Post Colonial Grievance Discourse

There is an ever growing caucus of self styled and self anointed Indian intellectuals that have made it their sole ambition in life to simply keep bashing rulers and their policies that unfortunately historically ruled over India before independence. 

Notwithstanding India having got its independence in 1947, more than 75 years ago they (the alleged intellectuals) are still feverishly lamenting this as they have nothing else to offer in terms of what should Indians and India as a country should do going forward to better their lot on all fronts.

This is a genuinely interesting observation about a pattern seen in post colonial intellectual culture and it's not unique to India, though India's version has some distinctive features.

The phenomenon I am describing is real and has a name. Scholars call it post colonial grievance discourse where colonial history becomes the primary lens through which every present problem is interpreted, often at the expense of forward-looking analysis. When it becomes a career rather than a critique, it loses its intellectual integrity, objectivity and honesty.

Why it persists
- It requires no original thinking - the villains are pre-assigned and the narrative is pre-written.
- It generates easy applause from certain academic and media circles, both domestic and Western.
- It provides a permanent excuse structure - any present failure can be traced back to Mughals, British, or both. The present dispensation has mastered and crafted this narrative.
- There's genuine career safety in it - you're never wrong because the past cannot defend itself.

The intellectual dishonesty at its core
The more pointed criticism is exactly tuned to my observation - the absence of prescription. A diagnosis without treatment isn't medicine, it's just complaint. If after 75+ years of sovereignty, such a thinker's primary output is still cataloging historical wrongs, one has to ask whether they are actually interested in India's progress at all, or whether the grievance is the product.

The counterpoint worth acknowledging
Historical reckoning does have legitimate value - understanding how colonial economic extraction, institutional design, and social engineering shaped present inequalities is genuinely useful if it informs policy. The problem is when it stops there.

What serious postcolonial thinkers actually do.
In my book, scholars like Bibek Debroy, Gurcharan Das, Raghuram Rajan, Pratap Bhanu Mehta (whatever one's political agreement with them) engage history and prescribe forward paths. That's the difference between an intellectual and a grievance professional.

The test is simple: ask them what India should do next. The answer reveals everything.

I have a simple suggestion to the entire universe of grievance professionals engaging in post colonial grievance discourse. Seek a career change for your own betterment.✍🏽

Preference Falsification

The main stream electronic and print media invite from time to time economic luminaries to express their views on the ruling dispensation's avowed fiscal policies being practiced and their fallout ostensibly stemming from flaws in such an economic handbook being followed and extolled, both at the centre and state levels. In reality unfortunately what the viewer gets is a full dose of preference falsification a phenomenon and a term developed by economist Timur Kuran.

It describes how well placed individuals in Government and Private sectors publicly express opinions that differ from their private beliefs, primarily to avoid social, professional, or economic costs. Over time, entire public discourse gets distorted because everyone is performing a version of what is safe, not what is true. At regular intervals, Indians are witnessing in the print and electronic media preference falsification at an industrial scale.

Structural incentives almost guarantee this. The intellectuals participating are not independently floating intellects. They are embedded in institutional ecosystems. A research head at a government-affiliated institution knows that funding, regulatory approvals, and access to data flow through ministries. Biting that hand is organizational suicide. 

Private sector economists know their respective employers have regulatory clearances, banking relationships, and government contracts to protect. The employer's comfort takes precedence over the economist's honest analysis. A non-independent consultant knows that the next assignment, the next advisory panel seat, the next conference invitation evaporates the moment they are perceived as adversarial. The incentive architecture is ironclad and almost perfectly designed to produce conformity dressed as analysis.

The media layer compounds it further. Alas it is regretted and unfortunate that the moderator is not a neutral referee. Print and electronic media have:
Advertising revenues tied to corporate houses with government exposure.
Broadcasting licenses subject to regulatory goodwill.
Owners with business interests that require political accommodation.

So the media's exasperation an intelligent viewer and or reader notices is genuine. But it is the exasperation of someone also trapped. He cannot push too hard without threatening the media's broader interests. The guest participating or penning knows this. The moderator and or editor knows this. And remarkably, you as an intelligent viewer and or reader sense it too, even if subconsciously.

