Two weeks ago I went down to the office of The Times of India to pick up my cheque for the 1,000-word piece I had written for them.

Picking up personal cheques is one of my favourite things in life, but this time my joy was compromised by the amount payable… 800 rupees. That’s about $17 dollars or eleven quid. Boy, did I party that night.

Still it’s all about the love of journalism, not the money, right? That’s why I still have the cheque and will frame it when I get the chance. But this is by no means an isolated case.

Last year, buried away in another Times of India piece I found the interesting story that Indian management students were buying up copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, citing it as inspirational text. One man, one vision, went for it, achieved it and so on. Weird, but true.

So I sold the story to The Sunday Telegraph in the UK, which they finally printed on Hitler’s birthday, no doubt in an effort to maximise online search and coverage. I rang up Delhi booksellers, I spoke to academics and I contacted historians… all for a fee of £90. Pathetic.

And so it goes. I’ve since written technology and health stories for The Guardian, and travel pieces for the Sunday Times and FT, but it’s getting harder, contributors are being reduced and the going rate is going down by the week.

The problem is especially acute when it comes to travel-writing. Instant electronic blogs, message boards and ye olde sociale networks especially Twitter, mean travel stories are whirling around every road and destination. Paid travel-writing for newspapers and magazines is effectively dead.

There should be no sadness about this. Journalists have had it easy for years. Research means clicking on a web site and has obviated the need to delve through parish records for information. A monkey with a gizmo could do it.

It has been a revolution and journalists need to change with the times and become publishers themselves. In a week where the extraordinarily well-trafficked New York Times is having a second go at charging for content, so this particular writer is doing the same.

So from next week, this newsletter will only consist of the first paragraph and will then direct you to Monty’s Outlook website where the completed editorial can be viewed.

So, in the tradition of good journalism where the first paragraph has to engage the reader, so you will be given the same choice. If you think it’s shit then you need to go no further.

If not, come to the website where you might just find some extra treats for the weekend… and guess what, it doesn’t cost 800 rupees, it’s free.

‘I spend half of my life at airports doing crosswords and pretending to sleep. Well, it’s lonely at the top as well as at the bottom of the corporate tree.’ – The Hoodoo Gurus

This week I saw the new George Clooney aircraft, er I mean vehicle, Up In The Air and, rather like the lyrics above, it brought back to me the utter redundancy of business travel.

I lived like that for four or five years. Obsessed with being upgraded, arriving in anonymous hotels and despite surrounded by familiar industry faces in the bar upstairs in the roof bar I never felt as lonely in my life. I thought I was travelling the world, but up in the air is very different from on the road.

Of course, that’s all different now. I own one pair of jeans, haven’t worn boxer shorts for 18 months and the idea of a trade show makes my body break out in handcuffs. A panel of mainly men in fitted jackets wearing big watches makes me think of machine-guns and hot, burning oil being poured down their… well, you know what I mean.

No doubt these words will come back to haunt me when the cash runs out and I beg to be readmitted to the altar of Amex business cards and the loving caress of an airport lounge with soft internet chairs and the scent of smoked salmon sandwiches.

And it may be coming sooner than I think. Living and travelling around India has suddenly become unsustainable and all because of one of those pesky little terrorists who travelled in and out of India on a multiple-entry tourist visa.

The Indian government has consequently, and quite arbitrarily, decided that tourists to India can only stay for a maximum of 90 days and then must stay OUTSIDE the country for two months before coming back or applying for a new visa.

Naturally this will instantly stop terrorism and India will be safe forever more. But for those who have made India their home are now stuck up the Ganges without a paddle… and will need to find asylum in Sri Lanka, Nepal or surrounding countries if they intend to return.

So things are literally up in the air again. Who knows what will happen? And then, in the most delicious of ironies, I have just received an email from a US Hollywood company asking me to arrange a slew of meetings in India.

Hahaha. Must activate that Amex card, must dust off the Gresham Blake jacket. Might even buy some jeans. OPEN THAT AIRPORT LOUNGE, I’M COMING HOME… but maybe I’ll think about it over the weekend.

There are more than 2,000 regular readers of this newsletter and if the stats aren’t damned then at least four or five of you take heroin regularly.

If you are one of these unlucky few then this week’s news that the price of dried Afghani opium has crashed from $225 per kilo in 2007 to less than $90 today should be of more than passing interest.

This is due to over-production by the Taliban as these charming ‘students’ (Talib is Arabic for student) have tried too hard to cash in on their favourite crop… which only goes to show it is absolutely correct to hate any form of student.

For the farmers of the region this dip in the price of opium, together with an increasingly powerful Afghan army, a resident UN security force, labour-intensive wages, warlords, goondas, middlemen and the Taliban tax, means they are giving up drugs for food.

