Once the party is over, birthdays have a knack of throwing up disquieting existential questions. Laugh or ignore them at your peril, warn the seers, for they will return to haunt you. So 60 going on 16 obviously calls for some introspection. For six decades we have studiously sidestepped that fundamental query: has it worked? The answer, I’m afraid, is a churlish maybe.

I don’t mean to rain on our patriotic parade. After all, with a growth rate of 9.2 per cent, a stock market that seems hooked on Ecstasy, and the exhilaration of becoming the world’s third-largest, trillion-dollar economy, the India Story is as seductive as a self-improvement book that proffers nirvana in three easy steps.

There’s a reason for this misplaced euphoria, particularly, I think, for those of us who were conceived during the pecuniary impotence of the sixties and seventies. But now that Dr Singh has rewritten the history, our tide has turned. Recently, a BBC poll found that an unprecedented 71 per cent of us are proud to be Indian.

And yet, after 60 years of Independence, India simply cannot shake off her past. That’s why six decades of democracy cannot erase these...

TRIBALISM: A society governed by moral and cultural control, many tribal identities are forged by ethnic hatred — the kind that has butchered thousands in communal clashes since Independence. Yet our bigots are rarely brought to book. Worse, thousands are persecuted and killed in caste wars. As for moral control, we may be a nation of one billion, but sex is still a foreign contraband that would ‘defile’ our values.

... contd.