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A mellow sun greeted us as we rolled into Delhi a little after midday. Eight cities, 8,000km (5,000 miles) and 18 days later, we are back to where we began our journey. It will take time to return to the normal rhythm of life; the rhythm of train life is different.

All of life is a journey, but this has been a truly special one. Travelling with colleagues from all over the world, we discovered shared language and culture. When the train pulled out of Delhi, Yusuf, my colleague from the Somali service, was the first to be surprised. He ran into my compartment and pointed to the ubiquitous neem tree by the tracks. "What do you call that tree, what is the name?" he asked. "It's in every home in Mogadishu. They call it the tree from India." There were many such serendipitous discoveries on our journey.

And then there were our travels into the many Indias, its cities and villages. There we met people and their leaders to try to make some sense of the general elections. I found a clear schism in the way the New India of the thriving cities and the Old India of the struggling villages are thinking.

In the cities, people appear to be exasperated by the fragmentation of politics and growing regional and caste politics. At the same time, there is a fatalistic acceptance of fractured verdicts, messy coalitions and horse-trading. In the villages, the talk is largely about aspiring to a minimum quality of life: a primary school, electricity for a few hours a day, a tar road. So, in the countryside, the general election has become an extension of the municipal or village council elections. Basic needs matter where people have little.

That explains the rousing turnout so far - between 52% and 59% in the first four phases of the polls. (India is voting in the fifth and final phase as I write this.) Old India must have voted more than the New India, as is always the case.

Many of India's politicians fail to understand this. A colleague spun a metaphor about India's two trains - the fast one carrying the rich and the middle class, and the slow one carrying the poor - to the railway minister Laloo Prasad Yadav in Patna, and wondered how the gap could be bridged. In reply, Mr Yadav droned on about the various trains he ran. "There are suburban trains for local people, there are passenger trains, there are express trains..." If it is all about putting together an ugly patchwork quilt of a government at any cost, do the politicians really need to care about the people?

This brings back a troubling thought. Has the meaning of democracy in India been reduced only to signify elections and then tom-tom it to the rest of the world? "In any modern democracy," writes , "elections are a part of a larger set of rules and practices designed to authorise the state, but in India they are carrying the entire burden of society's aspirations to control its opportunities." Because the state fails to fulfil its duties, things are bad.

There are also growing worries about criminalisation and "corruption" of politics in this bourgeois democracy: in many places, we found people talking about political parties selling seats to the highest bidder, usually a rich trader or real estate agent. One paper carried a story of a brand new BMW car being spotted in a garage of a small regional party chief of modest means. The car vanished a day after the story appeared, the paper reported.

It may be instructive to return to Mr Khilnani, possibly the most incisive commentator on the idea of India.

"The conflicts in India today are the conflicts of modern politics; they concern the state, access to it, and to whom it ultimately belongs," he says.

"Within a very short time, India has moved from being a society in which the state had for most people a distant profile and limited responsibilities, and where only a few had access to it, to one where state responsibilities have swollen and everyone can imagine exercising some influence upon it."

For me, I am just happy to be home. On the way out of the station, I looked back to see our train for the last time. I realise I have grown fond of the red and white express: the two-tier meeting car with its green plastic-covered berths, the first class sleeping cars with their musty red carpets, fusty upholstery, a regulation Incredible India poster, a small table, the dark fogged windows and dodgy door handles. As it tore through the night, the sleeping car sometimes rattled and shuddered, but I would usually sleep well. Next day, I would be ready to face another place, another people. I will miss it.

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• - What's this?

Indians have a strange relationship with their past. On the one hand, there is a wilful neglect of it and all it has to offer - witness the decaying and defiled monuments and their illiterate, myth-making guides, the grimy temples infested with extortionist priests, the derelict libraries and their rotting archives. On the other hand, there are Stalinist-like celebrations of the past through insufferably dull and routine remembrances of say, birth and death anniversaries of leaders and events.

The thought returns to me as I walk up to Anand Bhavan, the ancestral home of the Nehru-Gandhi family and Allahabad's most famous landmark. The walls of India's most historic residence are plastered with ugly posters advertising private tutorials of every kind - another pointer to how a shady private sector is highjacking education in the country after politicians allowed the public education system to crumble by choking it of funds. Vendors sell juice and ice cream outside the gates ("One ounce gives extra bounce," promises the Jolly ice cream cart). Even a part of the gate has not been spared the posters.

Thankfully, the neglect does not extend beyond the walls. The mansion where both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were born looks elegant. Small gardens wrap around the house in an embrace and visitors walk in an orderly manner.

Walking up the cool, oil painted stairway and coming out into the long, mosaic-floored corridors of Anand Bhavan is just the beginning of a history lesson on India. The museum points to an engaged first family of India's independence struggle. And the belongings of Jawaharlal Nehru point to a man of letters and taste, almost an unlikely candidate to dirty his hands fighting colonial rule.

There's his foot warmer made of China clay, spare buttons, a cyclo-style machine "which was used by Nehru to print and publish anti-British literature", and regulation Nehru jackets. There's also a glass flask, a samovar, a London motor car licence, an electric shaver, a blotting roller, vinyl records and even a tennis racket. His wife, Kamla's vermillon lies in a small bottle.

The stately study and bedrooms are stacked with books in handsome looking shelves. They point to a man who read voraciously and went on to write beautifully. There's HG Wells' The New World and books on the "wild tribes of Afghan frontier".

Two pieces of memorabilia stand out in this museum. One is a copy of Nehru's wedding card. It announces the nuptials on 7 February 1916 with the words "An answer will oblige" in the right hand bottom corner. It hints at simpler, more civil times.

The other is a conviction handed out to the leader and "11 other volunteers" - the judge sentenced them to six months "simple imprisonment" for "manufacture of contraband salt". (Indians were prohibited from making salt by their British rulers so that imported salt could be sold.) The date of conviction is 14 April 1931. The clinching evidence: one packet containing salt.

I bump into a girl from Gujarat in the museum. Her name is Kumud. She is Telugu, hailing from southern Andhra Pradesh state, but has lived most of her life in Gujarat where her father worked as a geophysicist examining the quality of groundwater. Kumud is studying to be a homeopathic doctor. This is her first visit to the museum.

I ask her what struck her most about the place.

"Oh, it's the sophistication of the way of life they led here. From the grand building to the book-lined rooms, it is all very sophisticated. This is a place where thinking people lived," she said.

What did she think of Jawaharlal Nehru, I continue.

"Nehru worked for the country. Not like today's politicians who work only for themselves. We got freedom because of politicians like Nehru. You can't even compare today's leaders with anybody like Nehru." On the way out I pass crowds waiting to get into the house. Even if Nehru's legacy fades in Allahabad, he lives on in the hearts of ordinary Indians. The crowds at Anand Bhavan say it all.

