India, April 11 -- The Delhi artists and intellectuals among whom I now found myself spoke at a pitch I have never encountered in another place or, indeed, in the same place since that period. Certainly, they were people of striking brilliance and originality, but the furious energy of their debates came also from the city outside. The old was dying, the new was in preparation, and we were living in the in-between, when nothing was resolved, everything was potential. Everyone was trying to absorb, to imagine, what the city - and their own lives - might become. They lived with empty stomachs, filling themselves on books and conversation - for forms of thought that are deemed formal and remote in stable times become intimate and necessary w...