Yet, something is rotten with the way drugs are tested and sold in the country.

A parliamentary panel investigation has found serious issues with the way approvals for foreign drugs are given and clinical trials are being carried out. Here are some of the startling findings:

This is not all. The panel expresses concern over the continued sale of potentially harmful drugs in India years after such products were banned or withdrawn in developed countries and the prevalence of "sub-standard" - 7-8% of total sales - in the market. Is India condemned to becoming a dumping ground for drugs?

PS: The government has now announced an investigation into the workings of India's main drug regulator, days after the panel's report. Three experts have been appointed to "look at the scientific basis of approving new drugs without clinical trials" and recommend ways of improving the way the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSO) works. One report says that global drug makers could also face new US scrutiny following this damning 78-page report.

On Thursday, Aviation Minister Ajit Singh told the parliament that the airlines are expected to report a combined loss of nearly $2bn for the last financial year. Independent analysts peg last fiscal's losses at $2.5bn.

All airlines - there are six main operators - barring budget carrier Indigo are in the red and further losses are expected in 2011-12, he said.

India's biggest airlines - the private Jet and the the national carrier Air India - are struggling.

Private airline Kingfisher has shut down overseas operations, pruned domestic flights, downsized and is desperately hunting for funds. Things are so bad that the government is mulling a proposal to allow foreign airlines to buy stakes in India's airlines to help revive them. But this is not expected to happen soon.

What is wrong with one of the world's fastest growing aviation markets? Aviation and telecoms are held up as leading examples of industries which have bloomed after the unshackling of India's economy.

But in less than eight years the boom is beginning to look like a bust. What went wrong?

Total losses since 2004 are estimated to be around $8bn, and the airlines are groaning under accumulated debts of up to $18bn, according to independent analysts.

Most believe the industry has been hit by steep fuel prices, punishing taxes, tough competition and the general economic slowdown. Airport charges are also on the upswing - Delhi airport has already seen a fat rise and Calcutta, Chennai and Mumbai are expected to follow suit - and flying is going to become more expensive.

Consider aviation fuel, which comprises more than half of the operating cost of an airline.

In early March, global aviation analyst Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (Capa) calculated that a kilolitre of aviation fuel cost 67,000 rupees ($1,247) in Mumbai, compared to 44,000 rupees ($819) in Dubai and 43,400 rupees ($808) in Singapore. India imports the bulk of its oil, so with the rupee falling, it is paying more for it. On top of that, oil is also also heavily taxed domestically.

The situation is not likely to improve in the near future unless oil prices drop, the rupee strengthens and taxes are cut. "There are serious fiscal challenges linked to the slowing economy and punitive taxes, but there are equally serious structural issues with industry and the infrastructure," Kapil Kaul, chief of Capa India told me.

The structural weaknesses extend from quality of air navigation services to adequate inspectors to the way the private airlines are run.

Mr Kaul says the quality of air navigation services needs to be upgraded: airports like Delhi, he says, can potentially handle 90 landings and takeoffs every hour, but do between 50-60. Mumbai airport manages some 30-35 landings and take offs every hour on a single runway. Gatwick manages almost double the number on a single runway.

"Navigation systems are marked by low productivity. There is not enough training of human resources," he says.

Analysts says most of the airlines have expanded recklessly and managed their money poorly.

They point to Indigo, the only airline in black, which runs a low-profile, no-frills, on-time operation and has an extensive network as an example of how the business should be run in these difficult times.

To add to this, many analysts believe, India has weak and understaffed regulatory agencies, and with an economy which aspires to attract billions of dollars in investment, still does not have a civil aviation policy. There is no evidence of any compromise on safety, but the understaffed safety regulator is a growing concern.

India has more than 400 aircraft - flying on both domestic and international routes - and some 3,500 pilots. More than 60 million Indians flew domestically in 2011, and some 37 million flew internationally. Passenger traffic grew by a healthy 17% last year, though it has slowed down a bit since.

On the face of it, the industry should be booming. Instead, it seems to have become a victim of a slowing economy, shoddy fiscal management, punitive taxes, poor management and the hubris of the operators.

Examining data on the economic performance of Indian states during a seven-year-period (2004-11), AK Bhattacharya, editor of the newspaper, wrote that he was puzzled by the data on Gujarat.

Gujarat is ruled by Narendra Modi, one of India's most controversial politicians, who has modelled himself as a no-nonsense economic reformer of one of India's fastest-growing states.

In March, a senior minister of his cabinet told me that Gujarat has been recording scorching double-digit growth, prompting even The Economist magazine to call it India's Guangdong. "Modi Means Business" said Time magazine when it put him on the cover recently.

Mr Bhattacharyya, however, wrote in Wednesday morning's edition of his paper that Gujarat's economy grew by 6.3% annually during this period, up from average growth every year of 3.6% - a relatively low base - in a 10-year period ending in 2003.

"It has seen the most stable of governments for the last several years," Mr Bhattacharya wrote. "And yet, it has seen its growth hovering around 6% for the last seven years."

I wrote a blog post with a link to the piece wondering whether Gujarat's red-hot economic growth was an invention of the foreign media which has been written extensively about Mr Modi's reformist government.

I had also wondered whether there was something amiss with the data on Gujarat in the Business Standard article.

Indeed there was - and I have updated the blog post to reflect this.

Since I wrote my earlier version, Mr Bhattacharya has carried out some crucial corrections in his Business Standard article - the modified version appeared on the newspaper's website later in the day.

He has written that Gujarat actually clocked a growth rate of 10.08% annually during a seven-year period beginning 2004-05. That is obviously far better than the 6.3% growth that he mentioned in the earlier version.

He has also taken out a paragraph in which he wrote: "It (Gujarat) has seen the most stable of governments for the last several years. And yet, it has seen its growth hovering around 6% for the last seven years."

Double-digit growth, of course, puts Gujarat in the league of the high growth states in India. The doubts that I had about it after reading Mr Bhattacharya's piece have now been clarified by the writer himself.

He writes in the modified piece:

"… which are the states that clocked double-digit growth in its gross state domestic product during the seven-year period from 2004-05? Only six states will make that list. On top of that list is Uttarakhand at 13.2%, followed, as expected, by Bihar at 10.9%, Maharashtra at 10.7%, Tamil Nadu at 10.4%, Haryana at 10.1% and Gujarat at 10.08%."

In the amended version Mr Bhattacharya also adds that "Gujarat's story is well-known and shows what sustained growth-oriented policies can do to a state's economic fortunes".

There is a vigorous debate on whether such high growth is delivering adequate social development in Gujarat. It is a point which many believe is valid is for the whole of India. But Gujarat, going by the data, is indeed a red-hot economy.

Yet, the world's most feted cricketer is also somewhat of an enigma - he is an inscrutable man, and has publicly stated that he is not entirely comfortable with manic fan worship.

For all his outstanding records, Tendulkar has been a less than inspiring leader on field, as his spotty record during a brief tenure as the India captain showed. He also hardly speaks his mind on issues.

Seven years ago Sambit Bal, editor of ESPN Cricinfo, asked Tendulkar why people felt he didn't take a stand on issues. "I have taken stands before, but often whatever I say gets misinterpreted and meanings are attached to it," the star replied. He didn't mention what issue or stand he had taken up and continued: "I don't want to go into specifics now, but I felt this is going to happen, so why get into it?"

