INDIAN DEMOCRACY IS NOW THE RULE OF A FEW, FOR FEWER, BY THE FEWEST

SEVENTY five years ago, the dawn of Indian democracy was baptized in blood, tears and loss of lives and livelihoods. It was also burnished by the hope of a new future. The reborn Indian revelling in the ecstasy of united identity didn't realise that the tryst with destiny was happening at the crossroads.

- PRABHU CHAWLA

There were roads less taken since the journey was yet to begin. As I wrote in one of the special issues of the India Today magazine, my own journey began with unsolicited displacement. Driven out with my mother and seven siblings from a comfortable house in Dera Ghazi Khan, now in Pakistan, I spent my childhood in a refugee camp in Jalandhar, then a small town in Punjab. Dismemberment, discombobulation, distance, dislocation and despair were my personal Partition tropes. It was also my crossroad. With no permanent shelter or vocation, street hawking was perhaps the family's best option to survive. A good education was a luxury. For a Midnight's Child like me, a ramshackle, four-room municipal school laid the foundation for what I would become 20 years later. By the century's end, India would become a Global Knowledge Empire with me one of its picayune subjects. In the years that followed, I witnessed the heat and dust of politics, the rise, fall, and rise and fall of the Gandhis, and the birth of other political dynasties some regional and others national. I recorded the emergence of coalition and opportunistic politics and nefarious nexuses in big business. As a journalist, I noted the financial policy tides that shaped India's economic coastline and painted on paper with pigments of pan-power political rainbows. As India Today magazine's editor in 1996, I would often stand on the terrace of our Connaught Place office to ruminate and recollect. I would run my gaze along New Delhi's skyline to register the changes in the city and its power centres since I came to India as a little boy with little to my name. From my perch, I would watch the ebb and flow of crowds through the Metro station, whose entry and exit were in the same block. My mind would drift to the railway overbridge under which I had played as a child.