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.

FEUDALISM: A society based on power, money and royal lineage. Thanks to our feudal mindset, elected representatives can ‘rule’ with impunity, unaccountable to their ‘subjects’. Feudalism is also why, despite a multi- party democracy, the family at 10 Janpath has remained India’s de facto sovereign for four generations.

What’s more, feudal policies ensure that nothing will disturb the status quo between India’s haves and have-nots. So while 100,000 Indians are dollar millionaires, 380 million of us live on less than a dollar a day.

COLONIALISM: A society based on racial superiority. Indians are probably the most racist people on earth. Our scope for bigotry is boundless: any caste, religion, or ethnicity serves as a worthy target, from mian and madrasi to mathadi and mallu.

PHONEY SOCIALISM: A society based on token empowerment of the powerless. So while we debate on quotas for higher education, 40 million children will never go to school. While the PM pleads with India Inc for affirmative action, nearly two thirds of us have no clean drinking water.

Happy Birthday? Not quite. Which brings us to that other existential query: where are we headed? Hard to say. Yet one thing is clear: if India’s destination is the Future, we must leave our Past behind. And remember to travel light.