Diary – 3 March 2016

Just as the presidential race in America started to get really crazy, I left for India. On the morning of the South Carolina primary, I interviewed Donald Trump from a restaurant near the state capitol. By the next afternoon I was dodging mopeds in a traffic circle in Mumbai. I’d imagined the trip as a respite from the campaign, much needed after weeks of immersion in a world where Bernie Sanders is considered charming and Hillary Clinton is regarded as an intellectual. Yet I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about the race. If you’re brooding about the future of your country, a former British colony is the wrong place to do it. It suggests too much.

The first thing you notice about Mumbai is the first thing you notice about every place the British once occupied, which is how much of themselves they left there. The US spent over a decade and trillions of dollars in Iraq, and the only physical evidence that remains is a concrete embassy compound, some airstrips and a sea of steel shipping containers.