If you take into account the fact that India is the second largest nation on earth and do a detailed and analytical comparison with other countries in various fields of human endeavour, you will see that India is still very much one of the most underperforming nations (and getting no better; for illustration, look carefully at China's record in various fields) in the world.
For too long, we have managed to make ourselves almost inconspicuous among the various large countries of the world despite being home to about one sixth of humanity !! And this fact should lend a big measure of perspective and moderation in our assessment of where we really stand. Sixty years of independence ought to have yielded much, much more in terms of nation building than has actually been managed. And 15 years of the so called 'liberalisation' and 'market reforms' have brought real development only to the already rich or a miniscule percentage of the upper middle class. This is not merely a 'leftist stereotyped vision' as widely generalised by commoners who are too innocent to understand the intricacies. Every detailed and comparative survey on the economy using tools such as the 'State of the Indian economy' report, reports of the 'Centre for monitoring of the Indian economy', 'Human development index' reports by the UN, other illuminating reports that are available in documents like the Census records, etc. will show that much of the Indian media has only been misleading the commoners.
