India today is a land of rising aspirations, global dreams, modern cities, contemporary ideas. But these visions of modernity have to struggle with difficult social, economic and political problems, negotiate with age-old traditions to create India 2000. The new city has fueled the imagination of people as a hotbed of opportunity, as a great leveler, which lets at least people aspire to go beyond the accident of their birth, into dreamlands, layers of fantasy, which often become reality. The new city lives on as a cauldron of energy and activity, by the year 2015 more than one-third of Indians will live in urban areas. But not only the new city, transition is also creating the new village in India rapidly. The new village defies cliches of an idyllic, pastoral lifestyle, where bullet cards work on green fields for emaciated persons living in mud houses. While poverty is a relentless reality for millions of people, transition has created a diversity of experience even in rural India. Development has brought wealth for many. The rural rich and middle classes today enjoy lifestyle sometimes more opulent than even the city elite. The new village seems to be transplanting the facilities and lifestyle of the new city to its own setting. People even dress and talk differently. Some Indian dresses, like the dhoti and pajama, have been replaced by urban-looking trousers and shirts. Poor illiterate villagers often speak the local language with smatterings of English. In many places, the new village is literally being reconstructed. Temporary houses are being replaced by stronger structures called bakka houses. Transition is literally fading out the old to bring in the new. Although the process of transition in India began sometime back, it rarely sparked off when economic liberalization began in the early nineties. The new economy has been the springboard for much of the transition. It is sometimes said that market forces unleashed by liberalization are too harsh for the poor. But it is equally true that even some of the traditional areas of the economy, like commodity markets, have been energized by the new economy. In some cases, the basic market forces of demand and supply have been activated. The challenge is to convert these benefits to real development for the poor. One of the bedrocks of the new economy is the technology dream. Interestingly, Indians take pride in science in spite of a perception that it's preoccupied with spirituality. Scientists say that India can capture 10-15% of the world market for upper-end manufacturing software in two decades and by 2010, software exports are expected to be $50 billion. One of the stories in the West about India is that it manages to preserve and practice democracy under very difficult circumstances. This is a true story, only it needs to be told a bit more. Hundreds of millions of Indians are becoming politicized continuously in the best sense of the term. Recent times, social movements have managed to politicize particular issues like the environment. Together with panchayats, such movements are creating the new politics. The new politics and the new economy are helping form a new society. A new society where what's new is celebrated and it's lived and dissolved. I see it's tackled and dreams dreamt confidently.