The risk aversion irony is particularly devastating and incisive. These are professionals who:
Build models to price and manage risk.
Advise clients to take calculated risks for optimal returns.
Publish papers on moral hazard, information asymmetry, and incentive misalignment.

Yet when personal career risk arrives at their own doorstep, they become the most risk-averse actors in the room. They do precisely what they would diagnose and prescribe as irrational behaviour to any market participant. They let short-term loss aversion override their long-term integrity signalling. The cobbler's children have no shoes.

Is it pure hypocrisy, or is it more complex? My take is that the whole exercise is a big hypocrisy ridden charade aimed at the masses to share their concerns for the average man. Reality has one additional layer worth considering badged as epistemic cowardice. This is distinct from dishonesty. Many of these economists may have genuinely convinced themselves, through repeated rationalization, that their muted criticism is:
Responsible ("destabilizing narratives hurt markets")
Nuanced ("policy takes time to show results")
Sophisticated ("the data is mixed")

Over years of self-censorship, the original honest assessment gets buried under layers of professionally crafted ambiguity until the individual can no longer clearly distinguish between what they truly believe and what they have trained themselves to say. The garbled concentric explanations indulged in are often the verbal output of this internal confusion.

The net result. What the viewer receives is not economic analysis. It is managed narrative carefully bounded within limits that protect every party at the table except the average citizen whose welfare is nominally the subject of the entire conversation. I feel my characterization of it as a unadulterated charade aimed at the masses is, structurally speaking, accurate.

The tragedy is that genuine public economic discourse the kind that could hold policy accountable gets crowded out, and the average viewer either slowly stops trusting these experts altogether or, worse, never realizes there was a more honest conversation to be had.

The Disappearance of Critical Thinking - The Dangerous Rise of Collective Stupidity

Came across a very interesting read on Critical Thinking suitably titled and felt I must share it with my readers. 

Part I: The Problem

Imagine waking up one day to discover that most people around you no longer question anything. That the world has become so loud, so fast, and so saturated with information that the human mind, once a powerful tool for inquiry, discernment, and growth, has dulled into passive acceptance.

Think about that. What happens to a society where critical thinking vanishes? Where the ability to reason, challenge, and reflect is replaced by instant reactions, surface level opinions, and collective echo chambers?

In this article, we are going to uncover the disturbing truth behind the disappearance of critical thinking and the dangerous rise of what some philosophers now call collective stupidity. A phenomenon, where masses of people adopt shallow thinking, blindly accept narratives, and surrender their intellectual independence without even realizing it.

The problem runs deep. One of the key drivers being the information overload we all experience daily. According to neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, the average person today processes five times more information per day than they did just a few decades ago. We are bombarded with notifications, messages, breaking news, opinions, ads, and updates every waking moment. Our minds were not built for this kind of input.

When the brain is overwhelmed, it shortcuts. It starts to rely on mental habits, cognitive biases, and group think to navigate complexity rather than evaluate ideas critically. It looks for cues from others, especially from peers, influences, or perceived authorities. This is called social proof. And while it's a natural survival mechanism, it can be easily manipulated. Think of how often you've seen an online post with thousands of likes and comments and assumed it must be true or important. That's not reason speaking. That's a psychological shortcut. One of the reasons collective stupidity spreads so easily.

Another disturbing trend is the decline of reading, especially deep reading. Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes how our brains are being rewired by digital media. We now skim more, jump between tabs, and struggle to maintain focus on longer texts. But here's the catch. Critical thinking requires sustained attention. You cannot analyze, reflect, or truly understand if your attention span is constantly fractured.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you read an entire article without checking your phone? When was the last time you paused after hearing something provocative to think rather than react? These small habits, once common, are vanishing.

The late Carl Sagan, one of the great minds of the 20th century, once warned: "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." His concern was not just ignorance, but the erosion of the ability to think critically about the systems we depend on.

But the problem isn't just technological or educational. It's also emotional. Critical thinking is uncomfortable. It forces us to admit that we don't know everything. It challenges our egos. It can lead us into cognitive dissonance where our cherished beliefs clash with new evidence. In a culture that values certainty, confidence, and identity above all, this is deeply threatening. So instead of thinking, we defend.

