You are right Mr President — India matters. And this is also true of food demand. Being a product of the oldest university of the home of the brave and the land of the free, I am taking the liberty of sending a larger brief on India’s food demand than Ms Rice sent you. The brief is free because average Americans have always been free and friendly with me.

India’s food demand mattered even when it was a colony. In my book, Indian Development Planning and Policy, I pointed out that at the beginning of the 20th century, India’s grain consumption per person was 200.2 kg and went down every five years till it reached the miserable figure of 152.2 kg when the British quit India in 1947. A British econometrician friend of mine, Angus Deaton, convinced me over bajri bhakri and kadi shak in Ahmedabad where I live, that grain consumption is the most important indicator of human welfare in a poor society and so this epoch created perhaps the most severe episode of large-scale human misery, including famines.

You are right Mr President — it is a good thing that food consumption is going up in India. That colonial episode hammered this point home, which is why some of us get upset when others give erstwhile imperialists the certificate of “good governance” — a view that should be appreciated by the people of the country which fought the American War of Independence. The famine episode mattered because our leaders were moulded by it.

... contd.