At the stroke of the midnight hour on August 15, 1947, India, which represents the unbroken chain of a civilisation that had once been denied the right to determine its destiny, reclaimed that right. Illustration by The Geostrata Our first Prime Minister, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru called it a moment when India would “awake to life and freedom.” Hidden later in the same speech was perhaps a more important idea: the achievement of independence was only “a step, an opening of opportu

“If consciousness is what emerges when information inside an individual is processed in increasingly complex ways, then civilization is...