Reflections

I just got back from a two week stay in India distributed between indore, Mandu , its environs and Calcutta/ Siliguri. This is the best time of the year to be in India and that proved to be true this year as well. It was deliciously cold in Indore, Calcutta as well as in North Bengal. The sun was out for most of time so that we had glorious sunny days and crisp cold nights. Life was good as an advertisement says. It made us seriously wonder what we are doing in exile. I most enjoyed revisiting Mandu. I have been there some 22 years ago and it appeared to have not changed a bit. I shall talk about this sometime, but today I want to set down my impressions of India as a visitor. No matter what the newspapers say, the country is progressing. This may be because of government policies, or in spite of them, but the impression one gets is of an energy that we really never saw during our travels across India earlier. Sadly this is more evident in Indore than in West Bengal. Indore gave...

This article was published in Pragati, The Indian National Interest Review. http://pragati.nationalinterest.in/ This free magazine discusses strategic issues related to India. The articles are often very thought provokimg. This article is from its latest edition. The original artilce can be read here. Calcutta, it bears repetition, was once the second city of the British Empire. In formal terms, its decline began in1912, when the Raj moved its capital to Delhi. Exactly, a hundred years later, the West has symbolically snapped its last link with the city, with Lufthansa, the only remaining western carrier to service it, announcing the discontinuation of its Calcutta-Frankfurt flight. In 1959, Calcutta became the first Indian destination for Lufthansa, ahead of Delhi and Bombay. In 2006, the German carrier re-asserted its faith in the city by starting a Calcutta-Frankfurt non-stop flight, declaring that the city had been identified as a “high growth area with immense potential.” The p...