I say perhaps, because it's a conclusion that at first seems at odds with much of his book's own evidence, and with what many of the interviewees see in the future. In a generation or two. It cannot last, the inequalities of income. I shudder when I think of that. . . . It will be totally chaos.
Some people think the descent into chaos has begun.
It can't really be explained. There was . . . But Mr. Naipaul's is a carefully considered optimism. What the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt they could appeal. They were part of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India's growth, part of its restoration.