Mr Bal pressed on: But your voice carries a lot of weight. By speaking out, you could make a difference? "If you know that whatever you say will become a controversy, why get into it unnecessarily?" Tendulkar replied. "At least I feel, okay, there are people who are managing those issues and my job, at least for the time being, is to play cricket, so let me focus on that."

So when news arrived last week that he had accepted a nomination to the upper house of India's parliament by what many believe is a discredited and struggling ruling Congress party, many were incredulous. Sanjay Manjrekar, a former team mate and one of the wiser cricket commentators, said he was shocked. "I never realised these sort of things interested him. He is not one to express his views publicly and this would be a real test for him. I hope he can make a difference in the parliament."

Others have been harsher, blaming the Congress party for cynically exploiting the icon to provide the nation with a pseudo feel-good moment at a time when its fortunes have touched rock bottom and people are feeling low.

It's entirely possible that Tendulkar has changed his views ever since the interview seven years ago. It's also possible that he is ready to step out of his comfort zone and face up to newer challenges and wants to make his voice heard and count.

But he has squelched rumours about retirement and zealously told the world recently that he plans to continue playing for a while - after all, he is India's biggest brand, and with millions of advertising dollars riding on him, he cannot be allowed to fade away with, say, the quiet dignity of Rahul Dravid. Yet Tendulkar has not spoken on how he plans to serve the parliament while remaining one of India's busiest cricketers.

The history of such reputed nominated dignitaries to India's parliament is largely uninspiring. At best, Tendulkar can make a difference by finally speaking out on issues - the utter neglect of other sports outside cricket and the thoughtlessly unrelenting calendar for India's cricketers, which leads to early burn out of talent. It is not going to be easy: cronyism dominates cricket, like most things in India, and nobody, including TV commentators, dares question the officialdom on anything.

At its worst, the god will become a mere mortal in a noisy, partisan, squabbling parliament whose own reputation, many believe, is at a low ebb. So has Tendulkar got his timing awfully wrong this time? Or as analysts such as Jayaditya Gupta say, does he deserve the benefit of doubt?

In West Bengal, the feisty Mamata Banerjee has refused to give her consent to Delhi's water sharing treaty with Bangladesh, put her foot down on allowing foreign direct investment in supermarkets, and has complained that Delhi is not helping her state, which is drowning in debt.

Ms Banerjee has also led the charge against the centre against its plans to open a specialised counter-terrorism agency. She has not only opposed the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC), but managed to lobby at least half a dozen other non-Congress chief ministers against what they call an "infringement on the rights of the states". The Economist magazine calls her the "mischief minister".

The beleaguered government cannot but acquiesce to Ms Banerjee's demands as she is a key ally. Emboldened by her moves, leaders of other non-Congress ruled states are also speaking up against what is arguably one of the most enfeebled governments India has seen. Tamil Nadu's J Jayalalitha is greatly piqued that the centre is not giving her state enough money.

These developments have a sense of deja vu around them.

For long, states have complained of an overbearing and arrogant centre, which defeats the spirit of federalism. They have been peeved by the centralisation of powers by the federal government which, they say, undermines their autonomy. As an example, they point to the existence of the Planning Commission, which was set up to allocate resources to states. They believe that the organisation is an anachronism in a liberalised economy. An Inter-State Council, set up in 1990 to forge a more equitable partnership between the centre and states, held its last meeting in 2006.

What national parties - specially the Congress - sometimes forget is that federalism has radically changed since the rise of smaller, regional parties and the decline of the Congress. Between 1967 and 1989 - except for a brief Janata Party government - Congress held power at the centre and the majority of states. That is now a distant memory: the rise of powerful regional identity-driven parties has virtually altered the nature of federalism. Displaying political nous, these parties support federal governments strategically, extracting concessions, like "lucrative" ministerships, money and projects. For many, this is a triumph of federalism.

But the states are hardly faultless themselves. They are often run by profligate populists. They use their clout with the centre to go soft on corruption cases involving their leaders. They are also found to be authoritarian, sectarian and reckless dispensers of patronage. Most of them have failed to articulate their views on the economy or foreign policy.

Political scientists like KK Kailash actually wonder whether these parties are true federalists themselves. Both Ms Banerjee and Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar state, model themselves as champions of federalism, but have had no "qualms in using central intervention powers to suit the interest of their respective parties", observes Mr Kailash. When they were allies of the BJP-led NDA government, Ms Banerjee's Trinamul Congress, AIADMK and Samata Party - all regional parties - pressured the centre to dismiss governments in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Bihar, clearly violative of the federal spirit.

There is much to blame on the Imperial Centre, as commentator Swapan Dasgupta calls it. He even believes that the time may have come to review the "sanctity" the constitution accords to this centre. While this may be true, regional parties also need to be more responsible and offer a larger vision. Clearly, there is a crying need for more give and take in the partisan and broken politics India is witnessing today. An energetic federal polity will follow.

If TV ratings figures are to be believed, fans have had enough of cricket despite the nine-team, 76-match, seven-week Twenty20 tourney.

Viewer ratings were down 18.7% in the first six games - a time when interest in the tournament traditionally peaks - compared with the same period last year.

That's not all. Season V began on a wrong note with a tawdry Bollywood song-and-dance opening show which even appears to have put off fans. Two top sponsors have withdrawn. Brand and communication consultants are warning that the IPL brand is in "choppy waters", and the league needs a "stronger game plan to rejuvenate the brand". One brand consultancy firm has downgraded the league's value to $3.67bn, down 11% from 2010.

Remember, the response to IPL Season IV last year was lukewarm. TV ratings dropped by 29% and even the final met a tepid response. Cricket fans were savouring India's spectacular win in the World Cup which preceded the tournament, and had little appetite for more cricket.

Why is the thrill gone this year - at least in the early stages of the tournament? After all, this is the tournament which combines the sublime (sledgehammer batting, close finishes) and the ridiculous (Bollywood entertainment, cheerleaders, "strategic time outs" in the middle of the games to facilitate advertising breaks). Indians love tamasha (entertainment), and the IPL is still the best tamasha on offer.

For one, after the song and dances are over, it's finally all about cricket. India is still licking its wounds after a nightmarish international season in which it lost eight overseas Test matches on the trot - its worst run since the 1960s. Though Sachin Tendulkar's 100th international hundred in Dhaka last month was a welcome diversion, India failed to pick up the Asia Cup. Don't disrespect the fan, Rahul Dravid eloquently said at last year's Bradman Oration, and to expect fans to flock to cheer non-performing cricketers at the highest level is a bit fey.

Also, Indian stars are the league's biggest draw, and most of them have been performing indifferently or are absent in the ongoing edition. Tendulkar is hurt after the first game, and Sehwag and Dhoni, two big hitters, haven't fired yet. VVS Laxman isn't playing this season. Yuvraj Singh is recovering from cancer and is out of the game for a while. Saurav Ganguly's batting is past its sell-by date. Rahul Dravid is playing a post-retirement nostalgia gig. Yusuf Pathan, a Twenty20 star, has fizzled out. When the stars are largely down and out, fans stay away.

