The Question

A child is born.

In the first weeks of life, that child needs nothing from the world. The mother’s milk is enough. There is no thirst that needs water from outside, no hunger that needs solid food, no question the child is asking that has not already been answered by simply being alive. The newborn is whole. Complete. Lacking nothing.

This is the most common miracle on earth. It happens millions of times a day, in every corner of the world, with so little ceremony that almost nobody stops to consider what is actually happening. A new human being arrives, and for a brief period, that human being is in a state of completeness that they will spend the rest of their life trying, in various unconscious ways, to return to.

Then the child begins to eat.

And with food — with the first cry for what is outside, the first reaching for what is not the mother — desire begins. The journey of an entire human lifetime begins. The journey of every civilization that human beings have ever built begins.

This book is, in one sense, about that moment. About what happens before it, what happens after it, and about a civilization that spent five thousand years studying it more carefully than any other civilization on earth.

I have been an observer for as long as I can remember.

Watching what my grandmother did in the kitchen without explaining why. Listening to what the family said at births and at funerals. Noticing which rituals my mother performed at certain times of the year, and which ones she would never perform at others. Paying attention to the small gestures — the way an older relative would touch the head of a younger one before a long journey, the specific way an Indian woman wraps a sari, the exact moment in a meal when the elders begin to eat. None of these things were explained to me. None of them were taught. They were simply there, woven into ordinary life, carrying knowledge that nobody could quite put into words.

I did not know I was observing. I only knew that India, in its daily life, was carrying something that no one was speaking aloud.

The question came later. It arrived one evening, on my birthday. I was alone. I had left a job some time earlier and had nothing waiting for me on the other side — no offer, no plan, only the feeling that something else was supposed to happen. To pass the evening, I put on a film I had seen before. Interstellar. A film about humanity searching for a new home as the earth slowly fails.

There is a small scene early in the film. The main character — an American father — is driving through a cornfield with his two children. A drone appears, drifting slowly above the field, no operator in sight. The children chase it, laughing. The father catches it eventually and sees what it is: an Indian surveillance drone that has wandered, somehow, all the way across the world. The father looks at the drone with something closer to respect. He tells them: this thing has been flying on solar power for years. He keeps the solar cells.

It is not a big scene. The film moves on to other things. But that night, sitting alone, something in that scene caught me and would not let go. The American children laughing as they chased it. The father — the wiser one in the scene — recognizing what was actually impressive about the Indian invention.

And a question rose up in me. Not from anywhere in particular. Just — there.

Why have Indians not invented anything?

The Preface continues for another 1,800 words. Sign up to receive the full text and Chapter 1 by email, or take the book home from any of the stores listed on the buy page.