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• - What's this?

Why did India's Grand Old Party lose the plot in its most secure bastion? As I enter the very last leg of our journey, I pose this question to a group of crafty politicians from Uttar Pradesh. India's most populous state has as many people as Brazil and grapples with more problems than you can ever think of. It also is where India's political heart beats loudest; with 80 parliamentary seats, its leaders and parties can make and break governments in India.

So what happened to the Congress Party, which ruled over Uttar Pradesh for decades since Independence and then floundered so badly that it hasn't even managed to win a state election here since 1989? In 1984, the party won two-thirds of the seats in the general elections here; by 2004, it was struggling to get into double figures managing to mop up just 11 seats.

We are sitting in a coffee shop called The Patio in a musty hotel in Allahabad, a main city in eastern Uttar Pradesh. The House of The Rising Sun and Bring Back My Baby to Me drone on in the background making for strange muzak. For the first time in our travels, the baking heat has deserted us and the sky is overcast. Blue-grey clouds hang from the horizon. The earth is damp, mud puddles collect on the broken sidewalks, and traffic moves slowly on the rain-slicked roads.

The four politicians come from different parties. With his falling curls and a black safari suit, Ashok Vajpayee belongs to the Bahujan Samaj Party of 'untouchables' led by the feisty leader Mayawati. He is a former Congressman - as party politicians are called - who jumped ship and joined the BSP two years ago when Mayawati began wooing upper caste leaders to forge her own magic coalition. Revati Raman Singh of the Samajwadi Party appears to be the canniest of the lot. He exudes a quiet confidence - people here tell me he is tipped to win the seat here. Dr Narendra Kumar Singh Gaur is a physics-teacher-turned Hindu nationalist politician belonging to the BJP, which is also struggling to stay afloat in the state. The earnest looking Chaudhury Jitendra Nath Singh has been a devoted Congress loyalist all his life and now serves as the mayor of the local municipality.

I realise our journey through India is bookended by the cities of its two greatest leaders, both belonging to the Congress party. We began in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, home to the party's spiritual leader and greatest icon, Mahatma Gandhi. We are winding up in Allahabad, birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and its best-known leader who believed strongly in the idea of India. In Ahmedabad, I found Gandhi's legacy all but forgotten; in Allahabad, Nehru appears to be a fading, jaded memory in the maddening maelstrom of local politics, dominated now by a host of squabbling, controversial caste-based parties.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the Congress party, run by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, represented India's early rainbow coalition of the rich and the poor, the upper castes and the untouchables, the Hindus and Muslims and other minorities. Its bulwark in Uttar Pradesh was breached in the late 1980s and that set the stage for its decline in many other parts of the country. The failure to protect the Babri mosque from marauding Hindu mobs in December 1992 truly broke the party's back here. Now it plays a grumpy leader to ambitious regional and small parties. Next week when the votes are counted, it will be lucky to get anywhere close to even 200 seats in India's 543-seat parliament. It will again have to court regional and small parties if it wants to take a shot at forming the government.

So what went wrong with the Congress party in Uttar Pradesh? The three rivals are in rare agreement.

"It all boils down to leadership," says the Congress mayor, Mr Singh. "Here local leaders came up representing their own castes. Look at Mayawati, look at Mulayam Singh Yadav (leader of the Samajwadi Party, a wrestler-turned-politician). Our party failed to throw up a state level leader to counter them."

Ashok Vajpayee, who defected to the BSP after spending decades with the Congress, is in rare agreement with his rival.

"After 1989, Congress had no leader in Uttar Pradesh. After the killing of Rajiv Gandhi, the dynasty retreated from politics. There was a vacuum in politics. Other parties moved in to fill it. And since then the party has declined," he says.

The failure to throw up a leader does appear to be Congress's monumental folly. Now, the party's efforts to regain lost ground here appears to be restricted to despatching the fourth generation Gandhi-Nehru scions, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, to their pocket boroughs of Amethi and Rae Barelli, leaving the rest of the state untouched. The decline possibly also has to do with Congress's centralisation of politics, where leaders based in Delhi do the decision making. This makes local party offices, in the words of one of the politicians here, "post offices" for decisions emanating from the headquarters.

There must be more to just lack of leadership, I suggest, as the politicians prepare to leave. There must be a breaking down of the traditional grassroots networks, a lack of engagement with issues, and a failure to tap into the complex rural zeitgeist. "May be, may not be," says the Congress mayor, "but eventually we failed to throw up strong, local leaders."

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What do you do when your 14-year-old son is snatched by masked men and bundled into a minivan while he is cycling to school? What do you do when you don't hear from his captors for nearly two years? What do you do when shamans and charlatans appear at your door seeking money in return for "information" on your missing son? What do you do when the politicians invade your home, TV news in tow, to commiserate with you, make promises about catching the culprits and then disappear into thin air?

Well, if you belong to the Pandey family in Patna, you pray for the boy's safe return. You visit temples and go on pilgrimages and keep praying. You cry till your tears dry up. You stop visiting relatives and friends and going on family holidays. You shy away from festivals. During Diwali, the festival of lights, you shut yourself up in the room. You cover your ears and shut your eyes, hoping that the lights will go out and the crackers will stop bursting soon. And you wait and wait and wait, hoping one day Akash Pandey will knock on the door and rejoin his father, mother and two sisters.

Akash Pandey is - was? - unlucky to be born in Bihar. In India's most lawless state, kidnapping for ransom has been a thriving criminal enterprise for as long as anyone can remember. Things have improved a little as the present chief minister has cracked down on crime - 66 people were kidnapped for ransom last year, down from 411 in 2004. Nineteen people have already been kidnapped in the first three months of this year. Most of the abducted people return home after paying through their noses. Akash Pandey is not one of them - yet.

There are other kidnappings in Bihar too, like families of girls abducting boys and forcing them into marriage and such like; these have been merrily on the rise - last year 2,735 such cases were recorded, up from 1,689 in 2001. There is no state in India where law and order has been such a major election campaign issue as in Bihar.

We are sitting in the gloomy Pandey residence in Patna's Rajabazar area on the hottest day in the city so far this year. It was from this rented apartment on a narrow lane that Akash began his fateful cycle to school, barely a kilometre away, on the morning of 10 August 2007.

His sisters, Akanksha, 18, and Ankita, 17, join us. Their parents are away. Akanksha, bright and wise beyond her years, begins telling me the story of her brother. It is one of doting sisters, of a young brother who dreamt of becoming a scientist and working for Nasa, of middle-class India's dreams and aspirations and of how the fickleness of life and a feckless state can paint your world black.

