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Good morning. The Indian election now coming to its climax matters not only to India but to all of us, for this vast, enigmatic, country focuses so many of the problems that beset the world as a whole. On the one hand India produces five million graduates a year and one third of the world’s soft wear engineers. On the other hand one is six of the women are illiterate and it has more absolute poverty than the whole of Africa put together. In particular there are people who suffer extreme degradation, the Dalits, the former untouchables, who despite laws which are meant to protect them, are discriminated against in every area of life and who are confined to jobs like manual scavenging. That extreme disparity between a financial elite, and those who can tuck in the sliptstream behind them, and the millions who are left far behind, which is such a feature of today’s world, exists in India in grotesque form. Behind this there is also in India a tension, a paradox, that affects the human spirit itself. On the one hand the sheer scale of the problem-a country with a population four times the size of America, so much corruption and a political class too often out of touch with how the majority live- make it is all too easy to despair. Yet the sheer resilience of the Indian poor simply in surviving always staggers me. And that is not all. Normally I throw away calendars at the end of the year. But in our bathroom I keep a particular favourite that shows two children riding water buffalos in their village pond. The look of sheer delight on their faces lifts my spirit every time I look at it. Not just survival but joy- And there is something else too. On one visit to look at aid projects the group I was with had a session with some girls who, with the support of a few pence a day, which their day labourer fathers could not afford, had been able to stay on at school. They had bussed 12 hours to see us, and in their smart uniforms they shared with us their ambition to be doctors, teachers, and politicians. They came from nowhere with nothing, but they had confidence and they had hope. In Rohinton Mistry’s devastating novel A Fine Balance about the suffering of minority groups in India one character says “You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair” For Christians that fine balance comes to a focus at this time of year. Despair expressed in some words from the book of Lamentation which are said daily at this time Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow For the sorrow of the cross and the sorrow of India and of the world are one in the heart of God-but that sorrow lives alongside Easter, in which, Christians believe, all our human hopes are grounded.