Many of the victims were Hindu pilgrims who were travelling to the Maha Kumbh festival in Prayagraj in northern India, according to Delhi’s caretaker chief minister.

Hindu faithful climbed the 272 steps of the Selangor temple for Thaipusam with prayers and offerings.

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The following contains spoilers for some of the episodes mentioned.

Recently, I tasked seven Atlantic writers and editors with selecting a perfect episode of TV. What emerged was a list that spans genres, generations, and cultural sensibilities. Their recommendations, which include the Veep episode “C**tgate” and a SpongeBob episode that examines “the empty promise of the good life,” are proof that identifying good TV is, at its core, a gut instinct. A perfect episode must find a way to burrow itself in the viewer’s mind, ready to be recalled in today’s crowded field of television.

When I posed the same challenge to The Daily’s readers earlier this week, I was met with enthusiasm and exasperation. “This is an impossible question,” Eden wrote back. “It’s like asking for the perfect song, the perfect movie, or the perfect book.” That being said, “I can think of five off the top of my head!”

Eden’s list includes “Forks” from The Bear, “Through the Looking Glass” from Lost, “The Suitcase” from Mad Men, and “Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us. And that doesn’t even cover “Friday Night Lights, or The Wire, or Insecure, or Derry Girls, or The Sopranos, or The Wonder Years, or My Brilliant Friend, or Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Eden added. I can sympathize—the breadth of options is dizzying.

Maybe some criteria would help. Our culture writer Sophie Gilbert wrote that “the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center.” Radio Atlantic’s podcast host, Hanna Rosin, argued that, “unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way.” And Suzanne, 59, offered her own formula: “The script must be: (1) tense or funny; (2) warm and loving to the viewers, performers, and crew; and (3) move the overall story forward.”

Of course, the benchmarks for what makes an episode perfect are as subjective and varied as viewers’ selections. But a thorough analysis of The Daily’s reader responses has uncovered some patterns. At least five people named a West Wing episode: Two readers nominated “Two Cathedrals,” which shows “the effects of death on time,” wrote David, from Chicago; L. Hawkins, 70, recommends “Noel,” adding that viewers should “listen for the sirens as the episode fades out.”

“Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us was mentioned by both Eden and Bob—it offers “a lesson that love may find you at any time, any place, and under the most unexpected circumstances,” Bob wrote. Two readers agreed with Atlantic film critic David Sims, who insisted in our recent roundup that “the richest cache [of perfect episodes] to search is the ‘case of the week’ entries of The X-Files.” Lisa, 47, wrote that she was thrilled to see “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” in our list (she also recommends the series finale of Derry Girls).

Other readers highlighted examples of good comedy. In only 22 minutes, “Remedial Chaos Theory” from Community “tells seven different stories, with each timeline building on the last,” E.F., 46, wrote. “The Ski Lodge” from Frasier stands out to Bruce, 52, who said that the episode is “riddled with quotable laugh-out-loud lines.” And L.M., 61, laughed until she cried watching a loopy Steve Martin in Only Murders in the Building’s “Open and Shut.”

For some, a perfect episode tells a story that reverberates throughout their life. Sharon, from California, wrote about an episode she remembers watching on Hallmark Hall of Fame, which follows a grief-stricken child who reads a story about magical silver shoes. To his astonishment, he finds skates that look identical, which he puts on to go skating in hopes of bringing back his dead parent. “As life went on and I became the mother of a child who lost his father in childhood, I’ve recalled the episode more than once,” Sharon wrote. “Now, at 80 years old, it still breaks my heart.”

Related:

Eight perfect episodes of TV The 13 best TV shows of 2024

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler The last days of American orange juice America’s “marriage material” shortage

The Week Ahead

Captain America: Brave New World, a Marvel action movie starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford (in theaters Friday) Season 3 of Yellowjackets, a thriller series about a girls’ soccer team whose plane crash-lands in the wilderness (premieres on Paramount+ Friday) Beartooth, a novel by Callan Wink about two brothers near Yellowstone who agree to commit a heist to settle their debts (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic

ADHD’s Sobering Life-Expectancy Numbers

By Yasmin Tayag

When I was unexpectedly diagnosed with ADHD last year, it turned my entire identity upside down. At 37, I’d tamed my restlessness and fiery temper, my obsessive reorganization of my mental to-do list, and my tendency to write and rewrite the same sentence for hours. Being this way was exhausting, but that was just who I was, or so I thought. My diagnosis reframed these quirks as symptoms of illness—importantly, ones that could be managed. Treatment corralled my racing thoughts in a way that I’d never before experienced.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

The government’s computing experts say they are terrified. Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago. Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. How Trump lost his trade war

Photo Album

Naga sadhus, or Hindu holy men, arrive in Prayagraj, India. (ANI / Rahul Singh / Reuters)

Take a look at these photos of Maha Kumbh Mela, a religious festival in India that’s also the largest gathering in the world.

P.S.

I realize it’d be a bit unfair to make everybody else share their perfect episode without naming mine: the series finale of Fleabag. There are many good things I can point out about this episode—Claire’s mad dash to happiness, Fleabag’s final confession, the Alabama Shakes song that plays over the show’s last moments. But above all else, it moved me, reminding me that love can outlast the person who prompted it.

— Stephanie

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Kumbh Mela attracts tens of millions of Hindu faithful every 12 years to the northern city of Prayagraj.

The festival draws millions of Hindu pilgrims and spiritual seekers from India and across the globe.

Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. A man who remains mostly unknown outside Hawaii but is reputed to have a powerful hold over his followers.

That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master. According to its website, the foundation promotes yoga meditation to achieve spiritual and physical enlightenment, but Butler, well known for his fervent and graphic sermons about the evils of gay sex, does not appear to tolerate dissent from his followers. Some former devotees have called the secretive group a cult.

Other than raw ambition, Gabbard’s adherence to Butler’s foundation has been the only perceptible through line in her switchbacking, two-decade political career. First there was an astonishingly quick leap from enigmatic state lawmaker to national Democratic Party leader; then came Gabbard’s almost-as-quick falling-out with the party establishment; there followed an inscrutable congressional record, including a seemingly inexplicable visit with a Middle East dictator; after that was Gabbard’s stint as a Fox News media darling, and finally her rebirth as a MAGA Republican, nominated to be America’s next spymaster.

While Gabbard awaits a confirmation hearing, even senators in Trump’s party seem concerned about her suitability. Maybe they should be: Democrats figured out the hard way that they couldn’t rely on Gabbard; Republicans may soon learn the same.

To understand how Gabbard ended up in the middle of such a strange ideological Venn diagram, it helps to know about her early years. Born in American Samoa, Gabbard grew up in Hawaii, where she was homeschooled and spent time surfing in the blue waves off Oahu. Her father, Mike, is now a Democratic state senator, but he’s done a bit of his own party-flipping; during Gabbard’s childhood, Mike was an independent, and later switched to the Republican Party, after leading Hawaii’s movement against same-sex marriage. He launched a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii and hosted a radio show titled Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii. In 1998, Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.

The Gabbard family was—and, according to several Hawaii residents and people familiar with the group, still is—devoted to Butler and his foundation. “The belief system was [Butler’s] interpretation of the Hare Krishna belief system, plus Buddhism, Christianity, and whatever else,” Lalita Mann, a former disciple of Butler’s, told me. Fraternizing with outsiders was frowned upon, Mann said; complete obedience was expected: “To offend him would be offending God.” Gabbard’s own aunt once described the group as “the alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”

Butler had an appetite for temporal as well as spiritual power. Gabbard, a smart, good-looking girl from a political family, always appealed to him, Mann and Anita Van Duyn, another defector from the group, told me. Butler described Gabbard as a stellar pupil of his teaching. In her teens, Gabbard reportedly attended a school run by Butler’s followers in the Philippines. “He always wanted someone to be high up in the federal government” to direct the culture toward godliness, Van Duyn told me. Trump’s team rejected this characterization. “This is a targeted hit on her faith, fomenting Hinduphobia,” Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, told me. “The repeated attacks that she has sustained from the media and Democrats about her faith and her loyalty to our country are not only false smears; they are bigoted as well.” (Gabbard herself did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The Science of Identity Foundation leader was not the only person to see Gabbard’s appeal. The people I interviewed described the surfer cum mixed-martial-arts aficionado as shy but warm. She has a rich, low voice, and always greets people with a friendly “Aloha.” Her demeanor helps explain how quickly she rocketed to political success from a young age. She chooses her words carefully, and listens intently, often seeming like the most mature person in a room, even when she is one of the youngest. “She cocks her head, and she pulls you in” to the “Tulsi hug,” one Hawaii Democrat told me. “It’s very mesmerizing.” Gabbard, in other words, has charisma. And she has always made it count.

