. British severely damaged our psyche, made us feel inferior. Some folks are still suffering from that disease. British thought that is the better way to conquer a civilization like India. Great to see finally India seem to be getting back the confidence. Trump Tariff episode, Ops Sindoor etc are good examples.
Indian insecurity was terrible amongst my parents generation. Lesser amongst mine. Much less amongst younger people. All of this is great. I explore this in subsequent Substack posts.
Such eloquent, lucid writing! Societies everywhere are complex (humans bring that innately) and India is even more so. You have distilled the essence of India as well as one could in under 1000 words. I'll revisit this.
What a wonderfully nuanced essay. What I particularly enjoyed is the way you take something as vast and complicated as India and make it easier without reducing its contradictions into simplistic explanations. The flow of the essay is exceptionally well managed—you move from the deeply personal and mundane to the historical, philosophical, linguistic, economic and political, and somehow bring all of it back to the central idea of India as a civilisation that has learned to live with contradictions rather than constantly trying to resolve them.
One thought that came to me while reading this is that perhaps India's uniqueness begins even before we get to its civilisation—it is almost written into its geography.
Very few places in the world contain such extraordinary contrasts within a single civilisational space: the snow-covered Himalayas in the north, the harsh deserts of Rajasthan, the fertile river plains of the Ganga and Brahmaputra, the vast coastline stretching across thousands of kilometres, the Western and Eastern Ghats, tropical forests, plateaus, and islands scattered across two different seas. You can travel through landscapes that feel like entirely different countries, yet they exist within the same civilisational continuum.
Perhaps this geographical diversity helped create the social and cultural diversity that you describe so beautifully. Different landscapes produced different livelihoods, foods, languages, customs, belief systems and ways of life—and instead of one completely replacing another, they accumulated over centuries.
That, to me, may be one of the most remarkable things about India: it has rarely been a civilisation defined by uniformity. It is a civilisation defined by layering.
Ancient and modern. Sacred and commercial. Local and global. Sanskrit and Tamil. Tradition and technology. Spirituality and entrepreneurship. Chaos and extraordinary order. All of these seemingly contradictory things don't merely coexist in India—they constantly interact, borrow from one another and evolve.
And perhaps that is why your idea of “and/and” thinking resonates so strongly. India has spent thousands of years practising it without necessarily giving it a name.
The real achievement, therefore, may not be that India has managed to create unity out of diversity. It may be something more subtle: India has shown that unity does not necessarily require uniformity in the first place.
A beautifully written piece, and one that leaves you thinking about India differently after you finish reading it.
Once, while watching a video about the political ecosystem in Kerala, a local gentleman described India. To this day, it is the most accurate description of this varied nation that I've come across. He said, and I quote, "Hindustan ek khwab hai."
Isn't that the most politically, economically and religiously void description of our beautiful country?
Yes, it is. And I agree with it. I only hope that the infrastructure runs so deep in IndiaOS that the current environment doesn’t ruin it forever. I am optimistic but not certain.
@Samir Varma I think this is not a strength of India but its weakness. India will never progress because it can never get consensus, no two people in india can ever agree on anything let alone understand each other properly.
Both USA and China have solved these problems in fact many nations have solved this problem of uniformity which is a pre-requisite for nation building and growth.
India believes that its superstitions, foolishness, diversity and other weaknesses are its strengths, in a very absurd reframing.
I’ve read all those works and I disagree. The USA can’t agree on anything at all. What the USA has is “inclusive” institutions, in the language of why nations fail. India is well on its way to developing those. The USA grew strongly for almost 150 years without inclusive institutions because it was developing them step by step. And that is what India is doing. India has a huge proportion of its population online now. They see how the rest of the world lives. All India needs is for the government to get out of the way (which it has been doing, step by step, since 1991) to grow for decades.
From the framework that the authors have given in WHY NATIONS FAIL, the analysis reveals that India will never be able to come out of poverty.
India is the grid with the question mark. In the book, the authors clearly state that there is no country that ever went from an unsuccessful company grid to the question mark, and then to the successful companies. The typical path to success is through the blue arrows, which China is taking right now. India is trying to move directly from an unsuccessful nation's grid to a successful nation's grid, while China has economic inclusion, but it does not have political inclusion. The authors give many use cases where many countries have moved from unsuccessful to successful by going to the left and then to the top, I marked them with green arrows. But they clearly say that not a single country could move up and then to the left, giving political inclusion or claiming to give political inclusion without economic inclusion will result in losing both. Many countries that went up before going right have all failed or simply stuck in limbo - They give 10s of examples in the book. India has taken that route, and it can never move from Left to right in the picture. And no country has ever made a jump direct from the lower quadrant to the top quadrant diagonally, which is impossible. Please let me know if my analysis is wrong. This is exactly why I am able to tell that India will never become a successful country. This has nothing to do with patriotism or nationalism it is simply path dependence and our country has chosen the wrong path 70+ years ago and there is no coming back i.e. we can’t go back and rewrite history.
