KBS Sidhu, IAS (retd.), former Special Chief Secretary to the Government of Punjab and Editor-in-Chief of The KBS Chronicle, published on 19 March 2026 what is, by any fair measure, one of the more carefully written pieces of civilisational reflection currently circulating in Indian public discourse. The essay, titled "From Dr Richard Alpert of Harvard to Ram Dass of the Himalayas" and available at https://kbssidhu.substack.com/p/from-dr-richard-alpert-of-harvard, takes the transformation of Richard Alpert — Harvard psychologist, son of American privilege, eventual devotee of Neem Karoli Baba and teacher known to the world as Ram Dass — as the occasion for a sustained and serious address to India's English-speaking elites and their diaspora abroad. The prose is controlled. The argument is genuine. The discomfort the essay is willing to name — that India's educated classes often market their spiritual inheritance more readily than they submit to it — is a real discomfort, and it is to Sidhu's credit that he names it at all.
But there is a question this essay cannot afford to leave unasked, and it concerns not Ram Dass but the one writing about him.
The strength of the essay is real and should be acknowledged without condescension.
Sidhu does something that very few writers operating in the register of Indian civilisational commentary actually manage: he allows the Ram Dass story to judge his own readership rather than merely flatter it. He does not use the Ram Dass transformation as evidence that India is great and should be proud. He uses it as evidence that India's own educated classes have become estranged from the very depth they are most entitled to claim. That is a harder argument to make, and it requires a writer willing to direct criticism inward rather than outward. The essay meets that standard at several important moments.
The phrase "success without centre" — which Sidhu uses to describe Richard Alpert's condition before his transformation — is not merely apt as a biographical observation. It is an indictment of an entire class, and Sidhu is honest enough to apply it to the Indian professional and diasporic world he knows from the inside. The observation that India produces "highly competent but spiritually undernourished people" is not a soft or diplomatic thing to say. It points at the same graduates of the IITs, the IIMs, the IAS, the law schools and the medical colleges who constitute the readership of The KBS Chronicle itself. That takes a degree of intellectual honesty that deserves acknowledgment.
The section on psychedelics as "an opening but not an anchor" is also precise. The failure of the chemically induced revelation to produce sustained moral transformation is not only a Western problem. It has its Indian parallels in every kind of temporary ritual elevation that returns the participant to exactly the same anxieties, vanities and self-protections with which they arrived. Sidhu sees this clearly enough not to romanticise the 1960s counterculture or to treat the India it came searching for as a mere backdrop for Western self-discovery. The Ram Dass story, in his telling, is neither orientalist fantasy nor Indian triumphalism. It is something more demanding: a genuine question about what it actually costs to kneel, and whether the Indian intellectual class is any more willing to pay that cost than the Harvard psychologist it is now praising for having paid it.
All of that is well done. But it is where the essay stops that demands attention.
The essay speaks of elites. It is written by one.
KBS Sidhu is not an outside observer of the class he is addressing. He is, by any honest reckoning, a member of it — and not merely a member but one who occupied its upper reaches for decades. To serve as Special Chief Secretary to the Government of Punjab in the Indian Administrative Service is not a minor credential. It is to have inhabited exactly the kind of institutional authority that the essay diagnoses as spiritually insufficient: the authority of the modern Indian state, the prestige of the civil service, the badge of civilisational legitimacy in its contemporary form. The IAS is, in the Indian context, what Harvard was in Richard Alpert's: not merely a job, but membership in the secular priesthood of a modern polity.
This observation is not an attack. It is a structural observation, and it is the kind of observation that the essay itself invites. When Sidhu writes that India's elites treat the spiritual inheritance with "embarrassed half-respect" — that they invoke dharma in public rhetoric while training their children almost exclusively for competition and acquisition — the reader who knows anything about the world Sidhu has inhabited for most of his professional life is entitled to ask: and in that world, what was the relationship between institutional authority and spiritual accountability? Not in general. Specifically. In Punjab. In the years of the service.
The Ram Dass story is powerful because it is specific. Richard Alpert did not simply write an elegant essay arguing that Harvard credentials were insufficient. He left. He knelt. He was renamed. The transformation had a cost that was visible, public, and irreversible. That specificity is what gives the story its moral weight. An essay about that story, written from within the class it is meant to challenge, acquires weight in proportion to the degree that its author has submitted the same specificity to scrutiny.
Sidhu has not yet done this, at least not in this essay.
There is a Punjabi Sikh dimension here that the essay does not enter, and it cannot be allowed to remain unentered.
The essay mentions Yogi Bhajan in passing — one line, grouped among other exporters of Indian spiritual vocabulary to the West. That is a significant compression. Yogi Bhajan was a Punjabi Sikh who built an international spiritual empire partly on the back of Sikh idiom and partly on the basis of claims that the Sikh Panth has never fully adjudicated and which have since become the subject of serious and documented allegations of abuse, manipulation, and institutional harm. The mention of his name in a list that includes Swami Vivekananda and Chinmaya Mission, without comment, without differentiation, and without the kind of discernment the essay itself calls for elsewhere, is a small but telling omission. Discernment, Sidhu writes, remains necessary. It does. And the Sikh community in particular has been asked to exercise discernment about Yogi Bhajan for reasons that go beyond the spiritual marketplace.
