If you read the news media today, you're bombarded with stories proclaiming loudly that the dominance of the West is over, and that China and India already dominate the world economy.
The papers trumpet the glittering office parks and high rises that house the corporate giants ready to steal American jobs.
Well, last summer I worked in one of those glittering office parks. Within the walls of one of India's largest firms, the situation is just as the papers love to describe it.
My coworkers were driven, motivated young professionals, typing away on Outlook and placing phone calls to our branch offices across the world.
They relished the chance to go toe-to-toe with Western competitors, and more often than not, they came away victorious, though their salaries, which—despite their iPhone-loaded pockets—were invariably described as "peanuts."
There was little culture shock to be had there: everyone pulled out their smartphones to check stock prices and the cappuccinos flowed freely.
Sure, lunch might consist of dosa and there might be monkeys outside the office windows from time to time, but what does that matter when everyone went to watch the latest Harry Potter film after work on Friday?
But the impoverished side of the developing world was always close at hand.
One of my friends could see over the barbed-wire-topped barricades from her window, and we would often look out, watching the campus' neighbors scratching in the dirt outside of their hovels.
Clearly, there are rust spots on the brilliant, networked, glass-and-steel edifice that is modern India.
My local coworkers found the contrasts even more bemusing than I did. Whenever we spoke of things other than the office, they would warn me over and over that the people I would meet on trips would "not be like us."
For the residents of the "New India," the old India is something that is mildly embarrassing and should be politely ignored, even when each journey home involves fighting off rickshaws in bumper-to-bumper Bangalore traffic.
For all this, traditional mores do live on to some extent.
Arranged marriages are declining in popularity, but, if the morality of television and Bollywood is anything to go on, love marriages are still the exception rather than the rule.
Even in the ultra-fast, ultra-modern world of Indian IT, many of my married peers had spoken to their spouses for only 15 minutes before agreeing to the engagement.
So when a colleague asked me if I would ever have an arranged marriage, I started to give the standard, "that's not really how it works in the West..." response. After sipping my company-issue cappuccino and looking out at the campus for a moment, I started to answer, but a different friend cut me off after I had expressed my negative sentiment.
He gestured out at the shiny, new office buildings with his mug, "I agree—I just don't see how people can continue to think in such ways when they spend all day here. How can you write code all day and then go home to someone you didn't choose? It doesn't work that way."
With the rise of the emerging markets, a lot has been written about how economic modernization does not necessarily imply cultural or political Westernization.
But inside the halls of New India, the holy mantra is "adapt to survive." Our firm was in the process of transforming itself to compete with Western companies.
Is it really that much of a surprise that its employees were doing so culturally as well?
Perhaps it's not entirely conscious, and perhaps some would blame the insidious tendrils of Western culture forcing itself into foreign nations.
But on the ground, all of the globalization I see is giving the locals more of what they want.
Yes, Harry Potter was the hit of the summer, but try to find another English-language film in the cinemas on most evenings: there are none to be had.
Likewise, my Western friends and I spent many an evening trying to decipher Indian television. They may be speaking English—at least when the game-show host doesn't inexplicably drop into Hindi for a few lines—but figuring out exactly what is going on is another trick entirely.
New India may not be quite here yet, but it's coming, and coming fast.
Some people decry the loss of native national culture, but this loss seems to be less the creation of a void and more the extension of tradition into the realm of the modern.
The stereotype of the modern, middle-class Indian woman is an university-educated techie who dreams of a beautiful romance that ends in a Bollywood-perfect traditional wedding.
It sounds like a marriage of the new and the old India to me.