At the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, where ghosts of British nabobs look out over the racecourse, my neuroscientist wife spoke to an audience of businessmen in support of Robin Sengupta, a pioneering Newcastle neurosurgeon. He has founded a world-leading Institute of Neurosciences in Kolkata where richer patients subsidise poorer ones. After a morning meeting doctors and patients, he showed us the land where an ambitious new medical school will soon emerge from the rice paddies and crayfish farms.
At the Jaipur Literature Festival, debating innovation with the economist Shailendra Mehta, I told the audience that the job of being the world’s most innovative nation in the decades ahead is vacant and India could apply: America’s slinking behind a tariff wall, Europe’s regulating itself to death, Britain’s deindustrialising fast, Japan’s stagnating and China’s going Ming-Mao dirigiste again. As Dr Mehta reminded me, India was the world’s economic superpower, far more than China and Rome, 2,000 years ago – why not again?
Near Jodhpur in Rajasthan, our naturalist guide, Shakti, showed us a blackbuck ‘lek’, a special spot where smart black and white male antelopes with corkscrew horns gather to compete for the attention of pale does. My new book, Birds, Sex and Beauty, published next month, is mostly about the very similar lek of the black grouse in the Pennines. From blackbuck to blackcock, it’s an enigmatic way of arranging sex.
The last time I was in these parts, in 1982, I was doing a census of a rare bustard, the lesser florican. We found 69 displaying males and urged the government to preserve its grassland breeding habitat.
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