ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR
It had never occurred to me that India might have an obesity problem, but apparently it does. Just before leaving India this month to return to Britain, where I found an obesity panic going on, I chanced upon a story in the Times of India headlined 'Obesity costs India dear'. According to the article, 27 per cent of Delhi schoolchildren are obese, and the country has spent over 1.43 billion on treating obesity-related health problems over the past five years. Since we know that millions of Indians suffer from malnutrition, this seems very odd. But then it turned out, further on in the article, that the problem was confined to 'affluent families' in the cities, which contained only about 5 per cent of the country's population but consumed 40 per cent of its available fat. Since India has more than one billion people, the vast majority of whom are very poor and couldn't get fat even if they wanted to, obesity affects only a tiny proportion of Indians. But in India this 'tiny proportion' is equivalent to the entire population of a medium-sized European country, so the scale of India's obesity crisis may not be so very different from our own. It's a sign of the country's growing wealth and sophistication that it worries about this kind of health problem and even possesses a Centre for Obesity Research. But it is still a long way from the point that has been reached in the United States, where thinness indicates wealth and obesity suggests poverty. In India the opposite still applies. One thing that is clear is that hardly anybody anywhere manages to achieve his ideal weight. Studies by the United Nations find people all over the world to be either overfed or underfed, but seldom normal. I think we should just concentrate on feeding the starving and stop worrying about people who choose to stuff themselves too much.
Iwent to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal and was not disappointed. It didn't 'look like a biscuit box', as Amanda. the heroine of Noel Coward's Private Lives, suspected that it might, but was everything and more than it is cracked up to be. The Taj Mahal is one of those rare sights that conform precisely to expectations, but also somehow exceed them. Others that fall into this category are Venice and the Manhattan skyline. It was, of course, built in the first half of the 17th century by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (King of the World') as a monument to his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who had died in 1631 after bearing him their 14th child. Shah Jahan is said to
have been heartbroken by her death and decided to make her tomb the most beautiful and magnificent in the world — a purpose in which he may very well have succeeded. It is seen as one of the world's great shrines to romantic love, which is why such poignancy surrounded the famous photograph of Diana, Princess of Wales, seated alone in front of it during a visit to India with her husband when their marriage was disintegrating. (When I passed by the stone bench on which Diana once posed, it was being occupied for the camera by an obese Indian gentleman.)
While the evidence is that Shah Jahan was genuinely very fond of his favourite wife and much distressed by her death, not everyone shares the heartbreak theory. The historian John Keay, for example, says in his history of India that the Taj Mahal was inspired by 'dynastic pride and Islamic symbolism, not romantic heartbreak'. And it is true that Shah Jahan was an obsessive builder who scattered across northern India many of its most glorious architectural monuments. Towards the end of his life, he was imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb in the fort at Agra from which, as an increasingly decrepit and senile old man, he would gaze down the Yamuna river at his great masterpiece. My guide told me that his son had locked him up partly to stop him spending any more money on buildings. The thought occurred to me that the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland should perhaps be careful lest their grandiose plans for Alnwick Castle, such as the Duchess's multi-million-pound water garden, should provoke a similar rebellion by their teenage son George, Earl Percy. Despite the recent addition to their enormous fortune of £22 million for their famous Raphael, the Duke and Duchess took legal steps a few years ago to stop George coming into a million-pound legacy until he was 25. He might well still be brooding about that. Ifound to my astonishment that in some parts of Delhi — in the posher residential quarters — they have actually installed speed bumps. The traffic in Delhi is chaotic, it is true, but it doesn't move very much; and it would be difficult to imagine a lower publicspending priority there than speed bumps. Perhaps the Indians feel that traffic-calming devices are the obligatory accoutrements of an upwardly mobile society. Maybe they have been to Hammersmith and seen what goes on. I thought that during the last few years the council had taken every conceivable step to ensure that traffic would proceed at a funereal pace. There is barely a street in my neighbourhood without bumps in it or a corner without raised cobblestones serving as obstacles to progress. Hundreds of thousands of pounds must already have been spent on this kind of thing. But the other day our main shopping street, Blythe Road, was once again closed to traffic for work to take place. I asked John in the hardware shop what was going on. 'They're trying to make us walk more slowly,' he said — and actually traffic-calming has that effect, too, since even on foot it can be tricky negotiating all the new railings and bollards that have sprung up at street corners. The work is now complete, and a crossroads in Blythe Road has been marked by the largest and grandest raised, cobbled platform yet seen in these parts. Will nothing ever exhaust the council's budget for superfluous expenditure?
As Max Hastings wrote in last week's Diary, the use of sign-language interpreters at opera performances is extremely distracting. It is also, as he said, very puzzling. Why would deaf people enjoy opera anyway? The Indian newspapers are less politically correct than ours. When David Blunkett was in Delhi at the same time as me, he was quoted as saying that he was looking forward to 'seeing' the Taj Mahal. And one newspaper asked what he could possibly have meant by this. That is not a question I can imagine a British paper asking. We are accustomed by now to the convention that no disability should be allowed to prevent anyone from enjoying any aspect of life, even though it obviously must do so to some extent. It may well be true that a person gets special satisfaction from doing something that he might normally be thought unable to do because of his physical condition. Being profoundly deaf did not prevent Evelyn Glennie from becoming one of the world's leading percussionists. But deaf people listening to music, or blind people looking at art: can they really enjoy it very much?
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