I really, really want to know how that's going to be done. It was 15 years, half a generation, after Shiva Naipaul that Dalrymple wrote about Laloo's Bihar in Granta. The shacks expand into slums. The slums are surrounded by garbage heaps. Goats, pigs, dogs and children compete for scraps of food.
Open sewers line the road.
Naipaul or Dalrymple, take your pick. This is the empire that a Laloo determined to stay in his chair presides over. This is the hell that he and his equally venal predecessors have built in Bihar. If in 1982, Naipaul saw a dying state in Bihar, it must be in some kind of grave today. That thought is what fascinates me.