Beyond wealth: The quest for a happier Indian soul

From poetry to pragmatism—India’s quiet trade-off

India, the land of gods and GDP, of sages and start-ups, has always thrived on contradiction. It’s where a sanyasi renounces the material world in the Himalayas while a Gurgaon stockbroker buys a fourth apartment to “park liquidity”—and somehow, both are seen as equally enlightened. Paradox isn’t a glitch here; it’s the regular morning chai. We’ve long been a civilisation that can chant shlokas at dawn and check stock tips by lunch, and for the most part, we’ve worn that with pride. But lately, the dance between the sacred and the secular seems less like a balancing act and more like a hostile takeover. Not transcendence, but transaction.

Enter, the World Happiness Report 2025. Finland, as always, remains serenely unbothered at the top, probably sipping blueberry soup in a public sauna. The U.S. has slipped out of the top 20, trying to self-soothe with oat milk lattes and algorithm-recommended therapists. And India? Despite its turbo-charged economy, moon landings, and infinite TED Talks, we’re still ranked behind Ukraine—a country at war. Our per capita income is climbing, yes, but our per capita peace of mind? Let’s just say it’s wedged somewhere between a traffic jam and an Aadhaar verification queue.

One cannot deny that India’s post-liberalization story is, by many measures, extraordinary. Our GDP has multiplied nearly tenfold since the 1990s. We’ve cultivated one of the youngest workforces in the world, sent spacecrafts to the moon on a budget tighter than a Hollywood rom-com, and built a start-up ecosystem buzzing with ambition. And yet, the texture of daily Indian life remains inexplicably coarse. The traffic is near-apocalyptic. The bureaucracy, Kafkaesque. We produce global CEOs faster than we produce civic sense. Our cities gleam with malls, but a walkable sidewalk is still a rarity. Corruption seeps through the system like groundwater—always there, mostly invisible, occasionally flooding.

Why? Is this the lingering damage of colonialism—the psychic toll of a nation looted not just of wealth, but of confidence, continuity, and control? Or is it the legacy of our own post-independence compromises, where bureaucratic survivalism replaced visionary reform?

Have we internalized scarcity so deeply that we cannot yet think like a people who deserve beauty, dignity, or ease? These are not easy questions. But until we ask them, the symptoms will persist: shiny surfaces, hollow insides, and a kind of national fatigue disguised as ambition. In our rush to catch up with the world, we’ve borrowed the speed of American capitalism but not its checks, chasing gloss without grounding. And the consequences show—in the cracks of collapsing flyovers, in banned exports that fail quality tests, in systems that run but rarely run well.

Let’s look away from infrastructure and inflation for a second and turn to pop culture—a space you and I actively cohabit. In the late 90s, Rendezvous with Simi Garewal offered something rare in Indian television: pause. Conversations unfolded slowly, with a kind of velvet patience. India’s newly globalizing elite sat across from Garewal in all-white settings, speaking not just of achievements, but of doubt, childhood, and inner life. In one memorable episode, actor Naseeruddin Shah reflected: “Success isn’t about the cars you drive or the titles you hold. It’s about the ideas you nurture and the grace with which you navigate life’s absurdities.” It was a moment of stillness and clarity—where self-awareness wasn’t mistaken for self-promotion. Celebrities were aspirational not just for their wealth or fame, but for their outlook—though often filtered through the post-colonial polish of posh, English talk shows.

Contrast that with today’s cultural equivalents—Koffee with Karan, a frothy, fast-talking carousel of curated vanity and controlled scandal, or India’s Got Latent, where bravado is confused for depth and certainty is performed like a party trick. These aren’t just shows—they’re mood boards for a society that prefers punchlines over pauses. They don’t elevate the cultural moment; they amplify its least reflective impulses. Where public discourse once sought nuance, it now trades in soundbites and scandal. Ironically, as our content grows louder, our tolerance grows thinner—not for extremism or xenophobia, but for poor jokes, awkward metaphors, or anything vaguely irreverent about Hinduism. We are, somehow, both hyper-fragile and hyper-expressive—a nation that wants to be entertained constantly, but never offended.