In 2002, soon after she married her first husband, Gabbard dropped out of community college and ran for a seat in the Hawaii state House. In that race, and in others that followed, a swarm of volunteers associated with Butler’s group would descend on the district to knock on doors and pass out yard signs, according to someone who worked with Gabbard’s campaign in those early days, and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Back then, Gabbard shared her father’s views on same-sex marriage and opposed abortion rights, two positions that were—particularly in recent years—politically risky in solid-blue Hawaii. But she was clearly struggling to form her ideology, the former campaign colleague said, and determine a political identity of her own.

After one term in office, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, and went to Iraq as part of a medical unit, the first of two Middle East deployments. After her return, she and her husband divorced. In 2010, she ran successfully for a seat on the Honolulu city council. “She was as ambitious as you could possibly be,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague told me. And she was respected. Gabbard was racking up experiences, fleshing out her political résumé. Congress was next for Gabbard, and everybody knew it.

In the fall of 2011, something happened that shocked politicians in Hawaii. EMILY’s List, the national organization whose goal is to elect pro-abortion-rights women to Congress, announced that it was backing Gabbard. To political observers, it didn’t make sense. Gabbard had a D behind her name, but was she really a Democrat? Behind the scenes, EMILY’s List was wondering the same thing. Although her position on abortion had evolved in ways acceptable to the organization, Gabbard was still iffy on same-sex marriage. Her answers on the EMILY’s List application had made its leaders uneasy, one former staffer told me, and that staffer was asked to call Gabbard for clarification. During their conversation, Gabbard said she didn’t want the government involved in marriage. The staffer pointed out that the government was already involved in heterosexual marriage, so it wouldn’t be fair to deny the same access to gay couples. Gabbard seemed not to have considered this, the staffer told me, and after only a few minutes on the phone, Gabbard declared that her position had changed. Politicians typically do some finagling to secure the support of special-interest groups, but this was different.

“I’ve never had another conversation like that,” said the staffer, who still works in Democratic politics but asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “She was willing to do or say whatever. It was like she had absolutely no moral compass.” I heard the same sentiment from numerous people who have worked with Gabbard, both in Hawaii and at the federal level.

Gabbard’s leftward journey was well under way. Her second Middle East deployment, to Kuwait, had inspired a “gradual metamorphosis” on social issues, she told Honolulu Civil Beat in 2012, adding, “I’m not my dad. I’m me.” By the time she got to Congress, in 2013, Democrats had embraced her like a long-lost friend. Gabbard was celebrated as the first Hindu member of Congress and was eagerly welcomed in the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging star,” and House leaders gave her a seat on the prominent Armed Forces Committee. She was, to use a more contemporary comparison, AOC before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“There was this initial huge fascination with Gabbard” inside the party, a former Democratic House staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about his time working closely with Gabbard, told me. President Barack Obama himself lobbied for Gabbard to get a vice chairmanship on the Democratic National Committee, its former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told me. The Florida lawmaker hesitated at first. “I was warned early on that she was close to extremists in Hawaii,” Wasserman Schultz told me, referring to anti-gay activists. Still, she gave Gabbard the benefit of the doubt.

Gabbard proved popular among the other freshmen. “She was funny, she was engaging,” a former House colleague and friend of Gabbard’s, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told me. She ran around with a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Representatives Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma; some of them met for CrossFit in the mornings.

But the congressional crush on Gabbard fizzled almost as quickly as it began. Wasserman Schultz told me that the DNC had a hard time getting Gabbard to show up for meetings or conference calls. When a House vote against employment discrimination came up, Gabbard was difficult to pin down, Wasserman Schultz said—even though, as a DNC vice chair, she should have been “the easiest ‘yes’ in the caucus.”

[Read: The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump]

Gabbard seemed eager to stand out in a different way. She took to sitting on the Republican side of the House chamber. Despite her DNC perch, she voted with Republicans to condemn the Obama administration for not alerting Congress about a prisoner exchange with the Taliban in 2014, and the next year criticized the Democratic president’s reluctance to refer to Islamic State terrorists as “Islamic extremists.”

The representative from Hawaii was not facing a tough reelection, so none of these positions made sense to her fellow Democrats. Some suggested that she was a rare independent thinker in Congress; others identified in her a less virtuous strain of opportunism. Gabbard had “masked herself as a progressive to gain power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. After all, voters in Hawaii almost never elect Republicans to Congress.

Others pointed to deeper forces. “I think something happened around 2013,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague from Hawaii told me, pointing out that, at the time, several of her original congressional staffers resigned, and Gabbard replaced them with people affiliated with the Science of Identity Foundation. In 2015, Gabbard married Abraham Williams, the son of her office manager, both of whom, the colleague told me, were involved in the group. The couple’s Oahu wedding was attended by several members of Congress, including then–House Whip Steny Hoyer, as well as a representative from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party. It seemed as though Butler’s group had reeled her back in, the campaign colleague said. He remembers thinking, “I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”

During the 2016 Democratic primary, Gabbard resigned from the DNC and endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president because, she said, Hillary Clinton was too hawkish. Sanders-aligned progressives appreciated her support, especially because the Vermont senator had just been shellacked in South Carolina. On the trail, Gabbard spoke confidently about anti-interventionism, climate change, and Medicare for All. “I couldn’t think of an issue then where we had any degree of separation,” Larry Cohen, a union leader and the chair of the pro-Sanders progressive group Our Revolution, told me.

Senator Bernie Sanders with Gabbard at his campaign rally in Gettysburg ahead of the Democratic primary election in Pennsylvania, April 2016 (Mark Wilson / Getty)

But, in 2017, Gabbard made a move that stumped her new progressive friends, as well as most everyone else: She flew to Syria, in the middle of its civil war, and twice met with the now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had by then already killed hundreds of his own people using chemical weapons, and who clung to power thanks to aid from Vladimir Putin. The original plan, according to a former staffer for Gabbard, had been to meet with everyday Syrians and “bear witness.” But as The Washington Post reported today, the trip’s actual itinerary deviated dramatically from the one that had been approved by the House Ethics Committee. The meetings with Assad had not been in the plan, and even Gabbard’s staffer, like others on her team, did not know about them until after they’d happened. “You fucked us,” the staffer, who also asked for anonymity to speak about confidential matters, remembers telling Gabbard later. “The reason you told us you were going on this trip will never come up again. It will only ever be about you meeting with Assad.”

For D.C. institutionalists, Gabbard’s conversations with Assad broke a long-standing convention that members of Congress do not conduct freelance foreign policy. But many also saw the trip as an unforgivable swerve toward autocracy.

Outside the Washington scene, Gabbard’s independence and charisma still counted. When Gabbard ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she could still muster an enthusiastic if motley alliance of progressives, libertarians, and conservative Hindus. She also did well among the kind of people who are fond of saying that all politicians are corrupt and neither political party is good for America. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast that year.

Despite that glowing endorsement, Gabbard never scored above single digits in the contest, and dropped out of the race in March 2020. In the years that followed, she would pop up now and again with new and surprising takes. In December 2020, Gabbard introduced a bill to ban trans women and girls from playing women’s sports, plus two pieces of anti-abortion legislation. In 2021, she left Congress altogether. The next year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, she blamed President Joe Biden and NATO for ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Then she turned up as a featured speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

At a late-summer conference in Michigan last year, Gabbard announced that she was supporting Donald Trump for president. She completed her political migration in October at a MAGA rally in North Carolina, when she said that she was joining the Republican Party. She praised Trump for transforming the GOP into “the party of the people and the party of peace.” Her message was that she hadn’t left the Democrats; they had left her. “People evolve on politics all the time,” the former House colleague and friend told me. “But that’s a long way from saying Hey, the party went too far to embracing Donald Trump.”

