Twenty-five years ago, a Bollywood movie gave us one of the greatest cricket matches ever filmed.
For those who have never seen it, Lagaan is an Oscar nominated Indian film set in a small village called Champaner during British colonial rule. The village is suffering through drought. Crops have failed. People are hungry. And yet, the British demand lagaan, the land tax owed by the villagers to the empire.
When the villagers plead for relief, the local British officer, Captain Russell, turns their desperation into a wager. If the villagers can defeat the British in a game of cricket, a game they barely understand, their tax will be forgiven for three years. If they lose, they must pay three times the tax.
Three times the burden.
Three times the humiliation.
Three times the cost of a game they did not ask to play.
That is the plot.
But that is not really what the movie is about.
I loved Lagaan when I first watched it because it brought together two of my great loves: India and cricket. That alone would have been enough. The dry earth. The village square. The impossible wager. The songs that carried longing and defiance in the same breath. The awkward beauty of farmers, potters, blacksmiths, drummers, fortune tellers, and outcasts learning a foreign game and slowly discovering that the game was never as foreign as they had been told.
For those of us who grew up with cricket in our blood and India in our bones, Lagaan was not just a movie. We knew those faces. We knew those silences. We knew the feeling of watching someone else make the rules and then act surprised when we learned how to play. I was born decades after the British left India, but history does not leave the body just because the flag changes. Some memories are inherited. Some humiliations arrive through stories, textbooks, accents, family warnings, and the knowledge that people who looked like us were once expected to bow, pay, obey, and be grateful for the privilege. Lagaan gave that old ache somewhere to go. It let us feel, if only for a few hours, that justice had finally found a scoreboard.
And then there was that final shot.
The ball rising.
The breath leaving every body.
The silence before the winning score.
The rain.
I still remember the feeling. Not just joy. Vindication. Release. The impossible relief of watching history, even in fiction, bend toward the people who had carried too much for too long.
That is what great stories do. They enter us first as entertainment and return years later as diagnosis.
But Lagaan is not just about a cricket match. The cricket is the container. The story is about power. It is about drought, tax, class, caste, occupation, gender, pride, betrayal, courage, and the beautiful, fragile miracle of people who have every reason to remain divided choosing, however imperfectly, to become a team.
It is about what happens when ordinary people are pushed beyond endurance by people who mistake authority for wisdom.
It is about the cost imposed by those insulated from consequence.
That is why, twenty-five years later, Lagaan does not feel old.
It feels current.
It feels uncomfortably alive.
Because we are all Champaner now.
Today, I am thinking especially about America.
Not because the rest of the world is exempt from this metaphor. Far from it. People in India will recognize Champaner immediately because we have lived with versions of it for generations. We know what it means to be told to wait. We know what it means to be measured by someone else’s scale. We know what it means for class, caste, language, privilege, bureaucracy, family expectation, and inherited hierarchy to decide who gets to stand where. We know the poetry of resilience, but we also know the exhaustion of needing resilience in the first place.
People across the Global South will recognize Champaner too. So will immigrants. So will workers. So will students. So will anyone who has ever felt decisions being made above them, around them, and against them by people who speak the language of order while leaving others to survive the disorder.
But I write this primarily as an immigrant who still loves America.
This is not the voice of someone standing outside the country, sneering at its failures. That would be easy. And lazy. Contempt has become one of the cheapest currencies of our age. It asks very little of the person who holds it. You can dismiss a place, mock it, diagnose it from a distance, and never have to admit that you are implicated in what happens next.
That is not where I stand.
I came to America because the idea of America once felt large enough to hold a life like mine. I arrived as an eighteen-year-old international student from India with ambition, uncertainty, fear, hope, and probably more innocence than I knew. Like so many immigrants before and after me, I believed in the promise. Not blindly. Not perfectly. But sincerely.
I believed that effort could matter here. I believed that institutions, however flawed, could still open doors. I believed that a person could arrive with an accent, an underfunded bank balance, a head full of questions, and a heart full of possibility, and still find a way to build a life.
In many ways, I did.
That is why my critique of America is not born from contempt. It is born from grief. It is born from gratitude that refuses to become silence. It is born from love that has become too honest to flatter.
The easy critique is contempt.
The harder critique is love that will not lie.
This is also the spirit behind my book, American Stupediority. The title is a portmanteau of stupidity and superiority. It is my attempt to name the distance between what America thinks it is and what America has become. It is the condition that appears when a powerful country becomes so intoxicated by its own mythology that it stops examining its own behavior.
Stupediority is arrogance without self-awareness. Confidence without curiosity. Dominance mistaken for leadership. Pride without repair. The refusal to learn because you are too busy declaring yourself exceptional.
