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India, along with China, is one of the world's rising superpowers. The power of both nations rests on similar foundations: a vast population and landmass, a weight of history and culture that stretches back for millennia and a driving ambition and hunger for success in the future. Yet these two countries could not be more different. If China's identity has been founded on a centralized rule and dominion stretching back thousands of years, India has always been a nation of a thousand disparate races, peoples, religions, and creeds. The very idea of India as one single homogeneous nation was only recently imposed by Western imperial conquerors.
It is also a nation of diversity—the home of at least three of the world's great religions and a whole sequence of empires and states, each with their own spectacular architectural and cultural legacies. In consequence, overwhelming contrasts exist: most dramatically between the rich and poor. India is a country that seems happy to accept and integrate the lowliest beggar into a society that also includes the most affluent prince. But it also appears to be a country of great tolerance, where individuals are allowed to pursue their own faith and ambitions.
As India strives to join the leading edge of the world's powers, century-old conventions are coming under pressure as never before, forcing deep shifts and changes within Indian society that will ultimately lead not to a simple emulation of Western or American models but an entirely new culture and identity that combines great strands of both Eastern and Western civilization.
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