The Big Story: Independence Day
As the grey clouds of India's best monsoon in many years loomed over India's monumental Red Fort, from which Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered his third Independence Day speech, it was easy to forget how disastrous the summer had been. The fact that you are reading this on a website and in English suggests that the worst effects of the drought – one of the most devastating the country has seen – passed you by. The heat might have been unbearable and water might have been more scarce, but most of India's well-off urban residents got almost no sense of the starvation, destruction and death being caused by just the weather (and government incompetence).

The India-Bharat divide has always been something of a fiction, because the narrative suggests an impoverished rural nation out in the countryside, entirely disconnected from urban India. The reality is that even within India's cities, entire worlds have become detached from each other. Go into the colonies adjoining the gated communities that are becoming ubiquitous, or even their back alleys, and you will see multiple nations that barely understand each other and often don't even attempt to. The 2016 drought made this embarrassingly apparent as scenes of distress and in some cases disaster barely penetrated rich households, except when they endangered the glitzy summer cricket extravaganza.

Look at the output of any news organisation (including this one), and you might conclude that India is currently locked in a battle between the Hindutva Right and Secular Liberals. Nightly news panels turn just about any issue into a Bharatiya Janata Party vs Congress vs <insert regional party here> struggle. But while these are crucial political battles, India is not so polarised that Indian identities are defined by an individual's politics.

As India enters its 70th year of independence, the vast majority of the country – nearly one-fifth of all humanity – is defined not by an ideological position or a political party but something much basic: The struggle to survive.

Independence Day Reads