Brijesh Dash, Bhubaneswar, 8 August 2026
There is a strange thing about time. We never notice its speed while we are living through it. It is only when we stop, look back and join the dots that we realise how dramatically everything around us has changed. A child becomes a parent. A village becomes a town. A bicycle gives way to a car, and then to an app that brings the car to our doorstep. The change feels natural because it happens one ordinary day after another. But play those years in fast forward and it almost feels unbelievable.
The story of independent India is perhaps no different.
Eighty years is not a long time for a civilization. It is barely the lifetime of one person. Yet, within those eighty years, we have travelled from a nation united by a freedom struggle to a society deeply divided over the very meaning of democracy, institutions and citizenship. We often explain this journey through elections, leaders or political parties. They certainly matter. But I sometimes wonder whether they are only the final expression of something much deeper that had already begun changing inside society.
What if politics merely followed economics?
Every generation inherits a different economic reality. And every economic reality quietly produces a different political behaviour.
The generation before Independence had very little. Jobs were scarce, industries were few, education was limited and poverty was widespread. Yet, economics had strangely taken a back seat. The larger national purpose overshadowed individual ambition. Freedom became the common currency. A teacher, a farmer, a lawyer or a trader could all disagree on countless issues, but they were united by one idea—that India first needed to become a nation before it could become prosperous. Personal success could wait. That generation made enormous sacrifices, not because sacrifice was romantic, but because there was no other path.
Independence changed the question completely.
The challenge was no longer how to remove colonial rule. The challenge was how to build a country that had almost everything to create from scratch. Roads had to be laid. Dams had to be built. Universities had to be established. Public institutions had to find their feet. Industries had to be encouraged. Poverty had to be reduced. Healthcare and education had to reach millions who had never seen either. There was an overwhelming feeling that everyone had a role to play. If the engineer built honestly, the teacher taught sincerely, the doctor served responsibly and the civil servant administered fairly, then together the nation would move forward.
Looking back, that belief may sound idealistic. But perhaps every young nation needs a little idealism to survive.
For nearly three decades, this was the dominant national mood. Institutions were still imperfect, sometimes painfully slow, but they represented hope. Government schools promised opportunity. Public sector industries promised self-reliance. Universities promised social mobility. The economy was not growing at the pace many desired, but there was still a broad acceptance that nation-building was a long-distance race. Individual ambition and national ambition were not seen as competing ideas.
Then, almost without anyone noticing, the conversation began to change.
The country had begun producing engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs and professionals in large numbers. Cities were expanding. Television entered homes. Consumer goods became more accessible. People travelled more. Aspirations grew faster than the systems that were meant to serve them. The problem was no longer the absence of opportunity. The problem was how to reach that opportunity before someone else did. That small shift changed more than we probably realised.
When opportunities are limited, people compete. When opportunities begin expanding, people learn to navigate systems. Rules that once appeared necessary slowly began to look like delays. Procedures became obstacles. Knowing someone who could make things move faster became almost as valuable as merit itself. None of this happened because society suddenly abandoned its values. Most people were simply trying to build a better life than the one their parents had lived. They wanted secure jobs, better schools for their children, a home of their own and a little comfort after decades of scarcity.
There is nothing unusual about that.
The remarkable part is that millions of ordinary people, making perfectly understandable decisions for perfectly understandable reasons, can gradually alter the political culture of an entire nation without ever intending to do so.
Perhaps that is the real speed of time. It is not measured by the number of years that pass, but by how quietly our priorities change while we remain convinced that we are simply getting on with life.
If there is one period that quietly altered the direction of this story, it was the decade of the 1990s. Liberalization, privatization and globalization did not merely change the economy; they changed the way Indians looked at life itself. For the first time since Independence, prosperity no longer appeared to be a distant promise to be delivered by the State. It looked achievable within one lifetime. Businesses expanded, new professions emerged, foreign companies arrived, salaries rose and a generation that had grown up hearing stories of scarcity suddenly found itself surrounded by possibility.
There was nothing wrong with that. In fact, it was necessary. No nation can keep asking its people to sacrifice forever. At some point, growth has to replace austerity, and aspiration has to replace survival.
But every economic transformation leaves behind a political footprint.