Fans also seem to be confused about whom to support. The IPL is a city-based league aiming to build up fan bases in half-a-dozen big Indian cities. But when Calcutta's icon Saurav Ganguly, Delhi's favourite Gautam Gambhir and Bangalore's biggest star Rahul Dravid end up leading the teams of Pune, Calcutta and Rajasthan, fan loyalties to home teams can begin to fray easily.

Interest will possibly pick up during the knockouts and the final at the fag end of the league. It may even pick up with more high-scoring games, edge-of-the-seat finishes, and big-bang batting by the stars.

But authorities simply cannot afford to let the IPL crash.

Listen to Sharda Ugra, India's top cricket writer, and you know why. "The IPL has now become a key component of world cricket's economy," she writes. "If it falters and fails because it is not alert to the audience climate around it, the domino effect around the cricket world will be damaging. Cricket's superstar status in many parts of its empire will be downgraded from club class to cattle class - all holy cows included."

So it is with relations between India and Pakistan.

The past few days have shown how fragile the relationship can be - even as India welcomed President Asif Ali Zardari's private trip to India on Sunday - the first by a Pakistani head of state for seven years - and PM Manmohan Singh invited him for lunch, the $10m US bounty for Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, provoked the cleric to openly launch a fresh attack against India (and the US).

But people live in hope, so Indian media is gung-ho about Mr Zardari's visit.

They say the Pakistani president must be applauded for trying to end trade discrimination against India, easing petroleum imports from across the border, and moving towards a liberal visa deal.

"Under Mr Zardari's watch, India and Pakistan are considering a sweeping agenda for economic co-operation for the first time in decades. The prime minister has every reason to welcome Mr Zardari warmly and consider the next steps in consolidating the unexpected movement in bilateral relations," the Indian Express wrote.

Analyst C Raja Mohan believes Mr Singh must make an official trip to Pakistan after his meeting with Mr Zardari. "For his part," he wrote, "Mr Singh should convey to Mr Zardari his readiness to move as fast and as far as the Pakistan president is willing to go." Others like Jyoti Malhotra actually find Mr Zardari's visit to the shrine of a famous Sufi Muslim saint in Rajasthan loaded with symbolism in these troubled times. "Clearly, Mr Zardari has stolen an imaginative moment from the bitter-sullen history of India-Pakistan, by asking to come to pay his respects to a cherished and much-beloved saint across the Indian subcontinent," she wrote.

The relations between two neighbours remain complex. A 2010 Pew survey found 53% of the respondents in Pakistan chose India as the greater threat to their country, and only 26% chose the Taliban and al-Qaeda. At the same time 72% said it was important to improve relations with India, and about 75% wanted more trade relations and talks with India.

Pundits like Mr Cohen believe that it will "take the [Pakistan] army's compliance, strong political leadership, and resolutely independent-minded foreign ministers to secure any significant shift of approach towards India".

None of this appears to be in much evidence at the moment.

Both countries have seriously weakened governments that makes them unable to move towards any radical confidence building measures. In the current circumstances, President Zardari's visit can only be a small bonus. And as scholars like Kanti Bajpai suggest, India must remain patient (even if faced with another Mumbai-style attack), continue to engage with Islamabad, help the civilian government in Pakistan politically, try to resolve a few outstanding disputes like Siachen and Sir Creek, build a relationship with the army and explore the possibility of cooperating with Islamabad on the future of Afghanistan. Despair does not help mend a stormy relationship.

It's an obvious question to ask at a time when powerful - and populist - regional parties are again flexing their muscles at a fickle federal government, key economic reforms are seemingly stuck in the bog of messy coalition politics, and the government is struggling under an avalanche of corruption charges. Economic growth and investment have cooled and inflation remains high.

So is it surprising that The Economist magazine, in its latest issue, says the politics is "preventing India from fulfilling its vast economic potential"?

Or when Fareed Zakaria, editor-at-large with Time magazine, tells an audience in Delhi this week that India's politicians are "out of touch… they try to portray India as a victim, not the victor".

With uncharacteristic exaggeration, The Economist even invokes a return to the stifling days of the controlled economy.

"Lately, like a Bollywood villain who just refuses to die, the old India has made a terrifying reappearance," says the magazine. It blames a "nastily divisive political climate" for the crisis and believes that India requires "energetic, active leaders, plus politicians who are ready to compromise".

Both the magazine and the pundit are right and wrong.

The quality of India's politicians, many argue, has declined drastically, as in many parts of the world. Most of them seem to be out of sync with modern day realities - expectations have fallen so ridiculously low that an iPad carrying politician is described by the media as a modern one!

Most are also seen as greedy, corrupt and disinterested in serious reform. The increasing number of politicians with criminal records and the brazen use of money to buy party tickets and bribe voters erodes India's ailing democratic process.

It is not a happy picture. "Today the Centre is corrupt and corroded," historian Ramachandra Guha wrote recently. "There are allegedly 'democratic' politicians who abuse their oath of office and work only to enrich themselves; as well as self-described 'revolutionaries' who seek to settle arguments by the point of the gun." Only serious electoral reform can ensure a better breed of politician.

But to believe that less politics is good economics is a bit fey. There is little evidence to argue that political instability has been bad for India's economy.

India's first flush of economic reforms was launched by a minority government headed by PV Narasimha Rao of the Congress party in the early 1990s. The reforms spluttered to a halt when the government secured a majority.

Later, a rag-tag 13-party coalition United Front government helmed by two prime ministers in 18 months in the mid-1990s undertook significant reforms, slashing taxes, deregulating interest rates and moving towards capital account convertibility.

One study by Kausik Chaudhuri and Sugato Dasgupta actually found that more investments take place when coalition governments are in power, one of the reasons being various regional interests are held together by "generous distribution of infrastructure projects". Economist Surjit Bhalla has argued that political instability is actually good for economic reforms.

"The contention is that lack of political dominance means that politicians in power will make the extra reform in order to fight for marginal votes in a future election," he has said. "And if political stability is present, the politicians are unlikely to make an effort because of their inherent short sightedness or complacence."

The problem, as Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha and Shankar Raghuraman argue succinctly in a study of coalition politics in India, is that privatisation - a key aspect of economic reforms - remains a dirty word with most of India's politicians, trade unionists and opinion makers.

There is still a serious lack of political consensus on issues like foreign investment, lowering interest rates on deposits in pension funds and privatising profit-making state-run factories.

Public consensus is harder to come by in an awfully unequal society where the middle class and the rich root for further opening up of the economy, while the poor want the state to invest in health and education and check corruption. The elitist biases in public policy is made easier by a poorly-informed and often unlettered electorate with low expectations.

Many would argue that India never got any magic going, so there is no question of losing it.

Consensus is painfully slow in such a society, and sometimes only a crisis can provoke the government - and the people - to bite the bullet. Reformers need to be patient; there are no shortcuts in India.

She grew up in a large family surrounded by the hum of prayers and "religious men with long beards". She got married at the age of 17 to a man who recorded the number of dead at a local hospital before he lost the job, and ended up on the streets driving an auto rickshaw for a living.

