In these times of interactive journalism I make it a point to read the blogs this column evokes. From doing this, I have discovered to my huge distress a national characteristic that I thought died with socialism. And, this is our uniquely Indian inability to distinguish between India and the Government of India. In those bad old socialist days when I was growing up, the political atmosphere in India was not very different to countries that lived secret, totalitarian lives behind the ‘iron curtain’. We did not criticise our ‘great’ leaders because that amounted to blasphemy and we did not run a tooth comb through their policies because that amounted to criticism of our ‘great’ country. It was a post-colonial time and the chip we had on our collective shoulders was enormous. I thought it had disintegrated with the new confidence that Indians developed after our moribund economy was opened up in the nineties and after satellite dishes ended our isolation from the rest of the world. Alas, the blogs tell another story.

My column on the appalling state of India’s infrastructure, last week, evoked a surprisingly robust response. The chip-on-the-shoulder wallahs raged about how this column is always ‘pessimistic’. And those who are really pessimistic about India’s future said that things were never going to improve. And, that all ‘good Indians’ should and do leave for foreign lands. A blogging battle occurred between the two camps. With the chippy ones taking the Mera Bharat Mahaan line: no matter how bad things are in India, it is a better country than ‘developed and depressing’ Britain. The foreign camp said correctly that this was rubbish.

... contd.