I often wonder how accurate a lot of economic analysis and commentary about India really is, given the fact that India is not really one country. It is many countries in one.

Some of our states are as big as other countries. Some of our states are bigger than other countries.

Then there is the other problem. When you live in a metro city, when you live in a city, it is very easy to come up with fancy theories and fancy analysis about the state of the economy. But until and unless you have at least had a glimpse of the real India, the rural India, the India where poverty is not an economic statistic but a lived reality, the India where jobs are scarce, incomes are low, livelihoods are hard to build, where despite the growth of bank accounts and UPI and so on and so forth, moneylenders still rule the roost and informality still thrives, it is very hard to have a good grasp of India as a country.

The economic divides in this country are so stark as to make your head spin and then explode after a few spins.

And none of this informality, or much of this informality, much of the lived realities of this country, I don’t think are fully captured in a lot of the economic statistics that we rely on to make sense of how the Indian economy is doing.

And this isn’t even a screed against our economic statisticians, although there is much to criticize. This is not that. It is just that the sheer complexity of capturing economic statistics in this country, the sheer complexity of this country, the sheer diversity of this country, makes it almost impossible to capture its true lived reality in statistics.

Of course, statistics are meant to give you a directional sense of reality and not an accurate picture of reality. But nonetheless, I keep wondering just how much of our statistics are impoverished because they don’t truly capture what happens in a large majority of India, and how impoverished our view of India is as a result.

And as I voice-type this, a few other examples come to mind.

We have come a long way. I mean, there is an insane amount of pessimism about India right now. If you spend eight minutes on Twitter, it feels like we are just a few months away from becoming Somalia or Zimbabwe, and maybe just a couple of years away from reenacting what happened in the Weimar Republic, with people wheeling money around in wheelbarrows.

But I think all that pessimism is overdone.

I don’t know who said it. It’s not my original quote. But I keep thinking about that line: India manages to disappoint both optimists and pessimists.

As funny as it sounds, in my own three decades of being in this country, and one and a half decades of being at least a little conscious about this thing called the economy, it feels like an accurate representation of this country.

I was speaking to someone recently, and the discussion of caste came up. I recounted a few depressing instances where I have seen disgusting views about caste front and center, and where people from what we have all come to term lower castes were treated in an abominable and abhorrent way.

The person I was speaking to was taken aback.

But this is a clear example of how impoverished a lot of our views about India are. And when I say “our,” I am talking about urban dwellers, not even the urban elites. Forget the urban elites. They think they are the torchbearers of Renaissance and Enlightenment liberal values, the intellectual heirs of Locke, Mill, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and other liberal thinkers.

This is a classic example of how underinformed our understanding of India as a country really is.

Yes, India has come a long way. Modernity has crept its way into even the remotest corners of this country. Digital technologies have profoundly altered the shape of the average Indian life.

But we are still an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in a dense kit of impenetrable fog that is slowly but steadily lifting, but still thick.

Anyway, this is just a random fleeting note. Just some random thoughts swirling in my head.

End of note.