'It's only black and white but it is a good picture,' he said.

In Sriprumbudur, a small town a few kilometres along the road from where former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated five years ago, the face of modern India is being painted in more subtle colours. But is no less apparent than on the choked, blaring streets of New Delhi and Bombay.

There is an understandable temptation for Westerners to romanticise such apparently unsophisticated scenes - dirt roads, wandering animals, humble homes, temples rising at the heart of the town - and wonder that it had not changed for hundreds of years.

But it has and its people have, too. A new sun is rising across this ancient land.

Satellite dishes are evident even in less-developed cities.

You expect to find STAR TV in India's big cities but the juxtaposition of a man drawing water from a well just three metres from two big satellite dishes erected next to a brick hut seems to remind visitors of a changing India.

Slowly, but surely, capitalism is being embraced by the country.

And tourism is helping India's gradual transition to an economic power in south Asia.

For decades, India has been the first-choice destination for backpackers but last year less than a million tourists visited India.

Now, tourism authorities are further developing the industry to maximise its potential.

By 2000, India hopes to be attracting five million visitors.

Hotels, mainly five and three star, are being developed and the infrastructure is being strengthened.

Here, foreign visitors are greeted like envoys.

After a drive of nearly two hours from Madras - a journey that in the West would have taken 20 minutes - a cup of hot 'cha' was most inviting.

'We have seen a lot more tourists since Gandhi's assassination,' my host said as I walked into the blackness of his home.

'They come to see the monument. Isn't it peculiar how adversity can bring prosperity?' The British are treated like returning cousins, not vanquished colonists.

This is a country to which the British may have given an unsurpassable rail network, but anything else is debatable.

Yet there is something about India and Indians that, perhaps naively, makes Westerners feel they are in the presence of something more profound, more understood, more civilised than themselves.

A nation bred not from poverty or wealth, from history or modernity, from culture or religion, but from a depth of soul that is deeper than we can fathom.

The snake charmers, exotic markets, dancing bears, pink palaces, desert forts and the intrigue of India that make up travellers' tales are carried around with every visitor.

This applies whether it is to the backwaters of Kerala in the south; to the spice markets of Madras; the din of Bombay; the crowds of Calcutta; the Taj at Agra; the deserts of Rajasthan; or the mountains of the north.