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The River of Dreams

Civilization and Nation

‘What do you mean by resurrecting the Idea of India?’

‘Is it dead?’

The passenger seated behind us was clearly eavesdropping on our conversation. My friend Sudha and I looked at each other and decided to let his questions be. The train was slowly pulling into the station at Haridwar. Our group had boarded it a few hours earlier at New Delhi. Our final destination was a camp on the banks of the river Ganga, upstream from Rishikesh.

The members of our motley group came from different parts of the country. We had recently become part of a youth organization called Young Indians (Yi), initially set up as a youth business forum within the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). But it was soon clear to those of us who had been part of its genesis that Yi needed to be a platform for young people from every walk of life and not just from business. We were hopeful that the organization would provide an opportunity for young Indians to contribute to India’s promising future. A lofty ideal, yes; but it was September of 2004 and all of us were young. I was barely twenty-five myself.

Since the inception of Yi in December 2002, we had spent several months discussing and reflecting on the role that young Indians could play in the country’s developmental journey. Therefore, the goal during this retreat on the Ganga was to dive deeper into what Yi could do to attract more young people to contribute their time and energy to the cause of the nation.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had just been defeated in the general elections a few months ago and a new government, a coalition led by the Indian National Congress (INC), called the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), had been sworn in. A group of varied parties with distinct ideologies had come together to form this government, and I was trying to comprehend how the ideology of the Marxist left was part of a government led by India’s chief pro-market reformer till date: the prime minister and economist, Manmohan Singh. As a young woman deeply in love with her country, I was witnessing at that point in time far too many contradictions within my country—social, political, economic and cultural.

The bus that picked us up from Haridwar was now passing by the Lakshman Jhula bridge at Rishikesh. I had only seen the Ganga at Varanasi before. There she flows calmly, the doorway to salvation. But at Rishikesh, closer to her origins in the Himalaya, she flows like a bundle of energy, transforming everything she touches. In the late monsoon, her ethereal beauty matches her formidable gusto. Her waters overflow with fresh rains and melting glacial streams and give her an aquamarine hue. The bus came to a halt near the Aquaterra camp site, and we picked up our bags and walked down the forested trail to reach the white sand beach. We were all thrilled to be finally getting closer to the river, and my friend Sudha—Sudha Iyer from Hyderabad, a PhD in health education—literally leaped towards the river in excitement.

We had planned an easy afternoon, with some play and rest. As evening approached, Sudha and I walked along the beach, barefoot, the soft sand beneath our feet. We were soaking in the beauty of the serene river gorge surrounded by the densely wooded Himalayan mountains. The evening sky was splashed with vermilion clouds. Mahesh Sriram, an innovation and travel expert from Chennai, caught up with us. We found a few large boulders and decided to perch on them, our feet dipped in the flowing waters of the river. No one said anything for some time. The silence was magical!

Then Mahesh broke the silence and asked, ‘So, what do you think it will take to attract more and more young people to do their bit for India?’

‘It is a difficult ask, Mahesh.’ I instinctively replied.

‘Why do you say that, Bhairavi?’ Sudha probed further.

‘I don’t have the exact answer but I feel India is too complex, too vast and to a large extent misunderstood by her own. It is hard to ask people to contribute to something in a sustained manner when they don’t understand it too well.’

Mahesh intervened, ‘Why do you think India is misunderstood?’

‘Well, I think most Indians don’t know their country that much. I am not talking about the history, geography or civics taught in schools. I am talking about the on-ground experience of knowing one’s country, seeing its eclectic civilization at play with one’s own eyes, grasping its grandeur and its imperfections and coming to terms with what is possible to change whilst being optimistic about the future,’ I replied.

The camp coordinator was now calling us for a briefing about the rafting trip the next day, so we paused our discussion and joined the rest of the group.

A beautiful fire had been lit. We sat around it in a circle. Once in a while the flames crackled, breaking the constant song of the gushing Ganga. The coordinator was instructing us about the ‘what and how’ of the rafting expedition. He clearly emphasized that although he knew that many of us could swim, rafting on the Ganga and navigating her rapids was more about being fully present in the moment and about working as a team. Awareness and agility would give us the presence of mind to respond quickly in case the raft capsized or if one of us inadvertently fell overboard.

