A few weeks ago I was in Delhi, trying to get on the Metro, and I couldn't.
Why? Because of NEET protests.
A lot of activists, some students, angry, blocking gates that are usually the most reliable thing in this city. I stood outside Rajiv Chowk for nearly ninety minutes, and I had time to think - which is rare in Delhi, where I am usually too busy avoiding bumping (a real – physical bump) into strangers on public transport.
I haven't written on this blog in nine years. The last time I did, it was also August, also around Independence Day, and I was writing about what makes a civilization call itself a nation. I don't know why I stopped writing. Maybe I got busy being Indian instead of writing about it.
But standing outside that gate, watching protesters, activists, and students who were protesting for the resignation of the federal minister, and a fair exam, I kept thinking about Vikshit Bharat 2047. We have twenty-one years left to arrive somewhere.
Arrive where, I am not entirely sure anyone has told me clearly.
My father once explained money to me using four letters: R, I, P, E. Rich is when Income is more than Expenditure. I think Vikas might work the same way, except I'm still working out what the Income and Expenditure of a nation really are. GDP, maybe, is just one column. Trust might be another. I don't think we've been keeping a full ledger.
Which brings me to what troubles me most this Independence Day - our fault lines.
Caste, region, religion, language, class. I don't believe these cracks are proof that something is broken. Every old structure has them; age itself leaves fissures. The oldest civilisation on Earth was bound to. The question is not whether cracks exist, but what we do at the crack.
Those NEET protesters, standing at the gate I couldn't access, were one such crack. Not my enemy. Not, I suspect, of the government's either, even if it felt that way on TV screens around the world.
Democracy is a tool - like a wheel, morally neutral. It can carry a civilization forward, or it can be wedged into a crack and hammered to widen it for short-term gain. I have watched both used, by many hands, over many years. I will not name them here - that is not the point. The method is the problem, not the player.
A democracy that keeps discovering new wedges is not competing; it is quarrying its own foundation.
What holds a crack shut is not paint, applied fresh each election cycle. It is mortar - something older than any party, older even than 1947.
Ours is a civilization identity: karma, tolerance, the discipline of questioning our own beliefs before we question anyone else's. Paint can be reapplied by whoever holds the brush. Mortar cannot be so easily replaced.
We often speak of Gen Z inheriting Vikasit Bharat. I want to speak of Gen Y - the Yuva governing, building, and voting today. The Gen Y is not tied to a year of birth.
The test for this generation isn't ideological purity, age, a persona, or a pattern that the market wants to understand.
It is simpler, and harder: did you leave the civilization more whole than you found it?
Because independence was never meant to be a date on the calendar. It is a daily audit - are we sovereign, today, in our data, our medicine, our thinking?
Vikas without sovereignty is just borrowed prosperity with better packaging.
2047 should not be the year we arrive. It should be the year we finally set our own coordinates.
I stood at that Metro gate for nearly two hours, and nobody around me stopped being Indian!