India, Oct. 12 -- Not so long ago, news of a terror attack in an Indian city barely surprised anyone, because it had happened before and seemed likely to happen again. One year it was Delhi, the next Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad or Mumbai. Television showed the same images: twisted vehicles, crowded hospitals, relatives searching for the missing. For Indians who came of age in the 2000s, this was the background noise of growing up. Terrorism was not a distant border problem. It had reached the markets, trains and streets of ordinary life.

For millennials, those years are lived memory. For much of Gen Z, they are a documentary or a story told by parents. That gap matters, because every generation judges its country by what it has experien...