Ah, Modi. The boys in the village were shouting his name on the news again, something about a big dam and the Brahmaputra. It made me think of all those small loans my old colleagues in the forestry service used to take to send their children to Shillong for school. Here we are, patching the same roof with the same pension, listening to Radio Moscow on my crackling cassette player, while a man on the screen talks of making India a 'superpower' — and yet I cannot find a single doctor within a day's walk for my mother's knees. The dam will not stop the frogs from singing, I know that much, but the school fees for the boy down the road will surely rise again. I suppose we are all just waiting for a leader who first understands that a leaky roof and a quiet, fair salary are not small matters, but the very measure of progress.