As opportunities multiplied, so did competition. Success was no longer measured only by hard work. It increasingly depended on how quickly one could move through systems that were often slow, complicated and still evolving. Licences, permissions, regulations and procedures became part of everyday life. The intention behind many of them may have been sound, but together they also created delays. And wherever delays become routine, shortcuts quietly become acceptable.
People did not wake up one morning and decide to compromise their values. Most were simply trying to save time, secure a contract, admit a child into a good school, obtain a loan, register a business or ensure that years of effort were not lost because a file refused to move. Accommodation slowly became a life skill. It was no longer seen as surrender. It was seen as practicality.
Parents noticed this before anyone else. Pratap Bhanu Mehta explained this shift in his latest edit in The Indian Express when he talks about “politics of accommodation”.
Our parents had grown up hearing stories of sacrifice. They themselves had lived through shortages and uncertainty. Naturally, they wanted us as children to struggle a little less than they had. They taught us to study hard, build careers, stay away from unnecessary conflict and focus on creating a secure future. It was sensible advice. Most parents across the world would probably have done the same. Yet there was an unintended consequence.
As careers became more demanding and the economy more competitive, fewer people found the time or the inclination to engage with public institutions unless they absolutely had to. Politics became something to complain about, not participate in. Institutions were expected to function, but fewer citizens felt personally responsible for defending them. If an inconvenience could be solved through a contact instead of a process, the contact usually won.
No single act weakens a democracy. But thousands of small accommodations, repeated over decades, slowly change what a society begins to accept as normal. This is why I hesitate when people ask, “When did everything change?” History rarely changes in one dramatic moment. It changes quietly while people are busy living their lives. Elections merely reveal what society has already become.
Today, when we see younger citizens questioning authority more openly, demanding transparency and refusing to accept explanations that satisfied earlier generations, it is easy to dismiss them as impatient. This is no longer just a debate in university campuses or metropolitan cities. Even in remote schools in states like Odisha, young students are increasingly raising sharp questions about institutional integrity and fairness. Around 140 inmates of Sanatemera Government Upgraded High school hostel in Nabarangpur district left the campus on 6th August in protest over poor infrastructural facilities as reported in Orissa Post on 7th August 2026. But perhaps every generation reacts to the one before it. The generation that fought for freedom questioned colonial authority. The generation that built the Republic questioned poverty and underdevelopment. The generation that liberalised questioned economic controls. Maybe this generation is questioning accommodation itself. Whether they will succeed is impossible to know.
History has a way of humbling those who believe they have finally understood it.
Which brings me back to the question that started this piece. Can a nation change this much in just eighty years? Perhaps the better question is whether nature ever allows any imbalance to continue indefinitely.
In forests, neglected undergrowth eventually catches fire and makes way for new life. Rivers that remain blocked long enough carve a different course. Even markets, left entirely to themselves, eventually correct excesses that once looked permanent. Human societies are no different. Whenever one way of thinking dominates for too long, another quietly begins taking shape. Sometimes it appears through students. Sometimes through workers. Sometimes through ideas that were dismissed until they suddenly became impossible to ignore. Nature’s balancing act rarely asks for permission.
The challenge before us, therefore, is not to romanticise one generation or blame another. Every generation responded to the incentives before it. The freedom generation gave us a nation. The builders gave us institutions. The reformers gave us opportunity. If today’s generation has inherited weakened public trust in many of those institutions, perhaps its responsibility is not merely to criticise them, but to rebuild them with the same patience with which an earlier generation built roads, universities and public systems from almost nothing. The speed of time cannot be slowed. Economic incentives will continue to change. New technologies will create new ambitions. New political movements will emerge. That is inevitable.
What is not inevitable is forgetting that prosperity and institutions are partners, not rivals. One creates wealth. The other ensures that wealth does not become the privilege of a few or the frustration of many.
Eighty years ago, India won its freedom. The decades that followed taught us how to build, how to compete and how to prosper. The decades ahead may demand something far more difficult—to remember that a republic is not sustained by economic growth alone, but by citizens who refuse to outsource their conscience entirely to the State. Perhaps that is nature’s balancing act. It waits patiently until a society begins asking itself the questions it had postponed for far too long.
