My parents sometimes call me modern. They do this when they want to make fun of me. Most recently they called me modern when I told them that my girlfriend, her ex and I are co-parenting the two cats they have together, so that the cats spend half the year at our place and half at the ex’s. “Modern relationships.” The fact that they can joke about this stuff makes them “modern parents”. There’s also “modern jobs”, “modern clothes”, “modern girls”, and “modern generation”.
Modern India is a combination of many such things and also things less wholesome than feline living arrangements – such as a failing democracy and growing social tensions. To be honest, the exact composition changes depending on the place, the people and the mood. The same goes for books about the country – which, at least to me, seem to have become more varied, though surely not enough.
