Last week I met a young lady from Japan. We got talking and she said that she was travelling around India exploring our spiritual traditions. In an unguarded moment she admitted that she was seeking solace from her lonely, banal and desperate life and hoped that India might offer her a spiritual guide to the art of living. Nothing unusual in that, I thought. She is part of a great tradition of travellers to India who have sought consolation from the material world. The tendency goes back to Fa Hien and Huan Tsang, two Chinese travellers in the first millennium AD, who came looking for Buddhist wisdom. And today young tourists come in hordes seeking an alternative way to live their lives. We in India respond to this with pride. We are not shy to contrast our spirituality to the materialism of the West, often as a way to shore up our self-esteem. But in the process, our view of ourselves has become lopsided, and we have forgotten that other worthwhile goals always informed classical Indian life--for example, artha (prosperity) and kama (pleasure). We have also forgotten our many wonderful rational traditions. Life in ancient India was more balanced and moksha (spiritual liberation) was only one of the multiple ends of human beings. There were renouncers to be sure, and many like the Buddha and Mahavira became extremely celebrated, but the mainstream followed the normal life of the householder pursuing a balance between the mind and the spirit. When around 500 BC, asceticism became widespread and an increasing numbers of intelligent young men “gave up the world” to search for spiritual peace, Brahmins responded by devising a theory of the balanced life of four ashramas, dividing the life of the twice-born into four stages: the brahmachari (celibate student); the grihastha (married householder); the vanaprastha (forest dweller); and sannyasin (wandering ascetic). There was always some tension between asceticism and sensuality, between the aspiration to liberation and the heartfelt desire to have descendants, between an active life of meritorious works (pravrtti) versus the renunciation of worldly activity (nivrtti). The Upanishads valued renunciation; the dharma texts argued that the householder who maintains his sacred fire, procreates children, and performs his ritual duties also earns religious merit. However, in medieval times we lost this fine balance, partly under the sway of bhakti and the devotional cults, and too many began to think of the world as maya (illusion). Oddly, the same thing happened in the west. Christianity overwhelmed life in the middle ages and people lost their balance. But beginning with the Renaissance in the 15th century and culminating in the Enlightenment in the 18th century, the west recovered its Graeco-Roman past of plural ends, and Christianity ceased to be its 'informing principle'. Westerners relearned Aristotle's teachings that the good life had multiple ends, with friendship being a prominent one. Thus, a multi-dimensioned modern personality appeared in the west, which kept religion in one compartment. Some Bengalis became aware of this in the 19th century; they questioned, attacked, and began to cleanse and contemporise our religious traditions and they went on create a mini-renaissance. Their movements gained confidence from the work of western scholars, who had discovered the historical foundations of our culture, a confidence which not been shaken since. But clearly these movements did not go far enough and we continue to be under the sway of superstitions and obscurantism. We need once again to restore the classical balance between the sacred and the secular. Indian spirituality is a wonderful gift to the world. So is our individualistic tradition--the only land where the renouncer has successfully challenged kings, priests and the social order. However, if we want to be a successful modern society, religion must not be the defining principle of our rich, multi-dimensioned lives. Every other Sunday I have been writing about unbinding India. My emphasis has been mostly economic--securing our freedom from the licence raj--but now I realise we will not be truly unbound unless we recover this fine balance.