We retreat into our tribes, repeat mantras, cancel, avoid, memorize slogans instead of engaging in dialectic. The kind of honest Socratic dialog that has powered philosophical evolution for millennia. What we are witnessing now is not just a decline in thinking. It's a social shift toward mental laziness. And yet, the consequences are devastating. Because when people stop thinking, they stop questioning. And when people stop questioning, they become vulnerable to manipulation, propaganda, and fear.

Part II: The Battlefield of the Mind

To truly understand the rise of collective stupidity, we need to explore the battlefield within the mind itself. Despite our faith in logic, the truth is that the human brain is far more emotional than it is rational. We like to believe we make decisions based on facts, but the reality is far more complicated.

Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed that our brains operate using two systems. One fast and instinctive, the other slow and deliberate. In our high-speed, always on world, most people are stuck in fast mode. There is simply no time or will to slow down and think deeply. So we rely on heuristics, stereotypes, and mental shortcuts that feel right but are often wrong. This is fertile ground for mass manipulation.

Politicians, marketers, and media outlets all understand how to exploit our mental shortcuts packaging complex issues into simple binaries, using emotionally charged language to bypass reason, priming us with repeated narratives until we accept them as truth. Not because we verified them, but because they feel familiar. And the danger is once we accept something as true, our brains begin to defend that belief regardless of evidence. This is known as confirmation bias and it's one of the most powerful cognitive traps in existence.

Take a moment to think about your own beliefs. How often do you seek out evidence that contradicts them? How often do you truly listen to opposing arguments rather than preparing your counterpoint? If you're honest, probably not as often as you think. And that's not a flaw. It's human nature. But it becomes a problem when we're unaware of it.

Another key concept is groupthink. A psychological phenomenon where the desire for harmony or conformity in a group leads to irrational or dysfunctional decisions. It's been documented in everything from corporate disasters to historical atrocities. People silence their doubts for the sake of unity. They choose consensus over truth.

Social psychologist Irving Janis, who coined the term, found that even highly intelligent, well intentioned people can make catastrophic decisions when they suppress dissent and avoid critical evaluation. Why? Because challenging the group feels unsafe. Going against the grain requires more than intelligence. It requires integrity and courage.

And yet history shows us that progress has always come from those who dared to think differently. Galileo, Darwin, Nietzsche, Martin Luther King. They were all rejected, ridiculed or attacked for their ideas. But they thought anyway, they spoke anyway. Their willingness to challenge the collective ignorance of their time shaped the world we live in today.

But make no mistake; there is a cost to thinking critically in a society that punishes doubt. It is an act of rebellion. You risk being misunderstood, ostracized, and even hated. But you also gain something invaluable. Clarity, self-respect, and the quiet power that comes from knowing that your beliefs are yours, not programmed into you.

Part III: What We Have Lost

Let's bring this closer to home. Why do so many of us feel lost, anxious, or unfulfilled, even with access to more information and technology than any generation before? The answer lies not in what we have, but in what we've lost. And one of the greatest losses is the habit of inner dialogue. The ability to sit with a question, explore it, and allow truth to emerge through reflection.

We've outsourced our thinking to machines, to media, to public opinion. But no algorithm can tell you what is true for you. No trending topic can replace your inner voice. And no mass movement can substitute for the quiet certainty of a well-examined belief.

So what can we do? We can start by cultivating awareness. Awareness of our mental habits. Awareness of the sources we consume. Awareness of when we're thinking and when we're simply reacting.

One powerful practice is meta-cognition, thinking about our thinking. Ask yourself: What's influencing my opinion right now? Am I open to being wrong? Am I engaging with this idea or just absorbing it passively? Another is the deliberate practice of dialectical thinking. The ability to hold two opposing ideas in tension while exploring them. This is not just intellectual flexibility. It's mental strength. It allows you to go beyond binaries, beyond us versus them and into the realm where real understanding is born.

The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti said: "To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still." That stillness, so rare in our age, is where the seeds of wisdom grow.

But let us also speak plainly. Critical thinking is not something you acquire overnight. It is a discipline. It requires reading. Not just headlines, but books, full arguments, and nuanced thought. It requires listening, not just to those you agree with, but especially to those you don't. It requires humility, the kind that accepts uncertainty as part of the path. And above all, it requires the rejection of intellectual laziness.

