Before we talk about the rare good ones — we need to be honest about the environment they survive in. Because finding them is remarkable precisely because of where they exist.

India is not a broken country. Broken implies it once worked and then failed. India is something more precise: a system that has been structurally optimised against the individual for so long that most people no longer remember what it feels like to be supported by the place they live in. This is not anger. This is a reading of the data.

Two steps forward, three steps back. This is the operating rhythm of ambition in this country. Not because the people lack ability — they demonstrably do not — but because the architecture surrounding them is designed, consciously or not, to extract rather than enable. Taxation that punishes productivity. Bureaucracy that rewards patience over merit. A judiciary so eroded by backlog, money, and political interference that justice has become a long-term investment with uncertain returns.

Covid clarified something that prosperity had allowed us to obscure: family is not a sentiment. It is infrastructure. When the hospitals were full and the government was absent and the uncertainty was absolute — what held people together was not institutions. It was the person who came. The person who called every day. The person who made decisions when you could not. The person who was simply, stubbornly, there.

And then there are the others.

The ones who, in full knowledge of how the world works, choose a different operating system. Who show up — to hospitals, to crises, to professional crossroads, to the quiet moments when you needed someone and did not even know how to ask. Not because they are naive about the risks. Not because they do not know what self-interest looks like. But because something in their architecture is oriented differently — toward people, toward the long term, toward what is right over what is convenient.

To understand why they are rare, you need to understand the three categories of people that move through your life. Because misreading which category someone belongs to is one of the most expensive mistakes a person can make.

What This Requires of You

Recognising these people is not enough. Recognition without action is just another form of taking them for granted — more sophisticated, perhaps, but functionally the same. What they deserve from you is specific.

Gratitude — not as a transaction, but as a practice. Tell them what they mean to you. Not once, not at a milestone, but as a habit. People who give consistently rarely ask to be told their giving matters. They will keep giving whether you say it or not. But they feel it — the same way everyone does — when the person they have been showing up for never shows up to say so.

Do not take them for granted. This is the warning buried in every gratitude post that gets written and then ignored. The rare ones — precisely because they are consistent, precisely because they never make their presence conditional — are the most vulnerable to being treated as permanent fixtures. They are not. They are people. They have limits, they have needs, they have the capacity to leave. And when they do, they do it quietly. Without drama. Without a scene. One day they are simply less available, and by the time you notice, the gap has been open for a long time.

Be that person for someone. This is the one that is hardest to sit with. Because being the rare one — in this country, in this economy, in this cultural moment — requires something close to stubbornness. It requires showing up when it is inconvenient, giving when you are not sure you can afford to, staying rational when the situation rewards reaction. It requires, in short, going against the grain of almost everything the environment around you is teaching. Do it anyway. It is the only way the number of rare people in the world increases.

You will not always get this right. Neither will they. The measure is not perfection — it is orientation. Which direction are you pointed? Toward the people who matter, or away from them? Toward building something that lasts, or toward protecting yourself from something that might not even come?

The system will not save you. The judiciary will not protect you. The government will not cushion your fall. What will — what has always been the only thing that actually does — is the handful of people who chose you. Deliberately. Repeatedly. Without being asked.

Find them. See them clearly. Hold them like your life depends on it.

Because in the truest sense — it does.