Growing up in the 70s and 80s in urban middle India was to know what shortages are. The state strangled enterprise and everything from a scooter to a phone to butter, milk and grain was scarce. The civics and history textbooks stank of double standards as they spoke about an India that was far away from the life of the person for whom that English textbook was written. I call it the Manoj (Bharat) Kumar movies phase of India—we were losers but were brainwashed into looking back at a glorious past. A past that was distant enough in its historical dividend not to matter to people struggling to find an average “service class” livelihood. Of course, “business class” then meant not an airline seat but something totally different.
My column in Mint
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