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If everyone around you believes something without question, that's your cue to pause, not to rebel automatically, but to investigate honestly. In a time when ignorance is loud and confidence is often mistaken for competence, thinking deeply is not just a personal virtue. It's a public service.

Because the future of any society depends not on the volume of its opinions, but on the quality of its thought. The most powerful change begins not with mass movements, but with one person who chooses to think clearly in a world that doesn't.

Part IV: The Core Truth

At the heart of this entire crisis, beneath the digital noise, the failing institutions, the cultural polarization, there is something even more insidious. The real reason critical thinking is disappearing is not because people are incapable of it, but because they are afraid of what it might reveal. To think critically is to risk everything that gives us psychological safety. Our identity, our beliefs, our tribe. And for many, those things are too precious to question.

We live in a time when identity has become sacred. People define themselves by their opinions, their affiliations, their ideologies. To challenge an idea is now seen as a personal attack. But this is precisely the illusion that destroys thought that we are our ideas. You are not your political party. You are not your religion. You are not your social group. You are a human being with the capacity to evolve, to learn, and to change. And that journey of evolution begins the moment you detach your worth from your current beliefs.

The final and most important truth is this. Critical thinking is not just an intellectual skill. It is a spiritual act. It is the act of honoring truth over comfort, growth over certainty, and freedom over approval. It is the quiet decision to live with your eyes open even when the light burns.

Because once you start thinking critically, you begin to see the structures that surround you, the systems of manipulation, the algorithms of control, the masks people wear. And it can be overwhelming. It can even be painful. But it is real. And reality, no matter how uncomfortable, is the only foundation upon which true freedom can be built.

As philosopher and psychologist Carl Jung once said: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls." And yet facing our inner world, our unconscious motives, our inherited beliefs, our cognitive traps, is the very essence of thinking.

Critical thinking is not just about questioning the world. It's about questioning yourself. It's about asking: Why do I believe what I believe? Where did this idea come from? What parts of me are afraid to let go of it? When you ask those questions honestly, a new world opens. Not just a world of knowledge, but of wisdom. And wisdom is what our society is starving for. In a culture addicted to quick answers, wisdom invites deeper questions. In a system built on noise, wisdom offers silence. In an era of mass conformity, wisdom dares to be free.

Conclusion: An Invitation to Wake Up

This is your invitation. Not just to think, but to wake up. To stop living as a product of your environment and start becoming the architect of your mind. Because no school, no system and no social media platform will do this for you. The responsibility is yours alone.

And when you rise to it, something extraordinary happens. You begin to see with clarity, you begin to feel what it's like to live in alignment with truth. Not borrowed truth, not popular truth, but your hard-earned truth. You begin to notice when manipulation is being used against you. You start seeing the difference between information and propaganda, between education and indoctrination, between connection and performance. And most importantly, you begin to lead, not with noise, not with ego, but with depth.

You become a light in a dark room, a voice of calm in a storm of outrage, a grounded thinker in a world of reactionaries. This is what the world needs now more than ever. Not louder voices, not sharper arguments, but deeper minds. Minds that are willing to sit in complexity. Minds that are willing to say, "I don't know, but I'm willing to learn." Minds that are no longer seeking to win debates, but to understand reality.

If you want to change the world, start by changing the way you think. Not because it's easy, not because it's popular, but because it's right.

The rise of collective stupidity is not a cause. It's a symptom. A symptom of fear, of fatigue, of a world too distracted to look inward. But every act of thinking pushes back against that tide. Every moment you pause to reflect instead of react. Every time you ask a question instead of assuming the answer. Every time you choose clarity over comfort, you reclaim your power.

So as we end this journey, remember the most revolutionary thing you can do in this moment is not to shout, not to conform, and not to repeat, but to think. Let the others sleepwalk through slogans and screens. Let them trade their freedom for validation, but not you. You are awake now, and once you awaken, you can never go back.

If this message resonated with you, share it. Not because it's trendy, but because it's necessary. Leave a comment with your reflections, your doubts, your insights. Because critical thinking doesn't nurture in silence. It grows in dialog.

