Our hotel in New Delhi was a palace, but all around us there was hardship. Along the traffic-clogged roads leading to the centre of town, families sat outside ramshackle shelters of corrugated iron and cardboard, warming themselves over open fires in the cold smog of a northern winter morning. Around them, tethered goats and wild boars nosed through low mounds of garbage. A certain section of India may be "emerging", but these people don't appear to be benefiting. During the party after the Epica Awards, one Indian ad man told me: "What you read about India is the best PR job ever. The truth is we're still in the 1930s."
I thought the 1930s comparison appropriate, because it brought to mind a famous aspect of Indian culture: Bollywood. Just as the musicals of Busby Berkeley took America's mind off the Great Depression, so Bollywood is India's way of escaping. Actors like the legendary Amitabh Bachchan must earn colossal fortunes and live in a world beyond the imagining of most Indians, and yet they are adored. The Indian press makes our own obsession with "people" look minor. Bollywood actors are everywhere, their every utterance and change of hairstyle reported. As far as I could tell, nobody is jealous or bitter about them. But, as my taxi driver stoically commented: "That's India." Garbage dumps and temples. The misery and the glitter, side by side.
