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An attack on India’s future

15 July 2006

We were sitting in the air-conditioned tedium of a traffic jam close to that great monument to the Raj, the Gateway of India, where soldiers and civil servants arrived and departed in the closing years of the Imperial age. Outside, the evening crowds pulsed homewards. A group of eunuchs dressed in bright saris advanced towards the waterfront bickering loudly. Nobody seemed to pay them the slightest attention.

‘Do you see all of those people out there?’ my guide asked. She pointed a slender, well-manicured finger in the direction of the teeming crowds. ‘They don’t know how lucky they are. Ah how lucky! To be born in this place and time.’

She was the wife of a close friend and had been given the thankless task of showing the visitor around Bombay (now Mumbai) while her husband participated in the city’s great unifying purpose, the pursuit of wealth. And at that particular moment, after several days spent enduring the city’s bustle, I could do nothing but agree; not because I had been battered into submission by the force of the city’s energy, but because she was undoubtedly right.

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