More broadly: Punjab is not only an instance of India's general civilisational inheritance. It is the ground of a specific tradition — Sikhi — that has its own theology, its own history, its own understanding of what surrender, service, and truthful living actually require. The essay's language of "India's spiritual inheritance" absorbs this specificity into a general warmth that does not serve the Sikh tradition well. When Guru Nanak walked the Punjab and beyond, he did not teach that inward transformation was sufficient. He taught that truthful living — sachiar, the one who lives truth — was the standard. Not those who speak beautifully about truth. Not those who diagnose the spiritual poverty of their civilisation and call the diagnosis wisdom. Those who live it, in the specific world, before specific witnesses, with a specific record that does not disappear because one has arrived at a more elevated understanding of one's condition.
Sidhu is a Punjabi. He knows this tradition, or knows of it. The essay's silence about what Sikhi specifically demands — as distinct from what a generalised Indian spiritual inheritance inspires — is one of its notable gaps.
The mirror problem.
There is a difficulty that attaches to anyone who writes from within power about the insufficiency of power. The difficulty is not hypocrisy, which is too simple a charge and usually a lazy one. The difficulty is structural. When a person of significant institutional standing writes that the institutions which confer standing are spiritually insufficient, they are making an argument that their own position simultaneously illustrates and complicates. They are holding up a mirror to their class while standing inside it. That is not dishonest. But it is incomplete unless the mirror is also turned inward, toward the one holding it.
Sidhu asks whether India's elites will have the honesty to listen — to take from the Ram Dass story the lesson that brilliance can be hollow, prestige sterile, and the deepest revolutions those that begin not when the mind becomes sharper but when it finally becomes humble. That is a serious question and it deserves a serious answer.
But the most serious version of that question is not the one addressed to an anonymous, generalised elite. It is the one addressed to the person writing the sentence. Not: will they listen? But: have I? Not: will India's IAS officers, executives and diaspora professionals examine whether their inner axis is real? But: has the man who served as Special Chief Secretary to the Government of Punjab — who exercised authority over administration, resources, and institutional culture in a state whose Sikh community has an unresolved and painful modern history — submitted that service to the same scrutiny he is now recommending?
That question is not asked in the essay. The essay ends where it becomes most difficult.
Ram Dass was renamed. What does renaming cost?
The moment Sidhu identifies as the hinge of the entire story is the moment of renaming. Richard Alpert did not just receive wisdom from Neem Karoli Baba. He received a new name. "Ram Dass" — servant of God — was not an addendum to his identity. It was a replacement. It meant that the old architecture of the self, built on Harvard, on academic prestige, on the West's secular priesthood, had been acknowledged as insufficient and voluntarily surrendered.
That surrendering of the name is what Sidhu holds up as the model. And he is right to hold it up. It is powerful. The question it places before every reader who finds it moving is: what, in my own life, am I willing to have replaced? Not supplemented. Not recontextualised. Not admired at a safe philosophical distance. Replaced.
For India's administrative elites — and specifically for the Punjab cadre, in the specific decades of the service, in the specific conditions of that state — the honest answer to that question touches territory that civilisational essays generally prefer to leave undisturbed. It touches the relationship between institutional loyalty and truth. It touches the silences that institutional membership requires and the ones that institutional membership produces. It touches the question of what a person who spent decades inside the structure of Indian state authority — with all that that authority meant, in Punjab, in those years — is willing to say clearly, on the record, without the protection of the elevated register.
Sidhu's essay is written in a register that is elevated. It is thoughtful, wide-ranging, and morally serious in its own terms. But elevation can also be distance. And the specific form of distance this essay maintains — between the civilisational observation and the personal record, between the critique of the elite and the examination of the critic — is precisely the distance that the Ram Dass story, read honestly, is supposed to collapse.
Ram Dass did not write beautifully about the limits of ego. He lost his. The essay that honours him most is the one that takes the same risk — not the one that renders his surrender into a graceful argument for others to consider.
A final and not unkind observation.
None of this is to say that Sidhu's essay should not have been written, or that its observations are false, or that a person who has served the Indian state cannot also speak honestly about the limits of the world that formed them. People change. Understanding deepens. The capacity for reflection is not cancelled by the record of a career. All of that is true and important.
But the essay's own central argument is that the lesson India does not need from the West is the one Ram Dass brings back: that brilliance can be hollow, prestige sterile, and the deepest revolutions those that begin with humility rather than sharpness. If that lesson is true — and it is — then it applies with particular force to the one recommending it. The writer who diagnoses the spiritual poverty of his class and does not simultaneously offer some evidence of what it has cost him personally to see it is performing an act of reflection that stops just short of where reflection becomes serious.
The essay on Ram Dass is genuinely good. Read it. It asks real questions and it deserves a real audience.
But read it with this addendum: the mirror it holds up should eventually face the hand that holds it. And when it does, the question is not whether one admires Ram Dass. The question is whether one is prepared, in whatever remains of one's public life and writing life, to do the harder and more specific thing that his story actually demands.
Not to celebrate the kneeling.
To kneel.
This article is written in the tradition of Sikh public intellectual engagement with questions of institutional power, spiritual inheritance, and the obligations that truthful living places on those who speak of it.