"Meanwhile, at the south end of town, the Raj still dominates the skyline, and breathtakingly so. Is there a more attractive clock building outside Europe than the Rajabai Tower, completed in 1878? Does America have a single railway station that compares to the one Mumbai commuters have used since 1887? A single post office more impressive than the one the British built there in 1913? A more majestic municipal building than the Bombay High Court? The old section of Mumbai amounts to an open-air time capsule, substantially unchanged from the day Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten flew back to London. Unfortunately, nobody has cleaned up since. The old buildings are filthy and neglected, with broken shutters, missing windows, and front lawns piled with rubbish. Just a block or two from the Taj Mahal Hotel, near the ocean in one of the priciest parts of the city, there’s a row of wooden Victorian houses, large and ornate and beautiful. It looks like a postcard, but walk closer. The roofs have been patched with blue nylon tarps. The porches sag where the support beams have rotted. Each one verges on collapse. There’s something crushingly sad about all this, but also instructive. Empires end, usually more quickly than expected. They’re not always replaced by something better. Worth remembering at election time."