I posted a not very grave Spine yesterday on a grand topic: the English language as a guarantor of the unity and the independence of India. While going to sleep, I remembered a review I'd read in The (London) Observer by Soumya Bhattacharya of a book, Vishnu's Crowded Temple , one of a rush of historical volumes crediting the British and British ways with the durability of India. The review points out two factors otherwise mostly ignored in the drama of Indian continuity. The first is Bollywood, being the world's largest film industry. The second being cricket which "infuses as of a sense of national identity and pride in the upper middle class professional as the farmer living beneath the poverty line. There is a glory to India and a salience of it to America and the West that the academy has, so to speak, thrown into purdah. And, by the way, Isaac Chotiner, a very bright recent intern at TNR, has published a learned and actually also charming review of Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy. I've just finished reading a paper, partially about the British in India, "Contemporary Operations: Reflections On and Of Empire," by Major General Jonathan B.A. Bailey, British Army (retired), a fighting man who has an imposing mind, a most imposing mind. He points out that seldom were there more than 70,000 British troops in the sub-continent. Not counting these, in 1897, there were 20,000 Brits in the entire Indian landmass, 3,000 officers in the Indian Army and 10,000 in commerce. What is different between India and Iraq? That's a real subject, dealt with peripherally by Bailey in his paper. Maybe there's another question: what's the salient difference between America and the British Empire? I can't find this graciously written piece of scholarship on the web, although it was published by the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA Paper P-41980), a place that surely must make its publications widely available somehow. You can try. In the meantime, there are lots of intriguing entries on "Google" of items by the general.