SPEED OF CHANGE "If nobody can be safe, do we still want this speed?"

 "If nobody can be safe, do we still want this speed?" he said. Can the roads we travel on in our cities not collapse? Can we travel In safe trains? And if and when a major accident does happen, can we not be in a hurry to bury the trains? China, please slow down. If you're too fast, you may leave the souls of your people behind. " 

"There has always been a certain smugness in the way India looked at itself," wrote the magazine's Raj Chengappa. "The myths have been shattered one by one. Instead of a progressive and pragmatic nation, most perceive the country as a trundling rhinoceros swathed in tons of red tape and trapped in a time warp of its own making."

During the first days of the August coup attempt in the Soviet Union, for example, Rao reacted publicly by saying that the upheaval proved reformers such as himself should proceed cautiously. Rao's remarks, and similar declarations by Indian diplomats, proved embarrassing after the coup failed and radical democrats charged to the fore in Moscow.

Indian businessmen and their ideological allies have the same worry about Rao that radical Soviet democrats used to have about Gorbachev -- that his cautious approach will undermine his chances to achieve real success.

But Rao's supporters argue that his government is moving as fast as it can under the circumstances, and that to move faster would be to invite disaster, given the subcontinent's continuing volatile problems of caste conflict, religious confrontation and separatism. "In spite of heading a minority government, I think Prime Minister Narasimha Rao has been very bold," said Madhavrao Scindia, the government's minister for civil aviation, who is seen, along with Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, as a leading cabinet neoconservative.

As a matter of fact, the former Soviet Union seemed to be losing interest in further upgrading its relations with India in the context of the latter's stand on the abortive coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. India's response to the coup, which collapsed within four days indicating a triumph for the reformers, was slanted in favour of party hardliners who had actually plotted the coup. Virtually justifying the coup and describing it as an instructive example for over-enthusiastic reformers, India's Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao categorically warned 'that any leader who chalks out plans for the future should take each step cautiously'.5 The Soviets were dismayed, not unexpectedly, at the apparent failure of India's Prime Minister to side with the reformers and to make 'even a symbolic gesture of solidarity with the man with whom he had signed the historic Delhi Declaration' .6