India

Anyone who has been to India will tell you how hard it is to capture the essence of the nation. I'm sat here twelve hours after getting back to the UK from my latest trip and already the experience has taken on a dream like feel. As Galbraith once said "Everything you know about India is true, and so is the exact opposite"

I think most of us respond to the complexity of India by imbuing individual experiences with some sort of universal meaning. So it seemed entirely unsurprising that in a two and a half hour long bag drop queue for passengers that had checked in on line I should run into an international expert on process optimization. As I pointed out to him later the odd thing is we all still managed to catch the flight.

Railways are central to the Indian way of life. Indian railways employ 1.4 million people.

Yet somehow on all my trips to India railways barely register with me.

This time my hotel did at least look out on to the new Bangalore Metro.

Modern trains, no crowding, quiet and quick. India is changing. My advice is to go now and go again in ten years time. You won't recognize it.