In a confused mass of emotion and gangly limbs, one had managed to survive teen years when I came across a birthday card which had these delightful lines by Mark Twain: ‘When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.’ I kept it for the moment it could be sent to my father. His reply went roughly like this: ‘Seven years or 70, the learning should not stop.’ Now that one is way past the age when my father received the card, there is much to look back on.There are some things one regrets and many to be thankful for. (I do think that people who say ‘they have no regrets in life’ are liars, or hypocrites, or deluded. A life without regrets is incomplete in several ways). It is also about how we get caught up in events that are out of our control. Most of us have small lives. Our existence or its absence is not going to change the fate of nations. But those lives matter to us, and to those we care for. If we are fortunate, there may be some who care for us too.In their excellent and provocative book, ‘Why Nations Fail — The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty’, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have argued that while economic institutions are critical for determining a country’s poverty or prosperity, it is politics and the political bodies of that place which will shape its economic structure and institutions. The authors were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024 and in this book, which was published in 2012, they argue that achieving prosperity depends on addressing some basic political issues.With numerous case studies, the authors span centuries and continents to demonstrate how and why certain nations became prosperous and more equal societies, while others did not. (Our country and its leaders could learn much from this study).I sometimes wonder if one is richer or poorer than one’s father or grandfather. This is not a rhetorical statement. This is a genuine question which for me, at the moment, has no answer. This is about simple economics and something more. This is about inflation and urban pressures. Not that rural ones are absent — there was a young man who put it bluntly: “I have left the village with the greatest difficulty and I’m not going back.” In later years, he may change his mind.But let that pass for the moment. Across our country, there is this hurtling into debt, if necessary, to outdo the desi Joneses — the Singhs in the posher locality, the Iyers with their fancy cars, the Maliks who holiday across the world and announce the fact on their social media. Is much of the middle class any better off than their ancestors?The poor are still poor and the mechanisms that will break the cycle of poverty are still weak and insubstantial. Are the earnings of the time when we were in our twenties and thirties significantly higher when we get older? Are our lives easier, or at least securer? Or is the same treadmill going on with inflation and insecurity?In the colonial years, it was sometimes said that your success or failure depended not on your capabilities, but on your ability to play cricket, your table manners and, critically, on your accent. If your accent was right and the lineage reasonably acceptable, you could go to the very top. No matter what rubbish you spouted and no matter how empty was the head. For families like mine, Partition was the defining moment for our elders.The family, now gathered on this side of a newly-created border, started coming to grips with the fact that they had lost their homes and livelihood and like thousands of others, were now refugees. What had been built over generations was all gone. Over the next few years, they moved to all parts of the country and overseas.One of the results of this dispersal is that there are some ‘first cousins’ I’ve never met and perhaps, there are some whose existence one is unaware of. The bottomline: after several lifetimes of work, all had been dragged down to zero. They had to start all over again. As may be said, yet again: ‘It is as if a soldier is to be judged by how crisp and clean his uniform is and not by his professional achievements.’ It is the system that can create growth or disallow it.— The writer is a Shimla-based author