What was taking Vajpayee so long?
In the spring of 1976 an earthquake hit northern Italy, near Trieste. Approximately 1,000 people were killed near the epicentre. To the north, in a suburb of Munich, Germany, residents of two multi-story apartment buildings ran out into the night to gather in an open space. They huddled and waited for the earth to stop moving, wondering when…if…it would be safe to go inside. In and around Munich, the quake registered just over 5 on the Richter Scale. That was enough to crack some walls, slide furniture around and make my heart stop for a second. I’ve been thinking about that night a lot recently. So far, living in fault-lined California, I haven’t felt any of the tremors that they say are a part of life here. Soon after I arrived in 1999, the city of San Francisco remembered the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989; 10 years of rebuilding, retrofitting and recovery. Scientists predicted then another ‘big one’ could come in about 30 years. When I told friends I was moving to the Bay Area,
