India: Land of Living Traditions. Alistair Shearer

      India is not just another country—it is an extraordinary adventure. Nowhere else has the same power to ravage the senses, strain the credibility, expand the mind and open the heart as this teeming kaleidoscope of seeming contradictions, a land full of contrasts as legion as they are legendary. It is the living museum of the human mind; to journey here is to time travel among sights, beliefs and practices that have long since disappeared elsewhere. Nothing is hidden in India. She is the land of dreams and tales, where travelling storytellers still mesmerize their village audiences, yet she is simultaneously the world’s biggest inventor of sophisticated computer software. A fabulous, ancient and stately civilisation, where respected feudal rulers still live in palaces and millions hold the cow sacred, India somehow manages to be the world’s largest democracy, which, while only 52 per cent literate, contains the world’s second largest pool of trained scientists and engineers.

      Everywhere one looks in India, time-hallowed tradition meets the twenty-first century head-on in a dizzying cocktail of intense impressions. Peacocks sit imperiously atop satellite dishes; elephants and cows cause good-natured traffic jams; processions of naked ascetics amble past crowded cybercafes. All humanity seems to be on the move on India’s roads, where the latest Mercedes jostles with wooden bullock-carts designed five thousand years ago and painted trucks, vertiginously laden, lurch past brilliant swathes of cotton, silk and chillies spread out to dry in the scorching sun beneath impossible tangles of telephone wires. The city streets, sizzling with entrepreneurial energy, are packed with people, yet beyond the cities lie the somnolent villages where seven out of every ten Indians live and time hangs suspended; beyond them again stretch tranquil forests and silent deserts where wild animals still reign.