And America is deep inside this condition.
We see it in the tribalism that turns neighbors into enemies and politics into identity theater. We see it in the anti-intellectualism that treats expertise as elitism and ignorance as authenticity. We see it in the infantilization of citizens who are told they are victims of everyone except the people actually manipulating their anger. We see it in a public culture that rewards outrage faster than wisdom, certainty faster than thought, cruelty faster than courage.
We see it in the bullying of the world while still expecting the world to admire American leadership. The lecturing. The swagger. The strange inability to understand that power without humility does not inspire trust. It breeds resentment. It creates distance. It makes even friends wonder what kind of future they are being asked to follow.
And we see it at home, in the suspicion of immigrants, the exhaustion of teachers, the cheapening of truth, the worship of wealth, the loneliness of young people, the performance of toughness, the fear of complexity, and the national habit of mistaking volume for strength.
This is the lagaan now.
Not one tax.
Not one policy.
Not one election.
Not one leader.
The lagaan is the cost ordinary people pay when power loses humility. It is the burden placed on those who did not design the game but are still told to play by its rules. It is the price paid by families working harder and falling further behind. By students told to dream while the cost of opportunity keeps rising. By immigrants asked to prove, again and again, that their humanity has paperwork. By workers told that someone else’s dignity is the reason their own life feels smaller. By teachers asked to prepare children for the future while adults keep vandalizing the present.
It is also paid by the rest of the world when America demands trust while behaving as though trust is owed rather than earned.
This is where the Lagaan metaphor reaches beyond nostalgia.
Captain Russell does not merely impose a tax. He turns suffering into spectacle. The drought is not real to him in the way it is real to the villagers. Their hunger is not his hunger. Their risk is not his risk. Their future is a wager because he can afford to make it one.
That is the old arrogance of power, and it has many modern accents. It speaks in policy rooms, campaign rallies, boardrooms, cable news panels, trade wars, culture wars, immigration debates, and education battles. It speaks whenever those insulated from consequence ask everyone else to pay the bill for their pride.
But Lagaan would be a weaker film if Champaner were innocent.
That is easy to forget because we love the village. We want to remember it as noble, unified, and pure. But Champaner carries its own fractures. Caste is there. Occupation is there. Gender is there. Ego is there. Fear is there. Suspicion is there. The village knows how to humiliate its own. It knows how to decide who belongs and who should remain at the edge of the frame.
Oppression does not automatically create solidarity. Pain does not automatically create wisdom. A shared enemy does not automatically create a team.
Champaner has to confront itself first.
Before it can challenge power, it has to widen its own imagination of who belongs on the field.
That is why Kachra matters. Not as a token. Not as a plot device. He matters because the person the village had pushed to the margins becomes essential to its survival. The hand they had dismissed becomes the hand that can spin the ball in a way no one else can. The body they had treated as lesser carries a gift the whole village needs.
That was good storytelling.
It was also moral architecture.
A society cannot defeat arrogance outside itself while preserving arrogance inside itself.
This is the lesson America needs now.
Because America is also a divided village. It is powerful and anxious. Wealthy and indebted. Admired and distrusted. Innovative and exhausted. Capable of astonishing generosity and astonishing cruelty. It wants to lead the world while too many of its own people feel abandoned, priced out, talked down to, manipulated, or simply unseen.
America is Captain Russell.
America is also Champaner.
America is also Bhuvan, still capable of courage when the odds look absurd. America is also Lakha, sabotaging from within because resentment can feel easier than repair. America is also Elizabeth, trying imperfectly to help from within a system she benefits from. America is also the crowd, frightened and hopeful, divided and desperate, wanting to believe but not always willing to do the work belief requires.
Understanding that complexity in important. If America is only the villain, then those of us who live here can excuse ourselves by condemning someone else. But if America is also the village, then we have to ask a harder question.
What are we willing to become together?
This is where I refuse despair.
There are still systems in America that can help right the ship. They are bruised, politicized, distrusted, uneven, compromised in places, and painfully slow. But they are not gone. Courts still matter. Schools still matter. Libraries still matter. Local government still matters. Journalism still matters. Civil society still matters. Elections still matter. Institutions still matter, not because they are pure, but because abandoning them only hands more power to those who want them broken.
America still has people who care.
That may sound small in an age addicted to grand declarations, but it is not small.
It is everything.
There are still teachers who stay late because one student needs one more explanation. There are still judges who deliver justice carefully. There are still neighbors who show up with food, rides, tools, time, and tenderness. There are still students asking better questions than the adults around them. There are still immigrants who believe in the promise, even after the promise has made them prove themselves too many times. There are still citizens who understand that patriotism is not obedience. There are still Americans who know that loving a country means wanting it to become worthy of its own claims.
