Ah, bhau, I was listening to my old pressure cooker whistle this morning—third time I patched that valve myself—and thinking: our village panchayat takes two years to decide on a single tap repair, but the builder who bought my cousin's land had his paperwork cleared in fifteen days. My granddaughter's guava tree gave only half the fruit this year because the monsoon came late and left early; the soil is tired, bhau, like the farmers. Who will speak for that soil? The court, maybe, or the newspaper fellow who came last week. But the delay? The delay has a victim—the old widow down my lane who cannot get her leaky roof fixed before the next cloudburst. We move too slowly for the ones who need it most.