India: "Modern India" is an oxymoron, a conundrum wrapped in an Asian enigma. Incredible wealth lives next to extreme poverty. India produces world-class IT and engineering graduates, yet has a literacy rate of only 72%. India is the world's largest democracy, despite 7 national political parties, 24 state parties, and yet remains remarkably more stable than countries like Italy, Israel and Brazil. Yet India has a bloated civil service that "employs" almost 80% of the workforce and has more than doubled in the size of it's GDP (and quintupled it's population in the last 50 years), but the poverty rate remains almost unchanged, despite the massive rise of a middle class proletariat.

India & China have almost identical GDP, yet they couldn't have arrived at the same economic point from more divergent positions. Spiritual, yet superstitious; mathematically exact, India remains plagued with inefficiencies of epic proportion. An emerging super power with a modern Navy and nuclear weapons, over 85% of India's population live on rural farms and will never travel 20 miles from their birthplace.

What an extraordinary place modern India is today...