The state has a duty to protect me from others but not from myself. This is the premise behind our Constitution, which reposes trust in me as a responsible citizen and gives me freedom to pursue my life in peace without interference from the state. Hence, the government was wrong in banning 857 pornography sites last weekend. To its credit, it realized its mistake by Tuesday and reversed its stand: it unbanned adult sites while rightly retaining the ban on child pornography.

Something has gone terribly wrong with our republic. There are ominous clouds over the approaching monsoon session of Parliament. When MPs should be deeply concerned with the fragile nature of our economic recovery, debating how to create a million jobs a month, they are straggling back to work in a stupor having forgotten why they were elected.

Last week’s historic accord with Bangladesh erased a dispute as old as Kashmir while nudging the subcontinent towards a common market. Trade and investment have been the refreshing focus of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s diplomacy. He understands instinctively that power emanates from a bowl of rice, not from the barrel of a gun. In this respect, he is following an ancient tradition that once made India a great trading nation that carried its amazing soft power on merchant ships.

Politics is a short game while economics is a long one. Both tend to converge in the end but in the interim they pull in opposite directions. Because of this mismatch, most of the people are invariably disappointed. This is Prime Minister Modi’s problem on the first anniversary of his government. Although his record is reasonably good, he has neither met the extraordinary expectations of his supporters nor followed through on key priorities.

Once upon a time we used to proudly call Indian Railways the ‘nation’s lifeline’. Today, we are embarrassed by it. Every Indian had an impossibly romantic railway memory. Today these memories have faded as successive politicians have played havoc with a grand old institution. The root problem is that railways is a state monopoly, starved by politics of investment and technology, and prevented by a pernicious departmental structure from becoming a modern, vibrant enterprise.

India elected Narendra Modi to control inflation, restrain corruption and bring back jobs. Inflation has come under control; there has been no corruption scandal in the past ten months; but jobs are nowhere in sight. Modi is banking on his ambitious ‘Make in India’ programme to revive manufacturing and deliver a million new jobs that are needed each month. But the problem is that manufacturing is precisely the sector that has historically let India down. Since 1991, India’s growth has been driven largely by services.

On the fateful day that the Aam Aadmi Party won a stunning victory in Delhi’s state election, I was captivated by the tragedy of ‘Dara’, a superb play by Pakistani writer Shaheed Nadeem, which opened recently at the National Theatre in London. Schoolchildren across India know all about the murderous rivalry between Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh for the Mughal throne but this play is not only about a war of succession; it is about what India was, what it became, and what it might have been.

For the past few weeks Shashi Tharoor, the celebrated writer and politician, has been the victim of a phenomenon called trial by media. The me dia can be unkind when life takes a bad turn. It delights in raising celebrities to the sky on one day, and with equal glee brings them crashing down the next. If you live your life under the glare of publicity, you must be pre pared to be tried by the public.

There was a time when I used to believe like Diogenes the Cynic that I was a citizen of the world, and I used to strut about feeling that one blade of grass is much like another.

Now I feel that each blade has its unique spot on the earth from where it draws its life and strength. So is a man rooted to a land from where he derives his life and his faith. Discovering one’s past helps to nourish those roots, instilling a quiet self-confidence as one travels through life. Losing that memory risks losing a sense of the self.

Too many Indians still believe that the market makes “the rich richer and the poor poorer” and leads to corruption and crony capitalism. This is false, of course. Despite the market having generated broad-spread prosperity over two decades — lifting 250 million poor above the poverty line — people still distrust the market and the nation continues to reform by stealth. The blame lies partly with our reformers who have not ‘sold’ the competitive market as Margaret Thatcher did in Britain.