It was just another busy morning in the Pandey residence: the children were getting ready for school, the mother was packing tiffin for them in the kitchen, and the father browsing through the morning papers over a cup of tea before getting ready for work.

"That morning, Akash wore a new school uniform, a white shirt. Then he put on a white cap. He asked whether he should wear this cap. He asked me whether he should apply a cream on his face. I told him to go ahead.

"Then he appeared from his room and asked, 'How am I looking didi [sister]?' I said, 'You are looking really smart'. He was so shy, he hid behind the curtain!

"Then he cycled off to the school. That was the last I ever saw of him."

Soon the telephone rang with the news of the kidnapping. A woman was on the line; she had seen the incident.

"She said my brother had been taken away. His school bag and the cycle were lying on the street. My father was shaking as he spoke. My mum collapsed on the floor in fear, shivering."

The police, Akanksha says, worked on the case for three months, before throwing in the towel. The government announced a reward of 100,000 rupees for any information about the missing boy, but nothing turned up. The woman who called up with the news remained the only witness.

Did you get any phone call or ransom notes after the incident? I ask.

"On 24th October, a telephone booth owner in our neighbourhood informed us that he had received an anonymous call asking to speak to my father, and that they would call later. My father rushed to the booth and waited till 10.30 pm in the night. No call came.

"Then we got two letters asking 1 million rupees ($20,000) in ransom. The letters said that Akash was not eating, that he was crying. The police said that the letters were forgeries."

Then came the politicians and the fraudsters, all cashing in on the tragedy. A woman claiming to be a human rights activist turned up to tell the family that the boy may have mistakenly landed up in prison, and she would secure his release in return for some money. Akash's mother gave her the money and the woman vanished. A priest kept on visiting asking for money to pray for Akash's return.

"When my mum called up the priest, he said he would send up "stronger" prayers for my brother's return if we paid him more," says Akanksha.

The Pandeys have no clue why Akash was taken away. They are a middle class family, and an unlikely target for kidnapping for ransom: Akash's father is a government worker and his mother is a homemaker. They say they have no enemies. But in Bihar, people have been kidnapped for as little as $50. People here believe that a section of the police and politicians have links with kidnapping gangs.

Akanksha takes me to the room where the siblings studied and slept. A small formica topped table where Akash studied stands in a corner. His soft toys are stashed away near an almirah. His guitar lies on the floor; and a few medals - school debate wins - hang on the wall.

"He was," his sister begins, and then corrects herself. "He is very fond of skating. He wanted a new pair of skates."

In a framed photograph, Akash flashes a faint smile outside the Taj Mahal on a family holiday not long before he was kidnapped. In his blue shirt and spectacles, he looks an affable, studious boy.

Do the sisters feel insecure and fearful after the incident? I ask.

"Sometimes we do. One evening, we were alone the house and the electricity went off. I am scared of the dark and started crying. My sister told me to stop. 'Just think about Akash,' she said. 'Think of how he must be living. How can we be afraid?'" says Akanksha.

It is time to leave. Akanksha says she wants to stay back in Bihar, become a journalist and give a "voice to the voiceless". Very early in her life, she learnt the first lesson on life in Bihar, and India - fend for yourself, because the state usually only caters to the rich and the powerful. If you are nobody, the state couldn't care less.

But first, she says, she will receive her brother when she returns.

"We will all celebrate when he returns. We will start going out and attending festivals. We have so many plans lined up," she says. "We are confident that he will come back. We have faith in God."

"Now he must be 16 years old. He must have grown up quite a bit. He must be looking a bit different..." she says, suddenly lost in her thoughts and bleary eyed.

It is difficult to stay on much longer. I take my leave and step out into a boiling afternoon. I make my way past grotty shops and rundown automobile garages that mark the road that Akash used every day to cycle to school. Behind me, the girls wave me off. Then they disappear into their home to continue waiting for their brother.

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• - What's this?

I am in Laloo Prasad Yadav's bungalow in an orderly, quiet neighbourhood not far away from the grime and stink of Patna. The capital of Bihar state, which Mr Yadav and his wife ruled for 15 years, is one of India's grubbiest cities. Bihar is one of India's poorest and most lawless states. Yet Mr Yadav has built up a formidable fan following as the country's most entertaining politician with his ready, rustic wit, an inimitable gift of the gab and an endearing swagger. In his latest avatar as the federal railway minister he is credited with turning around an ailing network. And he is a national player too, as a key ally of the ruling Congress party.

"Come, come," Mr Yadav greets us, as we pour into the driveway. "Too much heat here. I am taking rest. I have made special arrangements for you."

Despite the trappings of power, Mr Yadav remains a likeable, earthy man. He proudly shows off his mango trees and an aquarium ("Look! Fish, fish" he says excitedly). He tells me he has over 300 cows and he runs a dairy, from where the hotel I am staying in buys milk regularly.

We are led into a vast air-conditioned guest room stashed with crystal bric-a-brac, glasses, gold painted figurines, ornately framed pictures of deities and assorted kitsch. We settle down on the plush sofas, and Mr Yadav takes his seat in a plastic garden chair. Aides hover outside the room, and a smartly-dressed young boy, one of his nine children, keeps peeping. Some time into our conversation, Mr Yadav is joined by his wife, Rabri Devi, who has had a stint as the chief minister of the state when he was in prison on corruption charges.

It's been a hot and sticky campaign, Mr Yadav says. The heat was "unbearable".

"Every day I was doing 14 meetings hopping from place to place in the helicopter. I would get off the chopper smothered in dust, wipe the dust off my face, and then begin shouting slogans. It was tough. It must have been torture for the crowds too," he chuckles.

Mr Yadav, according to most people here, is facing tough competition from his rival, an efficient regional party politician and present chief minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar. Mr Kumar has worked quietly over the past three years. People say he has brought some normality and order to his beleaguered state: he has cracked down on the soaring crime, securing over 30,000 convictions helped by fast track courts, and built some badly-need basic infrastructure like village roads and schools. By all accounts, Mr Yadav and his party - once reputed for stitching up an unbeatable vote bank of the lower castes and Muslims - could suffer serious reverses this time.

Mr Yadav begs to differ. In a moment of pure theatre, he begins reeling off the names of the constituencies he is sure his party will win - when we do the counting, we find that he is confident of securing nearly 80% of Bihar's 40 seats. People here tell me he'll be lucky to get half of them.

Bihar is a metaphor for India in many ways. What you see here is what you get. Its grinding poverty, unabashed caste politics, debilitating corruption, political gangsterism and lack of governance is on open display. Bihar doesn't care to treat or hide its wounds. Its long suffering people have come to terms with the pain.

