In my own early life in Bombay, the experience of modernity was notably syn aesthetic and largely theoretical. saw and smelled modernity reading Life and American college catalogs at the united States Information Service library, seeing B.grade films (and some A-grade ones) from Hollywood at the Eros Theater, five hundred yards from my apartment building. begged my brother at Stanford (in the early 1960s) to bring me back blue jeans and smelled America in his Right Guard when he returned. I gradually lost the England that 1 had earlier imbibed in my Victorian schoolbooks, in rumors of Rhodes scholars from my college, and in Billy Bunter and Biggles books devoured indiscriminately with books by Rich.