After they were married, Noorjehan and her husband, Abdul, went to live in Juhapura, the bustling Muslim ghetto of Gujarat's main city of Ahmedabad, a place derisively called "mini-Pakistan" by many. It is a dystopian township dotted with cramped homes and narrow streets and where residents struggle to secure drinking water, cooking gas connections and small loans.

Noorjehan covered herself up in a burqa, stayed at home, looked after her husband and children like a good wife. Until the 2002 riots changed her life.

A refugee camp sprang up in her neighbourhood days after the violence and Noorjehan decided to step out to see what was going on. That was possibly the defining moment of her life.

"I was shocked when I saw the survivors. I saw a girl and a boy, siblings, who had been set on fire by the mob, die in front of my eyes. There were about 5,000 people in the camp. I didn't know what to do, and I felt helpless," she says.

When she returned home and told Abdul after what she had seen, her husband forbade her to go to the camp again and work there. "He told me I could not work with other men. I told him both Hindu and Muslim were working together to help the survivors. He wasn't convinced. But I decided to go back and help. The camp haunted me," says Noorjehan.

Noorjehan, sometimes carrying her six-month-old daughter, walked to the camp every day to help the survivors with food and water. She even joined a local NGO. When her husband heard that, she says, he beat her up.

For the next six months, the relief camp became Noorjehan's life. At home, her husband stopped talking to her and threatened her with divorce. She left her children with relatives and continued to work in the camps, giving out medicines, helping victims file police complaints, carrying out surveys and nursing the injured.

"I also quit the burqa. I put on the burqa when I married in 1991. I quit in 2002," she says.

The burqa, Noorjehan says, was part of the problem when she went to work in the relief camp. "People would pass snide remarks, the police would shoo us away. The burqa became an existential problem. I had to stop wearing it in order to do my job well," she says.

Ten years later, things have changed radically. Abdul is now a fawning admirer of his wife's work and accompanies her, sometimes with their school-going children in tow. "He helps me, supports me, understands me. I now live to get help, get justice," says Noorjehan.

Women like Noorjehan are leading a veritable revolution in the beleaguered Muslim community in Gujarat, which comprises less than 10% of the state's population. They have defied their husbands and parents at home and clerics outside to come out and work with riot victims and travel to dingy and often hostile courtrooms around the state to fight their cases.

Many of them are victims themselves, but they are waging a war against inequality in their homes and marginalisation and brutalization outside. Once sequestered and voiceless, they are making their presence felt at home and the world and challenging the stereotype of Muslim women in India. "A social change is happening in the community," agrees leading activist Shabnam Hashmi. "It took a tragedy to trigger this change."

It can sometimes look like an uphill task. After the 2002 riots, social cleavages have sharpened, ghettoisation has become endemic, lots of Muslim men have lost their jobs, and school-going boys like one of Noorjehan's sons have had to take up low paying jobs in call centres to support their families.

But they soldier on bravely.

In Juhapura, I went to see Niaz Apa, one of these women. She is 58, and lives with her husband in a 100 sq ft, two-room apartment built by a community NGO for displaced riot victims. It's an ugly two-storey building with an unending row of rooms flanked by a winding veranda. Her husband, Banu Mia, a quiet man with a hennaed beard, is a retired factory worker.

Ten years ago, Niaz jests, she was the "richest woman" in the relief camp, where she stayed for eight months. "I had land, I had a home. But my house got burnt down during the riots, and I sold my land in a distress sale and moved into this hovel, which is now my home," she says with no hint of obvious rancour.

That was not all. Even justice denied was denied to her. When Niaz identified the men who had torched her house in the court - "there were 12 of them, they had grown up in front of my eyes" - the judge asked her to compromise with the men. "He said just go ahead and compromise. Nothing is going to happen. And nothing did happen."

To forget her woes, Niaz says, she now works with the community and riot survivors, going to police stations, courts and cheap food shops. "It's all about securing justice by raising my voice. When the owners of the cheap food shops cheat us, I take up the cudgels. If the police station refuses to register a case, I raise my voice," she says.

"My life is now just about raising my voice and getting justice for the helpless."

In Godhra, I met Latifabano Mohammad Yusuf Getali, 49, who has made a stormy transition from a cloistered homemaker to a leading relief and peace activist, so much so that she was picked up as one of the 1,000 PeaceWomen for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. She has worked with riot victims, opened schools and picked up training to run schools and a NGO.

"I was in the burqa when the riots happened. I had no idea of the world outside."

"From the uneventful life of a Muslim housewife to a relief and peace activist, she has walked a long mile", says the citation by the organisation.

"Braving the wrath of her conservative community, Latifabano has helped hundreds of Muslim women in the state gain access to relief and legal assistance... Latifabano's organisation was the first Muslim women's organisation in Godhra, so she faced the considerable wrath of the conservative Muslim community. But she continued undeterred..."

But there is one thing all of them miss. Life since the riots has become boring, says Niaz Apa, because of ghettoisation - the only English word she knows.

"Earlier many of us would live in joint neighbourhoods. We had so much joy living with Hindu neighbours, participating in each other's festivals. Now we have only Muslims for company. Which is a bit boring, isn't it?"

The fact is nobody quite knows. There are various estimates on the exact number of poor in India, and the counts have been mired in controversy.

This week the Planning Commission said 29.8% of India's 1.21 billion people live below the poverty line, a sharp drop from 37.2% in 2004-2005. (This means means around 360 million people currently live in poverty.) But one estimate suggests this figure could be as high as 77%.

The problem, believe many, is that the new count is based on fixing the poverty line for a person living on 28.65 rupees (56 cents/35p) a day in cities and 22.42 rupees (44 cents/33p) a day in villages.

This was lower than last year's recommendation by the Planning Commission to set the poverty line at 32 rupees (65c/40p) a day which stirred up a major debate across the country.

Last year activists dared the head of the country's planning body to live on half a dollar a day to test his claim that it represented an adequate sum to survive in a country with high inflation and leaky and shambolic social benefits. They concluded that the claim appeared to be grossly unfair and scandalous.

In India, poverty counts are based on a large sample survey of household expenditures. In other words, they are based on the purchasing power needed to buy food with some margin for non-food consumption needs.

The fresh decline in poverty - rural poverty has declined faster than urban poverty during the latest period under review - has been attributed to the government's increased spending on rural welfare programmes. If this is true, it is good news.

But whatever the figure is, the number of poor in India remains staggeringly high. And, what is more worrisome, demographics and the social character of the poor do not appear to be changing.

Labourers (farm workers in villages, casual workers in cities), tribespeople, Dalits (formerly called low caste untouchables) and Muslims remain the poorest Indians.

Almost 60% of the poor continue to reside in Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Significantly, 85% of India's tribespeople and Dalits live in these states.

Most agree that India has reduced poverty - from 55% in 1973-74 to 29.8% in 2009-2010, if the recent figures are correct.

But it is not happening fast enough, considering India's reasonably high rate of economic growth. "High growth, though essential," says the India Development Report, "is not sufficient for poverty reduction on a sustainable basis."

If the demographics and social character of the poorest in India is not changing rapidly, what is wrong?

Economists like Arvind Virmani believe that bad governance, misplaced priorities, unchecked corruption and a huge failure in improving the quality of public health and literacy are to blame. All of this is correct. More importantly, does all this happen because the Indian state is inherently anti-poor?

