The name Gore Vidal takes up more than two-thirds of the space on the cover of my old paperback collection of some of his essays. For good reason, as the same cover has New Statesman, a considerable thunderer in those days, describing Vidal as "America's finest essayist'. In it is a little gem, his 1974 essay, "What Robert Moses Did to New York city', which educated Indians worried about the urban blight afflicting their country can read with benefit. Moses was parks commissioner for New York city for four decades up to the early sixties. Says Vidal, "After the Second World War he (Moses) built more than $2 billion worth of roads within the city. To do this he expropriated thousands of buildings, not all of them slums, and evicted tens of thousands of people who were left to fend for themselves. Moses's elevated highways shadowed and blighted whole neighbourhoods.' Vidal recounts that Moses was not satisfied even after having done this as "he had yet another Dream: exodus from the city to the suburbs, but only by car, for there were to be no buses or trains on his expressways