One of the hardest things to understand in India is the way in which caste and class relate, and how caste, in particular, still holds sway over the way in which individuals are perceived and treated. India is currently enormously optimistic, despite the world economic crisis, and aggressively aspirational posters for MBAs, English and computer classes adorn lampposts in even the smallest of beach towns. The immense gap between even basic infrastructure, religious tradition and cutting-edge technology seems to have been bridged with remarkable ease, so that it is not uncommon for places without clean drinking water to have broadband, and for trainee Brahmin priests to pray in temples while texting on their mobiles.

There is something utterly, utterly wrong and baffling, however, about sitting in the giant restaurant of a five-star hotel while someone tells you that half a billion people in the same country still defecate in the open for lack of alternatives, that the largest city Mumbai has no sewerage system and that you should brush your teeth with mineral water for fear of how dirty the tap-water might be. It's as if India has skipped from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, leaving out the parts where you had public works projects, New Deals or anything that would have provided the majority of people with roads, water or toilets. As a consequence, there seem to be two Indias - that of the burgeoning middle class, who can at least afford the mineral water they need to brush their teeth with, who study abroad, who entertain their clients in the five-star hotels and use swish new airports and take entrepreneurial Jet and Kingfisher flights - and the rest, who live and die where they grew up, live off the land and fetch water from a tank a mile away. When the British elevated certain castes to aid them in their colonial project (and why should either of them help the lower castes?) and when Gandhi privileged the village as the backbone of India life, the chances of establishing fully-workable infrastructure diminished until now, depressingly, it seems almost too late.

The immaterial economy of course still needs tangible things like wires for telephony, computers for global networking and classrooms for e-learning, but these are easier to implement, if undeniably precarious (power cuts, power surges) than the bigger things like plumbing and water-filtration plants. You can sling some power-lines from village to village relatively easily, but digging up the crowded town to lay pipes is difficult and expensive.

If collective public projects are impossible, then it's every aspirational young man and woman for him or herself. Nowhere is this better reflected than in the astonishing organisation of the personal ads (or rather, 'Matrimonials', as marriage/alliance is the desired outcome rather than romantic distraction) in Indian newspapers. In the Sunday Times of India, appear the following categories, a mix of modern outlooks ('Cosmopolitan'), health conditions, jobs, qualifications, marital status, religion, eating habits, age and, above all, caste:

WANTED BRIDES
Cosmopolitan
HIV Positive
Manglik
Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribes
Second Marriage
Senior Citizen
Agarwal-Bisa
Brahmin
Garhwali
Jaiswal
Khatri
Kshatriya
Kurmi
Kayastha
Sahu-Teli
Swarnkar
Saini
Vaish/Jain
Vishwakama Panchal
Maurya
Agarwal
Agrawal
Bihari
Mangaloreans
Marwaris
Rajput

WANTED GROOMS
Swarnkar
Vaish/Jain
Agarwal
Agrawal
Marwaris
Rajput
Bengali
Gujarati
Kannadiga
Malayali
Oriya
Punjabi
Sindhi
Tamil
Telugu
Assamese
NRI/Green Card
Doctors
Government/Defence
MBA/CA
Buddhist
Christian
Hindu
Muslim
Sikh

Here are some of the entries:

WANTED BRIDES

Cosmopolitan

- 36 Years old Vegan IIT mathematics professor with boyish good looks who hates dairy products seeks a suitable vegan girl (vegetarian who avoid milk products). Caste No Bar

- At 41 with one marital experience I trace the destined one proposing that I am discreetly on my conviction of serving best inclusive cause of humanity amid vice and virtue of ever mingling global values! Is it thou disposed so? Respecting element of secrecy I am at ... on Sundays (10-5)

- Prominent Industrial Hindu Family looking for very fair, extremely attractive only, convent educated girl, from cultured family with good values, for their '78 born, never married, 5'9" non-smoker, teetotaller, fair, very slim, good featured, Ivy League educated son.

Vaish/Jain

- South Bombay based affluent and cultured open minded Jain status family invites proposals for their highly qualified son working as an Investment Banker iin New York, MS, MBA & PHD from Stanford and MIT (USA), 5'10", very handsome, Nov 78 born

There are references here and there to horoscopes, good families and of course all the women are very beautiful and all the men very handsome. The main thing that features across caste/educational/religious lines is the term 'fair', that is, light-skinned (for the women at least). Indian TV is filled with incredibly pale Indian women and adverts for skin-lightening creams play constantly. This seems very depressing. What does it mean, this desire for hyper-whiteness? The white skin of Northern Europeans is in reality rather wretched: prone to blushing and burning, dry, papery, blotchy, easily wrinkled and terribly thin. But I don't think this is what the whiteness-fetish is about, neither to be like nor to resemble their Hyperborean distant neighbours - instead it perhaps forms a kind of internal differentiation between the two Indias - the new, entrepreneurial MBA-getting India and the backward, village-dwelling, manual labouring India. The white skin of the indoors-working immaterial labourer against the outdoors-living, sun-tanned, agricultural-worker. The new economy divides and conquers better than the British ever could.