PS: The government's flip-flop over poverty count continues. On Thursday, PM Manmohan Singh told reporters that a "fresh [technical] group has been set up to devise a new method to assess the number of poor". Minister for Planning Ashwani Kumar echoed the sentiment saying there was a need to "revisit" the methods of counting the poor which would be "consistent with current reality". So yes, we still don't know who are the poor in India.

It is even harder when your government is battered by corruption charges, under pressure from irate allies, has suffered a drubbing in recent state polls and is perceived to be indecisive and slow.

So it is no surprise that Mr Mukherjee's budget did not contain any unexpected announcements or launch any big ticket reforms, which have already been stymied the ruling Congress party's allies.

Soaring oil prices, high inflation and steep interest rates have not helped. The government's - and the Congress party's - overwhelming concern these days is to placate allies like Trinamul Congress and keep its flock together.

Politics drives economics in India - as in most parts of the world - and consensus is slow. Mr Mukherjee does not not have the luxury of being a bold reformist.

It also appeared to wear him - and his fans - out. The wait, as Mike Atherton said, had not "only become tiresome, as it shone a harsh light on Sachin himself and what is motivating him to continue". In the run up to his newest record, Tendulkar's batting reminded Atherton of a "novice learning the ropes rather than someone who has learnt them better than virtually everyone in history".

Not really. The India Human Development report has been saying this for a while. The situation is worse in the villages, where two-thirds of the homes don't have toilets. Open defecation is rife, and remains a major impediment in achieving millennium development goals which include reducing by half the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015.

Is the lack of toilets and preference for open defecation a cultural issue in a society where the habit actually perpetuates social oppression, as proved by the reduced but continued existence of low caste human scavengers and sweepers?

It would seem so.

Mahatma Gandhi, India's greatest leader, had, in the words of a biographer, a "Tolstoyian preoccupation with sanitation and cleaning of toilets". Once he inspected toilets in the city of Rajkot in Gujarat. He reported that they were "dark and stinking and reeking with filth and worms" in the homes of the wealthy and in a Hindu temple. The homes of the untouchables simply had no toilets. "Latrines are for you big people," an untouchable told Gandhi.

Many years later when Gandhi began encouraging his disciples to work as sanitation officers and scavengers in villages, his diligent secretary and diarist Madhav Desai noted the attitudes of villagers. "They don't have any feeling at all," he wrote. "It will not be surprising if within a few days they start believing that we are their scavengers."

India's enduring shame is clearly rooted in cultural attitudes. More than half a century after Independence, many Indians continue to relieve themselves in the open and litter unhesitatingly, but keep their homes spotlessly clean. Yes, the state has failed to extend sanitation facilities, but people must also take the blame.

In the upstart suburb of Gurgaon, where I live, my educated, upwardly mobile, rich neighbours sent their pet dogs outside with their servants to defecate and refuse to clean up the mess. As long as their condominium is clean, it is all right. These are the same people who believe that the government is at the root of all evil.

Things are getting better in the villages, however slowly. Only 40% had access to sanitation facilities in 2002. This increased to 51% in 2008-009. More than 60% of homes in Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand states were still without toilets. There are other interesting behavioural and cultural pointers: Sikh and Christian households had the highest - over 70% - access to improved sanitation. Hindus - at 45% - had the least access.

India provides subsidies to construct toilets and runs sanitation and hygiene campaigns. Federal spending on sanitation was increased nearly three-fold in 2005. In 2003, the government kicked off a scheme to award village councils which are able to eliminate open defecation. Kerala has been the best performer with 87% of its village councils picking up the award. Only 2% of councils in dirt-poor Bihar won in a dismal commentary on the state of its sanitation.

India could take the lead from the tiny states of Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. Both have used and empowered local people to tackle open defecation, build toilets and adopt good waste management. Haryana provides subsidies to poor households to build toilets, and enlists women to run campaigns in what is a largely patriarchal and less progressive state. Volunteers visit homes, encouraging people to built toilets. All homes in Himachal Pradesh have a toilet today, say government surveys. The plan is to get rid of open defecation by the end of this year.

But until the time its people get rid of curious - and skewed - cultural attitudes to community sanitation and hygiene, India will never have enough toilets.

Taking the lead in a special report by the London School of Economics, Mr Guha outlines seven reasons to support his thesis.

The challenges which will hold India back, he writes, are the Maoist insurgency, the "insidious presence" of the Hindu right wing, degradation of the "once liberal and upright" centre, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, trivialisation of media, the sustainability of "present patterns of resource consumption" and the instability and policy incoherence caused by multi-party governments.

More importantly, Mr Guha believes that India should not even attempt to become a superpower.

"In my view, international relations cannot be made analogous to a competitive examination. The question is not who comes first or second or third, whether judged in terms of Gross National Product, number of billionaires in the Forbes or Fortune lists, number of Olympic gold medals won, size of largest aircraft carrier operated, or power of most deadly nuclear weapon owned," he writes.

"We should judge ourselves not against the achievements, real or imagined, of other countries, but in the light of our own norms and ideals... We are a unique nation, unique for refusing to reduce Indian-ness to a single language, religion, or ideology, unique in affirming and celebrating the staggering diversity found within our borders (and beyond them)."

In fact, as Mr Guha's teacher, the late historian Dharma Kumar, once said, Indians should applaud the lack of homogeneity.

"Instead of regarding India as a failed or deformed nation-state we should see it as a new political form, perhaps even as a forerunner of the future. We are in some ways where Europe wants to be, but we have a tremendous job of reform, of repairing our damaged institutions, and of inventing new ones," Ms Kumar had once written.

India, as the participants in the LSE study say, should strive to become a more inclusive and efficient society, rebuild its broken institutions and engage with the egregious problem of state corruption. Superpowerdom can wait.

Roebuck was observing Dravid withstand a fearsome Australian pace attack with his trademark fortitude, attrition and immense powers of concentration.

He wrote: "Only the most resourceful players can withstand such an intense Australian attack for a long period of time. Dravid is such a man. Something more than attrition is is needed to remove him. Gelignite is the most obvious alternative but the match referee might baulk at that. Australia searched for a weakness as a dentist does for holes and could find none. Thereafter, it was a matter of waiting for a mistake. It was a long time coming."

The decision to retire from international cricket didn't require that long. Dravid said on Thursday that he had been mulling over it for a while, and thought this was the right time to depart and make way for a new generation of Indian batsmen.

It will be difficult to replace the legendary batsman, for whom, in the words of my friend and cricket writer, Rohit Brijnath, "decency and determination were not conflicting virtues". Something which many of the talented and brash young cricketers would do well to remember.

On Friday, Dravid said he never took the media's nickname for the patient batsman, 'The Wall', seriously. The Wall conjures up images of a frustratingly impenetrable obstacle, but Dravid was much more than that.

Nobody describes it better than Roebuck again, writing on a carefully crafted 332-minute-long Dravid innings.

"Somewhat to his chagrin, Dravid has been described as the "wall' of Indian batting, a tribute to the sense of permanence to be found in his batting. Certainly, there is something eternal about his work in the middle. Moreover, his innings are constructed brick by brick," he wrote.