At the same time, a society that once gave the world Ghalib’s ghazals, M.S. Subbulakshmi’s ragas, Rukmini Devi Arundale’s revival of Bharatanatyam, and Satyajit Ray’s humanist cinema, now finds itself chasing the accumulation of wealth over the cultivation of wisdom.

Our new elite—flush with influence—often show little interest in fostering an intellectual or artistic parity. Patronage has been replaced with PR. The goal is no longer to uplift public taste, but to monetize attention. And in this climate, culture becomes content, citizenship becomes a hustle, and the masses are kept distracted—endlessly scrolling, endlessly consuming, but rarely invited to rise above their own shortcomings.

What’s disorienting is not that Indians are chasing success—it’s that the definition of success has become depressingly one-note. The fantasy is seductive for the 5 percent that can dream it: a stable job, preferably in tech, with a bonus for a Canada PR. Maybe a podcast. A few thousand Instagram followers. A parent who finally stops asking when you’ll “settle down.” It’s neat. It’s packaged. And when this narrow vision of progress collides with India’s overpopulated, over-pressured, under-regulated reality, we see what happens: record levels of stress, burnout, rising intolerance, and a crisis of collective imagination. Public trust is low. People feel atomized. The middle class—ever aspirational—lives in gated silos, while public infrastructure withers around them.

Meanwhile, our youth—bright, curious, and burdened—are fed a strange dual diet: globalized ambition and local anxiety. Be extraordinary, they’re told, but also be safe. Earn money, but don’t chase “distractions” like art, activism, or compassion. Build an empire, but still attend every family function. Fit in, but stand out. The contradictions are exhausting. Finland might sound boring, for the upper class Indian. But it’s boring in that utopian, satisfying way: where trains run on time, taxes are paid willingly, and no one must call a cousin to “get a form signed.” Work-life balance isn’t a perk—it’s a norm. Trust in institutions is not aspirational—it’s expected. They don’t even need to invent yoga; they probably just walk in silence through forests and feel at peace.

And that’s the rub. Happiness, it turns out, is not a Bollywood climax or a salary package. It’s boring things: trust, fairness, breathable air, a few hours of free time each evening, and maybe not being shouted at on the road. It’s knowing that your government has your back, not just your taxes. It’s being able to dream beyond survival. We certainly needn’t become Finland. Our chaos, when tempered, is part of our charisma. But we must buy a new compass that accounts for modernity.

And that means recalibrating what it means to succeed. India’s soul cannot be outsourced. It must be cultivated. We need to nurture more than unicorns—we need to nurture our sense of community. We need those who ask inconvenient questions without getting trolled for “overthinking,” who volunteer without posting selfies, and who trust their institutions because—imagine this—those institutions actually work. It also means the government must invest not just in flyovers and data centers, but in something far rarer: dignity. In streets where you don’t play hopscotch over potholes. In public transport that doesn’t double as a pressure cooker. In mental health care that doesn’t begin and end with “Just do yoga.” The good life shouldn’t be locked behind a gated community or a wellness retreat in the hills—it should be as public as a traffic jam, but far more pleasant.

Finns trust their institutions. Indians… triple-lock their homes. Finns expect fairness. Indians expect jugaad. The average Finnish citizen doesn’t assume their tax rupees are going into an oligarch’s next government-backed venture. We, meanwhile, treat honesty in public service as a kind of divine miracle—something to be marvelled at, not counted on. Let’s start by retiring the idea that money, power, or privatised luxuries equal happiness. Unless that trifecta comes with universal healthcare, five weeks of paid leave, and a functioning public toilet at every train station.

India has the talent, the tenacity, and the timeless philosophies. What we lack is a cultural imagination wide enough to hold both ambition and empathy, progress and pause, individuality and community. Let’s not aim only to become a $5 trillion economy. Let’s become a society where no child must choose between a career and a conscience. A society where artists are not dismissed as impractical, where civil servants aren’t feared, and where happiness isn’t outsourced to Western think tanks.

Bertrand Russell once wrote, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” The question is: can we make space for that life again? Because a truly rich nation isn’t one where everyone owns a car. It’s one where the streets are safe, the air is clean, and no one must scream to be heard.