The characteristic approach of Europe has been world domination. What the world needs most of all is not some breathtaking scientific or economic breakthrough; it is a stable point of coherence. It has been basic to our spiritual vision that unity, peace and freedom are all spiritual values. The cardinal mistake perpetrated by secularists has been to respond to our civilisational identity and heritage with instinctive negativity. Stable world peace is possible, as Immanuel Kant argued in his essay on Perpetual Peace, only when the sovereignty of nation-states is tempered with a world state, which is the closest that Europe has come to the Indian vision of "vasudhaiva kutumbakam". God alone — experienced as the universal values of love, compassion, truth and justice — is the guarantee for the unity, peace and fulfilment of life.India, or what then was Bharat, evolved in an entirely different way." Sir Edwin Arnold deemed it appropriate to describe Lord Buddha as The Light of Asia. It is further aggravated by unenlightened eulogies of our civilisational assets, straining credulity and common sense to prove that modern science in its state-of-the-art technology was already in vogue in our dim, distant past. The alternative is to get bogged down by petty quarrels and jealousies with neighbours and, as a complement to that, strain our nerves and resources in gaining diplomatic brownie points that add up, in the end, to nothing. Given the excitement in the air, we could be tempted to stay focused entirely on the dynamics of nation-building and ignore our civilisational roots. This unity is the ground for freedom and peace.We are privileged to Sliding Gate Wheel live at a defining moment in the history of our evolution as a nascent nation that is also an ancient civilisation. When we embraced economic and cultural globalisation in the early 1990s, some of us did expect we would engage with the global community in terms also of what has been, from time immemorial, the essence of globality — the universal vision that we have been home to. This is a perilous path and its calamitous outcome can never be in doubt. India’s distinctive contributions to the world community will never be technological, militaristic or industrial. Here’s a third-party view on the matter. We are going the way European nations did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. God, as the source of life in all its manifestations, is alone the sufficient ground for its unity. The nation-state is the crux of this deadly confusion. Swami Dayanand’s vision of Aryavarta, with its pristine Vaidic spiritual ethos, resonated in the dream entertained by Yogi Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. The same was true of the Roman Empire. This stemmed from a prejudicial understanding of the past, vitiated by a psychology negativity burdened by memories of our colonial past. This fanciful celebration of our civilisational past is, if anything, more harmful than the secular prejudice against it.