Centuries of Indian life could be extinguished by the arrival of Walmart | Ian Jack

The country's street sellers will almost certainly vanish once foreign supermarkets are allowed into the big citiesCertain habits in Indian life once gave an illusion of permanence. On hot afternoons 30 years ago, for example, you could lie on your bed under a slow-turning fan and hear noises from the street that had been the same for at least a century. The lonely wife in Satyajit Ray's film Charulata heard them in the film's celebrated opening sequence as she flitted about her Victorian mansio...