"The essence of a nation," Renan wrote, "is that all individuals [in it] have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things." That is true of India, though we Indians are not as good at forgetting as we should be. We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.
Thraroor 1997