The thinking vote flexes its muscles

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Having said that, the fact that there were queues for them to jump is progress. Cuffe Parade is as posh as it gets, and only 26% voted in the last election. As one activist lamented: "Thinking people don't vote, and voting people don't think."

This time it was just over 40%. One woman said it was the first time she'd had to wait in three elections at Cuffe Parade.

The enormous effort made by civil rights organisations to encourage the middle and upper classes to vote in this election appears to have paid off, if only a little. November's terror attacks have also had a politicising effect.

There's a tendency to write off the educated middle-class vote as irrelevant because the country's elections are won and lost in the slums and villages where the majority of voters live.

Indeed, it's this impression, plus the sense that politics is a corrupt and dirty game, that keeps educated voters away.

The electorate at Cuffe Parade is just 11,000 strong, while more than half of Mumbaikers live in shanty housing or slums.

But as MV Mohandas Pai, head of human resources at the huge Indian IT company Infosys, pointed out to me, this is changing rapidly. By 2020, he predicts, the middle class will be a majority.

The middle-class civil rights organisations, professional independent candidates and newly engaged middle-class voters who have come into this election disgusted at the corruption and ineptness of the leading parties won't have made a decisive difference when results are announced on 17 May. But they are the start of something.

* India's stock-market regulator is showing its teeth, by cracking down on film company Pyramid Saimira after uncovering a vast system of share-price manipulation. Some 230 companies connected to the founders circulated funds to artificially inflate the company's share price. Nobody doubts that this kind of thing is rife on theMumbai stock exchange, but it remains to be seen if the regulator will now move on to some of its more powerful practitioners.