Although Sudha, Mahesh and I were listening to the instructor, our minds were still preoccupied with the discussion we had been having earlier. Sudha whispered to Mahesh and me, ‘You guys think India is aware and agile?’ I smiled and looked at Mahesh.

He spoke with the passion of someone who loves Indology, ‘If she was not aware and agile, would her civilization have lasted for thousands of years?’

By now the instruction session had ended but most of us continued to sit by the fire, engrossed in our own conversations. I looked at Mahesh and pointed out:

‘But we are not talking about the civilization, Mahesh, we are talking about the nation—a democratic republic.’

He jumped up and asked, ‘So you are saying they are different? India, the civilization, and India, the nation?’

I tried to explain what I meant: ‘I don’t know, Mahesh. I travelled a lot across the country with my parents when I was young, wherever my father (Tushar Jani) was opening his courier offices. People would queue up outside Blue Dart offices in towns like Tirupur and Guwahati to book shipments for textiles or tea samples to be exported to destinations abroad. As a child, I loved the stories shared by people from different parts of India who worked with my father. I have seen a lot of India, and have understood her through those travels and stories.’

Sudha interjected, ‘But I think it was also your school, Bhairavi, with its unique method of interspersing travel with learning that has also given you a different perspective, right?’

I nodded, ‘Yes, our school, B.A.K. Swadhyaya Bhavan, was an experiment in learning by doing. Apart from teaching us about the history and geography of the country through well-curated trips, the school also held elections, convened its own parliament and had a student government that took decisions on almost everything, from sports day to school rules. India was not some distant, intangible, formless idea for us in school. India was a persona—fully present, tangible and proximate. In my experience, back then, India’s civilizational values and national characteristics were intertwined. That’s why when I was a child, I didn’t see India’s civilization as apart from its identity as a nation.’

‘So, did things change when you grew up?’ Mahesh was curious.

‘Yes, by the time I finished college and began my first job, confusion had started clouding my understanding. The more I observed the making of politics and political choices based on caste, religion, region, language, the more lost I felt. Somehow, the ideas of civilization and nation had taken divergent paths in my head. For some years now, I have remained immensely proud of India’s civilizational heritage but in deep doubt about its political outlook. Often, I feel they don’t have much in common anymore. I also think constantly about civilizational values and national identity. If they are truly diverging, then how can we stay united?’

Sudha admitted, ‘I agree, these are important questions and they play on my mind too.’

Night had fallen and stars were sparkling in the clear sky. I lay awake inside our tent for some time, thinking about our discussions through the day. My mind was racing in several directions, questions crisscrossing it like shooting stars in the Milky Way. I was unable to focus on any common point in the myriad subjects we had covered—unity, identity, polity, civilization, nation and youth. I felt my own relationship with India was in a state of turbulence. My identity as an Indian was getting mixed-up. And I found myself asking a question I had never imagined I would: What does it mean to be an Indian?

During my travels, I had met Indians from different backgrounds, all of whom were visibly distinct from each other. There was not much in common between a Gujarati from Kathiawar and a Naga from Kohima. In terms of identity, a Gujarati might be at ease with her Indian identity, but a Naga may not. Despite this, there was something—unidentified and nameless, a bond that connected them. What was it?

Morning arrived with the promise of adventure. With our life jackets fastened across our chests, we were ready for a day on the Ganga. Rafting on the river near Rishikesh involves several grades of difficulty. Today we were going to definitely encounter grade 2, grade 3, and maybe even grade 4 rapids that would make us experience the ferocity of the river. We took our positions on our rafts and the oars were handed to us. One of the camp staff gently pushed the raft into the river. We felt the sudden rush of the waters and, instinctively, we dropped our oars into the river. Once we were in the river, we didn’t have a choice. We had to row fast and in sync. It took some time for all of us to adjust to the rhythm of this. Eventually we got our act together and the raft started moving downstream. As we manoeuvred through the rapids, the spray of the river waters drenched us thoroughly. But the warm sun helped, as did the fact that there was no time or space to think of anything else but to move forward.

