India, Sept. 27 -- Nothing tells you what a country is like as reliably as the state of its major airports. One reason why the world started looking more respectfully at East Asia was because so many of its airports improved beyond recognition towards the end of the 20th century. Singapore's Changi became the world's best airport and other countries raced to open new modern airports. Seoul's Incheon, Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi and so many others served as advertisements for their countries. The pattern has been repeated in West and South Asia. Dubai has taken over from Changi as the world's best airport; one reason why people call Dubai the new Singapore. And new Indian airports in Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai are symbols of a new India. By those standards, the decline of Heathrow, once one of the world's most glamorous airports, is an appropriate symbol of the rapid decline of London. Power breakdowns, failures of computer systems, chaos in luggage delivery, immigration queues that spill out of the arrival hall: These are weekly if not daily occurrences in Heathrow. London is now a city where many of its residents face economic hardship, while the obscene wealth of a lucky (usually non-British) sliver at the top is celebrated. Heathrow epitomises that. The airport is owned by a foreign monopoly consortium that makes huge profits while providing terrible services to passengers. Everyone complains. Nothing changes. **** Not all wealth in London is immediately obvious. The British royal family has long shunned the sort of ostentation that characterises many Middle Eastern monarchies. But behind the scenes, it has the sort of wealth that would make most global billionaires envious. Take Buckingham Palace, which is probably among the most expensive residences in the world. (Current estimates suggest it is worth over $7 billion.) The palace is located in prime real-estate in central London, it's real value lies in the land it is located on. It has 35 acres of gardens, which include a lake so large, it contains two islands. The current generation of royals is not keen on the palace: King Charles has refused to move in. And the royal family claims, with some justification, that it could not sell the palace, so estimates of its value are notional. But most Brits have no conception of how big the estate really is. That is unlikely to change, because even though the palace now offers ticketed tours of its grounds, the vast majority of guests are not Brits but foreign tourists. The tourists are gobsmacked by the acres of beautifully maintained gardens and waterways and knocked out by the museum-quality art collection, worth billions of dollars. The royals have always maintained that only a part of the collection is privately owned, while the rest belongs to the Crown. It's a valid distinction, but it does not take away from the fact that the royal palaces, paintings and thousands of acres of land all over the UK are maintained for the use of a single family, which passes them on from generation to generation. **** The British are justly proud of the quality of Scotch whisky, but most Brits don't know who the world's largest consumers of their Scotch whisky are. It is Indians. We drink more Scotch than any other country despite the high import duties our government imposes on it. Over the last few years, the most unexpected development in the global whisky market has been the growth of Indian single-malt whisky, made to the highest international standards. If this keeps up, will even those rich Indians who attach snob value to drinking Scotch keep buying the British product? Or will it be a repeat of the airports story where Bangalore airport is now a million times better than the collapsing Heathrow? **** I thought of the parallels when I attended a dinner at the grand old Savoy hotel in London hosted by Godawan whisky. As you may know Godawan is India's leading malt whisky, scooping up international awards at whisky competitions. But what adds an edge to the comparison with Scotch is that Godawan is owned by drinks multinational Diageo (headquartered in London) which is a dominant force in India's Scotch whisky market. You might think that Diageo has a vested interest in keeping Scotch's premium position free from any domestic threats but, in fact, it has done everything possible to maintain the high quality of Godawan. The sparkling dinner at the Savoy was to mark the release of a special edition called Godawan 173. The name tells its own story. The whisky is made in Rajasthan where the Godawan (also called the Great Indian Bustard) is an endangered bird. Diageo has run an avian version of Project Tiger to protect the bird with great success. The number of Godawan birds in the wild has gone up from under a hundred when the project started, to 173 today. The special edition marks that success. There are only 173 bottles, each in its own handmade Jaipur blue pottery decanter, and the whisky has been matured in casks used to make Asha, the legendary Rajasthani liqueur. The guests at the London dinner were overwhelmingly British and included many Scotch-loving veterans of the drinks trade who had never imagined, even four years ago, that they would ever attend a fancy dinner at the Savoy to celebrate an Indian whisky. I watched them closely as they tried the two variants of Godawan available in the market. They seemed to like the whisky. More important: They treated it with respect. When the special edition was served (just before dessert) they were open in their admiration. They had never drunk a whisky like this, they declared. It was a huge triumph for India and while the Godawan team was pleased, the international Diageo management was also overwhelmed by the response. (By some coincidence, the interim global Chief Executive of Diageo, Nik Jhangiani, is an Indian.) **** After the dinner, I spoke to Praveen Someshwar, who is the CEO of Diageo India (Full disclosure: We know each other from a different life. Praveen used to be CEO of HT Media). Praveen was delighted by the response in the world's toughest whisky market. He wants to take Godawan 173 to New York, to Singapore, to Hong Kong for such celebration dinners. He knows he has a world class product. And that, in whisky as in so many other things,this is India's time....