A few weeks ago, a very interesting essay hit the headlines. Authored by Yasheng Huang and
Tarun Khanna, I had, like many other India and China watchers, eluded to it in an earlier posting. The essay essentially argued India will surge ahead on the back of democracy and the institutions it has built over the years. Quite honestly, the theory is one I subscribe to. Over the weekend, however, I read another very interesting counter argument in Businessworld. Authored by Jehangir Pocha, a journalist of Indian origin based out of Beijing, Pocha has argued that India's isolation from the great wars and revolutions of the 20th century meant that much of the thinking that ossified Indian society in earlier centuries exists even in this one. India knows what it has to do; but not how to overcome the age-old obstacles to do it. Click here for the full essay.

Been reading up a story first published in October 1959 on India. Can't quite help, but feel amazed. The constraints that existed then, the kind of lives our people lived, and the sheer hopelessness of democracy in a country of 500 million people -- most of whom didn't even know India existed, forget democracy.

Daddy always cautioned me
how many rupees it took to get
a dollar; and when I bought my first
Chanel lipstick, it was as if
I might have bought a cow in India.
It was always like that - what I
could have had were we in Delhi.
So that on holiday at Reno Road
he´d hint that Washington was not
like home. That´s why he didn´t want
me window-shopping downtown.
Reetika Vazirani

The lines struck me as unusually sensitive. Unfortunately, I haven't read any of her works, or heard of her for that matter, until she died. Just learnt a lot more about her when my uncle who's now based out of Thrissur in Kerala wrote a tribute to her -- Living in America, Dying In America