Each raft had an expert from the camp guiding us through it all, but the responsibility of keeping the raft afloat, making sure it moved forward and ensuring that everyone stayed aboard, was collectively ours. As we improved on our team work, we began to enjoy the ride. The guides slowly started steering us towards the more difficult grades of the rapids. Some members of the team began yelling, terrified of moving out of their current comfort zone. But the guides insisted that without going through the more difficult rapids, there was no way we could reach our destination camp downstream. We braced ourselves for more splashes, turns, obstacles and adventure.

At one point where the river took a sharp turn, one of our group mates on another raft fell into the water. For a while, commotion prevailed as he was pulled out of the water and back onto his raft. As the day progressed, what had initially been challenging and frightening now became enjoyable and gratifying. Maybe we had learnt something about being mindful of our own vulnerabilities as humans. Maybe we had accepted the unpredictability of the river. Maybe we had summoned courage from within the very depths of our being. Ernest Hemingway famously wrote that courage was grace under pressure. Maybe we had learnt to be grateful and graceful to each other under pressure. It was just a rafting adventure, but it had changed something in each one of us. For me, becoming proximate with the Ganga and her waters had lifted certain inhibitions and fears. For Sudha, it had created a feeling of spiritual oneness. And for all of us, the morning’s adventure had deepened our bonds with each other.

As the new campsite appeared within sight, on yet another white sand beach, there was a sense of jubilation on board the rafts. It was as if we had won an Olympic gold. We hadn’t realized that the simplicity of being alive and well at the end of an adventure could bring feelings of such elation. Working with each other to keep our rafts afloat had somehow diminished the separateness between us and bonded us in a shared purpose. Through our collective experiences of fear, courage, doubt, love, empathy and trust, we had somehow crossed over to a sense of unity, the kind that we hadn’t experienced as a group before. The Ganga had done her magic.

After drying ourselves and eating some delicious camp food, we spent the rest of the day relaxing on the beach. My mind wandered to the dialogue of the day before. At that moment I had an epiphany of sorts. I felt that the Ganga was the civilization of India, flowing forcefully and eternally across time, merging separate strands of the Alaknanda and the Bhagirathi tributaries into her mighty waters, before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. One could not know the Ganga from a distance. One had to take a dip in her waters, raft on them, and swim in them to fully understand her. And, perhaps, the Republic of India was the raft pushed into the ebb and flow of this river of civilization, tossing and turning through the churnings of the past decades.

Weren’t the rafts initially like our politics, directionless and discordant, because we, the people steering them, were full of fear and dissonance? Was it not our collective responsibility to ensure that the raft of the republic moved forward, stayed afloat and that everyone remained on board? The analogies were quite a few. Initially, our rafts had struggled to move forward, but as we began to pull together as a team, the divisions subsided and we found a way to make sure that they reached their final destination in one piece. Of course, along the way there had been some accidents—people had fallen off and had needed to be rescued, and some rafts had capsized—but in the end we had been able to restore them all to safety. Wasn’t this how we needed to act when it came to the nation as well? But, when we all spoke different languages, ate different foods, dressed differently and worshipped different gods, how could we work together as ONE?

The River of Dreams

The next morning, Sudha woke up early. She asked me to join her in the Ganesh pooja she wanted to do. It was Ganesh Chaturthi. Across many parts of India, especially in Sudha’s home town of Hyderabad and mine in Mumbai, people were gearing up for the ten-day Ganesh festival. In 1893, to counter the restrictions placed by the British government on public gatherings, freedom movement leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak transformed a devout Hindu festival into a sarvajanik one—a public and social phenomenon. In 1996, when I was an undergraduate student in the United States at Miami University of Ohio, I was summoned to a class of religious studies to explain the ‘miracle’ of statues of Ganesh drinking milk, which had taken India by storm a year ago. I was questioned on the blind faith of my people. In answer, I tried to explain the popularity of Lord Ganesh and how he was worshipped quite universally across the country by the Hindus and how the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi was now a social event, with those of other faiths participating in the festivities too.