I know this America because I have lived inside it too.
It gave me an education. It gave me a home. It gave me friendships, daughters, work, purpose, and the possibility of becoming someone I could not have fully imagined when I left India. I will not pretend that does not matter.
But I also will not let gratitude make me dishonest.
The America I love is not the America of chest-thumping superiority. It is not the America that bullies and then calls itself brave. It is not the America that mocks knowledge, punishes vulnerability, fears immigrants, worships wealth, and treats the rest of the world as either a market, a threat, or an audience.
The America I love is unfinished.
It has always been unfinished.
And that is the whole promise.
The danger is not that America is imperfect. Every country is imperfect. Every society carries contradictions. Anyone who loves their homeland honestly knows the ache of loving a place that can be magnificent and maddening in the same breath. The danger is not imperfection.
The danger is when a country becomes too proud to keep becoming.
That is stupediority.
And that is the drought.
We are all Champaner now. But at this moment, Americans need to understand that we are not merely watching the match. We are in it. Some of us are paying the lagaan. Some of us are collecting it. Some of us are cheering the collector because we think proximity to power will save us. And some of us are still waiting for someone else to pick up the bat.
The great temptation now is to wait for someone else to save us.
One president. One judge. One billionaire. One founder. One election. One court case. One protest. One viral speech. One heroic batter to walk in during the final over and hit the six that saves us all.
But that is not how republics are rescued.
It is not even how Lagaan unfolded.
Yes, Bhuvan hits the final six. That is the image we remember because cinema knows how to carve memory into spectacle. But Bhuvan does not win alone. The village wins because enough people show up long before the final ball. They practice when they look ridiculous. They learn what they do not understand. They argue, fail, return, adjust, and keep going. They bring their occupations, instincts, bodies, wounds, and odd gifts into the work. They slowly become capable of a moment that once seemed impossible.
The miracle is not the six.
The miracle is that Champaner becomes a team.
America keeps waiting for Bhuvan.
But maybe the whole point of Lagaan is that Bhuvan only matters because Champaner finally stops waiting.
That is the question before us now.
Not who will save us, but whether we are willing to stop being spectators.
For me, that means I cannot simply diagnose America from the safety of analysis. I have to show up too. I have to be more vocal when silence would be more comfortable. I have to do my civic duty without treating citizenship as a mood. I have to educate myself beyond headlines and tribal cues. I have to stay open to multiple perspectives without surrendering the moral clarity to name cruelty, arrogance, and dishonesty when I see them.
That balance is difficult.
It should be.
If your politics never make you uncomfortable, you may not have convictions. You may only have a costume.
Showing up to bat every day does not mean shouting every day. It does not mean reducing every conversation to a performance of righteousness. It means doing the quieter, harder work of becoming a citizen who can be trusted with complexity.
The work is the match.
The discipline is the match.
The refusal to surrender our moral imagination is the match.
The daily swing toward dignity, belonging, truth, repair, and responsibility is the match.
It means telling the truth when the lie is easier. It means resisting cruelty even when cruelty comes dressed in the colors of your preferred tribe. It means listening across difference without pretending all differences are morally equal. It means reading more deeply, thinking more carefully, and refusing the national temptation to turn every disagreement into a battlefield.
It means defending institutions while demanding that they become better.
It means asking what our power costs other people.
It means remembering that patriotism without humility becomes propaganda, and humility without courage becomes surrender.
This is not sentiment.
Sentiment says the rain will come because the music is swelling.
Responsibility says the rain may not come on cue, but we still have to walk onto the field.
Real life does not give us the clean mercy of cinema. We may not get one final match. We may not get one perfect villain. We may not get one clear scoreboard. We may not get one last ball where the entire future announces itself. Justice rarely arrives in the final over with the whole village watching.
But that cannot become our excuse.
Every day is the match.
Every day is the wager.
Every day we decide whether to show up divided, distracted, resentful, and afraid, or whether we do the harder work of becoming a team worthy of the future we claim to want.
We cannot wait for one batter to save us.
We all have to walk to the crease.
Every day.
In classrooms. In courtrooms. In boardrooms. In neighborhoods. In voting booths. In conversations with our children. In the way we speak about those who are not in the room. In the courage to admit when we were wrong. In the discipline to learn before we shout. In the humility to understand that power without responsibility is not leadership. It is just noise with better weapons.
The rain may come late.
It may come unevenly.
It may not come in the form we imagined.
But every day we refuse to walk onto the field, we choose the drought.
So walk.
Pick up the bat.
Learn the game.
Question the rules.
Build the team.
And when the ball comes, swing.
Not because victory is guaranteed.
Because surrender should never be
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