Gabbard’s instincts are those of a “moth to a flame of power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. And Trump’s flame is burning brightly again. But in Gabbard’s dogged pursuit of power, or at least of proximity to power, others see the influence not of a new guru, but of the old one: Butler. “She’s his loyal servant,” Van Duyn, the Science of Identity Foundation defector, said, and Gabbard regards him as “possessing infallible authority.” Van Duyn also told me that she has sent letters to several Democratic lawmakers, asking them to vote against Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI because she fears that sensitive intelligence “can and will be communicated to her guru.”

Each of the current and former Democratic lawmakers I spoke with for this story had concerns about the Gabbard-Butler relationship. “There are some very tough questions that need to be asked,” Representative Jill Tokuda, Democrat of Hawaii, told me. “Who’s really calling the shots when it comes to what Tulsi Gabbard believes?”

Gabbard at the Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on October 27, 2024 (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

Butler, who is now in his late 70s and reportedly living in a beachfront home in Kailua, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Jeannie Bishop, the foundation’s president, disputed the accounts of people whom the group considers to be “propagating misconceptions,” and accused the media of “fomenting” Hinduphobia. (Butler’s foundation, along with a collection of 50 Hindu groups, sent out a press release last week blasting recent media coverage as “Hinduphobic.”)

[Tom Nichols: Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is a national-security risk]

Regardless of whom her opportunism ultimately serves, political opportunity has come again for Gabbard. After she hitched her wagon to Trump, he chose her to be his spymaster in chief—a position for which she does not seem remotely qualified. The current director, Avril Haines, was confirmed after previously serving as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and deputy counsel to the president for national-security affairs in the Office of White House Counsel. Gabbard has no similar background in intelligence or agency leadership. Henning, the Trump spokesperson, pointed to Gabbard’s endorsement from former CIA Director of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson, who has commended Gabbard’s “independent thinking.”

Gabbard’s Assad visit and her pro-Russian views also remain fresh in the minds of many in Congress. Nothing proves that Gabbard is a “Russian asset,” as Hillary Clinton once famously put it, but Moscow seems gleeful about her selection to lead the intelligence agency: “The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda crowed after her nomination was announced. Another Russian state outlet called Gabbard a “comrade.”

Judging by the congressional hearings so far, traditional expertise and credentials may not matter much to the GOP lawmakers charged with confirming Trump’s picks. But the incoherence of Gabbard’s ideological evolution may yet count against her: Reliability could be the sticking point. Republicans should know, as well as Democrats, that “she’s ruthless in her pursuit of personal power,” the Hawaii campaign colleague told me. “Even if that means disappointing MAGA folks or Trump, it’s clear she’d do it in a heartbeat.”

During her eight years in Congress, Gabbard was a fierce defender of privacy rights, something her supporters on both the right and the left long admired. In particular, she had opposed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that permits some warrantless surveillance of American citizens. But after meeting with senators last week, Gabbard announced that the act’s surveillance capability “must be safeguarded.” The would-be director of national intelligence had had a change of heart.

Millions of Hindu devotees will gather for the Kumbh Mela festival, the largest religious congregation on earth.

The Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela, described as humanity's biggest gathering, begins in India's Prayagraj.

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According to a 2023 YouGov poll, each year, about a third of American adults—and more than half of 18-to-29-year-olds—start the new year with at least one resolution. One of the most common resolutions, at 22 percent of all adults, is “being happy.” Another common one is “improving physical health.” I endorse the sentiment behind these commitments, of course—if I didn’t, I wouldn’t write the “How to Build a Life” column.

But these good intentions are too broad to be successful. Behavioral scientists have long shown that specific goals are the ones that tend to lead to real wins. They have found, for example, that setting a small resolution for a day’s work motivates teams, and can do the same even if someone is working alone. When I am writing a book (which I am about 75 percent of my professional time), my goal on any given day is simply to compose 100 words—a very modest but achievable target, and one that eventually adds up to finished chapters and, ultimately, a completed book. By the same token, researchers find that incremental progress is a great way to address complex policy problems.

And so it is when building your life. This year, try setting a very defined goal that you can realistically achieve—and that sets you on a path toward those bigger, more diffuse resolutions. And I have one particular, very achievable commitment in mind that will help you become happier and improve your health and effectiveness: This year, start getting up early.

[From the October 1904 issue: The fetich of early rising]

How early is early? you ask. Although the clock time will vary according to time of year and where you live, what I have in mind is before daybreak.

To rise before dawn sounds ascetic—indeed, the habit is characteristic of many monastic traditions throughout history. Certainly from the fourth century, and possibly earlier, Christian monks have observed the part of the liturgy called Matins, which is conducted between 3 a.m. and dawn. In the Hindu religion, too, adherents are encouraged to experience the brāhma muhūrta, which in Sanskrit means “the creator’s time” and refers to the moment that occurs precisely one hour and 36 minutes before sunrise. To discipline the body and mind, and frame the day in worship of the divine, the thinking goes, this is the appropriate time to get up.

Modern neuroscience indicates that, as painful as the practice can seem for people unaccustomed to it, this may be the right way to start the day for optimal human performance. For example, a 2012 study of adolescents and young adults ages 16 to 22 in India compared two randomly selected groups, one of which rose before 4:30 a.m. and the other at about 7 a.m. The researchers found that the early risers significantly improved during the study in both attention and recall tasks, outperforming the later risers. Consistent with this finding, a 2019 paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience showed that our brain exhibits greater functional connectivity in the mornings. This, we might assume, facilitates better performance of complex tasks.

Rising early is an especially effective resolution because it tends to enable the achievement of other popular goals. For example, new evidence from researchers suggests that rising early makes it easier to build good habits, because the goal-directed brain regions—such as the hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex—work better at this time than later in the day.

One habit that is easier to adopt first thing in the morning is exercise. Clear data exist to show that when people intend to exercise early in the day, they are significantly less likely to experience “intention failure” than if they plan to exercise later.

Of course, getting up before dawn is difficult. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t need a resolution. For almost everyone, the body resists getting out of the warm bed, and moving abruptly from sleep to wakefulness can feel like violent disruption. Mother Nature, you might feel, simply doesn’t want you to get up—and that could be right in an evolutionary sense: We are programmed to seek comfort and get rest when we can. Your Pleistocene ancestors—who probably didn’t live much past the age of 30—needed to husband their energy to fight for their survival every day. This instinct still exists, even though we are no longer fighting to survive.

Because getting up early is a challenge, you might assume that one cost of doing so would be feeling less happy. The research says the opposite. Psychologists writing in the journal Emotion have shown that people who get up early enjoy a more positive mood throughout the day compared with those who rise late. Even after controlling for problems such as depression and neuroticism that are associated with sleep disorders, people who stay up late and get up late tend to have worse habits of emotional regulation than those who get up early; that, in turn, can lead to higher levels of negative mood.

[Read: America’s worst time zone]

So the science on the benefits of rising early—in spite of the difficulty—seems clear. But what do you need to do to succeed in your resolution and develop this habit? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. This morning started last night.
Early rising is really the second part of two habits: The first part is going to bed early enough that you get sufficient sleep. This probably seems like the easier habit to keep, but for many people it isn’t. I have written before about why people don’t make it to bed or can’t get to sleep at a reasonable time. For many young adults, the problem is what psychologists call “revenge bedtime procrastination,” in which they stay up late as a form of rebellion against their own inner authority. Knowing that you have this tendency can help you break free of it.

Others might have a genetic disposition to want to stay up late and get up late. Or (like me) they simply find it hard to turn off their mental machine, which can make falling asleep tough. For this issue, science-based protocols can make a dramatic difference.

2. Raise the cost of not getting up.
One reason people struggle to rise early is because they aren’t required to do so. In my 20s, when I made a living as a musician, I always got up well after the sun rose, because I never had rehearsals or concerts in the morning. In theory, I wanted to get up early. But if I set the clock for 6 a.m., and then, when it went off, I knew there was no cost to going back to sleep, I would turn off the alarm and roll over. Later, in my 30s, when I finally went to college and graduate school, I had places to be very early—and that changed my habits.

Even if you don’t have to start your work or studies early, you can still induce yourself to get up by making a conscious commitment to accomplish something of value. In Meditations, which were Marcus Aurelius’s notes to himself, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher wrote: “In the morning when thou findest thyself unwilling to rise, consider with thyself presently, it is to go about a man’s work that I am stirred up.” So choose a deed that will stir you up.

