New Delhi, March 22 -- In my first job, one of my several bosses was managing a crisis at an event the magazine was hosting-police permission was not in place, the electricity had died and the whole thing was about to be called off. I walked in and said the helpers were yet to be fed.

That look on my boss's face would appear on many other faces through the late 90s and the noughts whenever adults discussed geopolitics and I spoke about potholes and open defecation on beaches.

There was a perception that civic issues were lightweight in the hierarchy of problems. In the beautiful film of our lives, the production design was done by India, and it was atrocious. But this was somehow not a tragedy in a nation where the middle-class seemed t...