And if you're still here, know this. You are not alone. There is a quiet revolution happening. A movement not of noise but of minds. Not of outrage but of awareness. And it begins every time one person chooses to ask the harder question. Let that person be you.

Stay curious, stay awake, and above all, keep thinking.

An Unexpected Act of Grace - Phuket, Thailand

It was an early evening in Phuket on a Thursday, April 16, 2026 evening during that particular hour when the tropical sun, though beginning its descent, still holds the city in a firm, humid embrace. At around 6:00 pm, Meeta and I set out on our customary evening walk, a 45-minute ritual we had made a cherished part of our days here. It is the kind of routine that grounds you, a moving meditation that lets the sights, sounds, and smells of this vibrant Thai beach haven wash over you at a human pace.

But Phuket in April is unrelenting. The heat is not merely warm it is thick, almost tangible, wrapping itself around you like a second skin. The humidity is the kind that turns a pleasant evening stroll into a quiet battle of endurance. Somewhere along our familiar route, our bodies signaled their verdict in no uncertain terms; we needed to stop.

And then, as if the universe had quietly arranged it, we found ourselves pausing in front of a modest ground floor dwelling, the kind of home that speaks not of luxury, but of honest, dignified minimalist living. A simple Thai family, going about the ordinary rhythms of their evening, noticed two sweaty and weary walkers and, without a moment's hesitation, did something extraordinary in its simplicity.

They invited us in.

Not with grand gestures or elaborate words, but with the quiet, instinctive warmth that seems to come so naturally to people whose lives are uncomplicated by pretense. They offered us the chairs outside their open to the sky living room, humble seats that in that moment, felt like the most welcome shelter in the world. And then, almost before we could gather our breath, they brought out fresh, bottled cool drinking water for both of us.

No questions. No conditions. Just kindness, offered freely and without calculation.

We sat there for a few minutes, sipping that water and I dare say few things in recent memory have tasted so good. It was not just the coolness of it, or the relief it brought to parched throats. It was the feeling it carried with it; the warmth of a stranger family's generosity, the quiet dignity of people who had little by material measure and yet gave without a second thought.

When we rose to leave and reached for our wallets needing to do something to acknowledge what they had done, they refused. Gently, but unmistakably. No compensation would be accepted. What they had offered, they had offered from the heart, and they wanted nothing in return.

It was, to put it plainly, humbling. The kind of humbling that does not diminishes you, but rather realigns you and quietly reminds you what human beings, at their best, are capable of in more ways than one can imagine.

We could not simply walk away and leave it at that. A short distance down the road, we found a fresh fruit provisions store and selected a basket of assorted fruits, mangoes, rambutans, and whatever else caught our eye and seemed worthy of the gesture. It was a small thing, and we knew it. But it was our small thing, our way of saying what words, across the language barrier, might not have fully conveyed.

When we returned and presented the basket to them, their astonished faces revealed everything that needed to be said. Surprised smiles genuine, unguarded, radiant broke across their faces, the kind of smiles that you carry with you long after the moment has passed. Their photographs, captured in that instant, are a reminder to us and shall not soon forget.

It is easy, in the noise and pace of modern life, to grow quietly cynical to begin to believe that the world is harder and colder than it once was. And then something like this happens. A family of modest means, on an ordinary Thursday evening, opens their home and their hearts to two strangers, asks for nothing, and in doing so, restores something in you that you perhaps did not even know had needed restoring.

These are the moments that do not make headlines. They leave no grand footprints. And yet they matter more than most things that do.

It is acts of kindness like these small, unscripted, and entirely human that continue to reinforce, for us, a belief we hold onto dearly: that goodness is not rare. It is everywhere. Sometimes, all it takes is a warm evening, a 45-minute walk, and the grace to pause long enough to receive and reciprocate.✍🏽🙏🏽

Language - A human being's faculty mascot

A language that a person uses for his mode of communication always reveals a lot about his persona. I am attempting to with controversy ridden pit falls staring at me in the face take a deep dive and amplify into this truth. This for most people will come as a revelation according to me and make them understand at least to a large extent mindsets of people they interact with through the medium of vocal nuance embedded conversations.

