“Kuchh baat hai ki hasti, mit-ti nahin hamari” — wrote poet Muhammad Iqbal decades ago. He wondered why and how Indian civilisation, unlike its Persian or Roman counterparts, survived waves of invasions. Predictably, there are multiple ways of answering this question. But a consensus response could be that our philosophy has empowered us to withstand not just several attacks by foreign aggressors but also face natural calamities and cope with the challenges, some of them emanating from our societal ills and infirmities.
