I must confess that many of my thoughts about India are still rather inchoate and flexible, but after talking to friends and coworkers about India it’s time to get around to some of those questions I had before leaving.

A few weeks ago I anticipated thinking about developing nations. From the moment that we first weaved through the crowded Delhi streets I observed a world different in so many ways from the USA and yet surprisingly similar. I still can’t claim to be an expert on Indian society but certain things lead me to claim that India is a dynamic place that is eager to synthesize modernity (as understood in developed countries) and traditional Indian values. The result is more Indian than American and is much less schizophrenic than you might suppose.

When Americans talk to foreign visitors and immigrants, we tend to ask questions about the places they left. When Indians talked to us, they wanted to know only about India. What do you think of India? How do you like India? What do you think of Indian people? Perhaps Indians already think they know everything about us — after all they get “Friends” and “Fear Factor” and “Boston Public” and “General Hospital” — but I suspect that Indians are keenly interested in how people from so-called “developed” countries view India.

Indian nationalism is running strong. No doubt, this is partly a response to having having a nuclear rival next door in Pakistan, but India sees itself as a regional economic power and possibly a rival to the US, Europe, and China in the latter part of this century. Indians, I sensed, want respect at the same time that they acknowledge that they have an appreciable distance to go before having many of the things that are basic in the US.

When we first started planning our trip, Jay said that “India is a land of contrasts.” Extreme poverty and extreme wealth exist side by side. India is trying very hard to fix these problems, and I believe that their burgeoning wealth will allow them to do many things; but the will must be there, and I’m not sure it completely is. Perhaps it’s because of the caste system or because of colonialism or because of religion or because of lack of means — for whatever reason we found a sense that certain people were meant to be at the top and others were destined to have a harder life.

I’m not trying to minimize the impact of India’s massive population, nascent infrastructure, and lingering poverty. For sure, these limit them in achieving all of the things they want, such as full employment, clean water, universal housing, education, adequate healthcare, and reliable electricity. (And there was no question that Indians felt these were priorities. They aren’t a set of imported “Western” values.) With more than a billion people, India needs to add six million jobs a year to keep the same level of employment. The environment and public health can only suffer when the state of Uttar Pradesh has 177 million people in an area the size of Colorado.

Yet Indians are fairly optimistic and relentlessly capitalistic. They seem to want to solve problems in their own way, and I have no doubts they will. For example, India needs more energy resources to feed their growing economy and the desires of the world’s largest and fastest growing middle class, so they’re risking of the ire of the US to build a pipeline from Iran through Pakistan.

In this land of contrasts perhaps the hardest thing to reconcile is that poverty still exists when so many people are working (and working extremely hard). Unfortunately in India poverty seems to be something you are born into and can only escape with difficulty. We saw many children begging or picking through trash in the roadside dump for scrap metal or plastic instead of being in school. We met people who were working in retail but had never gone to a day of school. For these people help is going to have to come from above.

In the US, where poverty exists but not like this, we only succeeded in squelching it through government heavihandedness: forced education for all children (even if they were needed in the farm or factory) and lots of government spending on electricity, telephone, post, roads, housing, and make-work projects. I suspect that India’s state and federal governments will have to mandate social changes and pay for a lot of economic relief and infrastructure changes.

India is making a lot of money in taxes from its growing economy, but I think that in India as in the rest of the world, much of the money for development is going to have to come from donor nations. To me it seems unconscionable to expect the developing world to bootstrap or rely on private philanthropy because we want to save a few dollars each on taxes. The world “over there” looks a little different on TV than it does out the window of the train in Chandigarh as dirty children rummage through trash or beg for change. Development feels different when people talk about it at Brandeis’ Heller School for Social Policy and Managment than when beggars are looking at you and tugging on your clothes.