A student in the class asked me, ‘So you’re telling me that Lord Ganesh is worshipped by everyone in India in a public festival because a freedom fighter used the festival to bring people together and organize public gatherings as they were banned otherwise?’ I nodded. He continued, ‘And you’re saying that this festival continues in many parts of India, even though it is almost five decades since India got its Independence, and the purpose of such a gathering is now redundant?’ My answer was still a resounding yes, but I think that student never managed to wrap his head around what I had said. As an Indian, however, this was completely normal for me. Ideas introduced into the mosaic of our civilization have consistently become part of its larger picture. This was something India did all the time, and with the craft and panache of a maestro.

The bus was ready to take us to Haridwar for our train back to the national capital. We boarded it almost reluctantly. As it drove down the road that ran alongside the Ganga, I looked out at her with deep gratitude. She had opened a window for me, allowing me to see the connections between India, the civilization, and India, the nation. She had kindled the flame of exploration in me, nudging me to seek and rediscover the values, forces and powers that bind us Indians as a people. She had made me ask pertinent questions of myself that needed further probing. She had brought back memories from my childhood and reignited the idea that diversity is the blood in India’s veins but as a country, India breathes a common set of values. I surmised that our unity needed expression and celebration that went beyond the national flag, the national anthem and cricket.

I confessed to Sudha that the Idea of India was like the eternal Ganga herself. It could never die and therefore needed no resurrection. On the contrary, it was my own understanding of my country that needed a practised resurrection. I was grateful to my friends from Yi who had made me think of ways in which I could give back to my country and maybe encourage others to do so too. But before I did that, I would have to travel, unlearn and learn, explore and connect with India, and Indians. I wanted to understand the subtle connections that tied a Naga to a Gujarati and I wanted to comprehend the massive policy failures that kept India away from its rightful place in the world as a developed and thriving democratic republic. There was much to imbibe, internalize and share. I made a promise to myself that I would commit to learn about India and its ways whenever the opportunity presented itself, not just because it would help me contribute better to my country but also because it was the calling of my heart to do so.

I looked out one last time at the Ganga. A mystical mist was gliding above her waters, once in a while giving a glimpse of her aquamarine hues. She flowed with a sense of purpose and a dream-like fluidity. Earphones firmly in my ears, I listened to Billy Joel’s The River of Dreams on my iPod. Its words seemed apt for the Ganga:

In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep

Through the desert of truth, To the river so deep

We all end in the ocean, We all start in the streams

We’re all carried along, By the river of dreams¹

Unseen Bonds

In the years that followed, I willingly got carried along by the Ganga, our river of dreams, and in earnest began my rendezvous with India. It has been fifteen years since the retreat at Rishikesh, and through these years I have had the pleasure and privilege of travelling extensively across the country. In fact, a lot of my travel also happened because we were expanding Yi as an organization and opening up city chapters across different states.

On one such occasion, I travelled to Nagaland, a state in India’s far north-east, on the invitation of Hekani Jakhalu, the founder of Nagaland’s own youth association, Youth Net. She wanted to explore the possibility of starting a Yi chapter in the state capital, Kohima. Atul Chaturvedi, my Yi colleague from Kolkata, had already made a presentation to a small group there and I was going over to interact with the prospective members. As I boarded the BG Express train from Guwahati station in Assam, I was advised, ‘Please don’t talk to anyone on the train and don’t tell them why you are going there.’ Strange, I thought to myself, but there was not much time for questions. I presumed the cautionary nudge was in context of the ongoing insurgency by armed groups in Nagaland.

