主题：印度恐慌中 -- 老广

So, what makes Indians so buoyant? Perhaps, relief: that the dark decades of soaring population growth, inching economic growth and intractable poverty, are finally over. No doubt, too, some prominent Indians are a little naive about the realities of multi-lateral diplomacy and ill-informed about the paths to development that others have trod. With little opportunity to travel, and a whole world within their borders, Indians have tended, until relatively recently, to be rather inward-looking—unlike the country's vast and thriving diaspora.

Perhaps, too, there may be something about living always in a crowd that encourages loud and overconfident opinion-giving. Or maybe, in their national subconscious, Indians have calculated that audacity, however unfitting at the time, simply works for them. It is certainly a feature of their brilliant entrepreneurism: another national characteristic—exhibited in teeming slums as well as in corporate boardrooms.

The Pew Research Centre found that Mr Bush's approval rating in India was “still astonishingly high” at 55%. In fact, Indians were the only people sampled who rated Mr Bush more highly than they did Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. So, perhaps they know something the rest of us don't?