Tangential thought: the Byzantine bureaucracy that is blamed on the British was not as bad in British times as it is today because the British rulers could (not always for the better..but then again, what is?) draw upon unwritten rules of aristocratic, racist and nationalist solidarity to bypass a lot of BS when it suited them. India, lacking that coherence (again, not completely lacking; there IS an Indian patriotic feeling to draw upon and perhaps also a sense of Brahmin solidarity and mission in some cases) is more a prisoner of that Byzantine bureaucracy than British India ever was....