Mr Yadav appears unfazed. "We will win, and the UPA government [the ruling Congress led coalition, of which Mr Yadav is a member] will rule again," he says. He appears confident that the Congress's estranged ally, the Communists, will end up supporting a Congress-led government to keep the Hindu nationalist BJP at bay.

We return to talk about his much-hyped role in transforming the slothful railways into a profitable enterprise. The Indian Railways is a behemoth without parallel: it employs 1.4 million people to operate its 14,000 trains running on a 62,000-km network.

Mr Yadav says he turned it around by cutting losses, boosting freight and increasing punctuality. For this feat, he is feted by management schools around the world. More discerning critics say that Mr Yadav has taken credit for work done by a team of efficient technocrats, and some of these reforms were set in motion by his predecessor - ironically the very same Nitish Kumar who now runs Bihar.

"Indian Railways," he says, "will alone defeat poverty in India. We have cut fares by 30% across all classes of travel and we are still making profits. It serves the rich and the poor."

But why did he turn out to be such an indifferent ruler of his own state? I ask.

Mr Yadav is unflappable. He says Bihar has inherent disadvantages: large parts of the land in the north are fallow; regular flooding by rivers that originate in neighbouring Nepal make matters worse. In feudal central Bihar, Maoism has taken root. The state also attracts next to no investment, and banks don't lend money easily here to start businesses.

"Bihar has to leap to catch up with the rest of India. It needs special care," he says.

It is time to leave. As Mr Yadav accompanies us to the car park inside the bungalow, he surprises us once more. An ice cream cart is waiting in the garden, and he orders a round for all us. He does not have one, because he is watching his weight. Do you have the cart permanently stationed in your house, I muse. "No, no," he says, with a mischievous grin. "I got the ice cream man from outside the zoological gardens for you people today."

There is no end of mirth in Mr Yadav's company. He lets us in on a secret before we leave. "A few nights ago I had a dream," he says, bursting into laughter. "I dreamt that I was getting married for the second time. My wife would be angry if she heard about it." If wit alone could help win elections, Mr Yadav would have ruled Bihar all his life.

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• - What's this?

These days, Buddhadev Bhattacharyya is translating a novel into his native language, Bengali. This when he finds time after his onerous duties as the head of the world's longest running democratically elected Communist government in India's West Bengal state. This is the third Marquez novel he is translating; the one he worked on last was . Bhattacharyya is also raving about the writings of , the Portuguese Communist and Nobel-prize winning author. "Have you read ?" he asks, when I meet him on warm summer morning in Kolkata. "It's amazing."

Mr Bhattacharyya is an unusual apparatchik. Years ago, he was derided by his critics as a "tinpot Stalinist" for his stuffy, impervious ways and a rather hostile relationship with the media. He had told me then that the journalists had "misunderstood" him, his eyes welling up. Today, he courts the media with a flourish, talks openly about the mistakes made by Communists in the past, and about the need for both foreign and domestic investment to bring more jobs to his state.

We are sitting with him in a large functional room in Kolkata's Communist party headquarters located on a sliver of a lane, not far away from the place where Mother Teresa lived and worked. Portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Ho Chin Minh adorn its pale white walls. A rather sharp bust of Lenin looks down over a heap of undistributed party literature stacked on the floor and a bin overflowing with cigarette butts and paper tea cups. The room brings back a flood of memories; of the many afternoons spent listening to the apparatchiki holding forth on dialectical materialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and other Marxist arcana over a regular supply of lemon tea.

Mr Bhattacharyya is 65, and an archetypal Bengali. He speaks softly, but he is argumentative. Like a good Bengali, he loves food, reminiscing about the "oh, so tasty and hot" crab soup in a coconut he had in Hanoi to a colleague from our Vietnamese service. He also writes plays with mixed results, and is a film buff. A month ago, he says, he saw an old Michael Moore film on downsizing. "Amazing," he says, again. He is also a hard working Communist.

Mr Bhattacharyya is a spirited defender of his much-maligned state, which in the past had been crippled by reckless trade unionism, flight of capital and deindustrialisation. He goes looking for positives. Bengal's four per cent farm growth rate, he says, is the highest in India. The state is India's rice bowl, and among its top vegetable producers. And, as many Communist leaders love to point out, there are no instances of farmers committing suicides here, unlike other parts of the country.

But for the last year or so, Mr Bhattacharyya's mission to industrialise this primarily rural state appears to have run aground, after . The Communist Party of India (Marxist) initiated far-reaching land reforms here after it took power in 1977; today, Mr Bhattacharyya says, 84% of the farmlands in Bengal belong to the poor and marginal farmers. The people, in return, gave a near blank cheque to the Communists to rule over their lives.

I ask him where he goes from here. If the farmers are refusing to part with their land, how do factories come up and provide the jobs that Bengal so desperately needs?

He begins with a careful explanation of land use in the state, and the dilemma facing the government.

Some 63% of the total land here belongs to farmers, Mr Bhattacharya says. Bengal is also immensely fertile - only one percent of its land is fallow, compared to the national average of 11% for fallow land. Another 13% of the land is covered by forests that cannot be touched. Existing industry and urban agglomerations make up the rest of the land. Communists appear to be in love with numbers.

"So this is the land situation," Mr Bhattacharyya says. "We have to buy some of the 63% of the farmlands to set up factories. We have to persuade the farmers, give them good compensation and rehabilitation."

But Bengal, he says, needs a tiny amount of that farmland to industrialise. The state has over 10 million acres of farmlands. For new factories to come up, the government needs just 100,000 acres, he says.

"We have come out with a concept of creating this 'land bank' out of four districts in the state. We have to provide food security to farmers, make sure we don't buy very fertile lands."

So fears about land grabbing by the government are exaggerated, Mr Bhattacharya suggests. He rubbishes the idea of Bengal becoming an industrial wasteland with investors running away after the

"Seven steel plants are coming up in the state. Many of them are land bought from farmers. There has been no resistance there. In fact, some farmers gave a red salute to a businessman who has opened one plant!"

Did he feel let down by the departure of the Tata-owned factory after protests at the site, led by his feisty rival, a gutsy, rabble rousing regional woman politician called Mamata Banerjee?

"I tried my best to keep them back. But the irresponsible and destructive opposition forced them to leave," Mr Bhattacharyya says.

"The Tatas have left. But I have not given up".

He says he is talking to a Chinese automobile company to set up a factory on the abandoned Nano site. And he is is going ahead with a petrochemical complex in another part of the state. He is talking to the Vietnamese to set up "artificial hatcheries for crabs and fish". Bengal, he says, is already the largest single foreign direct investment destination for Japan. Things are not that bad.

