Free Implosion by John Elliott

Acknowledgements
    I’ve wanted to write a book about India since the end of my Financial Times posting in Delhi in the 1980s, but there never seemed to be any time. Eventually my Riding the Elephant blog, which I have written since 2007, provided me with a platform to develop ideas and assemble material that I have gathered during twenty-four amazing and eventful years writing about a range of subjects in South Asia.
    None of this would have happened if Geoffrey Owen and Nico Colchester, then the editor and foreign editor of the FT , had not been willing to break with the convention that only foreign correspondents could be foreign correspondents and post me, then the paper’s industrial editor and formerly the labour editor, to India in 1983 to open the FT ’s bureau. Many thanks to them for launching a family adventure – years later, the careers of my three sons, Mark, Nick and Charlie, have all been linked at various times in banking, advertising and construction, to India.
    Thanks next to Bill Emmott, editor of The Economist , for helping me to settle back in India by giving me part-time jobs on that great magazine (newspaper as they call it) in 1995 and again in the 2000s. Then to Rik Kirkman, who hired me for Fortune magazine, and especially to Robert Friedman, my patient and instructive international editor in the late 2000s, who asked me in 2007 to write Riding the Elephant , which Fortune had just created. Remembering Robert’s constructive editing, I turned to him to sort out a muddled draft of the introduction to this book. Thanks also to James Lamont of the FT for organising the blog, after Fortune had handed it over to me, onto the FT.com website, and to Andy Buncombe of The Independent who quickly arranged for it to move to his newspaper’s blog site after it left the FT. Now it also appears as articles on the Hong Kong-based Asia Sentinel .com news site, thanks to John Berthelsen, the editor.
    Ravi Singh, then at Penguin India, and Namita Gokhale, who writes novels and co-directs the Jaipur Literature Festival, first encouraged me to think about turning the blog into a book, and both of them have kept me focused over several years. She, and novelist and BBC journalist Humphrey Hawksley, have constantly given advice, reading and re-reading long drafts, with Humphrey in particular prodding me into conclusions that I was trying to duck. They both helped with the title, which could have been the name of the blog, though that would not have indicated the line I was taking. I was always tempted to include the words ‘Because of the Gods’ as a counter-point to FT journalist Ed Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India (published eight years ago) to indicate that ‘the gods’ in the broadest sense of culture, customs, and habits are now slowing that rise down. But I’ve had IMPLOSION as a working title for a year or two, and that won through.
    Without Belinda Wright, this book may never have been completed because of the distractions of trying to work in Delhi. She lent me her tranquil forest home near her family’s ‘Treading Softly in the Jungle’ Kipling Camp on the edge of Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh on three occasions. With cheetal and monkeys, and the famous elephant Tara wandering by, and the prospect of tigers, leopards and bears not far away, I did a lot of writing over the twelve weeks I was there – well looked after by Babulal and all the staff. Thanks also to my old friends Diana and Horace Mitchell for letting me retreat to the quiet top ?oor of their home near Newbury to ?nish the chapters.
    I’ve been helped to explore and learn about India by many people over the years, and a lot of them appear in this book. I’m grateful to friends and contacts who have given me their time and advice, some also reading drafts, especially those listed here (roughly in the order of the chapters where they were most involved): Anand Mahindra, Sudarshan Maini and his family, Pavan