One word: Disaster. By 2050, India would have become a middle-income economy but her people would still die of hunger and her land would still be ravaged by floods and famines. Why? Because here and now, in the comfort of 2014, we think 2050 lies decades into the future, and the future has always been difficult to envision for a people who are at heart reactive not proactive. This is a country where thinking big is considered small, where lifetimes are spent in keeping millions the way they are – impoverished in their medieval idylls with no access to modernity. Modernity – that Goddess of evil whose curse may blight the hypocritical lifestyles of those who think, work and act on behalf of the impoverished. And so, building dams is evil, raising their height on Supreme Court orders even more so; possessing an atom bomb when all the hard bargainers have one is evil; switching to safe, pesticide-free, high-yielding genetically modified food is evil, and so is harvesting nuclear energy, mining rare-earths, or testing new drugs on animals. But the most evil of the lot is linking rivers, and it is presently this evil that we shall focus on.