It is time for Mr Bhattacharyya to leave for work at the red-brick colonial Writers Buildings in downtown Kolkata.

"I joined the government 32 years ago as a young man. Now I am an old man," he chuckles.

"But I understand that old Leftist dogmas do not work today. We need investments, we need capital. At the same time, the market economy cannot be omnipotent. Look at what is happening in the West. Capitalism is not the last chapter in human history."

Mr Bhattacharyya and his party are possibly facing the toughest elections in Bengal in a long time, as many people here openly talk about a need for change. But in the womb of the Communist party headquarters, he is relaxed and convivial. "Don't forget to read Saramago," he says, before disappearing down a corridor to meet waiting fellow comrades. "The Stone Raft is particularly good!"

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• - What's this?

There a lot of jangled nerves in Bengal today. "At 7 am today, Bengal enters the most crucial - and the scariest - phase of the 2009 elections," a morning newspaper here says rather dramatically. It is the second phase of elections in this eastern state, and 17 of its 42 constituencies spread over several districts are polling today. In 2004, the won 14 of the 17 seats. "That was then," as an analyst writes in today.

What is making the Communists skittish about today's polls in Bengal? Two places to be precise. Singur and Nandigram are voting. They make today's polling the toughest ever for the Communists who have ruled the state without a break for more than three decades. In both places, the government tried to acquire land for industry and faced stiff resistance from farmers. The fiasco in Singur ended with the factory that was supposed to make the world's cheapest car, , moving out of the state. And the dispute in Nandigram had a bloody denouement with the police firing on protesting farmers.

Singur and Nandigram have become synonymous with the hubris of, and confusion among, the Communists in West Bengal. They are also, as the analyst says, the "two iconic zones of conflict that have radically transformed the terms of the debate in the state". In both these places, many farmers see the government as a traitor, a provider turned depriver.

The Communists have ruled for so long largely on the back of a rather successful land reforms programme, where land was redistributed among the poor and marginal farmers. Land and food security is a sensitive issue for people in Bengal; the state suffered chronic food shortages and suffered from famines from the 1940s till the end of the 1960s. It was home to a rigorous political agitation over food security - it was even called the "food movement". The Communists seemed to have forgotten this critical bit of history in their haste to industrialise.

In the village council polls last May, both Singur and Nandigram voted heavily against the Communists. Will today see a repeat of that?

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• - What's this?

Returning home always feels special. I am back in Kolkata nee Calcutta after almost a year. But I feel like a stranger in my own city. I am staying in a city hotel this time with my colleagues instead of the family home. It feels very strange.

I grew up in this much reviled city. once told his mother that he was glad to have seen Calcutta "for the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon - namely, that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again". Rough justice given that Calcutta was the first capital of the British empire. The muggy weather did not help - found the climate humid and hot "enough to make a brass doorknob mushy." , who spent time in the city, wrote about the "great bloody mess that was dropped by God and called Calcutta". Much later it was hyped as a - I never quite understood what it meant; I am not sure whether Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre did either. Then it was derided as a "dying city" by a former Indian premier. Kolkata has had to live with flak for as long as anyone can remember.

In many ways, Kolkata has been a cursed city. It had been rocked by religious riots and its people decimated by famine - three million people starved to death in the city in the early 1940s. The partition in 1947 dealt a further blow to the city with thousands of refugees pouring in from its eastern borders. They set up homes in shantytowns which sprung up everywhere; the pathos of post-partition life was mirrored best in Bengali auteur movies. They were also the most neglected refugees: the per capita government spending on a refugee in Bengal was a tenth of the spending on his counterpart in Indian Punjab, which bore the brunt of a post-partition influx.

The war for the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 truly broke the city's back - another wave of refugees arrived. It earned the infamy of a pestilential and putrefying metropolis, full of hungry and dying people on the sidewalks. "In a sense, Calcutta is a definition of obscenity," wrote in his well-known book on the city.

Half a century ago, in the fifties, the city made a brief revival as a destination for business and a robust nightlife. Nightclubs on the city's high street which is called (there are no parks on the street apart from a tiny, unkempt apology of one) with fashionable names like Magnolia and Trincas hosted cabarets and live music. The city was best known for its crooners who sang a mean Billie Holiday and jazz bands which played Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington (Take The "A" Train, was a hot favourite).

I was a child of Kolkata's decaying days. I lived with my parents in Delhi when the Maoist violence swept the city in the early 1970s as idealist, bright young men signed up to a quixotic revolution that never was. It was a naïve, botched and bloody campaign where strange class enemies were targeted - a poor policeman here, a university professor there. It died a swift death as the government cracked down on it ruthlessly. Many of the bright Maoists fled the city for safer climes abroad. They went on to teach in top universities, among other things. I have known many such fire-spitting Maoists turned sedate champagne socialists.

I faintly remember the Communists sweeping to power in the late 1970s as the people voted against the Congress misrule of the state of West Bengal, of which Kolkata is the capital. The Communists have ruled ever since, uninterruptedly for over three decades. Many now quip that the dictatorship of the proletariat has given way to the rule of a new lumpen proletariat in the city where there are simply not enough jobs.

I did my school and college and watched the city go to pieces in the 1980s: studying in candle light as night-long power outages crippled the city, and strikes at the drop of the hat regularly brought it to a halt. Examinations were always delayed and question papers were leaked. In the last decade or so, Kolkata has picked up its pieces and got some of its groove back. To be true, it is a city of faded grandeur, still looking back to its glory days. But it has always taken the punches gamely and held out a promise of better things to come. That is why I keep coming back to Kolkata.

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• - What's this?

is sitting at the head of a table in a sparse room in his residence in a quiet neighbourhood in Bhubaneswar. It's a pleasant evening after days of a debilitating heat wave in the city; there is even a mild wind blowing today.

The polls are over in Orissa, a state that Mr Patnaik has ruled without a break for over a decade. It has possibly been the stormiest time in Mr Patnaik's 12-year-old political career. First, anti-Christian riots in Kandhamal - a remote corner of his state - sullied his secular credentials. Then he broke away from his ally and strange bedfellow, the Hindu nationalist BJP, whom he blamed for fomenting the riots. Mr Patnaik's party and the BJP had been jointly running the government for nearly a decade in Orissa. "Naveen Patnaik supped with the devil for many years,", "till he discovered that the long spoon had shrunk."

As the polls approached, Mr Patnaik stitched up a quirky coalition with two Communist parties and a smaller regional party which is allied to Congress. Yet nationally he has not pledged his support for the Congress or BJP-led alliances; and he is keeping his fingers crossed. Nobody quite knows who he will end up supporting in the eventuality of a hung parliament.

