Last week's Mittal-Walmart deal is symbolic of an India which is changing quietly. Indians now consume less cereals and more milk, vegetables and fruit. In the past 20 years, per capita consumption of vegetables has trebled in villages and doubled in towns; milk and milk products have doubled in urban and rural areas. The share of high value foods has risen in India's agricultural output from 32 to 44 percent from 1983 to 2003. Cereal consumption has declined even among those below the poverty line, according to the economist, Ashok Gulati's analysis.

I sometimes wonder why I pay Rs 10 per kilo for potatoes when the farmer receives only Rs 3. My potatoes travel some distance, I realise, from the farm to the mandi to my bania, and each person in the chain must get his cut. Still, the gap of Rs 7 seems excessive, especially when the American farmer receives Rs 4 to 5. This gap varies, of course, depending on the commodity and the season, but studies by agricultural economists show that farmers in the developed countries do get a bigger share of the consumer price because their distribution chain is shorter.

Lant Pritchett wakes up each morning and worries about the state of India's government schools. Formerly an economist at Harvard and now with the World Bank, Pritchett is happy that 93 % of India's children are now in school as the SRI survey shows. However, digging deeper into the SRI data, Pritchett finds that 53 % of all children in urban India are in private schools. In some states the ratio is much higher, but urban India overall has amongst the highest levels of private primary education in the world.

In the late seventies I lived with my family in Mexico City, where I noticed that our neighbours would wash the foot path outside their house every day. But we, being good Indians, swept our home, washed our driveway but left the pavement to the municipality. As a result, the walkway outside our neighbours' homes sparkled proudly while ours remained dirty and sad. It didn't take long before we felt ashamed and followed the good ways of our neighbours.

There were many smiling Indian faces last week. Our economy again beat forecasts and grew 8.9% in the April-June quarter. India's economic rise bewilders Indians. No one quite understands why this noisy and chaotic democracy of a billion people has become one of the world's fastest growing economies. This is the fourth year we are looking at around 8% growth, and this follows 22 years of very respectable 6% annual growth. With 25 years of high growth per capita income gains have been huge: from $1,178 in 1980 to $3,051 in 2005 (in ppp).

Train journeys have increasingly become a part of my life. My ancient mother had been ailing in an ashram on the banks of the Beas River in Punjab, and I would try to visit her as often as I could. But she was 91 and age finally caught up with her. She passed away one night after living a life that I expect was better than that of most of my countrymen.

One ought to read a great book twice, at least. When I first read Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace I was too young. I was only interested in the plot and the relationships between Natasha, Andrei, and Pierre. When I read it again in my forties, I was deeply moved by its moral concerns. I realised that the novel is really about the way we deceive ourselves, how we are false to others, how we oppress fellow human beings, and how we're deeply unjust in our day to day lives. Most of this moral blindness seems man-made and avoidable. It makes one wonder if this is an intractable human condition, or can we change it?

When I heard two weeks ago that one Sanjay Singal, chairman of Bhushan Power and Steel, had bought a one acre plot on 4 Amrita Shergill Marg in New Delhi for Rs 137 crores, I wanted to rush up to him and say to him, 'Now that you have one of India's most prized properties, do select a great architect to build your home. For god's sake, let's not have another cut-and-paste job. Your building ought to symbolise the rise of a new age in India after the reforms, and millions will remember you for having captured a great moment in our history.' For good architecture has the amazing ability to represent the life of the times in our imagination.