It is now more than 50 years since we have become a republican democracy. Even 50 years is a long time, and within 50 years dramatic changes can take place in a nation's life. Let me provide one or two examples of such dramatic changes. We know that the most powerful, feared, respected and perhaps the most despised emperor of the Mughals, Aurangzeb, who took the Mughal Empire to the zenith of its power, died in 1707, and exactly in 50 years, in 1757, the Battle of Plassey took place, which marked the end of the mighty Mughals and the beginning of a completely new chapter in India's history. Could anybody anticipate this at the time of Aurangzeb's death? To give another example: on 22 June 1897, London was celebrating Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee with great pomp and splendour, for it was not merely a celebration but also an emphatic assertion of Great Britain's lone superpower status in the world. Across the Atlantic, The New York Times, desperately feeling the need to make the US a part of this glorious moment, editorialized, ‘we are a part of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet’. Again, in exactly 50 years time, in 1947, the most precious jewel would be removed from the British Crown and Great Britain would lose its superpower status forever to none other than the US.