No better way to turn 70 than in the Darjeeling hills

Forty years ago I met a leading industrialist who had just returned from a visit to India, very depressed. He could see no future for a people who seemed to him fatalistically resigned to antimaterialism, mass poverty and the backward, corrupt, bureaucratically hamstrung state of their economy. ‘The problem with India,’ he said despairingly, ‘is the problem of want creation.’

If he could return to India today, he would rub his eyes in disbelief. From the ubiquitous roadside hoardings proclaiming ‘Making a billion dreams come true’ to the shiny new shopping malls and business parks springing up round every city, the world has rarely seen such an explosion of ‘want creation’. So fast is India’s economy taking off that within three decades, according to Goldman Sachs, it will be larger than those of all the EU members put together, overtaking the USA by 2045 and China not long after, to make India the richest, most populous country on earth.

 I recently made my own first visit to India for a mix of reasons. Naturally I was keen to see a country like no other, with its wealth of half-familiar history, culture and natural beauty. More personally, having marked my 65th birthday by taking my two sons up Kilimanjaro (as I recorded in the Spectator at the time), I wanted to celebrate my 70th rather more modestly by taking them to see the sun rise on the highest mountains in the world, and to track down my mother’s birthplace in the hill town of Nainital. But not least, having recently heard so much about India’s spectacular economic awakening from my son Nick, who is planning a chain of hotels across the country, I wanted to see this extraordinary renaissance at first hand.