India Shining?

I was going to write a long post about my five weeks in India, specifically Pune. However when I sat down to write, an incident came to mind. And it is something that I still see as clearly as a picture because I remember missing my camera at that moment.
I was heading home along one of Pune’s main roads. I noticed this man standing by the roadside next to his gleaming new car. He was animatedly chatting away on a flashy cell-phone and at the same time emptying his bladder on the wall bordering the road. At that moment I felt that there couldn’t have been a more apt depiction of ‘modern’ India. We have moved towards the future and incorporated a lot of good, as well as bad ‘western’ influences into our daily lives. However there are some things about our ‘rustic’ past that we refuse to let go of. We just want it all, the convenience of the future while we stick to the idiosyncrasies of the past.
Just like a Bollywood flick released a while ago put it, "Ek per past mein… ek per future mein… isiliye to present pe muth rahe hain!" (One foot in the past… the other in the future… that’s why we are peeing on our present!)… Touche!