In West Bengal, you just can’t be not affected by politics: the ‘politics of the poor’, as Prabhu describes it. ‘This, perhaps, is the only place in the world where people hate development,’ he tells me. ‘Yeh bhadralok ki rajneeti kabhi Hindustan ko amir nahi banne degi’ He was talking about ‘Leftist politics’ as intellectuals describe it, and how the politics of the elite would never let India become rich.
