The Washington Post is publishing—in its technology section—a blog by staff writer S. Mitra Kalita who will be spending two months in India. Especially because she knew India as a child, I find her comments on India today interesting.

A few clips—

On packing gifts for the relatives

In 1991, its foreign exchange reserves near depleted, India agreed to open up its borders to qualify for World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans. That allowed products from cans of Coke to computers to cars to flood the world's second most-populous country. That allowed me to finally "travel light," allowed my cousins and aunts and uncles to buy their own brand names, and created an information-technology and services sector that Americans might interact with when they call customer service or tech support.

On a visit to a mall opening

A red carpet, dozens of candles and endless strands of white flowers paved our entry to the opening of a new mall in Delhi tonight. Because this week marks Durga Puja, a Hindu holiday celebrating good's conquest of evil, it was easy to mistake the adornments for the religious festival -- but the only things being celebrated inside were entrepreneurship and the wave of consumerism sweeping India's upper middle class.

Make no mistake about the "mall" moniker. In India, that means marble floors and glitzy storefront displays. Like many conveniences taken for granted in the West, the Indian counterpart tends to be equally rooted in providing the customer experience. (McDonald's, for example, might have a worker who pumps your ketchup.) So the opening of M.G. 2 ... served up a heavy dose of pomp and importance alongside glasses of Coke and mineral water, with trays of tofu triangles and asparagus bruschetta circulated by waiters.

Despite rapid proliferation in recent years, malls in India are reportedly not doing well, attracting too many people who are "just looking" or simply enjoying the air conditioning.

On the "price" of globalization

The price of globalization is much higher than I expected.

I don’t mean the disparity between rich and poor, the loss of culture, the erosion of extended family.... I mean the actual cost of things.

... I headed to the mall. Not to keep blabbing and blogging about malls … but that’s really how many Indian twentysomethings (I’m hanging on to that category, albeit barely) pass their time. I spent Saturday afternoon browsing Metro, a mammoth multiplex of glass and neon amid others just like it in Gurgaon, a fast-growing suburb of Delhi.

Prices, in some cases, were equal or higher to those in the United States. Cheap labor may be touted as foreign companies turn to India for computer programmers, legal researchers or medical transcriptionists, but the resulting rise of the middle class has also meant a rise in the cost of living.
....

I am not alone in my sticker shock. Pretty much every Indian I meet says as much.

“It’s more expensive to live in India than the U.S., by the way,” economist Atanu Dey said to me over dinner in Pune tonight....

He described India’s population as a pyramid with an extremely broad base -- and a very tiny tip. “But that tiny tip translates into a very large number,” he said over a dinner that cost about $31. “Even if one in 1,000 people can afford something, that’s 1 million people.”

On offshoring for the little guy or gal

Our blogger talks with an entrepreneur who's marketing his services to small- to medium-size U.S. companies. The term "traditional" (vs. current) has now slipped into descriptions of offshoring. Interesting how American companies are so quickly eliminating the "middle man"—i.e., Indian entrepreneurs.

Strategic Sourcing India Pvt. Ltd.'s office sits above a crowded and dusty shopping center in a bustling part of Pune, just steps from the brand-name shops and franchises on Mahatma Gandhi Road. It is an example of traditional offshoring, and one that many companies utilized before opening their own offices in India.

On beggars and infrastructure

I saw something this week I rarely see in India, let alone the United States. Someone gave a beggar money.

Atanu Dey, who made a brief appearance in an earlier post, says it's standard practice. I have always been advised to refrain because most beggars in India reportedly give the brunt of handouts directly to a beggar lord. So I pressed Dey, a self-described thinker, on why he chooses to give.

"Would you beg?" he said, turning the questioning on me rather fiercely. Then softening, he said: "They beg because there is not an option. ... They were born in misery and live in misery."
....

The premise of his model for economic development is simple: India's rural areas need better infrastructure to lure services that will lead villagers to earn higher incomes....

I could not help but relate Dey's solution to my own family, who, like most of India, claims rural roots. And like much of India, many members of my family have left for the cities, admittedly with mixed results.

I returned a few years ago to my father's ancestral village of Baranghati, Assam, to discover those who remained weeping over all they lacked.

"There is nothing here any more," a distant cousin named Manju said to me. "I have a master's degree but there is nothing for me to do." Clearly, a great disparity exists between the prosperous India I am focusing on this time around and the India from where my blood line flows.

The divide seems not just a matter of city versus country. Despite phenomenal growth and evidence of new wealth in Pune -- from malls to Mercedes Benzes -- its bumpy roads are still lined with slums and dotted with beggars, rapping on car windows and pressing their hands together in submission.

I look away, as I was taught to do as a child, back to texting, talking, reading, anything but acknowledging the humanity just inches away. The prevalence of air conditioning in cars with sealed windows has only increased the distance I can keep.

According to economists, the beggars can expect to be trickled on any day now.