ARTICLE: An Indian Says Farewell to Poverty, With Jitters, By AKASH KAPUR, New York Times, August 8, 2009

A great capture of what globalization does when it comes to your sleepy backwater: everything changes. Glimpse:

The area around where I live was once an isolated rural hamlet. It was a hundred miles, along a potholed road, from the nearest big city, Chennai, or Madras, as it was called then. I grew up here, in the country, surrounded by five villages. I had an idyllic childhood. My life ran to the rhythms of an agrarian world: bullock carts and hand plows, bicycles, windmills. But for the men and women who lived in the villages, who eked out a living from the eroded land, life was much harder. Their existences were circumscribed by poverty. In many respects, their conditions were little improved from those of their grandparents. Things started changing in the 1990s. In 1991, the Indian government, facing an economic crisis, liberalized the economy. The currency was devalued, import barriers fell, and the state loosened its grip. A country that had been guided by the motto of self-reliance -- the government used to exhort us, "be Indian, buy Indian" -- joined the world. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the reforms initiated in New Delhi trickled down to rural South India. Farmers sold their bullock carts and started going to the fields in shiny red tractors. I noticed color televisions, and then satellite dishes, in the houses in the villages. The houses themselves were changing -- there were fewer thatch huts and more concrete structures. In the late '90s, the road to Chennai was turned into a highway. Tourists started making their way down the coast, eager to visit the beach, the international community of Auroville, or the colonial villas in the town of Pondicherry, a former French outpost just down the road from here. Development has for the most part been kind to this area. It's created new wealth, new jobs, new opportunities. The men and women who have set up shops and restaurants and yoga centers on the road to the beach have done well for themselves. But development has also disrupted existing ways of living. It has strained the social and cultural fabric of the villages. Kuilapalayam, a village at the head of the road leading to the beach, has had at least seven murders in recent years. Gangs of young men roam the village, extorting money, exacting revenge. Once, the panchayat, a traditional assembly made up of village elders, would have controlled the violence. But the new generation has modern ideas; they don't heed their elders, and the panchayat members are powerless, too scared to step in. Development has led to new resentments and torn apart families. Farmers who used to toil over barren patches of land suddenly find that that land is worth a small fortune. They've built new houses, sent their kids to school, bought motorcycles and maybe even cars. A couple of universities up the road have widened people's horizons. But neighbors who didn't own land, who watched their friends get rich, often don't feel quite as sanguine about the changes. And long-forgotten relatives have appeared, perhaps returning from the cities to make a claim on the land. The papers are full of often violent stories about disputes over property.

Ah, the loss of pristine innocence, mourned primarily by well-meaning outsiders and those locally who don't succeed in the new climate as much as their neighbors.