India’s deepest contribution is not culture, ritual, or tradition, but the inquiry into the self. Laws, technology, policy, and economic progress can improve external conditions, yet they cannot resolve the inner hunger that drives conflict, consumption, and ecological crisis. Real change begins with self-knowledge, honesty, and awareness of the one who chooses, desires, and acts. Without understanding the self, progress remains incomplete, no matter how advanced society becomes.
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Originally published in The Sunday Guardian on 14 jun '26
At Britain’s Parliament, an ancient Indian question challenged the limits of law and power
The theme I was asked to speak on at the House of Lords in the British Parliament this week was lovely: Indian roots, global wings. Lovely things charm us, and a charmed audience nods before it has time to look. So I begin by declining the nod, because both halves of that phrase mean something quite different from what they are taken to mean, and that difference is the whole of what India can offer. Roots, to most of us and most of all to those far from home, call up festivals and food, the aroma of a particular kitchen, the way elders are greeted, the values a family clings to harder the further it goes. There is nothing wrong with it, but it is smaller than the word deserves. In the Indian sense, a root is not a custom but a question placed before all others: Ko’ham, who am I. Every contribution of India the world has thought worth keeping: the Upanishads, the Buddha, Kabir Saheb, and others, grows from that single inquiry. Strip it away, and what remains is costume. To be rooted is not to remember where one comes from; it is to have asked, without looking away, what one actually is, and to find that the limits one assumed do not survive the looking.