In psychological experiments, participants who commit even to a trivial task such as solving a minor math problem right after their alarm sounds are far less likely than others to go back to sleep. If necessary, you can increase the cost of sleeping in by making yourself accountable to someone else. For example, if you get a workout partner and agree to meet at the gym first thing, you are much more likely to roll out of bed when the clock goes off—rather than incur the cost of letting your buddy down.

3. Make early rising divine.
As mentioned above, many religious traditions dedicate the time before dawn to prayer and worship, in the belief that these moments of tranquility and mental clarity are best spent in the presence of the divine. But a nonbeliever can equally well experience these hours as transcendent. Don’t take my word for it—here is confirmation from a notorious atheist, the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Do not shorten the morning by getting up late … look upon it as the quintessence of life … Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth.”

Make your predawn the most transcendent moment in your day by framing it in existential terms: The discomfort of rising early bears witness to your being truly alive, and it is the day’s first act of your rebellion against death. Spend that precious time without devices, with your attention undivided by quotidian demands and trivial distractions, so that you can explore deep thoughts about the big questions of life.

[Derek Thompson: Can medieval sleeping habits fix America’s insomnia?]

So much for the soul; let’s end on a practical note. To make getting up before dawn your ordinary routine, you need to establish the practice as a habit. As a neuroscientific matter, this is a behavior governed by the basal ganglia in the cerebrum. That means it must be repeated enough to become automatic, not a conscious daily choice. How long will this take to establish? British scholars studying habit formation have found that this varies widely from individual to individual: to achieve 95 percent automaticity, anything from 18 to 254 days.

For the morning larks among us, this means a predawn routine will start to become a true part of your life by the end of January; for the night owls, it could take until sometime in September. I was definitely the latter, and many mornings, it felt pretty bad to leave my warm bed when it was still dark. But it was worth it: The brāhma muhūrta is now the best time of my day.

On a winter afternoon in January 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before a podium, gazing out at a handpicked audience of the Indian elite: billionaires, Bollywood actors, cricket stars, nationalist politicians.

Modi had come to the north-central city of Ayodhya, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, to consecrate the still-unfinished temple behind him, with its seven shrines, 160-foot-high dome, and baby-faced statue of the Hindu god Ram, carved in black stone and covered in jewels. He did not mention the fact that the temple was being built on a contested site where Hindu radicals had torn down a 16th-century mosque three decades earlier, setting off years of protests and legal struggle.

Instead, Modi described the temple as an emblem of India’s present and future greatness—its rising economic might, its growing navy, its moon missions, and, most of all, its immense human energy and potential. The temple signified India’s historic triumph over the “mentality of slavery,” he said. This nation of nearly 1.5 billion was shedding its old secular creed and, despite the fact that 200 million of its citizens are Muslim, being reborn as a land of Hindu-nationalist ideals. “The generations after a thousand years will remember our nation-building efforts today,” he told the crowd.

Among the tens of millions of Indians who watched that speech on TV was 42-year-old Luv Shukla, who lives on the edge of a small town about a three-hour drive from Ayodhya. I met him on a hot day in June, and we chatted while sitting in plastic chairs outside the tiny electronics shop he has run since he was 16.

Shukla has supported Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party since it rose to power in 2014. He was drawn to Modi’s confidence and his talk of making India an explicitly Hindu country. But in 2024, for the first time in his life, he voted for the opposition, helping deliver an electoral setback late last spring that changed the narrative of Indian politics. Instead of the sweeping victory Modi had predicted, his party lost its majority in the lower house of India’s Parliament—just a few months after that triumphant speech at the new Ayodhya temple. Modi had done everything he could to bend the system in his favor, and that made the reversal all the more surprising. His government had frozen bank accounts of the main opposition party—a tax-return issue, it was alleged—and launched prosecutions of many opposition candidates, turning India’s justice system into a political tool.

Modi would remain prime minister, but with only 240 of the 543 seats in Parliament, he would be dependent on coalition partners. An especially shocking loss for the BJP was Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, long considered a bulwark for Modi and his party.

I asked Shukla why he had lost faith in Modi. One reason, he said, was “animals.” When I looked confused, he pointed helpfully to the street, where a huge cow was meandering down the middle of the road. “Look, here’s an animal coming now.” It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. The BJP’s preoccupation with protecting cows—for Hindus, a symbol of divine beneficence—was driving people crazy. No one was allowed to touch them anymore, Shukla said. They wandered at will, eating crops and fodder. Cows had even become a source of corruption, he claimed; funds have been set up to protect cows, Shukla said, but “the money disappears.” This is what Modi’s rhetoric about building a Hindu nation often amounts to at the local level, especially in villages that have no Muslims to blame.

Shukla moved on from cows to the government’s more basic failures. Small-business owners like him were most affected by the Modi government’s mistakes, such as the surprise decision in 2016 to cancel large-currency banknotes, a misguided effort to curtail money laundering that left ordinary people desperate for cash. The mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic caused staggering losses of life and income. Many small firms folded, and others had to let go of workers. At the same time, Modi’s grand promises about being India’s “Development Man” remained unfulfilled. The schools were a mess. The local hospital was a joke.

Shukla was getting angrier. He stood up, saying he had something to show me. We walked across the street, past a brightly painted Hindu temple—by far the best-maintained building in the village—and approached an abandoned house with a rusted bed frame beside it. Nearby was a ruined ambulance, its tires rotting into the dust. The building was supposed to be a maternity hospital, Shukla said, but the government had never followed through. He kicked the building’s broken door. “Useless,” he said.

India has been living on hype. Its leaders manufacture bigger promises every year: India as an economic titan, a spiritual leader, a world power capable of standing alongside China, Russia, Europe, and America. Modi’s enablers describe him as a “civilizational figure”—someone who stands above politics, who will use his country’s demographic weight to rewrite the rules of the global economy. This kind of chest-thumping is often picked up on in the West, where leaders such as President Joe Biden and France’s Emmanuel Macron have expressed a desire for a reliable and prosperous Indian ally. Even Modi’s abundant critics have focused mostly on his Muslim-baiting and his democratic backsliding, as if prepared to concede what they see as his managerial skill.

But the election results and their aftermath hint at a crack in Modi’s populist facade and a spreading discontent with his economic and political record. India’s growth has been heavily weighted toward the wealthy, who have become exponentially richer on Modi’s watch. Those who have benefited most are a small cadre of billionaire friends to whom Modi has granted special access for years. That practice was cast in a new light in November, when American prosecutors indicted the industrialist Gautam Adani—India’s second-richest man and a close Modi ally—for his role in a multibillion-dollar bribery-and-fraud scheme. (His company has denied the charges, calling them baseless.) The accusation revived fears about opacity and cronyism—the specter of “India Inc.”—that Modi had promised to address a decade ago.

At the same time, eight in 10 Indians live in poverty. Extraordinary numbers are out of work; one estimate puts unemployment among those ages 15 to 24 at more than 45 percent (though other estimates run lower). Instead of moving from farms to seek employment in cities, as people in other developing countries have done, many Indians—unable to find factory or service jobs—are making the trek in reverse, even as farm income stagnates and drought turns fields into deserts. Modi often says he wants India to be a developed country by 2047, a century after it gained its independence from Britain. But by several key social measures, it is falling behind neighbors such as Bangladesh and Nepal.

Saadat Hasan Manto, one of the Indian subcontinent’s great literary figures in the first half of the 20th century, once wrote that India has “too few leaders and too many stuntmen.” Many Indians appear to be tiring of Modi’s showmanship and growing frustrated with his failures. They may be proud of India’s fabled economic growth, but it hasn’t reached them. During the weeks I spent traveling in India last year, I detected levels of frustration and anger that were noticeably different from what I’d heard on earlier visits—about lost jobs, failed schools, poisoned air and water.

India is—among many other things—an experiment, the largest such experiment in the world, and one with urgent relevance for many other countries. The Modi years have made India into a testing ground for the following question: What, in the long run, exerts greater sway on the electorate—the lure of demagoguery, or the reality of deteriorating living conditions?

Mahendra Tripathi remembers the first time he saw Narendra Modi. It was January 14, 1992, and the future prime minister was in Ayodhya with a group of young Hindu nationalists standing outside the mosque known as Babri Masjid. A movement had been gathering for years to remove the mosque, which was widely said to have been built on the site of an older Hindu temple. Energy was in the air, often charged with violence, and Tripathi—then a young news photographer—wanted to capture it.

