What blacken our days are the insistent reminders of governance failure, hanging over us like Delhi’s smog. What kind of answers can be found in the Mahabharata, which is obsessed with questions of right and wrong?
In the spring of 2002 I decided to take an academic holiday. My wife thought it a strange resolve. She was familiar with our usual holidays, when we armed ourselves with hats and blue guides and green guides and trudged up and down over piles of temple stones in places like Khajuraho and Angkor Wat. As she moved to get up from her chair, I explained that I had studied the great books of the West during college but I had never read the Indian classics. The closest I had come was to take Daniel Ingalls’ Sanskrit classes at Harvard as an undergraduate. Now, 40 years later, I yearned to go back and read the texts of classical India, if not in the original, at least with a scholar of Sanskrit nearby. My wife gave me a sceptical look, and after a pause, she said, ‘It’s a little late in the day for a mid-life crisis, isn’t it?’
In the 1990s I travelled widely across the country and from these travels emerged a book, India Unbound. In it I wrote about India’s economic rise and concluded that it was increasingly possible to believe that for the first time in history Indians would emerge from a struggle against want into an age when the large majority would be at ease.
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