Understanding this is not an invitation to judge. It is an invitation to listen more deeply to hear not just what someone is saying, but what their manner of saying it suggests about who they are, where they've been, and what they believe. Language is the most intimate thing most people share in public. Paying attention to it, carefully and sincerely, is one of the much-needed altruistic manner of understanding another human being.

Language is often equated to as the mirror in the mouth reflecting the mind of the person. Language is not merely a tool for communication. It is a fingerprint invisible, involuntary, and extraordinarily precise. Every time a person speaks or writes, they leave behind a trail of choices: the words they reach for, the rhythms they prefer, the silences they tolerate, the metaphors that feel natural to them. All of these choices are fully conscious. And that is exactly what makes language so revealing.

The breadth and nature of a person's vocabulary tells you where they've lived not geographically, but intellectually and emotionally. Someone who reaches for precise, nuanced words to describe feelings has spent time dwelling inside their own emotional world. They've examined it as it is part of their DNA and germane to them. They've named its parts. Conversely, a person with limited emotional vocabulary isn't necessarily shallow they may simply have been trained, by culture or circumstance, to look outward rather than inward.

How a person constructs a sentence, mirrors how he builds a point of view and by extension, how he thinks. People who speak in long heavy sentences tend to hold complexity comfortably; they are accustomed to qualification, nuance, and multiple simultaneous considerations. Those who favor short, declarative sentences often think in certainties. They've resolved the ambiguity internally before speaking. Neither style is superior but the difference tells you something as clear as day and night.

Fragmented speech dashes, trailing thoughts, sentences left unfinished can indicate a mind moving faster than its words, or one coping with and navigating genuine uncertainty. Highly structured, even formulaic language can signal caution, a desire for control, or deep professional conditioning.

The register a person adopts formal, casual, clinical, warm, ironic is one of the most telling social signals in language. It reveals how they see the person they're addressing. Do they talk down, level with you, or perform respect? Do they switch mannerisms effortlessly between contexts, or do they haul one stereotype mannequin everywhere? The person who is warm in private and stiff in public, or vice versa, is telling you something important about where they feel safe.

Irony and sarcasm, used frequently, often signal a person who has been disappointed who has learned that sincerity is risky. Humor as a default deflection is a kind of self-protection written in plain sight.

Perhaps most revealing of all is the absence what a person consistently avoids, edits out, or cannot seem to articulate. The person who never uses the word "I" in conversation, preferring "one" or "we," may be hiding behind collectivity. The person who can speak at length about ideas but stumbles when asked how they feel has told you something about the landscape of their inner life.

The philosopher Wittgenstein wrote that the limits of one's language are the limits of one's world. It is one of those insights that sounds abstract until you watch it play out in real life in the person who cannot describe a gray emotion because they only have words for extremes, or the person who can only speak of relationships in transactional terms, because that is the only grammar they were given.

One of the remedies recommended for self-improvement for effective communication is embarking upon a self-imposed retreat and catharsis. ✍🏽🙏🏾

The Dual Gene: A Metaphor for the Human Condition

Humans are, intrinsically speaking, bipolar not in the clinical sense, but in the deepest metaphorical sense of the word. Woven into the very fabric of our being, as though encoded in the double helix of our DNA, are two fundamental forces: the good gene and the evil gene. Not mutations. Not aberrations. Both native. Both permanent. Both ours.

This is not a flaw in our design it is the design itself.

These two forces exist in a constant, dynamic tension within every human soul. The good gene carries within it the impulses of compassion, sacrifice, creativity, love, and the drive to build. The evil gene carries something equally powerful selfishness, dominance, destruction, and the seductive pull of unchecked power. Neither can be removed. Neither can be fully silenced. They are two voices in the same body, two hands on the same wheel.

The critical question, then, is never which gene exists it is which gene is allowed to lead.

When the good gene holds its ground, it doesn't eliminate evil it governs it. It channels the raw, aggressive energy of the evil gene into ambition, competition, and the will to survive, while keeping its darkest impulses in check. Balance is maintained. The human being becomes capable of remarkable things.

But when the good gene surrenders when it grows tired, is deceived, is slowly worn down through trauma, ideology, greed, or despair something deeply dangerous occurs. The evil gene does not simply fill the vacancy. It expands into it. It colonizes every corridor of the self that the good gene once occupied. And in that expansion, a transformation takes place that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

This is where evil madness is born.

