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This is a very emotive piece. Such optimism is often hard to find in Indian Anglophilic elite who tend to judge progress as movement towards Western (more particularly American) cultural norms. They are not completely wrong as "Western" culture does have a lot going for it. But you also get weird positions such as the low divorce rate in India being a bad thing as it means a lot of people are in bad marriages.
A minor nitpick. If you go by India in pixels' TFR figures, the 2.0 TFR seems to be mostly due to Bihar and UP working "extra" hard. The other relatively developed states of India seem to be quickly moving towards the TFR of developed countries without attaining even a fraction of their wealth. This is not encouraging since UP and Bihar will also probably follow the same path once they develop more. I remember you or someone else framing this as India implementing Woke policies way before anyone else in world while we are far from an economy that can even support such welfarism. While not relevant in my lifetime, I do worry that India will move from a poor country with some economic significance due its large population to a somewhat poor country with not enough people or industry to be of any significance.
EDIT: The last point is mostly my reflexive pessimism speaking. Given our population we'll reach that point way after everyone else if we ever do.
You got me. My contrarian ass came up with perfectly mirrored response to what I saw as an unreasonably negative knee-jerk reaction from OP.
It's weird. You'd think that an atheist who's seriously dating a white woman, plans to settle in the US and lives in one of the leftist-est zipcodes in the country would be doom-n-gloom about the current state of India.
But idk. I would have been a doom-n-gloomer if I hadn't spent my 4 undergrad years in a smaller town with a diverse population drawn from the lower rungs of society. Congress (Socialist) era India was a nightmare of proportions that my hyper-urban sheltered ass could barely phantom. Starting with the ideas of Vajpayee/Manmohan and finally, the agency of Modi to execute, things have started changing. Sanitation, direct-to-person Welfare delivery, bureaucrat accountability, on-time infrastructure projects....those little things have changed the lives of your average (cripplingly poor) Indian in unimaginable ways.
I have phrased it as such before. There was a reason Nehru was chided as Vishwaguru. (Professor to the world). He should have become an Oxford professor. Would have been excellent for India and the life-expectancy of his progeny.
Mate, my veneer of optimism runs thin. Don't make me face the my true fears. I want to be an optimist. But, I agree with you. Being a cripplingly poor country with billion+ people is a terrible predicament to find yourself in. Especially when the worldwide TFR is dropping rapidly, and India while somewhat insulated, will inevitably see the same decline.
Finger's crossed ??
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