Another memory dredged up from my childhood: I’m sitting in the waiting room at the music studio where I take violin lessons from Betty Dayton, reading a Life Magazine, some spring morning 1961 or so. The magazine features a picture of thousands of Indian workers in sandals and loincloths carrying loads of sand and cement up bamboo ladders and scaffolds. They’re using stoneage methods to build the concrete cooling tower of a nuclear power plant.

On reflection, this says a lot about their determination. I also remember that by the 1980′s the Indian government had begun installing solar-powered satellite telephones in isolated villages dotting the subcontinent, leap-frogging past the wasteful technology of copper-wire land lines.

By the mid 1950′s, Canada had already given a small working nuclear power plant to India to help its entry into the family of nuclear-capable nations. That was when India was the leader of the so-called “non-aligned” nations.

India has its problems, not the least of which is the caste system. They also have so many distinct languages that newspapers and magazines are published in over a hundred languages, and movies in almost thirty (or so I heard from a member of the Indian embassy at a film conference some years ago.)

Imagine how the U.S. would be if we had such things to deal with.

India must be some sort of dynamic culture.