What are words worth?

For the past couple of months, almost every other day, I have been driving on the new Outer Ring Road circling Hyderabad, and watching the city eat into the rocky wilderness of the Deccan Plateau. I've grown to recognise and in a strange way commune with the large boulders along the road, and each time I notice a new pile of rubble I realise it's one more rock that's found its way into the building materials of the real estate developers. I am amazed at the speed at which the rocks are disappearing into hills of rough gravel, first, and then flattened to make way for the large steel and concrete buildings that will house commerce of various kinds. Profitable, no doubt, and with a logic difficult to argue with. There's one rock that I've named the Wise Old Man. He has a large forehead and exposed teeth; sometimes it is like he has bared them in a permanent grin, mocking, or just sad. I wonder how much longer he will stand in the way of Cyberabad's expansion. Afte

In Peddanandipadu, a village in Prakasam district, at the end of a bumpy, dusty road where cyclists, goats, buffaloes—and the occasional jeep--jostle for space, one suddenly meets a low dapper building with a board prominently featuring the words “Free eye examination”. A clutch of elderly men, some wearing the spectacles that announce the arrival of diminished accommodation, settle comfortably at the base of the steps. Their casual appropriation of the space seems symbolic of a sense of ownership. The Vision Centre, dubbed so because it is a place where people come to regain—with the help of a pair of spectacles—sight once lost, or to seek a solution to something that is bothering their eyes. Inside the room, stepping back into position on the shiny new tiles, a young man in a professional’s white coat puts his display of spectacles in order and walks into his examination room to check a pair of lenses. Y Srinivasa Rao, the young Vision Technician who has taken over this Vision Centr