I never tire of telling friends that India is akin to 28 distinct European nations inside a common border—society, lingo, business methods changing every few hundred miles—and not a homogeneous entity as is believed. Ruchir Sharma’s Breakout Nations is unarguably an epoch-defining book—unusual for a comparative study of nations based on ground-level data collected from personal experience. On his conclusions about the Indian north and south, though, I beg to differ.