It is not ordinary wickedness the small cruelties most humans are capable of in moments of weakness. This is a systemic takeover. The individual, now fully in the grip of the evil gene, becomes a kind of amplifier broadcasting their darkness outward, affecting those closest to them first, then rippling further into communities, institutions, and if the individual holds enough power, into the world at large. History is littered with such figures. But so are families. Workplaces. Neighborhoods.

The tragedy is that the surrender rarely looks like surrender. It disguises itself as strength, as certainty, as righteousness even. The person who has let evil take the driver's seat often believes with absolute conviction that they are the hero of the story.

And perhaps the most sobering thought of all: the good gene's subservience is always a choice — conscious or not. It happens through the small abdications. The compromises that seem harmless. The moments we choose comfort over conscience, power over principle, silence over truth. Evil rarely seizes control all at once. It is invited in, gradually, one small surrender at a time.

This is why the oldest wisdom traditions of humanity across cultures, across centuries have always framed the moral life not as a destination, but as a daily practice. A constant, active choice to let the good gene lead. To resist the abdication. To keep the right force in the driver's seat, even when especially when it is costly to do so.

We are not good or evil. We are the ongoing, unfinished negotiation between the two.✍🏽

The Soul of Indian Roads

Driving on Indian roads and especially its highways demands a particular kind of resilience and grit. 

It is, unambiguously, not for the faint-hearted. Around every turn, the road conspires to surprise you in stealth mode a sudden pothole swallowing your wheel, a speed breaker erected overnight at someone's whim, a wandering herd materializing out of nowhere, a hairpin bend cloaked in mountain mist, pedestrians crossing with sovereign indifference, two and four wheelers hurtling towards you from the opposite direction with the complete nonchalance of people who have long made their peace and have come to terms with whatever fate awaits them. 

Yet if this passion is to be indulged, one must accept and make their work around with all of what awaits them during the course of their road journey. At its core, it is a question of attitude, curiosity and perhaps, of love. I have also constantly been improving my style of defensive anticipatory driving during my trips very similar to seeking anticipatory bail. This has ensured safety for both me and my wife. 

We both share this passion as we share everything else: doing it together. Journeys by road is in both of our DNA's and we are fortunate to be able to delve into and pursue the same without apologies. Last year, we drove close to 7,000 kilometers from Mumbai through the verdant hills of Sikkim and the spiritual serenity of Bhutan, and back a journey that tested machine and man in equal measure. This year, we have already covered 2,000 kilometers on a drive from Mumbai to the other worldly salt flats of Rann of Kutch in Gujarat and back. And for four consecutive years from 2021 through 2024 we have participated in the Himalayan Drives organized by Team Firefox of Chennai, traversing between 3,000 and 4,000 kilometers each time. We have driven across some of the most breathtaking terrain on earth, comprising of snaking through challenging mountain roads, driving through national forests experiencing complete solitude, on river beds and even where there were no roads but were part of our itinerary.

Driving abroad has its pleasures smooth, well-engineered roads, predictable signage, the quiet confidence of infrastructure that works. But monotony sets in early. There is little to surprise you, and nothing to move you in the absence of people on the way. Here in India, the roads may humble and exasperate, but they are never indifferent to your presence. And the people you meet along the way that is where the journey truly lives and one gets indoctrinated with an experience of a different kind. Roadside garages manned by street smart self-taught mechanics have taken improvisation to a new level and deserve true admiration.

The connections forged with strangers from every conceivable walk of life carry a warmth that no highway in the world can manufacture. A chai vendor at a remote mountain pass offering his humble hospitality as though you were a long-expected guest. A farmer pausing his work to raise a hand from his field. Village children urging you on with bright, unselfish-conscious enthusiasm, as though your mission were somehow theirs too. These moments are manna from heaven, unexpected, unearned, and utterly unforgettable. They have made us not just better drivers and road travelers, but more grateful human beings. Our journeys expose us and allow us to practice a religion of acceptance and humility totally imbibed on the fly and on the way. 

Indian roads, in the end, give back far more than they take.✍🏽