Some rural tea shops still keep separate sets of cups for their customers - one set for dalits (formerly known as untouchables), and one for the upper castes who fear contamination if they share cups with dalits.

The persistence of such antiquated norms does not, of course, automatically disqualify India from the ranks of modern nations. Modernity is a complicated condition, one that certainly allows ample room for the endurance of the old within the new.

The old can be updated, too, turned into something modern. Mohandas K. Gandhi, is often - and not inaccurately - thought of as a traditionalist, but it is useful to recall that part of his project was to modernize Hinduism by eliminating caste and other forms of oppression.

The point is that modernity is layered, defined more by a state of mind than by loyalty to contemporary trends or consumer fashions. As the German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno put it: "Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category." Perhaps the relevant question, then, is not so much whether India is a modern nation, but what form its modernity takes.

Some scholars - notably Benjamin Friedman, in "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth" - have suggested that economic development is often accompanied by greater tolerance, and a heightened commitment to democracy and social mobility. Certainly, there are signs, if at times fleeting, of such a process at work in India. Often, though, the nation's economic growth seems to have spurred primarily a scramble for material acquisition that has little to do with democracy or other such ideals.

The next few years are likely to be marked by something of a seesaw struggle between these two versions of modernity. Indeed, for all its ancient history, India sometimes feels like a work in progress, caught up in a whirlwind of equivocation over its identity.

The version of modernity it ultimately chooses will affect not just its own future, but also that of developing countries around the world, many of which look to the example set by India - along with China - to guide their path out of poverty.

But to return to the question: Is India a modern nation? Albert Einstein once wrote admiringly of Americans that they were a people "always becoming, never being." Today, it is less in the United States, and more in India's furious search for self-definition, that I feel that sense of perpetual reinvention, of energy and forward momentum.

If modernity is defined by an openness to change, an ability to accommodate newness and a willingness to shed the past, then I think the answer to the question is yes.

David Fuller's view India has created a middle class currently estimated at between 300 to 350 million people in record time. However with a population of approximately 1.2 billion, most Indian's remain trapped in poverty. This is the downside of India's so-called demographic advantage. The caste system is also a huge problem. There are advantages for countries in having a rich cultural heritage over thousands of years but social and economic mobility are seldom among them. This is more readily achieved in countries with largely immigrant populations.