Something about Modi attracted Tripathi’s notice, even though “he was nobody at that time,” he told me. Perhaps it was his dress or the way he carried himself. Modi has always been intensely conscious of the impression he makes. Even at the age of 6 or 7, he was deliberate about what he wore and “spent a lot of time in grooming,” his uncle told a biographer. His ego and charisma were evident early on; he liked acting in school plays but insisted on having the lead role.

[From the April 2009 issue: Robert D. Kaplan on Narendra Modi, India’s new face]

Tripathi remembers taking Modi’s picture and asking him when he would come back to Ayodhya. Modi replied that he would come back when the temple was built. “He kept his promise,” Tripathi told me.

Back in 1992, Modi was a party worker in the RSS, India’s first and most influential Hindu-nationalist group (the acronym stands for Hindi words meaning “national volunteer association”). The RSS was founded in 1925 in an effort to overcome the Hindu weakness and disunity that had, its founders felt, allowed India to be colonized by the British and other invaders over the centuries. The RSS aimed to impose discipline and military rigor on a growing army of Hindu recruits, along with a uniform: black forage cap, white shirt, khaki shorts. It later gave birth to an array of linked groups—including the BJP—with the shared goal of spreading Hindutva, or Hinduness, as the glue of a new nation. A central part of that nationalist ideal was the exclusion of Muslims, who were tacitly cast as latecomers to and usurpers of a Hindu realm.

Less than a year after Modi’s first visit to Ayodhya, Tripathi was standing in the same spot when a crowd led by Hindu zealots climbed the dome of Babri Masjid and destroyed it with sledgehammers and axes. Tripathi sympathized, but the mob was seething with rage and thousands strong, and he was lucky to get out alive. His photography studio, not far away, was demolished. “Everything was being broken down,” he told me.

Modi wasn’t there on the big day, and he is said to have resented missing the Ayodhya moment. But he got his own moment 10 years later, on a day that would prove just as important to the transformation of Indian politics.

On February 27, 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims home from Ayodhya caught fire in the western state of Gujarat. Fifty-nine pilgrims were killed, and rumors quickly spread that Muslims had caused the fire. In the pogroms that followed, more than 1,000 people were butchered, most of them Muslim. Modi had just become the chief minister, meaning governor, of Gujarat, and he was accused of telling the police to stand back and let the rioters teach the Muslims a lesson. Although he denied the allegations—and was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing after a decade of legal inquiries—he never expressed regret for what happened. His defiance in the face of pressure for his removal by opposition politicians made him a hero among many Hindus and gave him a national political profile.

Narendra Modi in Ahmadabad in 2007, after reelection as chief minister of Gujarat (Ajit Solanki / AP)

Modi’s timing was impeccable: India’s old order had been crumbling for years. Its founding ideology had been defined in the 1940s by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s brilliant first prime minister, who famously called his country an “ancient palimpsest” of its many cultures and traditions. Nehru wanted an alternative to the tribal mindset that had led to the partition of the country along religious lines in 1947, when about 1 million people—estimates vary widely—were killed in sectarian violence as they fled across the new borders between India and Pakistan. Separating the two nations by religion served as a way out for the exhausted British. To Nehru, it was a betrayal of India’s greatest gift. His India would define itself through diversity; through a grand, maternal embrace of all its discordant parts. Even today, the Indian rupee note declares its value in 17 different languages. Nehru’s patriotism was the high-minded vision of a Cambridge graduate who hoped to set India on a unique path—benignly secular and socialist, proudly nonaligned in the binary world of the Cold War.

By the turn of the 21st century, this ideal was a relic. India’s leaders had already begun appealing to either Hindu or Muslim communal feelings as a way to get votes. A new capitalist ethic was rising, a consequence of the 1991 decision to embrace the free market and abolish the “license Raj”—heavy-handed economic management by government bureaucrats that had stifled Indian business for decades. The elite had become richer and more isolated from the rest of the country, putting added strain on the old Gandhian ideals of austerity and simplicity.

“The truth is we were an effete, hopeless bunch,” wrote Tavleen Singh, a columnist and an avowed member of what she herself called “the old, colonised ruling class,” in a harsh self-assessment published in April. “We spoke no Indian language well, but this did not matter to us. We were proud of speaking English well. In our drawing rooms we sneered at those who dared enter without speaking good English. And at those whose table manners were not embellished with western refinement.”

Modi was one of those unrefined outsiders. He had grown up poor, the son of a tea seller from one of the lower tiers of the country’s hierarchical caste system, which still weighs heavily on the life chances of most Indians. That background gave him an unusual street credibility within the BJP, whose original support base lay with upper-caste Hindus. He presented himself as an ascetic figure who rose before dawn and worked until late at night, a man with no wife or children whose only loyalty was to India. (Modi does in fact have a wife—he was married as a teenager in a family-arranged ceremony—but he left her almost immediately afterward and has always described himself as single.)

It was a winning formula: Millions of poor and middle-class Indians greeted him like an avenging hero, and not just because of his lowly origins or his gifts as a speaker. The old BJP rallying cry—that Hindus were under attack—had a strong ring of truth in the 2000s, when Islamist terrorists carried out deadly bombings across India. Modi’s immense and sustained popularity is partly about his ability to project a kind of Churchillian defiance in the face of these threats.

Modi became prime minister in 2014 amid a popular movement against corruption, saying he would clean house and fulfill India’s great economic promise. Many liberals were receptive, despite their unease with his triumphalist Hindu rhetoric. There was no denying that the Indian National Congress—the party of Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, which had dominated Indian politics since independence—was corrupt. And Modi had gained a reputation for managerial competence in Gujarat, where he’d been governor for more than 10 years. He had streamlined regulations and worked to lure big-business owners with what he and his proxies advertised as the “Gujarat model.” He promised to do the same for the entire country.

Modi has some real achievements to his credit. His government’s road-building blitz has transformed the landscape over the past decade, adding thousands of miles of highway every year; the figure for smaller roads is many times greater. I can remember the days when driving across India was a bit like heading out to sea: You’d stock the car with gas and provisions—uncertain when you’d find a gas station or a place to eat—and set off with a vague sense that you were taking your life into your hands. Nowadays, an Indian road trip is remarkable for its ordinariness.

The BJP has also taken steps to democratize information technology. In a small village in northern India, I saw people paying for produce by holding up their smartphone to a QR code stuck on a vendor’s wooden wagon. The payment system involves minimal merchant fees and has removed the middlemen who used to take a cut. Every Indian with a phone now has access to a virtual “DigiLocker” where their identity and tax documents can be stored, a useful innovation.

Some of Modi’s defenders argue that he has renewed the country’s politics. Swapan Dasgupta, a conservative journalist and former BJP lawmaker, told me that Modi had made use of Hindutva not just to demonize his enemies but to mobilize Indians politically and to deepen the country’s democracy. “The gap between rulers and ruled has narrowed,” he said. “There is now a vernacular elite.”

Modi often gets credit for raising his country’s profile and being an effective ambassador for what he and his allies call Brand India. There may be some truth in this, though it’s hard to know what the term means. There was much talk of India as a leader of the global South when it hosted the G20 summit in 2023, a frenzy of publicity and Davos-style schmoozing with a reported budget of $100 million. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has taken brand-building to a new level, having published two books full of vaporous cant about “civilizational resurgence” and “the message of the Indo-Pacific.” He and others talk up India’s role as a partner to the United States in its competition with China—though they never make clear what India can do to help. India is a nuclear power, but its weak military has been humiliated by Chinese troops on the two countries’ shared Himalayan border.

Modi’s determination to cut a bigger global figure has its ugly and violent side. In 2023, Indian-government officials allegedly organized the assassination of a Sikh-independence activist in Canada and plotted to kill a Sikh leader in the United States, according to U.S. and Canadian officials. The boldness of the plot was a dark reflection of India’s rising economic weight in the West, despite the farcical denouement: An American informant had unwittingly been hired as a hit man. In mid-October of last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expelled top Indian diplomats, including the ambassador, saying that the Indian government had orchestrated a campaign of violence inside his country. (India’s government, which regards the two Sikhs as terrorists, has denied the accusations; Canada has also said it has no evidence that Modi was involved in or aware of any plot.)

