Having lived in Delhi since 1958 I have some very fond memories of it, before it started becoming a gas chamber about 40 years ago. Very few people now remember Delhi as it was before the Asian Games of 1982. Those games turned the old bucolic and bureaucratic Delhi into a boom town and it has not stopped booming since then. The fixed population of Delhi today is around three and a half crore. Another crore or so people float in and out annually. In 1980 the population was barely 70 million, mostly rural, living in the areas of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh surrounding Delhi like Gurgaon and Noida. Indira Gandhi’s farmhouse, by the way, was on the very southwest outskirts of Delhi. Today it’s south central. All those rural areas have been assimilated into a single toxic zone called the National Capital Region (NCR) and they are fully urban now. The NCR is so huge that when you fly into Delhi you can see the pollution the region causes rising up to 15,000 feet and extending some 200 miles in all directions. This is largely because in 1980 there were barely a lakh motorised vehicles. Today there are around three million.

The other day I, along with some friends, all in our mid-70s, were discussing the fate, of all things, muscles in an ageing body. Our brains are no longer important.

Should old people wear new clothes? I ask this question in all seriousness because for the last ten years I have been engaged in a running battle with my wife over this. I prefer old clothes. Indeed I have done so all my life. Not just that. I also prefer the same colours — grey or khaki trousers, and a white or grey bush shirt. My determination to not deviate from this was reinforced about 30 years ago. Someone had presented me with a red shirt which I rarely wore. But one day I was obliged to wear it. I had to go to the railway station to bring someone. I was wearing khaki shorts that had been altered from my five-year-old khaki trousers.

Life can be full of surprises and some of these can even turn out to be very pleasant ones. Last month at Geneva airport when I handed over my passport to the immigration officer, he started speaking in fluent Hindi. When I asked him how come, he said he had spent many years in ­Hindustan. From his accent I could say he was from Afghanistan. But I didn’t ask because that would have been rude. His friendliness was in stark contrast to the usually grim ways of immigration officials. It reflects the unfriendly immigration policies of all governments.

Coincidences have always fascinated me. These are events or occurrences, the probability of which happening is close to zero. In mathematics, the fifth letter in the Greek alphabet, e, denotes this. It means infinitesimal. These have happened to me twice in the last 30 years, one of which happened last month on a flight. But let me start with the oldest one, which was in 1993.

Recently I gave a lift to a classmate in my car. After he got off, my driver told me that this person had held a very important post in the government. I was astonished that he knew my classmate because he had never met him. When I quizzed him as to how he knew my friend, but he, always a man of very few words, said “Driver”. I was stunned. It has never occurred to me that despite all the fuss about privacy laws, the danger was sitting on the front seat and, moreover, behind the wheel.

It was with immense sadness that I read about Air India’s last remaining Boeing 747 making its last flight. Since the aircraft had been phased out gradually and the last passenger flight was in 2021, the event passed mostly unremarked. This last flight was a cargo flight. And thus, something truly great and beautiful passed into India’s aviation history. The plane was originally designed to carry heavy cargo for the US army. But in 1966 the now defunct Pan Am, known earlier as Pan American Airlines, decided it wanted an aircraft that could carry 250 passengers and with engines that consumed 25 percent less fuel than the old Boeing 707. In 1966 it placed an order for 50 jumbo jets, as the 747 came to be known.

Summer is here, more or less. The next 100 days will be hot and hotter. I live in North India where — as I think an Englishman wrote in the 18th century — it gets so hot that when stray dogs chase each other, they prefer to walk. I have vivid memories of the North Indian summers in the 1950s and 1960s. They were extraordinarily cruel. Then came the afforestation programmes surrounding Delhi with lakhs of trees. That changed things. Thus, before the trees grew fully, there used to be very massive dust storms. The Arabic word for them is khamsin. There would be hot winds that would gust at about 100kmph, fully laden with billions of tonnes of dust. The entire sky would turn black-brown and the sun would vanish behind the swirling muck.

About 30 years ago, while travelling on a train from Delhi to Chennai I was able to observe a very Indian phenomenon: all the six people sitting around me knew everything about everything. The total journey time was 36 hours of which 18 were spent sleeping. But the remaining 18 hours were available for incessant discussion on all subjects under the sun.

It’s often said there is an underlying unity in India’s huge diversity. We don’t agree on many things. But one of the few things that we do agree upon wholeheartedly is a strong preference for noise, the louder the better. Our diversity converges around extreme loudness. A few weekends ago this was brought home to me once again. Suddenly, quite out of the blue, a massive thumping of electronic music started up from behind our house. It’s a massive parking lot owned by a massive builder. It’s always full but not on weekends. So the builder has been renting it out to ‘events’ companies.

Over the last 25 years our family has shrunk. But for some reason that I can’t explain, our house has grown from a two-bedroom thing with a large terrace to a five-bedroom thing with virtually no terrace. We only use one bedroom, however. The remaining four rooms are used as storerooms, because, well, they are there. But every now and then, the urge to clean up, especially when the weather is benign, comes upon us and we start looking for things we can discard or, because hope springs eternal, sell. But eventually all the effort results in nothing more than rearranging a lot of junk. It also involves severe emotional obstinacy on everyone’s part. Fights ensue. Sulks rule the day. In the end it’s the whiskey that provides much needed balm.