For the last 45 years I have been a journalist. Not just any journalist, but an economic journalist. Mind, not a business journalist but an economic journalist. Someone asked me why I chose this utterly boring specialisation. I hadn’t ever thought about it. But when I did, it quickly became clear that (a) very few journalists knew economics; (b) amongst those who knew economics, very few could write English properly; and (c) amongst those who knew both, hardly any wanted to become low-paid journalists. I was thus rare as a pig with wings and newspapers gave me a job very readily. The pay wasn’t great but the editors by and large didn’t know economics which means they left me alone practically all the time. I could write on any subject. I could write ill-informed articles and, as long as the English was okay along with a modicum of economic jargon, I was the cock of the walk. Not that I wrote nonsense, of course. My father, even though not an economist, knew enough of it to keep me in line. And of course, there was the punctilious girlfriend who would criticise any loose sentence or grammar.

Last month, while looking for something on a high shelf, a carton fell on my foot. Fortunately it wasn’t very heavy. When I looked inside I found half a dozen photo albums. We had forgotten about them entirely. Much excitement ensued as we flipped through the photographs, a few of which were from the late 1940s. Some of the people in those photos are dressed in European clothes, hats and sticks including. Others are in Indian clothes, sherwanis, churidars and all. The ladies are all in saris. Some of those photos were taken in large halls that had animal heads on the wall. I am pretty certain that the photos weren’t taken at our house. My father was a civil servant and never lived in such a big house and there was no question of animal heads on walls.

North India, or at least the part of it that lies to the north of Agra, has invented many foods, especially after partition in 1947. Butter chicken. Kulcha a la aloo, ie stuffed kulchas. Chow mein avec tadka, which was our revenge against the Chinese for mauling us in the 1962 war. (Avec means ‘with’ in French, by the way). Dosas stuffed with kheema, which was a specialty of the Coffee House in Delhi. I think it reminded the Keralites who ran it of their kothu parottas back home. And in the 1980s a friend told me that Indian Airlines even tried putting kheema in idlis. Ouch!

Until last month I was in around 15 WhatsApp groups. Then one day I quit all but six family and professional groups. The remaining members of the groups which I left were hurt, appalled, angry and puzzled. I tried to explain to them that I had left because WhatsApp had brought together on one platform people who I had spent a lifetime avoiding. It is one thing to say hello, how are you, once in about ten years and quite another to wake up each morning to find these fellows behaving as if they know everything about everything. This is true of family groups, too, but as someone said, unlike friends you can’t choose your relatives. Atal Behari Vajpayee had said the same thing about neighbours like China and Pakistan.

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.