India is a nation of festivals. No nation has as many. They mark the changing seasons, religious events, political anniversaries, and birthdays of eminent persons. And yet they are just one aspect of our amazing diversity. When we explore food, or language, or literature, or ritual, or dress, or ecology, or ethnicity or even different conceptions of beauty, we find diversity in all its glory.

Diversity is India's greatest asset but an under-appreciated one. In the last sixty years we have given it the status of one half of the slogan, 'Unity in diversity', and have spent more time elaborating and campaigning for the 'unity' half, as we get about the task of nation-building. If diversity got a look in it was accompanied by some kind of subterranean anxiety as if its existence was a threat to unity, as if the fragility of 'unity' would be at risk if we stressed our differences and, worse, took pride in them. Discussion of diversity descended into a discussion of what holds us together, although we are different, and just like astronomers today who look for the dark matter that holds the expanding universe together, we spent our intellectual energies looking for the glue. Rather than marvel at the diversity we seem to have feared it.