"But to regard India's first drop merely as an obstacle is to underestimate his abilities. Dravid is a batsman of the highest class whose form in recent years indicates that he deserves to be included in the ranks of the major batsmen of the period. He has scored runs against all sorts of bowling on all kinds of pitches."

As the innings continued, Roebuck summed up David's qualities as a true Test virtuoso.

"Dravid has a simple game founded upon straight lines. Reasoning that runs cannot be scored in the pavilion, he sets out to protect his wicket. Curiously, this thought does not seem to occur to many batsmen, a point many a long-suffering coach could confirm," he wrote.

"He defends his stumps with skill and strength of mind. Australia's fast bowlers tried to upset him and might as well have been attacking a tank with a slingshot. Attempts to test his patience were no more effective. Dravid reads long books and does not expect a man to be shot upon every page."

Another time, another place, another cricket writer of repute and Dravid's skills are again put into perspective.

It's the epochal 2004 India tour of Pakistan, Dravid is walking to the crease in Karachi, and writer Rahul Bhattacharya is in the press box.

"The innings was entrusted now to Dravid, who had emerged as the one man in the world who could be trusted with any situation," wrote Bhattacharya. "He accepted with customary poise; urgent, but still mindful of the fate befalling Tolstoy's peasant, who ran all day for land but died at sundown."

Dravid departed one short of a hundred in the 48th over. He had scored 99 of India's 349 runs. India won the match by five runs.

On the face of it, it does seem so.

The party has fared abysmally in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, leading in only 27 of the 403 seats at the time of writing. This after the party heir-apparent and prime minister-in-waiting toured the length and breadth of the state over three months, speaking at over 200 campaign meetings. Remember, during the last state elections in 2007, Congress picked up a miserable 22 seats.

Congress was expected to cash in on traditional anti-incumbency in the opposition-ruled Uttarakhand and Punjab, but it appears to have failed here too. At the time of writing, the regional Akali Dal and Hindu nationalist BJP alliance had romped ahead in Punjab, while in Uttarakhand, the party was running neck-and-neck with the ruling BJP. The only consolation has been in the tiny north-eastern state of Manipur, but even here Congress's victory is attributed to a strong local leader rather than a powerful party.

All in all, despite a brave face put up by its leaders, it has been a dismal performance by India's Grand Old Party.

So what does this performance tell us about Mr Gandhi and his party?

For one, say analysts, it shows that when your party-led federal government is battered by allegations of corruption, indecisiveness, and stasis, unleashing a relatively young and sophisticated scion of the country's most famous dynasty on the campaign no longer guarantees votes in today's restless and aspirational India.

I had been sceptical of the English-language media's often uncritical endorsement of Mr Gandhi's campaign and mentioned this in a previous post, quoting leading political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta: "I think Rahul Gandhi is making the biggest mistake in thinking that political mobilisation and outreach can happen independently of your record in government." To be fair, Mr Gandhi has accepted blame for the defeat, despite public pronouncements by his faithful flock that their leader was not responsible.

It also proves that all the hard work put in by Mr Gandhi - and nobody denies that - does not translate into votes and seats if the local party organisation is weak and leadership is virtually non-existent, as happened in Uttar Pradesh.

The stranglehold of the dynasty has led to the emasculation of local leaders and feeble party networks. In today's India, centralisation no longer works as political power has devolved to regional leaders and parties. Congress, analysts believe, needs to foster and empower local leaders, but it is difficult to see that happening under the overwhelming aura of the dynasty and the preening obeisance of party rank and file.

The results in Uttar Pradesh also tell us something about the way India is evolving.

For one, it points to the unfettered growth of regional parties - the victory of Mulayum Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party and the marginalisation of Congress and the BJP, the two national parties, again proves that the state has become, in the words of a political scientist, "a two-dominant-party, multi-party system".

The defeat of the Bahujan Samaj Party, led by the mercurial Mayawati, redoubtable leader of India's dirt-poor Dalit, also offers some sobering lessons. Without Ms Mayawati's politics of assertion, Dalits would have never become politically empowered as they are today. This is what analyst Manini Chatterjee so eloquently calls the "irony of empowerment." But "empowerment has also meant awareness and aspiration, impatience and restlessness," says Ms Chatterjee.

Ergo, voters are no longer satisfied with paltry patronage. They demand more. They are less likely to turn a blind eye to corruption, which they are inured to. And no party, this election proves, can take voters for granted in today's India. Indian elections, as political scientist Vivek Prahladan says, are now being decided on how parties successfully link the "politics of belonging (identity) and the politics of belongings (offerings from the welfare state)".

"But Gujarat has moved on. Nobody is concerned [about the riots any more] except the media and NGOs. Today, it's a bad dream."

We are sitting in Mr Vyas's home on a balmy Ahmedabad afternoon. A fan heater warms the room. His BlackBerry is charging, and a cassette of sacred Hindu chants lies by the side of a Bose sound system. A supplicant comes into the room and leaves behind some papers.

Mr Vyas is a 65-year-old bureaucrat-turned-politician whose website describes him variously as an "innovative moderniser" and "an expert enlighten globe with excellent solutions (sic)". The engineering graduate from the elite Indian Institute of Technology is also a "scholar, analyst, academician, administrator, manager and public life functionary".

Mr Vyas, more crucially, is a spokesman for the Narendra Modi-led BJP government in the state.

It is not an easy job.

Night after night, on news television, he gamely defends Mr Modi and his government against unrelenting allegations of not having done enough to stop the anti-Muslim riots that followed the burning of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims. More than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, died because the government, many believe, failed to protect them.

Ten year after the riots, facing the inevitable question that continues to haunt his government, Mr Vyas puts up a swift defence.

"We have come out of 2002. The event is over-emphasised, it's blown beyond proportions. Let us leave it behind and look ahead," he says.

So we leave the riots behind and move ahead.

Under Mr Modi's stewardship, Mr Vyas tells me, Gujarat has been recording scorching double-digit growth, prompting even The Economist magazine to call it India's Guangdong. Its manufacturing-driven, job-intensive economy, many believe, is touted as a model for the Indian economy.

I am walking briskly into the present and future now with Mr Vyas.

Gujarat, he says, produces 35% of India's pharmaceuticals, 60% of its salt, 90% of its soda ash, a sixth of its cement, and a third of its cotton. It has Asia's largest milk-processing unit. Its 21 ports handle a quarter of the cargo in India. It even produces 10% of the world's denim.

In an energy-starved country, Gujarat boasts round-the-clock power, thanks to some smart reforms by Mr Modi's government. Farm output is growing at nearly seven times the Indian average.

Not surprisingly, Mr Vyas proudly tells me, Gujarat's growth has been in the double digits for a decade now. It is one of India's leading industrialised states.

"Economic growth in Gujarat," he says, "is because of the state's ethos, culture, enterprise, give and take, large heartedness and the fact that it is accepting of everybody."

This is possibly the irony of Gujarat.

Openness and a breezy mercantile spirit come naturally to the people of a state which has nearly a quarter of India's coastline.

But it's also a state which has seen seven major religious riots between Hindus and Muslims since 1969, when 630 people died in five days of fighting in Ahmedabad. Gujarat also has the highest per capita rate of deaths in communal incidents, at around 117 per million of urban population. Religious violence here coexists with a high literacy rate.