"I see a Third Front or a Fourth Front [alliances made up of sundry regional and Communist parties] heading the federal government this time. My party will not be with any BJP or Congress-led government," he says.

Sounds confusing? But it is not. At one level, Mr Patnaik is a good example of India's growing breed of politicians who are mastering the art of stitching up unpredictable deals, where expediency and realpolitik triumph over ideology. They are taking advantage of the fragmentation of the polity, where smaller, regional parties are promising to douse what VS Naipaul famously described as India's "million mutinies".

I return to the anti-Christian riots and ask why the situation was allowed to go out of control, forcing thousands of Christians into relief camps.

"Within an hour of the violence starting, I called up the federal interior minister, Shivraj Patel, in Delhi seeking extra security forces. He took four days to send forces. We just didn't have them," he says.

"The rioters had cut the trees and put up road blocks that delayed the forces. But I did arrest the trouble makers, I issued shoot on sight orders, and took steps against the perpetrators of the violence. Many of them are in prison.

So did Kandhamal really precipitate his party's break up with the BJP? Mr Patnaik's critics say that the two actually broke up over the more prosaic matter of seat sharing; the BJP simply wanted to contest more seats.

"No, no. I and my party could not tolerate what had happened in Kandhamal. It really changed the whole scenario. I come from a secular background. After the riots, the alliance was not tenable," he said.."

Twelve years after he joined politics after the death of his father and took over his party, Mr Patnaik appears to have immersed himself in the politics. Prior to that, he led a peripatetic life, shuttling between India and US, counting Jacqueline Onassis and Mick Jagger among his friends, and writing arcane books. When I met him at his Delhi bungalow years before he joined politics, we discussed a new coffee table book on healing plants that he had just published.

Does he miss his life before politics, the parties and the razzmatazz?

"I don't have time to think about my pre-politics days. I am so very busy," he says, asking an aide to swat a fly off the table.

"Let us not talk about Mick Jagger in the middle of an Indian election."

The accidental politician has turned into a rather successful chief minister of a state in little over a decade. We return to politics and the elections. Mr Patnaik tells me that he clocked 250 campaign meetings in 15 days braving the intense heat wave which had hit the state.

"People were very responsive and I am confident we will win for the third time. I have the blessings of the people."

He talks about the work he has done for his people: cheap rice for the poor, old age pensions, building, hostels for tribal girls (a quarter of Orissa's people are dirt-poor tribespeople) and wooing investments. He reels off statistics enthusiastically to support his claims.

"We have to bring lots of jobs and revenue to my poor state," he says.

I ask him about the rising wave of Maoist violence in the state. Orissa is the part of India's "red corridor" where the rebels have strongholds. They have infiltrated nearly half of Orissa's 35 districts. Over 90 policemen lost their lives here last year in rebel attacks and two police armouries were emptied out in audacious raids.

"We are strengthening the police, we are recruiting more of them, and we are fortifying the police stations. The Maoist problem has to be tackled on two fronts - improving the law and order and developing the tribal areas", Mr Patnaik says. It is an unremarkable set of solutions, but possibly the only one.

It is time to leave. Mr Patnaik says he is in a rush to attend a meeting. In an adjacent room, stands a bookshelf which offers a hint of his previous life - Dan Brown, Michael Crichton and John Le Carre crowd the shelves. What was the last book he read?, I ask. "Ah," he says, waving my question away, "Where is the time?"

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Once-sleepy is transforming itself. The roads have a steady trickle of traffic even late in the evening. Shiny new malls have sprung up. And during our journey to the hotel from the station last evening we followed a flatbed truck which moved slowly in front of us. Some men were cutting a cake on top of it. Pedestrians followed the truck hungrily, though it was unclear how the cake would be distributed from the moving truck. All this was to mark the launch of a new radio station which calls itself Choklate FM.

Today's morning paper has a story on how residents are "chilling out with branded goods" in the city. Another says magic is "fast becoming a career option" in the city. "If a person takes magic seriously as a career," says a magician quoted in the story, "there is great scope for growth". The smallest story in the paper is about fresh polling at 25 booths in - Bhubaneswar is its main city - today. Polls were disrupted at these booths last month due to Maoist violence, ballot stuffing and voting machine glitches. But Bhubaneswar has moved on.

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In world, it is time for the "summer carnival". Never mind the searing heat, climbing to over 43 degrees centigrade. As dusk falls, Mr Rao's 2000-acre property set in part-wilderness on the outskirts of Hyderabad comes alive. Part movie studio ("Come with a script and walk away with your print," is Mr Rao's favourite slogan), part theme park, part media city, the place is a fruition of the tycoon's dreams.

So the "summer carnival" hits this kitsch town. It's time for a modestly psychedelic light show. The Victorian lamps on its wide and long streets fade in and out, and the faux Greco-Roman sculptures dotting the streets are bathed in green and red neon. Odd-looking floats carrying men dressed as Mickey Mouse and assorted cartoon characters whiz past. It appears that the turnout is thin this evening, but the carnival must go on.

I am standing near a green verge lit up by an emaciated neon Eiffel Tower. A Winne The Pooh garbage vat glares into the distance. A plastic penguin with red eyes is still standing up to the heat. Ahead there are water falls over brightly lit rocks and more paraphernalia. For 400 rupees ($8) a visitor, Mr Rao offers you a guided tour around his kingdom of kitsch. His people tell me the tours are a big hit.

Not far away from the curious carnival, Mr Rao presides over his empire from an enormous glass-walled, wood lined office. His teak and glass bookshelf is lined with Lee Iacocca, tomes on "constitutional law of India" and a book called "1000 Places To See Before You Die". On his right is a surreal landscape of barren, brown hills and opulent brightly lit villas. In front are 19 glowing TV screens, each playing a different channel, including a dozen that he owns personally. "He sits here," an aide whispers, "and keeps a watch".

Almost on cue, the door opens and Mr Rao walks in. He is a slight, bespectacled man in white: white shirt, white trousers, white shoes and white Pierre Cardin watch on his wrist. He sinks into a sofa and invites us to settle down too. Behind our backs, the TV screens are agog with dancing girls, weeping women and breaking news. On one screen, a wizened farmer is holding up a pair of mangoes. An aide tells me it is an "entertainment programme for the farmers" a big hit from Mr Rao's TV stable.

"Tell me about your experiences," Mr Rao opens. "I am very interested".

At 72, he is a very curious man. His questions fly thick and fast.

"What is your aim? What do you expect to cover going round and round [in the train]? So is it the social aspect of India you want to cover?"

Then he breaks into a smile, nods his head and continues. "Are you satisfied with what you have done? Where are you going next?"