[Read: How Modi made himself look weak]

Three years ago, India became the world’s fifth-largest economy, surpassing its former colonial master, the United Kingdom. Yet by early 2024, even as Modi was declaring the dawn of a glorious new era, unsettling rumbles could be heard. Foreign direct investment in India had dropped by an astonishing 43 percent in the preceding year, partly thanks to high borrowing costs and unease about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Out-of-work men could be seen trekking along the brand-new highways, part of the movement from cities to farms that began during the pandemic. The magnitude of the unemployment problem could not be hidden.

Much of this story arc would have been familiar to anyone who had taken a close look at the “Gujarat model.” Although the state’s GDP rose during Modi’s decade-long tenure, the number of people without jobs held steady. Modi focused on big companies, but small and medium-size enterprises, which make up the backbone of India’s economy, did not fare as well. The obsession with growth appears to have masked a neglect of health, literacy, and the environment. In his book Price of the Modi Years, the journalist Aakar Patel notes that Gujarat’s rate of child malnutrition was one of the highest in India. While Modi was governor, the Central Pollution Control Board declared Gujarat to be the country’s most polluted state. A study of 18 Indian states and territories placed the rate of school attendance for students in rural areas of Gujarat at the very bottom. The “Gujarat model” has indeed been applied to the entire country.

The school principal agreed to meet me at her home, in a small town in Uttar Pradesh. She was middle-aged, with an aura of faded glamour; she had been a model in her youth, and photographs of her as a young woman hung on the wall. She had spent her life in this same town, never marrying, devoting herself to teaching and to the care of her dead brother’s children.

She had insisted that I not disclose her name, and I soon understood why. Her school district, she said, has nearly 700 teaching positions allocated to it by the government. But not even 200 are filled. Her own school, she said, has six teachers for 700 students. Many subjects do not get taught at all, and the school’s internet doesn’t work. Students, she said, lack phones or computers and must go to internet cafés to do their homework. She, too, is forced to go to internet cafés to handle the government’s burdensome reporting requirements, which must be done online. “All this rests on my shoulders,” she said. Little of this dysfunction is visible from the outside, because the school allows students to graduate despite the enormous gaps in their education.

Sacred cows block traffic in the holy city of Varanasi, on the Ganges, in Uttar Pradesh. (Mark Henley / Redux)

The endemic corruption of the school system is another obstacle. If a child makes a small mistake on an online form, “to get it fixed, you have to pay a bribe.”

According to India’s Annual Status of Education Report, an independent analysis, most 14-to-18-year-olds in rural regions were still struggling with basic division in 2023, and about a quarter of them with basic reading. Some 30 percent of all students appear to drop out of high school.

“It’s a moral failure of the political leadership,” says Ashoka Mody, who spent decades with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and who published a polemic about India’s developmental gaps last year titled India Is Broken. The book is densely documented and shot through with anger. One of its recurrent themes is the disparity between India and East Asian societies, which have seen mass primary education as a precondition to industrial growth and large-scale employment.

Narendra Modi has been in power for a decade, with his BJP allies running many of India’s state governments. The schools have only gotten worse. Modi’s educational priorities appear to be mostly ideological. History textbooks have been rewritten to include more Hindu-nationalist figures, praise Modi’s own initiatives, and minimize contributions by Indian Muslims. In 2023, India cut a number of science topics from tenth-grade textbooks. You won’t find Darwin’s theory of evolution, the periodic table of elements, or the Pythagorean theorem.

Even when Indian students attend a decent school, the system often fails them. In a tiny rural village called Bhushari, in Uttar Pradesh, I met a 19-year-old man who said he was spending two to three years studying full-time for civil-service exams. “I’m trying to get a government job,” he said, as we sat sipping cool drinks on the earthen floor of his family’s reception room. “The youth of India—we all want a government job. Families prefer their kids to get a government job; they think this is more reliable, because you cannot get fired.” You are also more likely to be able to get married if you have a government job.

For those who pass the exam, the relative dearth of government jobs can make new-hiring calls look like a crumb thrown into a lake full of starving fish. As Foreign Affairs has reported, in early 2023, the state government in Madhya Pradesh posted 6,000 low-level government jobs and quickly received more than 1.2 million applications. The volume hinted at the inflation of academic pedigree in India: There were 1,000 people with Ph.D.s, 85,000 graduates of college engineering programs, 100,000 people with business degrees, and about 180,000 people with other graduate degrees. The civil-service bottleneck puts enormous pressure on exams, and it’s hardly surprising that cheating has become an issue. Last June, the government canceled the results of an exam that had been taken by 900,000 aspiring academics in more than 300 cities, citing suspicions that the answers had been leaked onto the dark web.

Those who fail the test or don’t get the job have few options, and many end up in what economists call “the informal sector”—as vendors, day laborers, tuk-tuk drivers, and an endless array of other ill-paid roles. There aren’t many manufacturing jobs, because China drained them away decades ago.

The young man I met in Bhushari had been, in one sense, lucky. His father is the village sarpanch, or headman, and the family owns valuable farmland. If not for that, he would not have had the freedom to study for so long. He had spent his entire life in a village of some 2,900 people. He didn’t want to be a farmer in a place where drought is a constant threat, and where temperatures get hotter every year.

As my car thumped out of Bhushari on a pitted road, I saw cracked brown fields spreading to the horizon in all directions. People talked about the year’s record-breaking heat wave everywhere I went. Farmers told me the local wells and aquifers were drying up. The annual monsoons have become more erratic. Temperatures reached 121 degrees Fahrenheit when I was in Delhi, and there were frequent news reports about water shortages and people dying of heat exposure. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was worse, the heat or the smog. Of the world’s 100 most polluted cities, 83 are in India, according to 2023 data from the environmental group IQAir.

India’s environmental problems are among the most serious on the planet, but they have not been high priorities during Modi’s decade in power. He has shown occasional interest in the condition of the Ganges, India’s most famous river, which is sacred to Hindus. It is also one of the most polluted rivers on Earth, with stretches that are ecological dead zones. Modi’s electoral district includes Varanasi, a riverside city and an ancient pilgrimage site. Last spring, the BJP mounted elaborate campaign spectacles over the river, with 1,000 drones performing a light show to spell out, in Hindi, the slogan “Modi Government, Once Again.” During a trip to Varanasi in late May, Modi made a surprise visit to an electronics engineer named Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, who has led efforts for decades to clean up the Ganges. The visit did not go well.

Mishra told me about the encounter when I went to see him, about a week later. It was night when I arrived in Varanasi, and I walked a mile along the darkened Ganges, past burning funeral pyres, Hindu priests performing rituals, and scattered children and dogs. Mishra’s air-conditioned office was a relief. He runs an environmental NGO founded by his father and is also the mahant, or head priest, of one of Varanasi’s best-known Hindu temples, a title that has been passed down from father to eldest son in an unbroken line stretching back 400 years. This blend of sacred and secular authority is unusual, and earns him wide respect.

On the day of Modi’s visit, Mishra complained to him about the government’s failure to prevent cities and towns from dumping raw sewage into the Ganges. The river absorbs close to 100 million gallons of it a day. Its waters are a greenish toxic brew. Mishra reminded Modi that he’d given him the same lecture in 2013, shortly before Modi first took office as prime minister, and that nothing had been done. Modi does not like to be chastised. He told Mishra he would come back after the election, and then went on his way.

Mishra, meanwhile, continues to monitor the river like a doctor with a dying patient. He told me that around the time of Modi’s visit, samples from one spot contained 88 million fecal coliform bacteria per 100 milliliters of water—176,000 times the maximum amount that India allows for a Class B river, which is considered safe for bathing.

But as many as 50,000 people bathe daily in the river, Mishra told me. I myself saw hundreds of people swimming in it. Many Indians drink from the Ganges, including Mishra himself: It is one of his duties as a priest.

The city of Ayodhya—where Modi inaugurated the new Hindu temple—is a near-perfect emblem of Modi’s rule: It has been reshaped into an advertisement at the expense of its residents. The government wants to make Ayodhya into a tourism and pilgrimage site for Hindus worldwide and has thrown enormous sums of money at the project, building wide roads, an airport, a train station. But in the city’s old neighborhoods, nothing seems to have changed apart from new street signs that have been posted incongruously on decaying buildings and market stalls. Tens of thousands of locals have seen their homes and workplaces demolished. Many are furious at the Modi government. One of them is Mahendra Tripathi, the man who photographed Modi in Ayodhya back in 1992. He is now jobless at the age of 65, having lost his office to the urban renovations last year.

