Srinagar, May 30 -- Project Modernity has failed.

Tracing the wellsprings of the same to Western 'Enlightenment values', where reason, its handmaiden rationality, and individualism were harbingers of 'progress' and a new social order, the obverse seems to have happened.

Wars of choice in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran, after the so-called post-Cold War peace dividend, the excesses of globalism, global inequality, poverty, uneven economic development, and so on, social disorder, dysfunction, and anomie in Western societies, unhinged capital flows that promote consumerism as the ultimate 'value', among other things, all point to this.

While the irony is that the Global South is moving in this direction, lock, stock, and barrel, many acr...