On May 7, India woke up to ‘Operation Sindoor’, a series of precision strikes by the armed forces at nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. This was in retaliation to the terrorist attacks in Pahalgam on April 22, in which 25 Indians and one Nepali citizen, mostly tourists, were killed. This was the same week that a report on the Indian Wealth Divide revealed that most of the country earns so little that an annual income of just ₹2.9 lakh puts you in the top 10%. It came just two months after a venture capital company published a report that out of the 140 crore Indians, only the top 10% have enough discretionary money to spend on non-essential items. That same evening, during the mock drills announced by the Ministry of Home Affairs to check if the country was prepared against “new and complex threats”, instead of staying in during the blackout and learning to hide their locations, many Indians thronged the streets and burst firecrackers — just like they would to celebrate …