“My livelihood was destroyed twice,” he told me, first by the rioters who destroyed Babri Masjid, in 1992, and a second time by the government that replaced it with the temple. “Now I’m old and don’t have the energy to start again.”

On a boulevard that leads to the city’s Lucknow gate, I met a middle-aged man selling snacks in front of a one-room shop. He told me the shop was all that was left of his family’s four-story house, which had included a much larger grocery store and upstairs rooms for his children and their families. The road needed to be widened, government officials had told him. The demolition had left him and his family with nowhere to live and no livelihood until they’d managed to reopen a shrunken version of their shop. “Not a single BJP worker came to check on us since the demolition,” he said. His wife stood alongside him, misery stamped on her face.

A few doors down, a man was sitting on the floor of a tiny apartment. He was cutting and folding newspapers, to be sold to vendors as food wrappers. At his feet was a little bowl of homemade glue that he used to dab each folded paper before pressing its side together. He told me he had been making his living this way for 25 years. He was 60 years old, he said. Before the demolition, he’d had enough space to live with his family; now there was barely enough room for him to sit down. It was about 110 degrees outside, and the apartment’s metal door was half open. “My house used to go all the way to that white strip,” he said, pointing to the middle of the road. “Now this is all I have.”

Later that day, I drove past another side effect of Modi’s big temple: a vast, improvised landfill, built to accommodate the construction and demolition debris. Clouds of dust and pale smoke hung in the air above its lumpy surface. As we drove toward the landfill, the dust enveloped us, seeming almost to create its own weather system. In the dim landscape, I saw shacks where families were living, and a mill where people were grinding wheat. During monsoon season, the whole area becomes a flood zone. It seemed to go on for miles.

A flooded street in Vijayawada, in southern India, in 2024. Annual monsoons have become more erratic, and India’s environmental problems are among the most serious on the planet. (Vijaya Bhaskar / AFP / Getty)

Modi’s reputation is built partly on stage presence. His rallies have drawn as many as 800,000 people. On giant screens, his magnified image towers over the crowd. People who have been in a room with him sometime speak of an overpowering aura, as if he were a rock star or the pope.

Almost as impressive is Modi’s ability to deploy—or inspire—an entire industry of social-media fans and public-relations professionals who get the message out on a daily basis, telling Indians how Modi has made them respected in the world and defended their Hindu faith from attack by Muslims, “sickularists,” and “anti-nationals.” Some of these people are television personalities, such as Arnab Goswami, a kind of Indian Tucker Carlson. Others are anonymous warriors in a campaign to label the Muslim film stars of Bollywood as terrorists. Many of them work as trolls on social media, where the BJP has aggressively promoted its message even as it censors its critics. (India’s significant market share—it has more Facebook and YouTube users than any other country—has allowed the Modi government to bully tech companies into removing oppositional content.) Others make movies or sing songs.

Kavi Singh is a star of the genre known as Hindutva pop, a mixture of jingoism and danceable beats. Her signature style is unusually androgynous for India: a man’s Nehru-style jacket and tunic, with a multicolored turban wrapped around her head. Her long hair flows over her shoulders.

Singh made her debut during a moment of national crisis. In early 2019, a suicide bomber in a car rammed a convoy of Indian paramilitary police in the northern district of Pulwama, killing more than 40 people. An Islamist terrorist group based in Pakistan claimed responsibility. The attack—followed by accusations of intelligence failures—was a humiliation for Modi, who had cast himself as a more aggressive protector of India than his predecessors. The next day, while the country was still overcome by grief and anger, a song appeared on Indian WhatsApp groups, sung by a strident female voice. The lyrics put the blame not on Pakistani terrorists but on India’s own Muslims:

The enemies are among us but we blame the neighbor
The one who is secretly carrying a knife; finish off that traitor
If our own hadn’t helped carry this attack
Pulwama wouldn’t have seen the blood of our bravehearts spilled

The song went viral, and was followed by a video version in which Singh performs at a studio microphone, her singing interspersed with footage of gun-toting Indian soldiers and grieving families. She began churning out new songs with impressive regularity.

I met Singh at a guesthouse in the state of Haryana, about two hours north of Delhi. She wore her trademark outfit in shades of saffron, the color worn by Hindu saints and ascetics. Singh said she believes that the Hindu god Ram gives her signs. She seemed to claim credit for one of Modi’s most controversial acts—the 2019 decision to revoke Kashmir’s semiautonomous status and lay claim to the Muslim-majority province, an old source of conflict between India and Pakistan. “Everybody listens to me,” she said. “I know that Prime Minister Modi listens to my songs.”

A rice paddy in the state of Haryana. Lack of work has driven many Indians from cities to farms, even as farm income stagnates and drought turns fields into deserts. (Prakash Singh / Bloomberg / Getty)

It was hard to tell whether Singh was naive about the ways her music has been used, or just preferred to shrug it off. After the Pulwama suicide bombing, Kashmiri Muslims were attacked all over the country.

When I met Singh, she was making final preparations for a long journey on foot—known as a yatra—to help unify Hindus in the aftermath of Modi’s election setback. Her plan was to start in the northern pilgrimage town of Haridwar and walk southward for six months or a year with her entourage, blasting her music from loudspeakers every step of the way. Did she expect her yatra to meet with protests and critics? “Absolutely” there would be protests, she said. “They will try to assault us as well.” The way she said it made me wonder if that was exactly the point.

Modi’s defenders sometimes note that large-scale communal violence has declined since the 2002 Gujarat riots. But one type of violence that has not declined is the lynching of ordinary Muslims.

One morning, after driving from the smog of Delhi into the great belt of farmland to the east, I met a man who narrowly survived a lynch mob in 2018. He is a Muslim farmer named Samayadeen who has spent his entire life—nearly 70 years, he reckons—in the same settlement, a tiny cluster of mud-and-brick houses surrounded by green fields of mustard, wheat, and sugarcane. After we shook hands, he led the way, limping visibly, into the open-air courtyard of his house, where he lay down on a string bed and apologized for his slowness. A buffalo dozed comfortably in the mud on the far side of the little enclosure.

Six years ago, Samayadeen was gathering fodder with another man on his farm when they heard noises in the distance. A lone figure was running toward them, chased by a crowd of about two dozen men. As Samayadeen watched, the mob caught up to its prey and started beating him mercilessly with sticks.

Samayadeen’s companion ran off in terror. But Samayadeen recognized the victim, a fellow Muslim named Qasim. He hurried over and tried to stop the attackers. They turned on Samayadeen as well, accusing both men of killing cows.

Eventually, the attackers dragged the men to their own village, where other men arrived to continue the beating in front of a Hindu temple. Samayadeen recognized some of them. When the police finally showed up, they had to fight off the mob before they could drive the injured men to a hospital. It was too late for Qasim, who died soon afterward of his injuries.

What is most striking about the lynchings of the past decade is not so much their scale—several dozen people—as the government’s attitude. Modi and many of his BJP allies have spent years demonizing cow-killers while at the same time downplaying lynching reports. In some cases, local officials have treated suspected murderers as heroes.

Samayadeen’s case might have gone nowhere, even with a good lawyer on his side, if not for the help of a journalist who went undercover to record video footage of a man who admitted that he’d incited the mob to kill Muslims. After that tape was admitted as evidence, a number of the attackers were indicted and ultimately convicted.

As he told me this story, Samayadeen emphasized repeatedly that all the people who had made his case a success—the man who’d helped him bring it, the lawyer who’d represented him, the judge who’d handed down the decision—were Hindus. “What I’m trying to say is that all the Hindu mentality is not like that,” he said, referring to the mob that tried to kill him.

Samayadeen’s comment about varieties of the Hindu mentality came to mind as I flew to Tamil Nadu, at the bottom of the subcontinent, 1,000 miles south of Delhi. Tamil Nadu’s leaders have long been openly contemptuous of Hindu nationalism, and their governing philosophy represents a powerful alternative to Modi’s worldview. They have put much greater emphasis on mass education and health care, and the south is today the most prosperous part of India. Bangalore and Hyderabad—two of its largest cities—host the country’s IT hubs.

Modi has been trying for years to make political inroads in the south. In May, as the election campaign came to an end, Indian news channels began broadcasting a striking image over a chyron that read Breaking News. It was Modi, eyes closed, sitting on a stone floor with his legs crossed and his palms pressed together. He had traveled to a seaside sanctuary on the southern tip of Tamil Nadu to spend 45 hours in ekantvas, or solitary retreat. The images showed him in saffron robes, subsisting (as the news channels reported) only on coconut water. But Modi’s meditation wasn’t actually solitary; he was being filmed from multiple angles.