The 2002 riots were obviously the worst. More than 1,000 people, according to the government's own estimate, were killed. Property worth nearly $60m (£38m) was destroyed. An estimated 200,000 people were displaced. Ten years later, around 25,000 of them still languish in relief camps - this, in a state which won international plaudits for rehabilitating victims of a massive earthquake in 2000. Many have moved into newer ghettos. Ahmedabad is the most ghettoised city in India.

So is it easy for Gujarat's minorities to forget 2002 and move on, I ask Noorjehan Abdul Hamid Dewan, a 38-year-old woman, who lives in Johapura, Ahmedabad's biggest Muslim ghetto?

During the riots, Noorjehan risked her auto-rickshaw driver husband's ire to come out of purdah to help survivors in a relief camp in her neighbourhood. Since then she has been working tirelessly with them.

"How can people forget the riots and move ahead?" she asks. "People don't forget. They simply remain quiet in fear. We haven't forgotten a thing. We want justice and we will keep fighting for it."

This is a difficult task in what political scientist Christopher Jaffrelot calls the "dysfunctional" justice system in Gujarat.

If you are poor, fighting for justice can wear you out, rob you of your daily wage, and force you to cave in and compromise with the perpetrators of the violence in exchange for a little money. This is one of the ways you "move on".

Social activist Harsh Mander calls such compromises a "mode of survival for victims, in their highly unequal battle to rebuild their lives after mass violence".

The other way to move on is to have faith in a broken judiciary, and keep hoping that some justice, however incomplete, will happen.

Activists point out how more than 2,000 cases of violence were closed within months of the riots because of partisan investigating agencies and prosecutors and brazen intimidation of witnesses, even earning the opprobrium of the Supreme Court.

It was only in 2006, after the Supreme Court stepped in and ordered the reopening and a re-investigation of nearly 1,600 of these cases, that some hope was rekindled. Complaints were lodged, more than 40 police officers involved in the riots indicted and more than 600 people arrested for violence.

Two years later, the Supreme Court appointed a special team to investigate half a dozen key cases of violence. It also asked a trial court to decide whether Mr Modi should be probed in one of the cases. Even this intervention has had its share of problems - half of the investigators were selected from the already discredited local police force, for example.

A few trials have been completed - in two major cases over the burning of the train in Godhra and an episode of violence in Sardarpura - among the 151 towns and 993 villages which were convulsed by riots - 11 people have been sentenced to death and 51 others sentenced to life in prison. "Justice," says activist Gagan Sethi, has been "exceedingly slow."

Justice may be elusive, but Muslims, who comprise fewer than 10% of Gujarat's population, have moved on in their own small, meaningful ways in a state which many say does not do much to support them.

More and more Muslims are sending their children to schools and colleges. In 2002, there were 200 Muslim educational trusts in Gujarat. Now, there are more than 800.

"The reaction of the Muslim community has been very positive," says social scientist Achyut Yagnik. "Muslim women are also talking about more education. It's all about moving forward with education."

He is right. Everywhere I went, Muslim men and women spoke about the importance of education.

In Godhra, I met telecommunications engineer Mohammed Yusuf, 51, who spent a year in prison after being falsely implicated in bomb attacks. He is a soft-spoken man with a flowing beard.

"For long, we have lived as frogs in the well. Now we need to get out, educate and inform ourselves, know what our rights are, find our place in the world and defend our rights," he says.

Ten years. More than 1,000 lives lost. Broken lives. Scant justice.

But in Gujarat's frayed social fabric, hope still beckons.

Ten years ago, Arko's picture of a tailor named Qutubuddin Ansari became the face of religious riots which left nearly 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead in Gujarat.

In the picture, Mr Ansari, then 28 years old, is standing on a narrow veranda. He is wearing a light checked shirt stained with dried blood. His faintly bloodshot eyes are glazed with fear. His hands are folded in an expression of obeisance, hiding a mouth agape. It's a disturbing study of fear and helplessness.

"An Indian Muslim stranded in the first floor of his house, along with a few other Muslims and surrounded by a Hindu mob begs to the Rapid Action Force (Indian paramilitary) personnel to rescue him at Sone-ki-Chal in Ahmedabad, March 01, 2002," said the caption of the picture put out by Reuters news agency, for whom Arko worked at the time.

The Gujarat riots were among the worst in India since Independence. The Hindu nationalist BJP state government, led by Narendra Modi, was accused of not doing enough to bring the violence under control.

Ten years later, Arko and I are standing under the same veranda of an awkward looking two-storey building in a crowded lane, running alongside a busy highway in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's main city.

Next door, literally risen from the ashes, are a motorcycle showroom and a sooty garage. A rebuilt madrassah, which was gutted during the riots, is packed with cheery students.

A new flyover loops over the highway, offering the only change in a drab landscape of squat homes and grubby shops.

The photographer and his subject have just met. There has been a limp shaking of hands and both have hugged each other hesitantly. Arko told him how glad he was to see him. Mr Ansari had smiled shyly.

Now, Arko is telling us that the meeting is bringing back a lot of memories, some good, others bad.

The unchecked rioting had entered its second consecutive day when Arko and a bunch of fellow photographers found themselves outside the building where Mr Ansari was trapped on the morning of 1 March 2002.

Earlier they had hitched a ride with a van full of soldiers trying to bring the city under control.

When the van entered the highway before midday, Arko says, the sky was black with smoke from the fires and the road was strewn with bricks and stones. The military van moved with its headlights on.

"It was darkness at noon. There was frenzy all around. The city had gone mad."

Mobs armed with swords and stones from Hindu neighbourhoods across the highway were crossing over and attacking and setting fire to Muslim shops and homes on the other side. People watched this grisly show from their homes across the road.

The van sputtered on past the building where Mr Ansari stood when Arko looked back for a moment and saw his subject for the first time. He looked through the telephoto lens, and clicked, "three or four shots possibly, all in a fraction of a second".

Then he turned around and asked the soldiers to stop the van.

"Looking through the fog of smoke, we spotted the group of people trapped on the balcony of a burning house. We told the soldiers that we were not moving until they rescued them," says Arko.

I pick up the rest of the story from Mr Ansari, who is listening carefully. A curious crowd collects around us.

"We were trapped on the first floor for over a day, and we couldn't go down because fire was raging below.

"And when I saw the military van pass by, I thought, 'This is our last chance'. I began shouting Sahib! Sahib! to the soldiers and folded my hands, and when I did that they looked back and returned," he says.

A few soldiers were immediately positioned outside the house, and later in the day, as the fires below ebbed, Mr Ansari and his friends came down a stairwell built outside the house.

Next morning, Arko's picture of Mr Ansari had made it to the front pages of newspapers around the world. They called it "the defining image of the Gujarat carnage".

The problem was Mr Ansari didn't even know about it until a week later, when a foreign journalist hunted him down in a relief camp for riot victims, carrying a newspaper with the picture across an entire page.

"Then my life went into a tailspin. The picture followed me wherever I went. It haunted me, and drove me out of my job, and my state," he says.

