All things of significance come out of Asia

I was nothing but a tourist. India is a vast place, in population, populations, and all four dimensions including time, going back to the Harappans. I’ve just spent three weeks there as a tourist. So, like walking to the sun, you start where you are, walk for ever, and the sun’s still up there where it always was.
I’ll leave the aesthetic, which is another dimension through which India seems to extend indefinitely - the Taj Mahal, the most clichéd example, when it first comes up in its entirety through the East Gate is beyond cliché. I only went to see it because my son and Siraz down the garage said I must. It never occurred to me that a building could make me feel like crying, or seem the only perfect thing in the world. There, seduced already, wandering off into the transcendental in which I absolutely do not believe. (The appearance of the Taj is theatrical, it is revealed quite suddenly as you walk towards a high ogee arch in a screening wall).
No, what most impressed me about India was that wherever you are, wherever you look, nearly everything you see is made there. When I came back and saw Britain briefly with a tourist’s eye, what impressed me was single human beings with self esteem hovering around the hundred per cent mark, accelerating and decelerating their persons across this minute fraction of the surface of the planet in vehicles weighing three tonnes that will do 200 KPH. This is the Jeremy Clarkson universe, of idiot fantasy. You know that Britain manufactures practically nothing, yet has “the fourth largest economy in the world”. You wonder of what this economy consists. Then you realise that if you take all your credit card debts, consolidate them, and transfer them to a single credit provider, then such a transfer, for each average UK adult (excluding mortgages), adds nearly £8000.00 to “the economy,” and the aggregate of such debts is over one trillion (or one hundred thousand million) GB Pounds. That’s how we have the Fourth Biggest Economy in the World. We add up all the negative numbers, and then multiply them by -1. We are doomed, doomed.
In India, performance and speed are not at a premium. There are a few Hondas and Toyotas and a lot of cars and motorbikes made under licence, Maruti Suzuki, Hero Honda, but practically all of the lurch and honk and flow of the traffic is India manufactured and not going very fast, and the 1948 vintage Ambassador, though much evolved, is still the official vehicle. This seems true of most other stuff, televisions a cookware and textiles and clothes and food and diesel generators, so you get the impression that India could be cut off from the rest of the world for a year or two without suffering too much. Well, it would need fuel imports. But otherwise, they could survive. India does not seem much in need of the global liberalisation, the Fourth Largest Economy in the World voraciously asset-stripping their utilities to fund our one trillion personal debt, as preached by Tiny Tony Torture and his Chums.
In India, where one human being in six lives, 60% of all savings are held by people who work outside the formal economy. I don’t know what that means in fiscal terms, but clearly all these millions of people do not work in the “financial sector” or as hairdressers. And that’s the first photo. It looks down from Jami Masjid, and if I’d had a better zoom would take you into a dark ravine, the end disappearing in haze, like something in a computer game, with complex bridges of gloomy wires and pipes and girders bridging between the cliffs of dwellings piled up like natural formations almost as if they’ve been hewn out of a substance half way between mud and rock. These narrow streets are there in every town in India, millions of them, and from a distance they feel almost frightening in their multiplicity, their burden of population, the mystery of what goes on there in its uncataloguable recursive diversity.
And yet, two things. Walk down one, and you are among human beings who are about their own concerns, who do not notice you unless they want you to buy something. You are immediately part of the seethe and flow. The walls either side are stained ochre or grey, dull and gloomy, and there is dust and rubbish of course, though not so much of either, but in among all this is paint and decoration and shopfront after shop front, business after business, palm reading, CT Scans, retailers of every sort, stone masons, a shrine to Ganesh, Internet cafés, opticians, ayervedic massage, a rubber manufactory, bicycle shops, pharmacies, anything you could expect and among it a lot of other stuff you might not.
And the second. I have to quote from memory from Parvan Varma’s book on India because I must have left it there: the average family may well live in a dark hole in the warren of Old Delhi, but they will have room there for a washing machine, a cooker, a fridge, a television, music centre, God, his consort, and maybe a wall mounted fold down dining table. And they will be buoyant. (Varma is more elegant than that, But I have the gist.)
So that’s the strongest impression an idle tourist has brought back from that triangle between the Himalayas and the three seas that meet at Kanniyakumari; the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea; a place where rickshaws have mobile phones that you can hire by the minute to trade in diamonds, arms or bullion on platforms beyond the imaginings of - well, me anyway; where the Mafia is endemic and everywhere, and driving an economy that has tentacles all over the earth; whose intellectual capital in science, technology, IT, and trade is also spread over the earth; where Tata and Ashok lorries are transporting steel by the millions of tonnes over narrow roads; whose diaspora, the NRIs or Non-resident Indians, will remit about $500 billion to the homeland over the next ten years. History moves on to a place where we are not.