India needs reforms, not a super babu

We were at Checkpoint Charlie. There it was, in real life no more than an unimpressive white prefabricated cabin with a grey slanting roof straddling the famous crossing in the Berlin Wall that had come to symbolise the Cold War. This is where spies were swapped on smoky, rain-washed evenings; a gap in the Iron Curtain immortalised by writers of brooding yet brilliant fiction like John le Carre. Just in case those crossing Checkpoint Charlie from West Berlin into East Berlin were unaware of their passage from ‘freedom’ into ‘servitude’, a large board had been put up for their benefit: “You are leaving the American sector.” These six words were repeated in Russian and French. In brief, you had been warned.

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