Specifically, these farmers are turning to wheat production as a viable alternative to their former harvests, and more bizarrely it is a group of Zimbabwean farmers who were forced out by Robert Mugabe who are helping them do this.

Rift Valley Agriculture is an NGO headed by these men who head off with local farmers to the local badlands to advise on all forms of wheat production and have handed to increase yields by more than 30%, thus increasing the flight from drug to food production.

What does this have to do with India? Not much, except it has always mystified me why India doesn’t seem to have a heroin problem bearing in mind its proximity to Afghanistan. Perhaps closed borders with its bogeyman Pakistan has protected the country from this scourge, menace, never-a-frown-with-golden-brown etc.

I also read it in a three-week old copy of Private Eye and I thought it was interesting. I hope you do, too… whether you’re a smackhead or not.

Blimey. Just like that. A decade. The Noughties. Gone in another 40,000 seconds or so. Welcome to the Tennies.

Naturally we all like to define the end of another 10 years. What’s to say? Got married, had a son, worked hard to reclaim a rung on the prosperity rung, made a bit of money on property, gave up most vices, published my book, downsized, went to India, became a Bollywood actor.

Not bad but still a long way from being comfortable or as a travelling mate of mine once said: Still alive, don’t forget. So what of the next ten years, and more to the point, what of India’s next ten years?

The safe money would appear to be on India taking over the world as a junior partner of China Inc by 2020, but I beg strongly to differ. Yes, India will probably grow by 7% this year, but it has absolutely no chance of being a serious player for at least two generations because its way of doing business remains ephemeral.

Lovely, beautiful Rajasthani artwork that falls apart after a couple of months, landlords that prefer to rip off tenants for 12 months and then have an property lay empty for two years, schools (especially the shameless European School in Goa) that operate different tariffs based on the gullibility of contributing parents, a Government that grants a separatist state independence then rescinds it a few days later… I could go on.

Then there are the roads. To keep up with China’s gleaming transport systems, India would need to spend $16 billion on roads in the next two years. Not only are they more dangerous than making sharing jockstraps with a Nigerian banker’s son who studied in London, but they kill Indians.

And that’s not only the egregious number of deaths caused by psychopathic drivers who passed their driving test by bribing their instructors, but because they are in such a shocking condition that more than 40 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables rot every year because either they aren’t picked up in time or unrefrigerated trucks can’t get to market quickly enough.

Some estimate that more than 50% of India’s total rice production is lost between field and table and this is a country where more than 30% of its population lives below the poverty line. Who gives a toss in rural India if an Indian rocket found water on the moon when the water in the local well is poisoned?

And that is the challenge for India. To bring the living standard of its non-urban population to one of dignity and equality. It’s a long way from the opulence of Turner Street to a benighted hectare in Assam and an impoverished farmer hanging from a tree because of urban loan sharks.

Perhaps it is finally time for India to stop revelling in its image as a land of contrasts and sort its act out. Contrasts are all very well, but not much fun if you’re on the arse-end of that contrast.

So, predictions. In ten years’ time I’ll be happy to keep learning from books and hoping my son passes his exams. As for India, more of the same and not much different from today. Has potential, but must do much, much better.

Nowadays it’s not the East India Company that has a monopoly over India, but the use of the English language that determines the success of an Indian who wants to get ahead in the world.

According to a census taken eight years ago (it takes time to monitor one billion people) more than 10% of the Indian population speaks English although this official figure is widely considered a gross underestimate.

Indian parents look across to China, which has a new policy that makes English compulsory in primary schools and is consequently adding 20 million (!) new English speakers each year, and are booking their children into English meduim schools to learn the language.

Such schools cost a great deal of money compared to Hindi medium government schools where education is free but English is not mandatory. Hindi is spoken by 41% of India’s population and there are many sectors of Indian politics that would like this figure to be much higher.

But a case in the early 1990s underscores the problems that Hindi has compared to the creeping ubiquity of English. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Mulayam Singh Yadev wrote a letter to his counterpart in the state of Kerala in Hindi who made his stance clear by replying in his native language of Malayalam, not Hindi.

And therein lies the significant rub. India has an array of local languages as long as Ganesh’s trunk and people prefer to speak their own language, not Hindi. More tellingly, they seem to prefer English as a second language.

In the state of Maharashtra that includes the city of Mumbai it is a matter of state pride to speak Marathi. Extremist politicians are also hijacking this language issue to set their own agendas although nobody is complaining about the use of English.

All of which bodes well for anybody setting up an English language school in India. More than 60 years after India gained its independence from the British, perhaps that little imperialist devil is having the last word… in English that is.