RJ Sharat

Why confuse pride in our national identity with ideology? Aapka kya kehna hai is baare mein?

No Judgement Without Representation India’s Case for a New Global Scoring Order! In my latest piece in The Sunday Guardian, I take a closer look at how today’s global indices are shaped — largely by institutions based in the North Atlantic, with little comparable voice from the Global South. I encourage readers to examine the evidence, the comparisons, and the assumptions for themselves. What is presented as neutral benchmarking often raises deeper questions about fairness and perspective. From the USCIRF’s “motivated and biased characterisation” of India to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s shifting democracy rankings, the pattern suggests that what appears objective may, in fact, reflect a particular way of seeing the world. I group this score-card factory into three tiers: 1️⃣ multilateral indices with clear mandates and transparent data; 2️⃣ opaque, self-appointed Western arbiters; 3️⃣ “Views” or independent surveys offering a face-to-face reflection of lived experience. Yet India is already pushing back: ✔ NITI Aayog’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, ✔ a climb to 38th in World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index, ✔ top-ten climate scores, ✔ sovereign-rating upgrades, and ✔ Pew Research Center’s strong findings on public faith in our democracy. As the article concludes, India should build international benchmarking with partners across the Global South — an Atma-Gyan, a mirror to a West grown complacent in its authority to judge. The demand this generation must make is many voices, many metrics, and the right of nations like India—with its civilizational gravitas, its democratic scale and economic weight—to define the standards by which they are measured.

This is the process of making Ashtabandhanam (ancient indian adheisive) in Keralam, India Ashtabandhanam is essentially the sacred adhesive that permanently fixes the deity's idol to its stone pedestal during Prana Pratishtha.

"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever" — Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980