If I Was Born in India: Tiffin Boxes, Board Exams, and the Joint Family

Imagine waking up to the hiss of a pressure cooker. In the next room your grandmother is already finishing her prayers, an uncle is reading the newspaper aloud to nobody in particular, and your mother is packing three stacked steel tins of lunch for three different people. If you were born in India, the first thing you would learn is that you are rarely alone, and that this is supposed to be a comfort.

About 18 of every 100 people alive today are Indian. That makes "a normal life in India" almost impossible to describe in one piece: a child in a Mumbai high-rise, a girl in a Bihar village and a boy in a Kerala fishing town live very different days. What follows is a window, not the whole house.

Childhood & School: The Board-Exam Years

Since 1 April 2010, the Right to Education Act has made free schooling a legal right for every child from 6 to 14. It also requires most private schools to keep a quarter of their first-year seats for children from poorer or disadvantaged families, a rule the Supreme Court upheld in 2012, though states fill those seats unevenly.

• Two exams that shape a life. At the end of Class 10 and again at Class 12, students sit national or state "board" exams. The marks decide which stream you study (science, commerce or humanities) and which college will take you. Families plan around them; relatives ask about them at weddings.
• Coaching culture. For engineering and medical entrance exams, millions of teenagers add evening or weekend coaching classes to school. The city of Kota in Rajasthan has become famous for it: well over a hundred thousand students move there each year just to prepare.
• Three languages by design. Under the "three-language formula," most children study their regional language, Hindi and English. A child in Pune might speak Marathi at home, study in English and chat with friends in Hindi. Tamil Nadu has never adopted the formula and teaches two languages, Tamil and English.

The structure is changing. The National Education Policy 2020 is replacing the old "10 + 2" model with a "5 + 3 + 3 + 4" design that starts with play-based early years. In government schools, a free cooked lunch reaches more than 100 million children, partly to keep them in class. Quality still varies enormously between a well-funded private school and a crowded rural one, and that gap is one of the country's most argued-about problems.

Food: A Country of Kitchens

There is no single Indian cuisine, just as there is no single European one. The north eats more wheat (rotis, parathas), the south and east more rice; coconut, mustard oil, ghee and peanuts change from region to region. What unites most meals is the thali: a round plate holding rice or bread with several small bowls of dal, vegetables, yogurt and pickle, eaten, very often, with the right hand.

• Many vegetarians, but not most. In a 2021 Pew Research Center survey of nearly 30,000 adults, 39% of Indians described themselves as vegetarian, and most of the rest said they limit meat in some way. Restaurants mark dishes with a green dot (vegetarian) or a brown one (non-vegetarian), a symbol required on packaged food.
• Chai, all day. Black tea boiled with milk, sugar and often ginger or cardamom, sold for a few rupees at a roadside stall and drunk from a small glass or clay cup.
• The dabbawalas of Mumbai. Since 1890, a network of lunch carriers has picked up home-cooked tiffin boxes and delivered them to offices across the city. Before the pandemic, about 5,000 dabbawalas moved some 200,000 boxes a day, sorting them with a hand-painted code of colours and numbers. Remote work has shrunk the trade, but it still runs.

In India the lunch box is a message: someone at home cooked this for you this morning, and a stranger carried it across a city of millions so it would still be warm.

Family Values: The Joint Household

Many Indians grow up in, or close to, a joint family: grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts and cousins sharing a home or a building, pooling money and raising children together. In big cities, more young couples now live on their own, but the family remains the first safety net. Elderly parents are expected to be cared for by their children, not by an institution.

Respect for elders is physical. In many families, children greet grandparents by bending to touch their feet, a gesture asking for a blessing. Decisions such as what to study, where to work and especially whom to marry are rarely made by one person alone.

Arranged marriage still accounts for the large majority of weddings, although the form has changed: today it often means families introduce candidates and the couple decides, sometimes after months of meeting. Supporters see stability and family support; critics point to pressure, dowry demands (illegal since 1961, but persistent) and limits on marrying across caste or religion. Both views are held by millions of Indians.

Unique Laws & Everyday Systems

• The biggest election on Earth. In the 2024 general election, India registered nearly 980 million voters and about 640 million cast a ballot, over six weeks, on electronic voting machines. After voting, every voter's left index finger is marked with indelible ink so nobody can vote twice.
• Caste discrimination is unconstitutional. Article 17 of the Constitution abolished "untouchability" in 1950, and India reserves places in universities, government jobs and parliament for historically excluded groups. Caste still shapes marriages, neighbourhoods and politics, and the reservation system is debated constantly.
• Paying by QR code. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) lets anyone with a bank account send money instantly from a phone. In August 2025 it handled more than 20 billion transactions in a single month. A vegetable seller with a printed QR code on her cart is entirely normal.
• Trains as a way of life. Indian Railways carried about 6.9 billion passenger journeys in 2023–24, roughly 19 million a day. Booking a sleeper berth weeks ahead for a festival trip home is a national skill.

Culture: Festivals, Cricket and Cinema in Many Languages

India is mostly Hindu, with one of the world's largest Muslim populations and large Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain communities. The calendar fills accordingly: Diwali, the festival of lights, with oil lamps and sweets shared with neighbours; Holi, when streets turn into clouds of coloured powder; Eid, Christmas, Guru Nanak's birthday and dozens of regional harvest festivals. Many families celebrate their neighbours' festivals as well as their own.

Cricket is the closest thing to a shared religion. When India plays Pakistan, cities go quiet. And "Bollywood" is only part of the film story: Hindi films earned about a third of the box office in 2022, with Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada cinema making up much of the rest.

India also carries hard problems openly: air pollution in northern cities, a low share of women in paid work, crowded public hospitals and big gaps between rich and poor. Young Indians argue about all of them, loudly, often around the dinner table, which is itself very Indian.

Your Country vs. India

Numbers will not tell you what a festival smells like, but they can tell you what a life there is likely to look like. Pick your own country, or any other country in the series, and compare.

Notice the urban figure: by India's own definition, only about a third of its people live in urban areas, which is why "village India" is still the majority experience even with megacities like Mumbai and Delhi.