I disagree with them. Why Nations Fail is a superb book, but it is massively underspecified. Nothing they say is dispositive. India is well on its way to building inclusive institutions. And, by the way, China is not. As a matter of fact, it would not surprise me in the slightest if, in 30 years, India’s economy was bigger than China’s. You heard it here first!
Hi I tried really hard to put the point in the comment, but I think i have failed, so i put them in a visual format on this article - with path dependence of needing to have inclusive economic institutions before having inclusive political institutions, i.e. path dependence.
I tried to put it in an article - let me know if there are errors in the logic
This is one of the most articulate and resonant pieces I’ve ever read on India — not just as a nation, but as its own operating system. You’ve managed to put into words what so many feel innately but struggle to explain, which is the ability to hold contradictions and to contain multitudes without needing resolution.
Thank you kindly for this — looking forward to the rest of the series.
India isn’t pluralistic. It survives because it’s Hindu majority and nearly every ethnic group is majority Hindu. Everywhere Hindus are not a majority has an insurgency movement.
Kashmir, Khalistan, NE Christian secession insurgencies.
Furthermore one of the main premises of Islam is killing polytheists and punishing them. That polytheism is the worst sin on the planet.
Any blind Hindu that “celebrates Eid with their Muslim friends” after centuries of persecution by Muslims and continued animosity by them towards Hindus deserves whatever bullshit these muslims have in store for them. Some Hindus are just so brainwashed.
There was too much of generalization from a scholar like you . You write Sikhs contribute wheat for the Hindus . Punjab ( with Sikh majority ) contributes only 16.5% of wheat produce whereas other non Sikh states UP grows 32 % MP grows 16% and adequate contribution comes from Haryana and Rajasthan .
You said Christian Schools teach English to Hindu and Muslims . Now the best of English medium schools in Big cities are owned non Christian Society like DPS Nalanda
Utterly ridiculous a self fulfilled vishwaguru complex post without checking the ground reality. The caste, religion, rituals etc deeply entered in our psyche. Get out of your imagined world views about india. It is deeply misogynistic society. Anything is uncomfortable fo us to explain we take refuge of our culture traditional. We don't treat our fellow Indian with respect regardless of their religious , caste identity. Did we Learn from the firstclasss democracies in the world. Can you tell us which country treat us with respect as it used to be? Which city is a livable. We are a inward looking society always happy tosee ourselves in the mirror.
You have to add one more consideration to a write-up which contains a lot of what we have known all along. We aren’t a specially chosen people; we are prone to similar problems as people anywhere in the world; and human systems are at the mercy of the elements, as are natural systems.
There is nothing to suggest India can’t be as messy a quagmire as Africa today or Europe in the first half of the last century.
In India alone, has emerged a social order where individual rights are accorded to the lowest of the low and the weakest of the weak; while these may not be equal; they are differentiated. But they all individually matter; and they are all, in their own way; sovereign. And these people are linked to one another through mutual obligations for service, which bind their incentives together. This has historically been the case; and all the current constitutional order has done is to merely give its rougher edges a necessary haircut.
India is a country of some 1.5 billion people. There is no way such a monster can keep up for a day without some innate, non-state manner of civic organization and order which survives not merely despite the state; but often times without it. That is how Indian society has survived all these centuries when she wasn’t sovereign.
One thing that is undeniable about India is its stability. That is not a gift of the political gods - least of all the religious clergy - whose trade of igniting trouble often takes places in the background of assumed normalcy and order, giving them a sense with which they can cause trouble without it coming back to bite them.
This presumption of social stability is the gift of the social order pre-existing between people, which defines for them their sovereignty, and then, their obligations to one another.
It is hurt when people replace consideration for one another with non-consideration; when they replace allegiance to society with allegiance to diffuse entities whether religious or political.
People often blame Indians for being inconsiderate towards each other. Were that to be true, we would have witnessed, in India, multiple bloodlettings of biblical scales - it is not as if there is a shortage of potential victims. But for specific episodes which are notable for their rarity, India has avoided most of the smoke. Ever heard of a deadly riot between worshippers of Lakshmi and devotees of Parvati? Don’t think so.
