This would change tomorrow if the prime minister announced that he wanted change, but he says nothing and his boss says nothing either. They are busy persuading their Marxist supporters to continue lending the government their ‘outside’ support, but surely even the Marxists could find nothing objectionable about radical improvements in our education system?

Aha, I speak too soon! It must be jet lag or something, but for a moment I forgot that the Marxists object to all private investment. This is why nothing can happen even if Rahul Gandhi has himself supported the idea of foreign investment in education.

Nothing can happen in terms of labour reform either and nothing can happen by way of privatisation because these are things that make ideological hackles rise into hammers and sickles.

From Bangalore I flew to Mumbai, our commercial capital, and gazed with gathering gloom at the acres and acres of slums that are the first thing you see of the city from the air. For fifteen years (or is it twenty?) we have been told about a slum redevelopment programme. A huge bureaucracy runs this out of fine offices in high buildings, but on the ground, real change is not evident.

‘Incredible India’ is running out of time and you notice this most painfully when you return from some foreign land.