A westerner's perspective.<p>Recent trip from bangalore airport to hotel. Started with a clean, hot dry airport exit escorted to your air-conditioned car by hotel driver. Then briefly open fields. Then 30 minutes of red dirt road, with freeway in view barely in construction. With slums all along the street, with metal shacks aptly named 'hotels', with heaps of trash openly laid out and eaten by cows, with homeless kids/adults in bare feet walking along side of roads, with groups of women on their knees dusting the road with brooms. Then briefly comes tons of cars and people walking in between traffic. Tons of cars and people. Some semblance of city began to form. 2 story buildings. Then you're at your 5 star hotel in a 'nice' neighborhood. Across from slums and heaps of garbage and dirt roads and massive traffic and beggars everywhere. This is with no raining, which is usually 8 months out of the year.<p>Recent trip from Mumbai to airport hotel. Armed guards at outside the airport entrance. Taxi drivers mobbing you, trying to grab your bags. Your driver drives on local road as he speaks in his broken english how low this fare is, and you seemed to be stuck in traffic for an eternity what should've taken only 20 minutes. Highway barely constructed, with no workers in sight. Loud motor cars everywhere, no semblance of order. Tons of beggars/slums fills the side of the road. Nearby, restaurants, all with heaps of garbage sitting outside the establishments, attracting only the locals. Some fancy houses appear, but the are lost in the sea of ravage. A woman with a malnourished kid comes to your taxi and knocks on your window and begs. A woman with a bloody stump knocks on your taxi window, but your knowlegable friend says that's fake blood, although the missing hand is real. Then after a while, you arrive in a 5 star hotel, in the most posh neighborhood/city in India, not 10 seconds away from slums/garbage/cows/dirt. And this is with no rain.<p>A 3rd world country, with massive population and corruption and squatter's rights and caste system and religious fervor and terrible weather/land. Same economic progress in 1980s with China, but vastly diverged since.<p>I don't see a way out for India.