We are sorry Mr President, but unlike you they did not know that India matters. One cannot blame them because some favoured economists of Indian origin working in America still find it difficult to recognise all this and for them, even in books written in 2007, the food and energy self-reliance episodes of India are best ignored since they were a part of the dark ages.

Meanwhile, I must report another episode. An American think-tank wrote a paper and gave it to our prime minister in 1974 which said that India would never feed itself in the long run for as income rises, people eat more meat and meat needs more land. Indira and Rajiv Gandhi took the future seriously and so this was sent to me for comment. We worked very hard on it since this was a very serious argument from our technologically sound American friends. But it turns out that given our arable surface area, water resources and the technologies already adopted by our farmers, even with a steady state population of 1.4 billion, if the rich Indians of that time ate meat like the rich Indians of today, we would have enough grain to feed ourselves.

Occasionally, we bungle but we are a very fractious society, and our bunglers also have to correct themselves. In the long run we are not a problem. If you don’t believe me, ask McDonald’s. In Ahmedabad instead of the McBurger, they sell McAloo burgers with potatoes from Mehsana. That is comforting because if the rich Indians of that time ate like the rich Americans of today the world would collapse. However that will not happen and we will trade with you (buy some and sell some) and our scientists will also spare a little land for jatropha. We also showed the world that when small things happen to a lot of people, the effects can be more than a lot happening to a few people and we call this inclusive growth.

... contd.