The year 2015 was a great one for tolerance, despite the hue and cry about how intolerant we Indians are. We proved those naysayers wrong by showing just how tolerant we were about a whole lot of things, from the first noisy day of January until the last heavily polluted day of December.

Around this time last year, for instance, residents of Navi Mumbai were informed about how the City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) planned to start what it referred to as ‘pre-development work’ for a new airport in their part of the city. The work, expected to cost a mere Rs 2,000 crore and take a year to complete, was to commence in January 2015. A week ago, CIDCO announced that it expected to start the ‘pre-development’ work for the construction of the airport from March 2016. Naturally, we tolerated this, the latest in a long line of inexplicable delays. The project costs will rise, of course, but we will tolerate it. We also tolerated the fact that pretty much anything that isn’t actually development can be slotted into the ‘pre-development’ category.