I would say, why India survives, is because of consideration. Perhaps best shown by your anecdote about the funeral, where the grieving party could have taken up the issue of disturbance with the tantri, only to reconcile themselves with the fact that he is merely doing his job, and that he has others to attend to, and that, he would be the best at what he does anyway. We are not the society of Karens.
More than Hindutva etching away at our sense of inclusivity; I would point out the increasing sense of wealth over consideration; and technocratism over human consideration; these would be the major factors to be wary about; and which would negatively impact the Indian “way”. India’s way is a way of allowance without upsetting the whole. Technocratic precision and excellence, while it looks brilliant, discounts the human element of things, which I think would fundamentally be its undoing in a society like India.
Humans are imperfect. Humans don’t measure up all the time. Humans don’t perform all the time. Humans behave differently. Humans relate to each other differently. India is the only place where human connections prevail.
The sadness is that this prevalence of human consideration is being replaced, by nothing more than bullying and propaganda, by connections to an out-there god, or money, or professional expertise. This scares people.
This is one of the best articles I have ever read about INDIA. Despite my weak attention span, you managed to make me stick to the post till the very end.
Thank you. I appreciate the kind words. My plan for series is to try to explain India, warts and all, no BS, and still be amusing. Because India without humor will just make your head explode!
I have to say I’m so glad I read this article, I’m definitely going to check more of what you’ve written, I would love to read more of your thoughts. Thank you!
Well written. Diversity and living with contradictions comes naturally to us. India is country of immigrants(long before US). People came from multiple religious background like Jews, Parsis, Muslims, Christians etc. They came to India and integrated. People from europe, greece, china etc came and integrated. I think except, british every set of people came to india, integrated and became Indians. I strongly feel foundation of that attitude comes from Hinduism, which is truly plural, accepts diversity, doesn’t expect 100% compliance, which teaches to co-exist with others! Infact India gave birth to 4 religions as well. India is truly unique that way…
Yes. If the British had come to stay, like everyone else, history would have been different. But they came to trade, and Indians were foolish enough to let them make one king fight against another… [and finance the British too!] and that ended the trade and started the colonialism. Which was enforced by Indians as well! It is quite a bizarre story. The Indian attitude seemed to be, “meet the new boss, same as old boss.” Which, if you believe Daron Acemoglu, isn’t unreasonable from the point of view of the common man—most institutions were “extractive.”
I think, British was 1st group which exploited our diversity( religion, ethnicity, caste etc) and created divisions among us so that they can plunder as much. While Muslim invaders committed looting and killings, kind of damage British inflicted was at different level. It was pure evil in terms breaking our confidence in values, customs, religion etc. British severely damaged our psyche, made us feel inferior. Some folks are still suffering from that disease. British thought that is the better way to conquer a civilization like India. Great to see finally India seem to be getting back the confidence. Trump Tariff episode, Ops Sindoor etc are good examples.
Indian insecurity was terrible amongst my parents generation. Lesser amongst mine. Much less amongst younger people. All of this is great. I explore this in subsequent Substack posts.
Such eloquent, lucid writing! Societies everywhere are complex (humans bring that innately) and India is even more so. You have distilled the essence of India as well as one could in under 1000 words. I'll revisit this.
What a wonderfully nuanced essay. What I particularly enjoyed is the way you take something as vast and complicated as India and make it easier without reducing its contradictions into simplistic explanations. The flow of the essay is exceptionally well managed—you move from the deeply personal and mundane to the historical, philosophical, linguistic, economic and political, and somehow bring all of it back to the central idea of India as a civilisation that has learned to live with contradictions rather than constantly trying to resolve them.
One thought that came to me while reading this is that perhaps India's uniqueness begins even before we get to its civilisation—it is almost written into its geography.
Very few places in the world contain such extraordinary contrasts within a single civilisational space: the snow-covered Himalayas in the north, the harsh deserts of Rajasthan, the fertile river plains of the Ganga and Brahmaputra, the vast coastline stretching across thousands of kilometres, the Western and Eastern Ghats, tropical forests, plateaus, and islands scattered across two different seas. You can travel through landscapes that feel like entirely different countries, yet they exist within the same civilisational continuum.
Perhaps this geographical diversity helped create the social and cultural diversity that you describe so beautifully. Different landscapes produced different livelihoods, foods, languages, customs, belief systems and ways of life—and instead of one completely replacing another, they accumulated over centuries.
