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At 7 this morning, just as the sun was coming up in London, I got dressed and went for a walk on Wanstead Flats, a great expanse of green right outside my door. I saw geese flying south against the orange and blue sky... a man on horseback, white seagulls swirling above the football pitches and at least six airplanes fanning out in different directions in the morning sky.

Needless to say, I am excited about going back to India. I'm only posted there for three months, but my association with the place goes back a lifetime. I was born there and went back in my 20s to work as a journalist. I met my husband there (we'll celebrate 10 years of that anniversary while there). And I learned more about India than I ever had being dragged there by my parents.

My mother's family is from Jammu, the Hindu part of Kashmir. It's a bustling, crowded trading town, the last place trains stop before the landscape rockets upwards into the Himalayan Mountains. Jammu is renowned for its red kidney beans and Basmati rice. My father recently brought me a sack of beans stowed away in his suitcase. They're small, brick red and meaty tasting, but not dense. We make them with garlic, ginger, turmeric, cayenne and coriander. A total aside-- I woke up this morning to the news that eating curry makes you smarter!! It's the turmeric apparently... If that's the case, why have I always struggled with the simplest math??

Anyway, there's little of my family left in Jammu nowadays. My uncle died last year.. and our connection to the place languished with him. The old family home with its open courtyard is locked up... and tied up in a property dispute. My cousins have married and moved away. One of them works as a software engineer in the new suburbs of India's capital, Delhi. He and his wife work six days a week, 14 hours a day. Where we used to spend all our free time together... now I can barely get him to commit to dinner....even red rajma beans!

My father's family emigrated from Rawalpindi, in what is now Pakistan, to Delhi, when India was partitioned in 1947 after British rule ended. He grew up in a two-room government-issue flat in south Delhi, in an area called Netaji Nagar. And south Delhi is where I'll be based, not far at all from Netaji Nagar, where my cousins and I slept outside on string cots in the summer and played on the government-issue concrete slides in the playground.

Anyway, enough about the past. India has moved beyond nostalgia and socialism. I'm sure all of you have picked up the phone in the past year and talked to some uber-polite call centre worker who may or may not be able to solve your problem... or even understand what you're talking about... but keeps calling you "Ma'am" or "Sir" with great deference. (Don't get me started on deference!) The back office and high-tech industry is booming, but still only represents a tiny proportion of India's economy. Most Indians... and that's a staggering 700 million people -- more than twice the entire US population-- still lives on a dollar a day or less and is being slowly crushed by global competition.

In 2004, I did a long ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ TV feature about one such woman, Nagaratnama, who lives just a few hours outside the gleaming cyber city of Hyderabad, in India's southeast. When I first saw her, she was sitting, deathly silent, outside her small house in a farming village. Her little boy played around her, as her father-in-law explained that just the day before, Nagaratnama's husband had been found dead, holding a can of pesticide he'd consumed. It's a tragically cheap and common way for farmers, straining under the weight of a few hundred dollars debt, to escape their misery. They are too poor to get proper credit from the bank, so they borrow from local moneylenders who charge them extortionate interest. Then, to make it even worse, the local supply shops often sell low-grade seed, so their harvest is never enough to live on. With India opening its markets to the world, these farmers are being undercut and out-produced. And there's nowhere for them to get job training or assistance.

The next day, I watched as Nagaratnama was led through the village in a red sari, jewellery and a red bindi, or dot, on her forehead... to say goodbye to her husband at the edge of the fields that killed him.

There, the women of the village wiped away her makeup, broke her glass bangles and stripped her of her wedding sari, swathing her in sterile white instead. At least in her village, the heads of widows are no longer shaved, though she'll still be considered unlucky and an outcast. All I can remember are her gaunt, under-fed body and her large, sad eyes. Just a few hours before, I'd been standing in a glass tower crowned by satellite dishes and fed by fibre-optic cables. How is that India can be so successful and so tragically inept all at the same time?

As Ros mentioned earlier, my job over the next three months, is to report India for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio News. But I'll also be preparing for World Have Your Say to broadcast live from India in February. Some of the topics that intrigue me are about India's future-- its identity, culture, corruption, its incredible energy and shortcomings. Please let us know what you want to talk about. I'm sure can stretch the global conversation a little further, in spite of the time difference! Oh, and if you're really, really into India, I'll be posting on my own blog, though at the moment it's still under construction. And apologies for not including any links-- apparently my home browser doesn't work properly with Movable Type (another thing to sort out in India!) Cheers for now- Anu.