Portrait of a blooming India
My ignorance entirely but I did not realise that India is rich in orchids. "We have over 1,700 species of orchids from the Northeast and western Himalayan belts and along the Eastern and Western Ghats and in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands," I learn from Bala Kompalli, a botanical horticulturist who has helped put together a month-long orchid festival at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in southwest London.
This year's festival, the 22nd, in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, is "a celebration of India's vibrant culture, colours and magnificent plant life".
At the press preview, I found rickshaws and market stalls filled with orchids and a peacock made from blooms. Orchids are suspended from trees. And in a pond a nymph-like girl pushed around a floating basket of orchids.
Common species include dendrobium, cymbidium and Coelogyne cristata.
The festival's creator is Nick Johnson, "glasshouses manager" who tells that the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, founded in 1787, was once "run as an off-shoot of Kew".
He points out that Bala, who came to Kew 12 years ago, having studied botany at Andhra University, is an example of the close ties between the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Botanical Survey of India, which began in Calcutta but now has 50 branches all over the country.
"I visited India seven or eight times and it's lovely to be able to talk about something you really, really love," Johnson enthuses. "And I really love India. It's a wonderful country - it has so much to offer in so many environments. So it's great to be able to do a festival about India."
Panda policy
China has a “panda policy,” according to Kate Sullivan de Estrada, lecturer in Modern Indian Studies at Oxford University.
"China loans pandas only to friends - and India has never received one," emphasises Sullivan.
She and Manjari Chatterjee Miller, assistant professor of International Relations at Boston University, are guest editors of a 248-page report on Indian foreign policy published recently in London by the prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs.
India's Rise at 70, which has scholarly contributions from many countries, says that although Modi's foreign policy reflects continuity, he has sought to make India a Vishwaguru by adopting the teachings of "the Bengali intellectual, Swami Vivekananda".
He has also pushed yoga as "one of India's signature cultural exports".
The candid view of David Scott, a former Brunel University lecturer, is that "the UK has been running after India rather than India running after the UK - on both the political and economic fronts".
Pace maidens
This morning's Oxbridge entrance essay is on Bengali girls - "Why are they so fast?"
I am referring, of course, to their ability to bowl fast.
I first wrote about Isa Guha in 2002 when as a 17-year-old she opened the bowling for England - Isa is now a BBC cricket commentator.
In between discussing his traumatic experiences with demonetisation during a family holiday in India, Dundee-based economist Monojit Chatterji shows me a picture of his 23-year-old daughter, Priyanaz Chatterji, on his phone.
"She learnt cricket in the back garden at home - and now plays for Scotland," her proud father tells me.
In the women's world cup qualifier in Sri Lanka, Priyanaz - "her name is part Bengali, part Persian" - "will be opening the bowling on Monday".
No swearing
First time Labour MP Rupa Huq has been commended by Daily Telegraph sketch writer Michael Deacon for getting round the rule which prohibits members of Parliament from swearing during last week's Brexit debate on triggering Article 50.
Rupa "was successful because it left the unspeakable unspoken", Deacon noted admiringly. "She was casting doubt on the prospects of the Prime Minister's strategy for Brexit. 'There may be a crock of something at the end of the rainbow,' said Ms Huq, 'but it may not be gold'."
Both Rupa and her younger sister, self-styled "Bangladeshi babe" Konnie, who obliges paparazzi with (deliberate?) wardrobe malfunctions, studied at Cambridge.
No partition
Hugh Bonneville, who plays Lord Mountbatten in Gurinder Chadha's film, Viceroy's House, attacked Donald Trump's travel ban affecting Muslims at an Asian dinner in London last week that was attended by Prince Charles.
"I think if this film can do anything, it can remind people that the only way forward is to listen, to talk, to compromise and to accept each other's lifestyles and religious points of view - and not try and divide people," said the actor famous for portraying the aristocratic Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey.
Gurinder said her movie showed "what happens when you preach hate and division".
Tittle tattle
The satirical magazine Private Eye has an "inaugural special" currently on the stands, with Donald Trump taking the following presidential oath: "I swear to tell the post-truth, the alternative truth and nothing like the truth."