That, to me, may be one of the most remarkable things about India: it has rarely been a civilisation defined by uniformity. It is a civilisation defined by layering.
Ancient and modern. Sacred and commercial. Local and global. Sanskrit and Tamil. Tradition and technology. Spirituality and entrepreneurship. Chaos and extraordinary order. All of these seemingly contradictory things don't merely coexist in India—they constantly interact, borrow from one another and evolve.
And perhaps that is why your idea of “and/and” thinking resonates so strongly. India has spent thousands of years practising it without necessarily giving it a name.
The real achievement, therefore, may not be that India has managed to create unity out of diversity. It may be something more subtle: India has shown that unity does not necessarily require uniformity in the first place.
A beautifully written piece, and one that leaves you thinking about India differently after you finish reading it.
Such an amazing post samir!!!
such a amazing.
Once, while watching a video about the political ecosystem in Kerala, a local gentleman described India. To this day, it is the most accurate description of this varied nation that I've come across. He said, and I quote, "Hindustan ek khwab hai."
Isn't that the most politically, economically and religiously void description of our beautiful country?
Yes, it is. And I agree with it. I only hope that the infrastructure runs so deep in IndiaOS that the current environment doesn’t ruin it forever. I am optimistic but not certain.
@Samir Varma I think this is not a strength of India but its weakness. India will never progress because it can never get consensus, no two people in india can ever agree on anything let alone understand each other properly.
Both USA and China have solved these problems in fact many nations have solved this problem of uniformity which is a pre-requisite for nation building and growth.
India believes that its superstitions, foolishness, diversity and other weaknesses are its strengths, in a very absurd reframing.
Check this out and let me know
https://open.substack.com/pub/businessanalogies/p/sbusiness-analogy-032-the-lost-satellite?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I’ve read all those works and I disagree. The USA can’t agree on anything at all. What the USA has is “inclusive” institutions, in the language of why nations fail. India is well on its way to developing those. The USA grew strongly for almost 150 years without inclusive institutions because it was developing them step by step. And that is what India is doing. India has a huge proportion of its population online now. They see how the rest of the world lives. All India needs is for the government to get out of the way (which it has been doing, step by step, since 1991) to grow for decades.
From the framework that the authors have given in WHY NATIONS FAIL, the analysis reveals that India will never be able to come out of poverty.
India is the grid with the question mark. In the book, the authors clearly state that there is no country that ever went from an unsuccessful company grid to the question mark, and then to the successful companies. The typical path to success is through the blue arrows, which China is taking right now. India is trying to move directly from an unsuccessful nation's grid to a successful nation's grid, while China has economic inclusion, but it does not have political inclusion. The authors give many use cases where many countries have moved from unsuccessful to successful by going to the left and then to the top, I marked them with green arrows. But they clearly say that not a single country could move up and then to the left, giving political inclusion or claiming to give political inclusion without economic inclusion will result in losing both. Many countries that went up before going right have all failed or simply stuck in limbo - They give 10s of examples in the book. India has taken that route, and it can never move from Left to right in the picture. And no country has ever made a jump direct from the lower quadrant to the top quadrant diagonally, which is impossible. Please let me know if my analysis is wrong. This is exactly why I am able to tell that India will never become a successful country. This has nothing to do with patriotism or nationalism it is simply path dependence and our country has chosen the wrong path 70+ years ago and there is no coming back i.e. we can’t go back and rewrite history.
I disagree with them. Why Nations Fail is a superb book, but it is massively underspecified. Nothing they say is dispositive. India is well on its way to building inclusive institutions. And, by the way, China is not. As a matter of fact, it would not surprise me in the slightest if, in 30 years, India’s economy was bigger than China’s. You heard it here first!
Hi I tried really hard to put the point in the comment, but I think i have failed, so i put them in a visual format on this article - with path dependence of needing to have inclusive economic institutions before having inclusive political institutions, i.e. path dependence.
I tried to put it in an article - let me know if there are errors in the logic
https://open.substack.com/pub/insightcollection/p/insight-026-why-nations-fail-and?r=3az3p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
See this comment from David H Levey: https://substack.com/@davidhlevey/note/c-192837952?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=hfb1h
This is one of the most articulate and resonant pieces I’ve ever read on India — not just as a nation, but as its own operating system. You’ve managed to put into words what so many feel innately but struggle to explain, which is the ability to hold contradictions and to contain multitudes without needing resolution.
Thank you kindly for this — looking forward to the rest of the series.
