Last week, or last month, I was in India. Kolkata, to be precise.

I met a lot of people that week. I saw many tens of thousands more. It’s that kind of place of Kolkata. A city that rushes past you, albeit in manic order, with gaunt faces staring as they drift into the crowd. I’ve never been anywhere where I felt more voyeuristic, more disconnected and more irrelevant.

For those I had the chance to talk to about it, it was a mixed reaction. A handful liked it. A lot more didn’t. A little too pungent for their overly sensitive senses, apparently. For the most part though, they were ambivalent.

Quite how you can be ambivalent in a place like Kolkata is beyond me. Its raw and wretched frame sweats centuries of Bengali history. It has an industrial vibrancy that lacks direction making it a muddled and confusing place to be. Like any other city of its size, there’s an energy that emanates from it and yet that same energy is strangely inert in the immediate space that surrounds the handful of magnificent marble structures of decadent imperialism that pepper the landscape. The Empire did a terrific job in sucking the life out of India, whilst putting so much back into it.

One such place is the Victoria Memorial Museum, Kolkata’s answer to the Taj Mahal. It is a timeless expression of imperial grandeur. Looking up at it from the surrounding grounds, the Memorial is an imposing place. Exactly as was intended by its Victorian architects. At its centre sits a large white dome, built in direct parallel to the dome of St Paul’s in London. Which, of course, is the name of the cathedral it sits close to which, in turn, is modelled on Westminster Abbey. It’s as if the whole place is in a time lag, naming rights included.

These days, it is rare to talk of India without speaking of its economic resurgence. More often than not, it’s the country that’s playing boom-time catch up with China as the rest of the world teeters on the brink of recession; the country that is garnering its1 billion plus population to reinstate its rightful place in the world as an economic superpower. But I’m not quite so sure it has the collective determination needed to get there any time soon. It seems just a little too disorganised to create the commercial velocity required.

At this point in the piece I’ll remind myself that I am of course guilty of a gross generalisation of the very worst kind and may conceivably lack any credible anthropological know-how to make fleeting commentary about India’s economic direction. Judging India on the back of a short trip to Kolkata is akin to dismissing the economic relevance of Europe because of poor sanitary conditions in Naples.

But there is some commonality across all Indian cities that can’t be so easily dismissed. And they account for much of why India is what it is and what it will become.

First and foremost is service. Western companies have not set up call-centres all over the sub-continent because they had a spat with the local authorities in Guilford. They put them there because service is a natural Indian disposition, not a commercial aspiration. Everywhere you go people can’t help themselves but to help you. “Service with a smile” was clearly translated from an ancient Mughal dialect. That’s not the case in Guilford.

Second is dignity. I choose my words carefully having brushed past the horror of Kolkata’s slums. You can’t not be affected by what you see there. But neither can you ignore the spiritualism and human dignity that prevails. Rituals run deep in India, from young couples courting to animal traffic management – from the odd to the bizarre. It is this dignity that will stagger economic growth rather than stagnate it.

And third is technology. The sub-continent produces more technology and engineering graduates than any other country. With English as their language of choice many of the earlier graduates have since matured into global beating business leaders leading equally globally dominant companies. For those fresh out of school, they are the ones who will be giants of the future. Just ask Bill Gates where he thinks the threat to Microsoft lies. It is not the European Union’s anti-trust watchdog.

Quite what this means for the India vs. China battle remains unclear. Both markets are predicted to see an economic slow down in 08 and 09; both countries have unrelenting consumer demand on the back of a burgeoning middle class. But it does seem that India has the cultural wherewithal not to be fazed by economic hiccups however significant elsewhere in the world. From the spice lords of the 12th Century to the Opium kings that fuelled the East India Company of the 19th Century, entrepreneurialism is in the country’s DNA. And that matters.

To be ambivalent about India is to resign your self to being little more than a camera-touting tourist. It has long been one of the world’s most progressive countries, boasting market capitalism long before the West was discovered. In the history books of the 2300 Century, brand India of the 20th Century will be seen as little more than an economic sabbatical. Its return to power is just another trading day away.