No better way to turn 70 than in the Darjeeling hills

Forty years ago I met a leading industrialist who had just returned from a visit to India, very depressed. He could see no future for a people who seemed to him fatalistically resigned to antimaterialism, mass poverty and the backward, corrupt, bureaucratically hamstrung state of their economy. ‘The problem with India,’ he said despairingly, ‘is the problem of want creation.’

If he could return to India today, he would rub his eyes in disbelief. From the ubiquitous roadside hoardings proclaiming ‘Making a billion dreams come true’ to the shiny new shopping malls and business parks springing up round every city, the world has rarely seen such an explosion of ‘want creation’. So fast is India’s economy taking off that within three decades, according to Goldman Sachs, it will be larger than those of all the EU members put together, overtaking the USA by 2045 and China not long after, to make India the richest, most populous country on earth.