All aboard the Varanasi time machine
Of all the current nations in existence, it is perhaps India that has the best claim to an uninterrupted link to its ancient past. Both Egypt and Iran lost something of their origins in their conversion to Islam, as did Greece and Rome with Christianity. China certainly retains real connections with two millennia ago, in its written language and philosophies such as Confucianism for example, although communism did reject and try to suppress some of what its leaders saw…