We tell him about our journey so far. Mr Rao warms up, telling us about his life as a film producer - "I produced 80 films in different languages," he says. This helped him conjure up his Indian Disneyland mixing cinema and leisure. So he took over this "godforsaken" piece of land, and built the film city. "Biggest in the world, sir," an aide says, "according to Guiness Book of Records".

Ramoji Film City promises "every conceivable type of location from New York skyscrapers to Japanese tea houses, Western streets to airports and railway stations," says a handout carrying Mr Rao's profile. There are also "various locales" to film songs, a staple of Indian movies.

"We love songs," says Mr Rao. "Chasing the girl is common. We need a lot of locales for that."

Mr Rao made his name in the film world by making a weepy hit on a one-legged girl who becomes an ace dancer. He says he has stuck with making "socially relevant films", whether the market likes it or not. He tells us a story of one such "creative flop".

"I made this film on whether marriage is essential to become a mother. How is it possible? It was a flop. I was ahead of my times, people told me."

Outsiders tell me that the film city is not doing as well as it used to. Mr Rao says some 200 films are made here every year. After 9/11, he says, very few foreign production houses have come here to make films. He doesn't explain why.

The business of news excites Mr Rao most. He is the pioneer of regional TV news in India and now employs 5000 people for his news channels. Many of these are not making money during the downturn, he says, but it is all part of the game.

For the past few years, he has been involved in a battle with the state's chief minister, belonging to the ruling Congress party. The Congress party politician has begun investigations into Mr Rao's interests, including a thriving small deposits business. His channels have hit back against the politician, he says, "exposing his misdeeds". He gives us a book that he has published against the politician, a vitriolic compilation of news reports. It is called "The Bad and Ugly." He proudly shows us the 30 district editions of his mass circulation Telugu paper he owns over snacks in a plush eating hall.

"News is my mainstay. The rest of the stuff are all side dishes," he says.

What does he feel about the elections in the state? Who is likely to win?

The chief minister is Mr Rao's bête-noire. It is quite clear that he would love his rival, a regional strongman, to win.

"If I have to be pro-people, I have to fight those who are anti-people. That is why I am exposing corruption in the present state government," he says.

It is time to leave. Mr Rao walks nimbly up to the foyer and waves us off. We cross the "summer carnival". On the way out of Xanadu, we just follow the yellow neon on the street. The huge gates draped in sparkling red beckon us. We pass through and come out into the inky black darkness of a hot summer night.

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In the heart of Jubilee Hills, where Hyderabad's rich and famous live, a smart looking one-storey building is humming with activity.

Men, dressed in white and wearing white and green sashes around their necks, buzz around a reception hall. Framed sayings of Gandhi and Mother Teresa adorn its white walls. "I do not pray for success, I ask for fruitfulness," says one by the saint from Kolkata. In cavernous white rooms covered with paintings of Gandhi, Mandela and the Mother on their walls, there are more waiting men and women, wearing more sashes. Behind the reception is a picture of a thick set man with raised eyebrows, smilingly tentatively. His hands are folded in a namaste, the traditional Indian greeting. Around the corner is a three-dimensional poster of the superstar smiling over a sea of people. It is the only bit of camp in a rather neat place.

I am in Telugu movie star office. The 53-year-old son of a policeman and biggest film star launched a political party last August. Life imitates art in southern India, which has a long and chequered history of actors joining politics. Now, the Telugu star with his (People's Rule) party has become the biggest talking point here.

Chiranjeevi is the latest addition in the long list of movie stars who have moved to a career in politics in this cinema-crazy part of India. Andhra Pradesh already has one formidable regional party launched by a star of yesteryear, which is doing very well. The star is dead, long live the party. Next door, in Tamil Nadu, a former film script-writer is in power, and his main rival is a former heroine, who took over the party from one of the biggest movie stars of India.

His aides tell me that this building is Chiranjeevi's "political office". There is a separate party office in the posh neighbourhood. I am impressed by the slick decor. There is none of the gaudiness that marks many political party offices in India; there are no ugly posters of the star stuck on the walls and outside; and there are no throngs of wastrel supporters whiling away their time. The place has the brisk order of a corporate office, rather than the familiar chaos of a politician's lair. The only poster I detect is the one gummed below the reception desk. "Prajya Rajyam party," it says, "Membership forms available here."

As I settle down in his air-conditioned 'conference room' flanked by a big LCD television set on one wall, and a huge projector screen on the other, the superstar walks in. He is wearing a white shirt and slightly baggy black trousers. He is a dark, thick-set man with tired eyes. "It is fantastic that you people are here," he greets us. "It shows how our party is doing, that we are important."."

Chiranjeevi has spent more than 30 years in the Telugu film industry, popularly called in these parts. He has acted in no less than 149 films. He has played the superhero in many of these testosterone potboilers, serenading and rescuing buxom heroines, break dancing in night clubs and streets, fighting villains with white Ambassador cars flying in the air and trucks blowing up in the background.

"All that is over now," he says, with a sheepish smile. "I am not going to do any more films. My fans may be disappointed. But no more films. I have now chosen a life in politics."

He says he is enjoying it. "It is a wonderful feeling. There is a lot of euphoria. People love me. They are looking for an alternative, a third one," he says. Andhra Pradesh's politics is largely bipolar - the ruling Congress party and the strong regional TDP dominate the landscape.

Barely a year into his political life, Chiranjeevi is already excelling in the art of studied politicese. He talks about social justice, the plight of the downtrodden, gender disparities and taming inflation. His one-liners come quick and fast for bite-addled TV news: "We are the richest state with the poorest people", is one of them. If all this is not enough, he's even promising a "package" of "rice, lentils, cooking oil, tamarind and salt" for only 100 rupees ($2) to the poor.

His swaggering film-persona has taken a backseat. But he continues to cash in on his star capital for his politics in his new avatar of a social messiah. His status also provides him with an off the shelf political base: there are, he says, 5000 fan clubs of his around the state. Once dedicated to full-time worship of the star, they now canvas votes for the politician.

Do people see him as film star or a serious political contender, I ask. Do they ask him to shout out their favourite dialogues from his films, and demand a break dance from him at his campaign meetings?

"No they never do that. You know, the people are not looking at me as a star," he says.
They are looking at me as their saviour.

"For other actors, the film image is larger than life. But for me, my personal image is larger than my film image."

He talks animatedly about his party's chances in the polls this time. "You know, the voter turnout here this time was 72%. There was 17% more polling this time. I think these extra votes will go to our party," he says.

"There is a silent revolution around the corner. I am confident that I will win a majority."

Few expect Chiranjeevi's party to win the polls. But the star exudes a quiet confidence born out of reigning over the hearts of millions of his fans for three decades.

