India calling

You wonder whether you should flush. That old Indian culture clash between the ‘have’ of having a hotel loo to pull the lever on, and the ‘have not’ of sitting on a dusty side street waiting for a passing rupee, sustains.

I am at a conference here in New Delhi. The sun glistens on the waters of the infinity pool below my window. And yet from the same vantage point I can see the bustle and throng on the street beyond. One fence between ostentatious excess and un-missable deprivation.

I read this week that India now has 125,000 millionaires, but it has 600 million of the most impoverished people on the face of the earth. I read this in the context of the UK’s Aid budget which makes a priority target of these very people.

It is this UK/India relationship that we who are meeting here, are focussing on this weekend. I wonder too whether we could not have done this via video conferencing. Strangely, the intensity of human deliberation still outsmarts what is possible on a video link. It’s those one to one dialogues that the camera fails to facilitate that often add most sharply to understanding.

I first came here by bus. I was a driver on a commonwealth Expedition (COMEX) in 1969. We took six weeks to get here. The arrival was gradual, natural, reflected in the way the bread changed from upright Hovis, via baguettes, to dead flat chapattis.

Flying here in eight hours, the culture shock is sharper. The heaving masses at the airport gates, the rackety traffic, the dead slow three wheelers meandering in the centre of main roads, the smash ups along the way. The heat, dust and scent of difference.

And here I awaken to the same news, but from a different perspective – Bahrain’s ruthless crackdown, Tunisia’s ex-President Ben Ali reportedly dying from a stroke.

Got to get going. I’ll blog again before I’m back at the desk in Blighty on Monday.