THEY met when they were both graduate students at Columbia University in the US—"a perfectly standard story"—married and went to London for a year where "we were first introduced to modern India". P.N. Haksar, Krishna Menon, Feroze Gandhi, Kumaramangalam, "the whole gang", was in London at the time and the freedom struggle was uppermost in their minds. "There was much talk of Nehru then, of Subhas Bose, Gandhi. I remember Indian students sitting at the feet of Krishna Menon and hearing his analysis of the day's news." Today Alice Thorner's contemporaries are grandparents, they have faded from the scene in which they once played an active part. Yet she retains her endless curiosity about India and is still excited at the way in which the policies of the past are being reinterpreted. "So much that was held to be true in those days is now being re-examined. That fertilisers would multiply crop output, that canals would solve the problems of dry regions. Now all of these facts are seen to have serious ecological consequences."