It's not been smooth going, he says. He has been pelted by eggs and stones on the campaign. But "the shower of flowers" has often followed the eggs and stones. One of his rival parties has accused him of "selling blood", he says, with a hint of hurt in his voice. Chiranjeevi runs thriving blood and eye banks in the state - some 70% of the blood, he says, is supplied free to the poor.

"Politics is not a bed of roses. I knew that before I joined. I am a strong man," he says.

But isn't politics in India an enervating profession, campaigning in the boiling heat, handling party pressures, keeping ambitions of rivals in check? I ask.

He nods his head. "I don't find politics physically demanding at all. I used to work night and day in the films anyway."

"But yes, there are no retakes in politics. You have to be careful about what you say and do."

Will Chiranjeevi storm the box office at the recently concluded polls? Or will his performance fetch a minor hit? Many of his fans and political supporters put his photo up on the wall with the Hindu gods in their homes. Like the rest of India they will know the answer in less than a fortnight now.

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It is a warm evening at a vast park in Hyderabad. A brightly-lit faux water fall cascades from the top, and ancient rocks that litter the city are strewn all over the place for an earthy effect. A makeshift stage clothed in white stands empty with flowers and paper strewn on it; the speaker has made use of the podium already. Hundreds of people mill around. Some sit on red chairs around white-clothed tables, tucking into food; other jostle to catch a glimpse of the man who threw this party.

At the epicentre of all this activity, a politician plays host to some 2000 of his party cadres who had helped him during the gruelling election campaign. Polls in Andhra Pradesh - the state of which Hyderabad is the capital - are over. It is time for N Chandrababu Naidu, India's reform-spewing politician, and former chief minister of the state, to relax and take stock. Mr Naidu, whose regional party, has ruled for 17 of the last 28 years here, says he is confident of ousting the ruling Congress this time. (State and general elections were held simultaneously here.)

"After their hard work, I want to thank my main party workers. So I have invited them all here," he says.

Mr Naidu has also invited us to this private party, hours after our train rolled into Hyderabad last evening. It is an unusually relaxed setting to meet one of India's most prominent politicians and a powerful regional satrap.

When he was the chief minister of the state many years ago, he called me to his residence at five in the morning. When I arrived, I found bleary-eyed bureaucrats outside his door, nearly dozing off. Inside, Mr Naidu checked power generation figures on his computer and answered questions cheerily.

His admirers said he was a man in a hurry, pushing reforms, widening roads, privatising state services, shaking things up, talking about electronic governance. He had invited a multinational consultancy firm to prepare a blueprint for reform in the state. He invited me in to a meeting with these blue sky thinkers, where one of its managers in a sharp blue suit recommended a certain municipal tax to raise revenues. "But we've already been having this tax for years!" said Mr Naidu, throwing up his hands.

I was not surprised when Mr Naidu lost power barely four years later, ousted by an upstart Congress leader, who had campaigned in the villages and tapped into the groundswell of popular dissatisfaction with the chief minister's urban bias. The state was drowning in debt, and the farmers were taking their lives, ruined by a drought and unpaid loans. India's first regional reform czar left office a much sobered man.

Now we are sitting at this 'picnic park', as one of his cadres describes the place. It is packed with shining steel chairs topped with red and white upholstery. Mr Naidu looks as fit as I saw him years ago; and in his trademark khaki shirts and trousers, he looked quite the same. He turned 60 last month. He says he weighs 75kg, and looks ready for challenges in what promises to be a tumultuous political summer ahead.

Mr Naidu is an astute, unusual politician for India. He talks about globalisation, trickle down effect and supply side economics. He talks about the development models for Singapore and Malaysia. He talks about how the Obama campaign spent a billion dollars in a transparent manner. Now, he also talks about the need for "new reforms" to bridge the "gap between haves and have-nots".

"We have to create wealth for all. There is the serious issue of the poor being left behind," he says.

This time, he is promising cash transfers for the poor and middle class. I ask him what this promise means.

"Every month, we will deposit anything between 500 and 2000 rupees into bank accounts of the poor and the unemployed. There will be no leakages. Many countries have done this successfully," he says.

I ask him whether he had done his maths. Where would this money come from? Andhra Pradesh has over 70 million people. The majority are poor.

"We haven't calculated it, but we will. We will work it out," he says.

Then he appears a bit confused. He alludes to taxing companies to raise money for the scheme. Then, he changes tack and says existing money could be used for the scheme. Over dinner, I ask him whether he could find the money he needs by cutting back existing schemes for the poor.

"Sure, why not?" he said.

I felt Mr Naidu was treading a political and economic minefield with his favourite scheme.

It was time to leave. He had eaten very little during the dinner, nibbling into some bread and fruit. He said he had to leave town early next morning. He was taking a well-deserved holiday with family. "After a long, long time," says Mr Naidu, before making his way out of the park hemmed in by a posse of security guards. He has to be back before Delhi beckoned after the votes are counted.

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The more things change, the more they remain the same. Mumbai has failed India again. More than half of its population did not turn up to vote in Thursday's polls; I am now told only 43% of voters cast their ballots. This is some four percentage points less than the turnout in the last general elections in 2004.

This, after residents have endured dismal governance, floods, train bombings and terror attacks. This, despite frenzied pro-vote campaigns. On Thursday, I spotted a billboard in the heart of the city which said: "To forget 26/11 [a reference to last November's terror attacks], remember 30/4 Voting Day". Mumbaikars, as its citizens are called, seem to have forgotten everything. Lots of them, clearly, couldn't care less.

Our train tore out of Mumbai last night and hurtled towards India's deep south. Early this morning, I was told we were running ahead of schedule. Unbelievable. The catering boys on board cheekily took credit for that. "We fed the driver so well that he is speeding away on the tracks," one of them told me, grinning.

I get some evidence of this when I try a shave on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ express. I am hurtled back and forth against the wash basin as the speeding carriage shakes and rattles. I am bounced back to the door. The foam and razor go flying in the air. Washrooms in India's express trains should come with safety belts.

Our next stop is Hyderabad, the pride and shame of India. It is the city of India's info-tech and tinsel dreams - they make great software and hit movies in the Telugu language. Bollywood filmmakers love to remake Hyderabad movies. It is also now home to Satyam, India's biggest corporate fraud - the owner of the one of the top software companies is facing the heat after he allegedly stole from the company and cooked his books.

The earth turns browner and drier as we head south. We pass Maharashtra's bustling small towns, and in one, Solapur, our train gets a good scrubbing. Men in green overalls hose it down. As we roll out of Solapur, I see men crossing the tracks and a few squatting uncomfortably close to check out our train. Then we pass a burial ground and some women in brightly coloured saris entering a hole in the wall to get into the neighbourhood across the tracks. There is no end to short cuts in India.

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