The train ride was quite pleasant. I initially tried to keep to myself, but my co-passengers from Dimapur, our destination in Nagaland, were so warm and friendly that I couldn’t remain aloof for long. They were a family of four, a couple and their two daughters, originally from Mokokchung district in Nagaland. They now lived in Guwahati and were going to Dimapur for a family wedding. As soon as the mother learnt that I was a vegetarian, she asked her husband to get some vegetarian snacks for me at the next station. She felt terrible about not being able to share their food with me as the home-cooked food they were carrying with them was non-vegetarian. Their two young daughters were studying in college, and I thought it was a great opportunity to ask them if a Yi Nagaland made sense. ‘I like the idea of a youth platform but please don’t call it Young Indians, no one will then join it in our state,’ the younger of them said. I must have looked bewildered. So her sister, two years older, explained, ‘See, the thing is, we don’t feel Indian.’

I looked at their parents, who were now paying close attention to our discussion. The father expanded on what his daughters had just told me. ‘Since the very beginning, when the lands of the Naga tribes were included in the Union of India and then later divided amongst several north-east states, we Nagas have felt that we need to unify our ancestral lands and live together as one people with autonomy.’

While trying to comprehend what they were saying, I asked, ‘Don’t you guys have special status through several schedules of the Constitution and Articles where you do enjoy special privileges of certain autonomy under the Union?’

He replied, ‘Yes, all those provisions are there, but people don’t feel they have much in common with the rest of India and we feel that our way of life is completely different. It is this mission to unite all the Naga people and their lands that has led a large number of Naga youth to take up arms and fight an insurgency.’

I shook my head, ‘But does that justify violence?’ He thought for a moment and then replied, ‘How else can we express our desperation? Over the years, peace efforts have failed and people have been disheartened. Corrupt politicians have made a lot of money, while a large number of people in the state have remained very poor. Through the years, conflict just took root in our society.’

It was already dark when the train pulled into Dimapur station, but this wonderful family of four insisted on waiting there till my receiving party arrived. They said, ‘If for some reason they don’t turn up, you are coming to our family home with us tonight. Then tomorrow, we can contact your friends.’ I looked at them in deep gratitude. Hekani had sent a vehicle with the staff of Youth Net to pick me up from the station and drive to Kohima. I bid goodbye to my fellow passengers and thanked them for their generosity. On the way to Kohima, I spotted a board that read, ‘Welcome to Nagaland. Nagas are not Indian.’ For a moment, I thought maybe it was not such a good idea to come here to start a Young Indians chapter. I mean, I thought, they don’t even feel they are Indian!

But then my thoughts went to the warmth, openness and care shown by my co-travellers on the BG Express. They reminded me of another family I had met on a train from Mumbai to Bengaluru. A south Indian family of four—a couple, their young son and the husband’s aged mother. They lived in Mumbai but were originally from Karnataka in south India. I recollected how they had shared their ‘tiffin’ with me, some delicious south Indian savouries. The old lady was not conversant in Hindi or English and the young grandson kept translating her Kannada into English for me. They had asked me what was taking me to their hometown, and when I mentioned work, the boy’s father offered a slew of advice. When we reached Bengaluru, they gave me their address and insisted that I visit them for a meal. The grandmother even put her hand on my head and blessed me.

I pondered on the fact that both these families were very different from each other. The Naga family were Baptist Christians, non-vegetarian, spoke English and even good Hindi. The Kannadiga family, on the other hand, were strict vegetarians, Hindu by faith, and spoke very little Hindi. And yet, both families had been open and warm towards me, a complete stranger. They had both been generous with their advice and care. I thought of the times I had travelled by train in Europe. I remembered how everyone kept their distance from you, and how the locals didn’t chat with you with much interest or welcome you to their homes. I recollected one train journey in Austria in the early 1990s with my parents, when another couple from our first-class compartment got up and left because they didn’t want to sit next to Indians. I faced no such treatment in Nagaland, even though some people there were struggling with their identity as Indians.

The Naga family and the Kannadiga family may have had very little in common in terms of faith, language, race and food, but they shared a common set of values. They had both been warm to a fellow traveller, happy to share their meals and make accommodations—culinary and linguistic—for a stranger clearly not from their part of the country. They had been willing to invite me into their homes, unafraid and were completely uninhibited when it came to learning about and interacting with people who might be different from them. This commonality between them was subtly articulated but fully pronounced in the way they conducted themselves as people. To my mind, this ability to be both at ease with the unknown and to welcome it with open arms was ubiquitous across India. I am told it is also prevalent in the other South Asian nations of Bangladesh and Pakistan. But, as an Indian, I can only speak for India.

