The Elephant, the tiger and the cell phone : Shashi Tharoor

For more than four decades after gaining independence India, with its massive size and population, staggering poverty and the slow rate of growth, was associated with the plodding, somnolent elephant, comfortable resting on its achievements of centuries gone by. Then in the early 1990s the elephant seemed to wake up from its slumber and slowly begin to change until today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, some have begun to see it morphing into a tiger. As Indian turns sixty, Shashi Throor, novelist and essayist, reminds us of the paradox that is India, the elephant that is becoming a tiger: with the highest number of billionaires in Asia, it still has the largest number of people living amid poverty and neglect and more children who have not seen the inside of a schoolroom than any other country.