Let’s give British royal couple Prince William and Kate Middleton a nice post-Maharaja welcome

Sharp young Indians looking forward to knowing more about how to enter the portals of one of the oldest and finest institutions of scholarship are in for a shock. So, it’s best to prepare them here that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are not on a week-long trip to India starting this Sunday to facilitate young Indians to go and study at the University of Cambridge. Well, they can’t. Because the visiting couple are William and Kate from Buckingham Palace. It would be like expecting Brad and Angelina to help you get into Yale.

But once that confusion is out of the way, we should, of course, make the young British couple feel welcome. If they want to slum it a bit, who are we to deny them a trek through Dharavi, that refreshing antidote to Dorset. And it’ll always work wonders for Kaziranga National Park once the authorities put up a framed photo proclaiming Kilroy-style ‘The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were here’. For, nothing gets Indians swooning over all things monarchic swoonier than gushing over young members of the House of Windsor gliding through their backyard à la the Duke of Amethi having a lunch-op in a Dalit household. But it would all be less confusing if instead of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the lovely couple comes to post-Maharaja India as Mr and Mrs… now, what on earth is their surname?