He ran away to Malegaon in neighbouring Maharashtra to live with his sisters and had been working there for a fortnight when a co-worker walked into the shop with a newspaper carrying his picture. His boss didn't want any trouble and fired him immediately.

Next year, he left for Calcutta, but returned after a few months when he heard that his mother had a heart problem.

Over the next few years, Mr Ansari lost half-a-dozen jobs as people recognised him and journalists hounded him relentlessly. Political parties used the picture to woo Muslim votes. A group blamed for dozens of bomb attacks across India used the picture in an e-mail claiming to have carried out an attack. Muslim organisations freely put out adverts using the picture.

The picture brought a few happier moments. The owner of a clothes shop in Calcutta recognised him and gave him a discount on a T-shirt. An officer pulled him out of a queue for picking up papers to vaccinate his mother for her trip to Saudi Arabia for Haj, arranged for her inoculation quickly, and remained in touch with him. A resident of Poona wrote to him, giving him all his contacts and asking him to get in touch with him if he ever needed any help.

"I feel very bad, very sorry to hear that my pictures caused so much problems for you. I apologise," Arko tells Mr Ansari, as we settle down in his home in a slum, not far away from the house with the veranda.

Mr Ansari is sitting opposite him, and his eyes drop to the floor for a moment.

"Nobody is to blame, brother," he tells Arko. "You did your job. I was doing mine, trying to save my life. Your picture showed the world what was happening here. What happened to me eventually was kismet, destiny."

"And as things stand, my life is on the mend. I have a beautiful family, I have work, I have my own little home."

A few years ago, Mr Ansari bought a two-room tenement with a small tailoring shop for 315,000 rupees ($6,400; £4,000) from his paltry savings and loans from friends and family. It is a modest home with a raised bed, a television, a few utensils, a shiny red refrigerator and a washing machine tucked away behind a curtain. Upstairs, he and his co-workers stitch more 100 shirts a week, and he earns up to 7,000 rupees ($142; £90) a month.

His family has grown to include an eight-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. The eldest daughter is now 14 and wants to become a teacher.

Arko has also moved on - he quit Reuters after nearly a decade of rich work, including covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and began a photography school in the city of Mumbai.

Now Arko tells Mr Ansari of a personal tragedy that marked his coverage of the riots.

He says he was sent to cover the riots even as his mother was in the last stages of cancer. His wife had called him every day during the time he was taking pictures of the mayhem, imploring him to return to be by his mother's bedside.

"By the time I returned, she had slipped into a coma. I never got to speak to her. Three or four days later, she died. I have no siblings, and my father died when I was one. And I couldn't even exchange a last few words with my mum," he says.

Silence descends on the room.

Then Mr Ansari speaks.

"I can understand your pain. Allah sent you to save us, brother. You did a greater good," he says.

One event, two lives, both bookended by personal tragedies.

"It feels strange. I have mixed feelings," Arko says, as we take leave.

"On one hand, Qutubuddin was empowered by my picture. On the other, he lost his privacy and a bit of his life."

"I just hope he remembers me as a friend. We met as strangers as I think we parted as friends."

"I now want to remember him as a smiling, happy man. Not the frightened man on the balcony."

Annawadi is a "sumpy plug of slum" in the biggest city - "a place of festering grievance and ambient envy" - of a country which holds a third of the world's poor. It is where the Pulitzer prize winning New Yorker journalist Boo's first book Behind the Beautiful Forevers is located.

Annawadi is where more than 3,000 people have squatted on land belonging to the local airport and live "packed into, or on top of" 335 huts. It is a place "magnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich's people's garbage", where the New India collides with the Old.

Nobody in Annawadi is considered poor by India's official benchmarks. The residents are among the 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when India embarked on liberalising its economy.

Boo's story - a stirring and gritty non-fiction narrative, one of the best ever written by a foreigner on India - revolves around the self-immolation of a cantankerous, one-legged slum woman called Fatima Sheikh and how her neighbour and a hardworking, young garbage trader called Abdul and his family are framed on a charge of murdering her. Fatima's death is a liberation from enervating poverty, and a chance for some neighbours to make money from Abdul's family, who are making a bit more money than the rest from selling recyclables.

This is when Abdul realises that the Indian criminal justice system was a "market like garbage" - "innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags".

Boo adopted what she calls the "vagrant-sociology approach" and followed Abdul and his neighbours of this unexceptional slum over the course of several years - November 2007 to March 2011 - to see "who got ahead and who didn't, and why, as India prospered".

She used more than 3,000 public records, many obtained using India's right to information law, to validate her narrative, written in assured reported speech. The account of the hours leading to the self-immolation of Fatima Sheikh derives from repeated interviews of 168 people as well as police, hospital, morgue and court records. Mindful of the risk of over interpretation, the books wears its enormous research lightly.

Boo's narrative is peopled by a vast range of gripping characters from Annawadi, the world from which New India shies away. An aspiring slum boss woman who volunteers for a local Hindu right wing party. A man who paints his horses with stripes and rents out the fake zebras to birthday parties of middle-class children. A corrupt nun who runs a children's home. A deranged man who talks to a luxury hotel building skirting the slum.

Then there's a bunch of young scavengers and thieves, ravaged by rats and high on white correction fluid, who live, work and die quickly. They are the young flotsam that India breathlessly parades as its demographic dividend when, in reality, the children, tired and brutalised, are already past their sell-by-date.

The people of Annawadi are also caught up in the hideous web of corruption and official venality which hurts the poor most, and lead utterly dehumanising lives in a city that aspires to become India's Shanghai. It is far removed from the dreadful stereotype of the happy-poor Mumbai of Slumdog Millionaire.

The local councillor runs fake schools, doctors at free government hospitals and policemen extort the poor with faint promise of life and justice, and self-help groups operate as loan sharks for the poorest. The young in Annawadi drop dead like flies - run over by traffic, knifed by rival gangs, laid low by disease; while the elders - not much older - die anyway. Girls prefer a certain brand of rat poison to end their lives.

Behind The Beautiful Forevers is a bleak, heart-breaking book, which leaves you numb with anger, helplessness and pain. In this age of globalisation, Boo writes, hope is not a fiction. But hope flickers dimly in Annawadi as the "unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise".

Boo asks some uncomfortable questions: What is the "infrastructure of opportunity" in India? What capabilities does the market offer? What capabilities are wasted? Why don't places like Mumbai where filthy slums stand cheek-by-jowl with the world's priciest buildings explode into violence? Why don't unequal societies implode? What happens to the powerless when, among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity is "typically an insider trade".

Boo has an interesting take on corruption, rife in societies like India's. Corruption is seen as blocking India's global ambitions. But, she writes, for the "poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained".

On the other hand, Boo believes, corruption stymies our moral universe more than economic possibility. Suffering, she writes, "can sabotage innate capacities for moral action". In a capricious world of corrupt governments and ruthless markets the idea of a mutually supportive community is a myth: it is "blisteringly hard", she writes, to be good in such conditions. "If the house is crooked and crumbling", Boo writes, "and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?

Election officials believe so. They say that a record 62% turnout in the first phase of the seven-phase vote on Wednesday is the highest since 1947, up from a dismal average of 46% in the 2007 polls. "It rains votes in Uttar Pradesh," said a clever headline in The Hindu newspaper.