Thanks. There will be some “darker” pieces in this series too… It’s not all sunny! :-)
India isn’t pluralistic. It survives because it’s Hindu majority and nearly every ethnic group is majority Hindu. Everywhere Hindus are not a majority has an insurgency movement.
Kashmir, Khalistan, NE Christian secession insurgencies.
India will collapse without Hindus
Furthermore one of the main premises of Islam is killing polytheists and punishing them. That polytheism is the worst sin on the planet.
Any blind Hindu that “celebrates Eid with their Muslim friends” after centuries of persecution by Muslims and continued animosity by them towards Hindus deserves whatever bullshit these muslims have in store for them. Some Hindus are just so brainwashed.
There was too much of generalization from a scholar like you . You write Sikhs contribute wheat for the Hindus . Punjab ( with Sikh majority ) contributes only 16.5% of wheat produce whereas other non Sikh states UP grows 32 % MP grows 16% and adequate contribution comes from Haryana and Rajasthan .
You said Christian Schools teach English to Hindu and Muslims . Now the best of English medium schools in Big cities are owned non Christian Society like DPS Nalanda
Utterly ridiculous a self fulfilled vishwaguru complex post without checking the ground reality. The caste, religion, rituals etc deeply entered in our psyche. Get out of your imagined world views about india. It is deeply misogynistic society. Anything is uncomfortable fo us to explain we take refuge of our culture traditional. We don't treat our fellow Indian with respect regardless of their religious , caste identity. Did we Learn from the firstclasss democracies in the world. Can you tell us which country treat us with respect as it used to be? Which city is a livable. We are a inward looking society always happy tosee ourselves in the mirror.
You have to add one more consideration to a write-up which contains a lot of what we have known all along. We aren’t a specially chosen people; we are prone to similar problems as people anywhere in the world; and human systems are at the mercy of the elements, as are natural systems.
There is nothing to suggest India can’t be as messy a quagmire as Africa today or Europe in the first half of the last century.
In India alone, has emerged a social order where individual rights are accorded to the lowest of the low and the weakest of the weak; while these may not be equal; they are differentiated. But they all individually matter; and they are all, in their own way; sovereign. And these people are linked to one another through mutual obligations for service, which bind their incentives together. This has historically been the case; and all the current constitutional order has done is to merely give its rougher edges a necessary haircut.
India is a country of some 1.5 billion people. There is no way such a monster can keep up for a day without some innate, non-state manner of civic organization and order which survives not merely despite the state; but often times without it. That is how Indian society has survived all these centuries when she wasn’t sovereign.
One thing that is undeniable about India is its stability. That is not a gift of the political gods - least of all the religious clergy - whose trade of igniting trouble often takes places in the background of assumed normalcy and order, giving them a sense with which they can cause trouble without it coming back to bite them.
This presumption of social stability is the gift of the social order pre-existing between people, which defines for them their sovereignty, and then, their obligations to one another.
It is hurt when people replace consideration for one another with non-consideration; when they replace allegiance to society with allegiance to diffuse entities whether religious or political.
People often blame Indians for being inconsiderate towards each other. Were that to be true, we would have witnessed, in India, multiple bloodlettings of biblical scales - it is not as if there is a shortage of potential victims. But for specific episodes which are notable for their rarity, India has avoided most of the smoke. Ever heard of a deadly riot between worshippers of Lakshmi and devotees of Parvati? Don’t think so.
I would say, why India survives, is because of consideration. Perhaps best shown by your anecdote about the funeral, where the grieving party could have taken up the issue of disturbance with the tantri, only to reconcile themselves with the fact that he is merely doing his job, and that he has others to attend to, and that, he would be the best at what he does anyway. We are not the society of Karens.
More than Hindutva etching away at our sense of inclusivity; I would point out the increasing sense of wealth over consideration; and technocratism over human consideration; these would be the major factors to be wary about; and which would negatively impact the Indian “way”. India’s way is a way of allowance without upsetting the whole. Technocratic precision and excellence, while it looks brilliant, discounts the human element of things, which I think would fundamentally be its undoing in a society like India.
Humans are imperfect. Humans don’t measure up all the time. Humans don’t perform all the time. Humans behave differently. Humans relate to each other differently. India is the only place where human connections prevail.
The sadness is that this prevalence of human consideration is being replaced, by nothing more than bullying and propaganda, by connections to an out-there god, or money, or professional expertise. This scares people.
https://hiddeneagle11.substack.com/p/index-funds-in-2026-are-they-oversaturated?r=6ab8kx
India is a land of contradictions.