So, to borrow the title of an American bestseller, Dude, where's my country? In the autumnal fog of 2003, even if the vision of the stocktaker is impaired by that familiar annual malady of calendar fetish, can't you really see where it is? No, it is not a stagnant shame in the backyard of civilisation-and if you want to see one, look in the distant deserts of Mesopotamia. And, sorry, India is not an oriental remoteness in tatters.

The nation has suspended its essential trait of phlegmatic fatalism. Looks like the text of India 2003 cannot tolerate questions of the cynic or the ha-ha repudiations of the harrumpher. India is where it has to be, in its rightful place under the sun, at home with a smile that exudes blissful gratitude and easy confidence. Being Indian at this moment in history is, well, very heaven. Or, the year 2003 was the golden expression of national well-being.

"Today the nation is at a turning point from where it can take a big leap forward. The yearning to make India a developed nation is gathering strength." Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee in his Independence Day speech

Are we trumpeting irrational triumphalism?

See how we reached here. Twelve months ago, it was India as duskland of hate, its faultlines glaring and its heart beating to the song of the killer and the whispers of the dead. The idea of India was a stereotype drenched in blood, an idea in which armed fallacies of faith stalked the enemy in the back alleys of fragile tolerance. India walked into 2003 as a nation scarred and let down by Gujarat. Still, we won't say that India has graduated from sorrow to smugness. India has refused to be trapped hopelessly in the remains of a bad yesterday, proving once again that this is a nation hardened by history, that it suffers only to renew itself the day after, and this narrative stretches from the mixed legacy of 1947, of freedom and fear, to the becalmed evening of 2003.

It was, in retrospect, a passage of choice and stability. It may be an eastern archetype: the Wise Leader, the Knowing One, the Eldest Statesman. In the political India of 2003, he was the most reassuring presence, he at his passive best amidst the active aspirations and agendas of his colleagues and partners. The prime minister as stability sage. And the stirrings were of change, magnified by a pop sanyasin and a people's princess, standing triumphant on the wreckage of bad governance and false models of salvation. The political script was written in golden letters: you can't tap popular disillusion without the dream of an alternative, and pretence will not have popular mandate.

And dreams were oversold in the shopping mall. For the economy, it was annus mirabilis: the growth was a record, and India, once Third Worldism's poster state steeped in socialist shibboleth, was fast catching up with the global economy. The buzz in the marketplace was: Oh well, it is glorious to be rich, and never before have dreams looked so realisable-and, remember, we are not talking about the best-selling dreams in the multiplex, which, by the way, happens to be one of the most conspicuous monuments of the golden urban Indian.

It is not golden gloating. After decades of post-independence somnambulation, India is not a diffident outsider in the brash new world, where the abiding morality denies the tyrant the last hole of survival, and where evil, not as defined in the Book but as defined by the cavemen of religion and the bunker-dwellers of dictatorships, is identifiable and immediate, challenging the way we live and think. And it is not one nation's fear-or war-alone. India knows it intimately well, and India has been living through it for so long. Year 2003 saw India containing the sponsor-in-chief of extra-territorial terror. But not at gunpoint. Peace did not sound so boring.

India is nation as permanent astonishment, and in the eternal Indian thriller, every page is an invitation to new revelations-damning, redeeming. The spirit of the closing one accelerates hope, enlarges dreams, exaggerates expectations, widens the smile. This moment India deserves. Oh come on, we have cried enough in history.