Eventually, we launched the Yi Nagaland chapter. It was Yi’s first chapter in the north-east of India. Over the past two decades, I have had many more opportunities to travel across the state and get to know its people and their traditions, their aspirations and challenges. I have made friends for a lifetime and some of my Naga friends even read out Naga blessings at my wedding. Over the years, the residual issues around their Indian identity have remained for some of the Naga people, but beyond that we have had much in common, and we have built on that.

Working in the logistics sector and starting my own ventures also immersed me neck-deep in the rich tapestry that is India. On warehouse floors in my company, I have seen a Hindu operation executive from the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh collaborate with a Muslim machine operator from the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Their team was led by a half Sikh-half Zoroastrian manager from Mumbai. During the Muslim holy month of Ramzan, the Hindu team members would clean the prayer room daily for their Muslim colleagues. During the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, the Muslim team members would clean and decorate the mandal enclosure for the idol of Ganesh to be welcomed. It was evident that people from diverse races, regions and faiths could work together towards shared goals and that they had a common set of values that bound them. Designing and operating supply chains for large multinationals took me to several parts of India. I found that this ability to work together for a company despite identity and cultural differences was prevalent everywhere in the country. Even at Yi, as the organization expanded, people from diverse backgrounds joined the mission and we were able to achieve a convergence of minds through discussions and follow a shared purpose. One of our biggest challenges came when we wanted to start a Yi chapter in Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir, in India’s far north.

I had visited Kashmir frequently throughout my childhood, but once the conflict there got out of hand in the 1990s, we stopped travelling to the Valley. During those terrible years of violence, this beautiful ‘paradise on earth’ had transformed into a wretched hell of blood and sorrow. In 2002, a professor from a college in Srinagar met me at a conference in Mumbai. He requested me to visit their campus for a guest lecture on supply chain management. I promised him that I would certainly do so. I took a flight from Delhi to Srinagar later that year. As the aircraft approached the runway of Srinagar airport, I saw bunkers and fighter aircraft from the air. Momentarily, I was unnerved—until I looked up at the horizon, where the beautiful Zabarwan Mountains basked in the sun. Something in their quiet strength made me believe that there was hope.

From the airport, I was escorted by an armoured vehicle to my hotel. The next day, I had a very engaging session with the students, and many of them requested that I visit again. Their curriculum had suffered from years of neglect and they had no connect with the world of business outside the Valley. I was more than willing to do their bidding. In earnest I began my work with the Kashmiri youth, and thus was born the deep bond I share with the land and its people. Initially, I visited once a quarter, but soon that was not enough and the visits became monthly. Like in Nagaland, I became friends with many Kashmiris, who are practically family today. I ended up marrying a man who is half Kashmiri Pandit and half Gujarati by blood, and my Kashmiri friends recited blessings and escorted me to my wedding mandapa.

My work with the youth in the Kashmir Valley made me understand the issues around the conflict there—beyond the geopolitics, and through a humane lens. Some places I went, I was greeted with warmth, but I was asked, ‘Aap India se aaye ho?’ (Have you come from India?) The question clearly implied that some Kashmiris didn’t consider their land or themselves as Indian. Apart from that, however, there was much in common between us. We shared the values of respecting guests, honouring teachers, celebrating heritage, appreciating beauty and creativity, and welcoming strangers, just to name a few. I felt the same warmth among Kashmiri families that I had experienced among my fellow travellers on the BG Express to Nagaland. The openness of the Kannadiga family was matched by the generous Kashmiri hospitality. Here again, the food, language and faith were different, but there was a common set of values that tied us all together.

