What do I know anyway?

There are days when I sit with my (rather large) peg of whisky on a cold winter’s evening and introspect on how on earth I became the sort of person who begins every political, social, or moral reflection with a full confession of sins that I did not personally commit but have inherited by birth, by caste, by malehood, by the randomness of being born into a home where joy was the default and fear was unheard of, and where books were never locked behind glass cupboards but left lying around like loose change. It feels almost ritualistic now, this preamble of privilege, this litany of acknowledgements, this instinct to say,

Look, I know where I come from, I know I am the product of an absurdly stacked deck, I know that whatever I have achieved rests on foundations I did not build.

And yet, here I am, still trying to say something about the lives of people whose circumstances I will never truly inhabit. It is not lost on me that this is precisely the trap that people like me keep falling into, the Brahmin liberal who thinks he has outgrown his conditioning, the enlightened one who has supposedly walked out of Plato’s cave and now feels responsible for telling the people still inside why they ought to leave. It is embarrassing, even when I know it to be true, even when I work every day to keep that instinct on a leash, even when I hold my tongue, even when I whisper to myself that I do not know better, that knowing more is not the same as knowing right.

Because here is the thing. Life has been extraordinarily kind to me. Not always gracious, not always smooth, not always predictable, but kind in ways that matter to survival. I have had enormous heartbreaks, I have been lied to, I have been betrayed, I have been bankrupted to the tune of a hundred million dollars, I have been shot at, jailed, divorced, broken, resurrected, and broken again, but never once have I had to wonder where my next meal would come from. Never once have I slept in fear of being homeless. Never once have I had to worry about my physical safety in the way that millions do. And because of this safety-net, because of this cushion, because of this invisible harness of caste, gender, education, and mobility, I have had the luxury to read widely, travel freely, meet extraordinary minds, and wander intellectually into territories that my ancestors would have found blasphemous.

So yes, I became a liberal. Not a heroic one. Not a revolutionary one. Not even a consistent one. Just the kind of liberal that privilege often produces, socially left of centre and economically right, full of tenderness for the oppressed and full of theories about the oppressed, all the while swimming inside a pool that the oppressed did not know existed. And so I keep telling myself: be careful, be careful, you are not their saviour, you are not their conscience, you are not their Vanguard Party, you are not their interpreter to democracy. You are merely someone who can afford to think about these things because somebody else is cleaning the street outside your home.

This tension becomes painfully sharp when I look at something like the recent Bihar elections. Let us, for a moment, set aside the allegations of manipulation, not because they are unimportant, but because I want to get to the deeper wound beneath them. For the sake of argument, let us assume the electorate chose freely. Let us assume that after two decades of an incumbent whose human-development record is an indictment written in slow motion, the people returned him again.

And when you hold that fact in your hand, you cannot help but think of Bihar itself, this land that once housed Nalanda, one of the world’s greatest centres of learning, where knowledge was so abundant that its libraries burned for months when destroyed. You think of Pataliputra, the imperial city of emperors and scholars. You think of how this soil has produced, even now, an astonishing number of IAS officers, IPS officers, scientists, academics, researchers, diplomats, artists, and writers, far disproportionate to its economic condition. Bihar is intellectually rich even when materially poor.

And then you look at the Patna Metro. A shiny, expensive, ambitious project, beloved by governments and contractors alike. You see stations built with concrete and glass, escalators gleaming, platforms spotless at inauguration. And then, almost immediately, the pan stains appear, the spit marks, the small acts of defiance or indifference or simply habit. And you hear people like me muttering under our breath about civic sense, about responsibility, about gratitude.

And then come the two positions, delivered with great confidence.
One position says: of course Bihar deserves a metro. Why not? Why should Patna lag behind Delhi or Mumbai or Bengaluru? Who are we to deny this dignity to its citizens?
The other position says: maybe they did not need a metro. Maybe they needed electricity, schools, hospitals, irrigation, industry, roads, jobs. Maybe the money went to the wrong place. Maybe a metro is meaningless if everything else is broken.

But, here’s the thing: both positions are equally privileged.

Both assume knowledge they do not possess. Both presume to diagnose what Bihar needs. Both speak from a distance. Both rely on certainty that comes from comfort, not lived reality.

And so the dilemma sharpens in ways that make you feel small.
Where does empathy end and entitlement begin?
Where does concern collapse into condescension?
Where does liberalism mutate into paternalism?
Where does my belief in progress slip into the arrogance of assuming I know what is best for people whose lives are nothing like mine?

Because let me not pretend otherwise. I do believe certain things are good. Education, healthcare, civil liberties, smaller families, reliable electricity, safe drinking water, functioning institutions, equitable opportunities. But even these beliefs are shaped by my life, by the books I have read, by the relative safety I have always inhabited. And sometimes I wonder if even these supposedly universal truths are, in their own way, reflections of who I am rather than reflections of what is.

What if the Bihari voter is not choosing a bad option but rejecting an alternative they have tried and suffered from? What if their calculus is shaped by fear I have never known? What if their priorities arise from histories I have never lived? What if the very things I call progress mean nothing to them, or worse, threaten them? And what if, at the end of it all, I am the one who is wrong?

And this is where the long, confusing trolley problem of Indian democracy appears, not on a whiteboard but in the dust of lived lives. If I pull the lever, I impose my idea of the good. If I refuse to pull the lever, I abandon people to outcomes I find devastating. Every choice feels arrogant. Every silence feels irresponsible. Every path is uncertain.

Which is why, for once, I am ending somewhere I do not usually end. Usually, I end my writing by taking a position, offering a belief, placing a flag in the ground, saying here is what I think and here is why you might consider thinking so too. But not today. Today I end differently, because today I am facing the truth of my limits. The limits of knowing what is right for a people, a community, a state, a nation. The limits of knowing what is right even for my own family. The limits of knowing what is right for myself, given that most of what I call wisdom comes from hindsight, not foresight, and the future remains stubbornly uninterested in my predictions.

So the pompous righteousness of people like me, speaking confidently about what is right or wrong for entire populations, feels suddenly absurd, almost comic, when held against the complexity of civilisation and the unruliness of human life.

And so I leave this here, not as a conclusion but as something trailing, something unfinished, something that wanders out of my hands and into the world without any claim of authority, something that drifts the way all honest thoughts drift when stripped of performative certainty, something that simply says: this is what I believe about democracy, about India, about people, about the fragile art of living with one another, even when I do not understand much, even when I suspect I never will, even when I am trying to make sense of a world that refuses to sit still long enough to be understood…

… and maybe that is all there is.