Table of Contents
There is a sadness that comes from seeing clearly.
All great poets know this.
It is not a sadness of despair, but of depth.
The sadness of having seen and experienced too much truth to still believe in all the lies.
This is not depression.
This is vision.
And this is precisely the kind of cultural consciousness I’ve always understood India to hold.
Not “Bharat.”
Not the ultra-nationalist, anti-intellectual, theocratic fascist tribalism of the present.
Not the vulgar Bollywood, "Jai Hind", GDP-first playground of the Bania-class Ambani-Piramal losers of some stinking "Mumbai" shithole.
Blindly reverse-engineering some 15th world shithole MAGA Trump Towers.
Not that Bharat.
I mean India. My India.
The India that reads Woolf and sees a mirror.
The India that recognises Krishnamurti, Huxley, Orwell, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Kerouac, Sontag, Arendt, Tagore, Kabir and Rumi as siblings in a shared house of meditation.
A shared foundation of silence and solitude.
The India that understands that the highest art and culture from anywhere in the world — whether born in Amsterdam, NYC or Calcutta — belongs to all of the world and to the truth of things.
And never to idiotic flags, borders, nation-states and national anthems.
That is my vision of my gorgeous India.
That is the India I carry in my blood.
Not a stupid place on a map.
But a civilisational frequency — a deep, spacious consciousness that doesn’t need to Chest-thump or flag-hump.
Because the true Artist is always stateless.
British culture is Indian culture.
Indian culture is British culture.
Not through empire, but through the shared spirit of counterculture poets and artists who gave their lives trying to articulate truth.
The highest works of the West — the philosophy of solitude, the poetry of melancholia, the silence of the painter’s gaze — all belong within my Indian archive of inwardness.
Because my India is not a country.
It is a way of seeing and being.
And living. And doing. And dying.
The real India should have embraced Woolf.
The real India should be teaching her in every school, alongside Ghalib, Rumi, Gibran, Sappho, Schopenhauer and Aurobindo.
Because, unlike the West,
the real India doesn’t fear sadness.
It understands it.
It sits with it. It lets it speak.
Where the West jumps to always offer some cure,
My India offers a silence and a solitude.
This is not suffering for its own sake — but awareness without escape.
An acceptance so deep,
even sorrow becomes sacred.
My India is not a country.
It is a way of seeing and being.
And living. And doing. And dying.
This is not sadness.
It’s the silence that follows
a storm you survived alone.
The stillness of a soul who’s already
burned, buried but become.
Not to be seen.
But to remind this rotten world
of the ways of kneeling and kissing the sky.