Hidden Superpowers

Eventually, in 2009, when I took over as the national co-chairperson of Yi, we were able to launch the Yi Srinagar chapter. There were some initial difficulties, but as in the case of Nagaland, we were able to build on what we shared despite our differences. It was also during this time that I had the opportunity to interact closely with the late Professor C.K. Prahalad on his vision for India for year 2022– India@75. CK, as we called him, was regarded as one of the most celebrated strategic thinkers in the world. He had authored the book (amongst many others) Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. It is a book that continues to inspire development enthusiasts and business leaders who wish to advance grassroots development by using markets and entrepreneurial tools. He made us think of audacious societal goals we could aspire to achieve by the time India celebrated seventy-five years of Independence.

CK passed away in 2010 and the Confederation of Indian Industry decided to set up a foundation to carry forward the work of the India@75 mission. In order to do my bit for the mission, I sold two of my ventures and took a leave of absence from my family business so that I could devote time to build this foundation for India’s future. My work with India@75 gave me the unique advantage of being able to think and work for the country on a scale I had never done before. It exposed me to policy formulation and to the working of development programmes, civil society and stakeholder consultations, mass volunteer movements, governments, Parliament, politics, media and much more. But while I saw many of these programmes and movements succeed, I also witnessed quite a few policies and programmes failing, simply because of a lack of connection between the leaders in the government and the people. Often, during consultations, people would say that they wished their governments understood them better.

Upon stepping down from my full-time role at India@75, I searched for answers to the questions that kept coming up during the initial years of the mission. What was that ‘connect’ that people were seeking with their government? It was not about elections and votes or rights and citizen services. They craved something deeper and more profound. Why were governments, with all their experience, unable to communicate their policies effectively to the people? This propelled me to speak to Mahesh, who was by now one of my closest friends from Yi. We decided to take a road trip across India during the general elections in 2014. Ejji K. Umamahesh, the curator of major transcontinental car rallies and the erstwhile deputy secretary for the Formula-1 India Grand Prix, and Venkatesan Nagarajan, a cinematographer and digital media professional, were the other two friends who joined in our crazy journey.

We drove 18,181 km across the country for fifty-one days, during which time we met thousands of Indians from all walks of life and visited all the states except Jharkhand, Sikkim and Chhattisgarh (where we had to abruptly change our travel plans because of Naxal threats). We could not visit a few Union Territories because of adverse weather conditions and paucity of time. We called the adventure ‘Highway to Swades’—a road trip to better understand our country. Our extensive and intense time on the road made me connect with India even more deeply.

What we saw and experienced through our travels across India and our interactions with a wide cross-section of Indians was that there is something much more powerful than simply the idea of a polity that keeps 1.38 billion people in this country together. With the use of multiple lenses of business, policy, markets, economics, race, religion, caste and even history, I felt I could finally understand and appreciate India’s story. It was a narrative that was alive, constantly evolving into something new even as it held on to the flavours of India’s ancient civilizational heritage. I concluded, that there is an inner core—the very being of India, nourished by inherent unseen powers—common to Indians from all corners of the country. These powers have ensured a continuous civilization for thousands of years. These are India’s Superpowers. Each superpower is a shared idea, a shared value system and a shared aspiration. If applied judiciously to policy frameworks and implementation, these superpowers have the immense potential to transform the future course of the country. But for some reason, those in charge of formulating our national policies have paid scant attention to these powers and largely continue to ignore them even now. I have identified twelve of these superpowers that are currently relevant to our path ahead as a country, but I am sure there are even more. These twelve superpowers contain the tools to bring Indians across the length and breadth of the country together, towards a shared ambition for our nation.

In the general elections of 2019, more than 900 million Indians were eligible to vote—that is, almost a seventh of humanity. In April and May 2019, braving scorching heat and intense summer temperatures, 67 per cent of Indians voted, the highest percentile to vote in the electoral history of the country. What are these people voting for? What do they want? How can a people so diverse in religion, language, caste and race decide collectively on what they want for their today and their tomorrow? How does India decide its priorities for development and progress? How can the individual aspirations of a billion-plus people converge for the collective good of the nation?

Today, India is at an important crossroads. There is much to be optimistic about, and yet there is a fear we are transforming the mosaic of our society and polity into a