1968 and beyond
The future did not arrive the way I remembered it.
That was how I knew I had succeeded.
For years, the world had followed familiar contours. Different pacing. Softer landings. Fewer scars. But the outlines remained recognizable enough that memory still felt useful.
Then, slowly, they didn't.
The first sign was not dramatic.
It was surprise.
A decision taken that made no sense according to the futures I carried. An alliance explored without urgency. A reform delayed for reasons that had nothing to do with fear.
The logic was unfamiliar.
Not wrong.
Unfamiliar.
History had stopped asking my permission.
India chose paths I had never walked.
Some were bolder than I expected. Others more cautious. Some contradicted lessons I thought permanent.
And yet—none of them collapsed the republic.
That mattered.
The nuclear option remained dormant.
Not rejected.
Not embraced.
Handled with a kind of careless responsibility only those who inherit power without trauma can manage.
That frightened me.
It also meant the country was no longer ruled by memory of catastrophe.
Borders shifted in importance.
Not physically.
Psychologically.
India spoke with neighbors as a state that expected continuity, not crisis. That expectation itself altered behavior.
Confidence, once earned, does not ask permission to persist.
The world adapted again.
But this time, not to my silence.
To India's unpredictability.
That was new.
Unpredictability born not of weakness—but of autonomy.
I found myself consulting memory less.
Not because it had failed.
Because it no longer fit cleanly.
Events branched in ways I had not anticipated. Crises resolved without following known scripts. Alliances formed around interests that did not exist in the timelines I remembered.
This was not chaos.
It was authorship.
There was loss too.
Mistakes made that foresight could have softened. Opportunities missed that patience might have preserved.
But those costs belonged to the present.
Not to me.
That distinction mattered.
One evening, long after my role had faded into habit, I realized something profound.
I was no longer afraid of being wrong.
Because being wrong now belonged to everyone.
I thought of the man I had been.
The historian obsessed with survival curves and failure patterns. The guardian of restraint. The quiet manipulator of tempo.
He would not recognize this India fully.
And that was the point.
A nation that follows a prophet never becomes one.
A nation that outgrows one becomes itself.
I wrote one last sentence—no date, no context:
"The future does not need witnesses.""It needs participants."
Then I closed the notebook for the final time.
Not because history had ended.
But because it no longer needed me to explain it.
India would err.
India would argue.
India would surprise itself.
And sometimes, it would succeed in ways no historian could predict.
That was the future I never saw.
And the only one worth building.