Yet, India adapts. Young dhaba owners use QR codes. Classical musicians go viral on Instagram Reels. The Pandit (priest) performs pujas via Zoom for NRIs (Non-Resident Indians).

To step into India is to experience a sensory overload in the most beautiful sense of the term. It is a land where the sharp beep of a Mumbai taxi merges with the temple bells of Varanasi, where a silk weaver in a village uses a 500-year-old loom to create a saree that will be bought via a smartphone, and where a single family can house grandparents who speak only a classical dialect and grandchildren who code in Python.

Indian culture and lifestyle is not a static museum piece. It is a river that has absorbed the Vedic, the Mughal, the British, and the Silicon Valley influences. To live in India is to live in multiple centuries at once. It is exhausting, loud, chaotic, and deeply, beautifully human.

India is the only place where you can practice a 5,000-year-old meditation technique in the morning and close a million-dollar deal on your iPhone by lunch.