The 'cradle of human civilization' that Mark Twain spoke of is no longer the India we know today. I am sure the reasons for this appear obvious. We are plagued with problems- be it in gender inequality, crushing poverty or inter-community tensions. 'Bah!', one might scoff. It's all about looking at the glass half full instead of half empty.

After all, it isn't everyday that The Economist declares the arrival of 'India's hour'. Glance through economic statistics, or walk across any shopping mall in a metropolis, and the resurgent India will vividly unveil herself. It is 189 years since James Mill wrote his degrading History of India, and it's time to finally bury its ghost. Like Mill, today's commentators who have never visited India are today in 'volte-face' mode. The 'Indian century' ' they say ' has begun.

I couldn't agree more. In Western terminology, we are indeed 'doing well'. We are firmly set on the linear socio-economic path that was firmly entrenched in the global discourse ever since that little island in North-Western Europe took the plunge (at our expense) into the Industrial Revolution. This, to our capitalist-oriented friends, is the path to unending prosperity. To our Marxist brethren, it is the road which will ultimately deliver socialism to us. But progress has started either way.

Call me a pessimist my friends, but to me India deserves better- far better. The India I want was once a civilization, not merely a Westphalian nation-state which is a bastion of a Western ideology- Marxist or Liberal. We have lost the battle of ideas- something which mentally binds us to the Empire, even if physically we may have thrown it off. Every single idea uttered in the public space today is borrowed. It is ironic that we need a Roberto Calasso to remind us of 'the need for Vedic words'. Even then, we shrug our shoulders, call it outdated, and move on.

Why is the Indian urban scene looking no different from downtown London or New York? Why do sexual issues among young people resemble those in the West? Why- oh why on earth- has English acquired a superior status in the minds of the young people who cannot speak a line of their native tongue without inserting English words? Why do protests against the United States and globalization look exactly like those that are carried out in the West? Why is it 'cool' (and not insane) to wear a tight leather jacket and not a payjama-kurta on a hot and sweaty summer day in Kolkata? Getting drunk and puking on the roads or starting a fight happens outside Indian nightclubs (with ingenious names emulating their Western brethren) just as much as it happens in Britain. 

All our theories are dead. All our mentalities are dying. Already a foreigner can talk about India with equal competence than us, since we all use the same figures and ideologies anyway. Soon there will be nothing (read again- nothing) that is distinguishable about Indians. Thanks to fairness creams, even our skin color might not be too different to an Occidental (or that's what we're told in adverts anyway).

Revert to the great men and their visions, and we should see how far we've digressed. Here are two of my favorites. Rabindranath Tagore once said '