How can you describe a country that spans from the Tibetan, Nepalese and Bhutanese Himalaya in the north, nearly 3000km to the Gulf of Mannar near troubled Sri Lanka in the south, from the borders of Pakistan in the west, 2500km to the border of 'East Pakistan' (Bangladesh) in the..well, east, and with a magnamonious (yes, I made that word up) population of over 1 Billion people? Answer: you can't. India. There can't be many words to start a paragraph that invoke so many varied reactions and so much imagery: Bollywood, bright hindi clothing, Kashmir and Pakistan, curry, the Maharajas, the sort of music Saif, if you knew him, would famously play in his car, elephants, nuclear weapons testing, the Taj Mahal. But to assign such preconceptions to a country made up of 28 states diverse
... read more