India turned 75 as a democracy in 2022, and this DW documentary asks how far the country has drifted from the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi and the other founders who built it. Arun Gandhi, the Mahatma's grandson, links past and present, reflecting on the pluralistic, secular state his grandfather campaigned for. The film moves through personal stories that add up to a mosaic of contemporary India: children laboring in urban brickyards, indigenous communities pushed off their land for corporate projects, and caste-based marginalization that persists despite a constitutional ban. Against this, it sets India's ambitious space program and geopolitical rise, along with the country's spiritual traditions and creative responses to hardship. Interviews with activists, workers, and displaced families carry the narrative rather than a single narrator's argument, and the film lets the contradictions sit side by side, wealth beside poverty, democratic ideals beside Hindu nationalism, without resolving them. It is the first of a two-part documentary.