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Monday 8 September 2008

No better way to turn 70 than in the Darjeeling hills

Christopher Booker launches his eighth decade in India with a spot of street cricket, a return to his mother’s birthplace and a salute to a country reclaiming its historical pre-eminence

With thanks also to the Raj, I was grateful to my mother for being born by the beautiful Lake Nainital near the India-Nepal border, because it gave us a memorable walk along a wooded ridge up to a 9,000-foot peaklet against the spectacular backdrop of Nanda Devi and the snows of the high Himalayas, with troops of grey langur monkeys swinging through the deodars and giant rhododendron trees. Thanks to Google, Nick’s BlackBerry and some 2002 election papers on the net, we were able to identify Oak Cottage, where my mother entered the world, as it is now the home of a fierce lady Hindu nationalist politician. The charming girl students living in a hostel in her garden dream of becoming software designers.

Rising before dawn in the more famous hill resort of Darjeeling, I celebrated my birthday with the unforgettable sight of the sun rising on Kanchenjunga, at 28,028 feet the world’s third highest mountain, emerging from the darkness like a great glowing jewel in the sky. We then, halfway down the precipitous road back to the plains, spent a delightful hour with Rajah Banerjee, a 60-year-old alumnus of London University shining with energy, whose Makaibari estate, run on wholly organic lines, grows the finest tea in the world (twice recording the highest-ever prices at auction).

Tourist sights are one thing, but quite another is the explosion of economic energy in a people born for the IT revolution. It was Indians who designed the Intel Pentium chip, set up Microsoft’s partner Sun Microsystems and Hotmail and who are responsible for 40 per cent of all new start-ups in Silicon Valley. Since the loosening of bureaucratic shackles in the 1990s, India’s economy, growing at nearly 10 per cent a year, has been roaring ahead in pursuit of China to overtake the rest of the world. Three hundred million of the country’s 1.2 billion people are now prosperous enough to count as middle class, rising by 50 million a year, and 200 million Indians have mobile phones, a figure growing faster than anywhere. Internal flights on India’s efficient local airlines have more than doubled in ten years. Westerners may still be shocked by urban slums and rural poverty, but since 1970 the proportion of the population living officially below the ‘poverty line’ has halved, to 25 per cent.

Nothing better symbolises the changing status of Britain and India than the likelihood that the new owner of Land Rover and Jaguar will be Ratan Tata, Asia’s top businessman, whose industrial empire has already swallowed up such emblematic UK companies as Tetley Tea and what used to be British Steel. As one sun sets, the other rises. Gazing back across the sea from the ancient Hindu cave temples of Elephanta Island to the tower blocks soaring along the Bombay waterfront, where property prices are now among the world’s highest, little Europe seems very far away and increasingly insignificant. As my son likes to recall, for much of the past 2,000 years India’s economy was the richest on earth. After a brief 300-year interregnum — and thanks to ‘want creation’ — it looks as though that day may soon come again.

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