Thoughts for the Day

"But where Delhi was unique was that, scattered all around the city, there were human ruins too. Somehow different areas of Delhi seemed to have preserved intact different centuries, even different millennia. The Punjabi immigrants were a touchstone to the present day; with their nippy Maruti cars and fascination with all things new, they formed a lifeline to the 1980s. The old majors you would meet strolling in the Lodhi Gardens were pickled perhaps half a century earlier. Their walrus moustaches and Ealing comedy accents hinted that they had somehow got stuck in about 1946. The eunuchs in the Old City, some speaking courtly Urdu, might not have looked so out of place under the dais of the Great Moghul. The sadhus at Nigambodh Ghat I imagined stranded citizens of Indraprastha, the legendary first Delhi of the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic."

-William Dalrymple, City of Djinns


"China's population of 1.3 billion constitutes more than a fifth of humanity. Asia's population, in total, includes 60% of humanity. Asia's fate is truly the world's fate. But well beyond the sheer numbers involved, there is something deeply ironic about the basic economic fact that China and India are poor countries catching up with the high-income world. After all, both China and India are ancient civilizations that in important ways were far ahead of Europe not so many centuries ago."

-Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty