Satire | Congrats, you are now Viksit

It’s that time of the year when holidays are in the air, along with PM10 and PM2.5. I know people who’ve been planning for months for their annual two-week break from India. A journalist friend is off to Turkey - yes, that traitor country which is best friends with Pakistan. Another has jetted off to Finland, to spend Christmas in Lapland, Santa Claus’s hometown - a weird choice, I must say, for someone who doesn’t even believe in Santa Claus. An ex-colleague, as I write this, is sipping yerba maté in Machu Picchu. This obsession Indians have with foreign travel is something I no longer understand. I say ‘no longer’ because, until a decade ago, it made sense. India was a poor country, with poor infrastructure, very few OTPs, and lots of poor people. Naturally, people wanted to go abroad to experience the joys that only a ‘Viksit’ (developed) nation could offer. But this is no longer the case. In 2025, India officially became Viksit. I know 2014-2025 wasn’t an easy time for many of us. But who doesn’t look back with nostalgia on the epochal battles one had to fight and win? The battle of demonetisation, battle of the lockdown, battle of the GST, to name a few. But they all had a singular objective: to make us Indians the most resilient people on earth. Survival over Mysore pak Ask any self-help guru which is the most important survival skill. They’ll say it is resilience. They’ll further say that the most resilient human is also the most Viksit. There is only one way to increase resilience: repeatedly expose ourselves to misfortune. That’s why 2025 has been a godsend. It subjected millions of Indians to the full range of resilience-testing: from terror attacks to flash floods, avalanches to bridge collapses, stampedes to floods, landslides to factory explosions, plane crash, cyber fraud, extreme corruption, extreme deforestation, and even war. At a personal level, 2025 was the first time I got a proper taste of nuclear panic. My timelines exploded with videos of newly hatched ‘disaster influencers’ calmly explaining what to do in case a nuclear missile lands in your living room. My wife already had a ‘Go Bag’ ready by the time I started to Google ‘what should you pack in a Go Bag if you are anticipating a nuclear bomb?’. We had a major row when she threw out three boxes of my favourite Mysore pak from the emergency kit. She wouldn’t listen despite me showing her Perplexity AI’s considered view that “comfort food is vital for mental well-being during a catastrophe”. Looking back, however, being forced to prioritise survival over Mysore pak was a great boost to my self-esteem, not to mention my resilience. The secret sauce 2025 delivered another big slap to Indians in the form of Trump’s $100,000 fee on the HbA1c visa - widely used by migrant Indian workers to track their blood sugar in America. But people didn’t even flinch. The notification of the four...

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