I like the idea of looking back. It can teach us a lot of things because historians like to constantly remind us that we have a tendency to repeat ourselves. The idea of looking back is that we look at what our ancestors did, and try to incorporate the good while avoiding the bad. Unfortunately, for us in India, this little trick has failed to work. We do look back often, but it sometimes feels as if we then deliberately repeat the things that have let us down as a nation. We revel in our ability to learn nothing.

This notion of the past was brought to my mind by the latest in a long line of suggestions from the Prime Minister’s Office. I often think of it as an advertising agency more than a place of governance, because of the regularity with which it suggests campaigns rather than anything tangible that can be measured as progress. The Idea Of The Month was called ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’, which made no sense when I first read it, and only confounded me further over the days that followed. Would ‘Partition Remembrance Day’ make more sense, I asked myself, with the assumption that those memories being dredged up would be horrifying either way? Why were the horrors in question referenced so clearly, and why exactly were we supposed to recall them?