This stunt was the culmination of a campaign during which Modi hinted more than once that he had attained divine status. “When my mother was alive, I used to think I was born biologically,” he told a TV news interviewer in May. “After her demise, when I look at my experiences, I am convinced that I was sent by God.” Later that month, he said that he received commands from God, though he admitted that “I cannot dial him directly to ask what’s next.”

But the south has not been receptive terrain for Brand Modi. In Chennai, the city once called Madras, I met with one of Modi’s most eloquent adversaries—Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, known to everyone as PTR. Now 58, he holds a degree from MIT and worked as a banker in New York and Singapore before returning to his native Tamil Nadu. He made his name running the state’s finance ministry, and now leads the state’s IT efforts. PTR met me at his office, in a gated compound that possessed an air of faded colonial grandeur. His family has been prominent in Tamil Nadu for hundreds of years.

[Read: India is starting to see through Modi’s nationalist myth]

The south’s priorities are the inverse of Modi’s, PTR told me. They are rooted in decisions made a century ago, when southern leaders—even before India’s independence—began passing progressive reforms including compulsory education for both sexes, women’s right to vote and hold office, and affirmative action for members of historically disadvantaged castes. The motives for those reforms may have been political, but the effect was to create a springboard for greater prosperity, as in Singapore and other East Asian countries. While northern India has pursued a zero-sum model of growth, the southern states have tried to ensure that “the pie grows because everybody is vested in the system,” PTR said. “Everybody’s got access to the basic things,” such as jobs, decent schools, and health care.

When I asked about Modi’s economic stewardship, PTR was withering. He walked me through all the mistakes Modi has made, starting with his much-lamented decision in 2016 to “demonetize” the country’s highest-currency banknotes. PTR’s eyes rolled as he considered the effects of this blunder, calling it “one of the staggering catastrophes of economic policy in the history of the world.”

PTR also deplored the way Modi has personalized his office and concentrated power in Delhi at the expense of the states. India was already more centralized than other large democracies such as the United States, thanks to the authors of its 1949 constitution. Modi’s brand of nationalism is rooted in the idea that India’s size and diversity call for an even stronger hand and a more unifying creed, but in practical terms that has made the task of government much harder: The average member in India’s 543-seat Parliament now has about 2.6 million constituents. It would make more sense, PTR said, to acknowledge regional differences and delegate more authority to the states.

Listening to PTR, one can easily get the sense of a road not taken—a way to steer all of India on a less divisive course. Unfortunately, the south is less an alternative than a rival. Its economic philosophy goes alongside a distinctly southern religious and cultural identity that is almost as aggressive as Modi’s. The two visions are so divergent that it is easy to see why there were calls for a separate southern nation called Dravidistan when India became independent.

This cultural rift became apparent when I asked PTR about Modi’s promotion of Hindutva. The subject makes him visibly angry. “I believe that Tamil Nadu is the most Hindu-practicing state in the country,” he said, noting that the state government alone manages some 35,000 temples. All told, he went on, “there are probably 600,000 temples of noticeable size and maybe a million temples of all sizes.” PTR gestured at the red pottu on his forehead, a symbol of Hindu devotion. But the south’s version of Hinduism, he said, is “antithetical to the notion of a muscular Hindutva.” The southern tradition is rooted partly in a century-old revolt against the privileges granted to Brahmans, the priestly caste that sits at the top of Hinduism’s ancient social hierarchy.

Modi’s challenges in winning over the south are not just about Hinduism. The people of Tamil Nadu are mostly ethnic Tamils, and many see themselves as the original inhabitants of a region that has faced discrimination from the north. The BJP did not win a single parliamentary seat in Tamil Nadu last year, despite Modi’s efforts.

When I arrived in India, the election was still under way. The BJP platform was ostensibly that of a political party with hundreds of parliamentary candidates, but its title was “Modi’s Guarantee.” From the moment I arrived in India, at the Delhi airport, I couldn’t avoid Modi’s image—in life-size cardboard cutouts, in huge murals on city walls, in stickers on doors and windows, on roadside billboards. BJP supporters walked around with paper Modi masks wrapped over their face, giving the eerie impression of an army of clones.

Even when you looked at your phone you’d see him, asking for your vote in Hindi, in Urdu, in half a dozen other languages he doesn’t even speak; his voice had been copied and transfigured by AI programming. The opposition talked constantly about him too, adding to the widespread sense that the entire election was a referendum on the 10-year reign of Narendra Modi.

The election took place over six weeks, like a slow-moving tsunami, and the results started coming in on the morning of June 4. Modi was already doing far worse than he and his party had expected. Projections were giving the BJP fewer than 200 seats, a steep drop from its previous total of 303, and a result that would spell the end of its parliamentary majority. Modi’s continued rule would depend on the cooperation of coalition allies.

At about noon, I sat in on an editorial meeting in Delhi of The Hindu, one of India’s few remaining independent newspapers. The mood was buoyant. There had been a betting pool on the election, and as one editor read out the names of the winners, there was laughter and cheering. I heard a flurry of hot takes: “It’s about hubris; he’ll have to tone it down.” “It’s a huge sigh of relief for India’s Muslims.” “Coalition politics is back.” The political editor said she wanted a story on what the BJP got wrong, and someone joked that it would be too long to fit in the paper.

A little later, I made my way over to the headquarters of the Congress Party, on Akbar Road. A raucous outdoor party was under way, with a thick crowd of members and guests milling around in a state of bliss. The Congress Party and its opposition allies had lost, but were behaving as if they’d won a historic victory. Partly, this was because Modi and his party had done everything they could to tilt the election in their favor, and everyone knew it. Opposition politicians had faced a wildly disproportionate number of investigations. In some cases, political figures who switched to the BJP saw their charges abruptly dropped.

To some extent, Modi had himself to blame for the way the election results were interpreted. He had said early on that he expected to win 400 seats, a supermajority that could grant him the power to change the constitution. Had this happened, Hindutva might well have been enshrined as the country’s new ruling ideology.

[Read: The humbling of Narendra Modi]

Modi’s narrow victory felt like a rebuke. But opinion varied on what it meant. Caste seems to have played a role, especially in northern India. Modi’s party has always been vulnerable to defections by low-caste Hindus, who feel the party is still wedded to upper-caste privilege, and many Dalits, once more commonly known as untouchables, appear to have shifted their votes to the opposition.

Another prevalent view was that Modi had taken his divisive, anti-Muslim religious rhetoric too far. He may also have overplayed the god-man role. During the initiation of the Ayodhya temple last January, he’d violated protocol by performing religious rites himself.

Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, where Modi last year consecrated a Hindu temple on the site of a mosque destroyed in 1992 (Biplov Bhuyan / Sopa Images / Getty)

In the days and weeks after the election, many Indians were too overwhelmed by happiness and relief to worry about the details. Modi was no longer invulnerable. He would have to compromise, people said, if he wanted to keep his job.

[Read: Many Indians don’t trust their elections anymore]

But Modi is not used to compromise. He is very good at dividing Indians to suit his political needs, and he is probably too old to change. In some ways, he is a more authentic product of India’s democracy than any of his Congress Party predecessors, with their patrician pedigrees. His departure—he will be 78 during the next general election, and is not expected to run again—will not change the country’s structural vulnerability to populist strongmen. India may be more susceptible to the politics of identity and division than other countries precisely because, as PTR told me, it is so immense and so diverse. It is more a continent than a country, as the British liked to say—a self-serving point, but one that has grown even more apt since their departure.

Modi’s legacy may be decided by those who no longer chant his name. Indian democracy will face its most important test in the small towns and villages where the bulk of the population still lives. One of the people I met in Uttar Pradesh, a 51-year-old farmer, told me that he’d voted for Modi, but a decade of BJP rule had soured him on politics. The party had “played the drums of zero tolerance for corruption,” he said, but had not paid attention to the people’s needs, and corruption had only grown worse.

“Hindutva,” he said, “stands for a religion with the most humbleness, the most virtues, the best upbringing, the good culture we have that doesn’t exist anywhere else.” He paused a moment. “There is no party that really stands for that,” he said, “and there won’t be one.”

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Modi’s Failure.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.