By Brian Greenspun

Sun, Mar 2, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Bangalore, India — When New York Times columnist and best-selling author Tom Friedman visited Bangalore, he knew instinctively that the world was flat.

It so impressed him that his must-read book, “The World Is Flat,” took its shape and its inspiration from what he heard, saw and just knew. And that was that India was fast becoming the new outsourcing and IT technology center of the universe. That was only three or four years ago.

When the Brookings Institution India Study Tour landed at the Bangalore airport, we all had the same, Friedman-inspired apprehension about what we would see just a couple of years later.

Was it all hype? Did Tom get it right? Was the outsourcing of so many of America’s knowledge- and serviced-based jobs just a fad, a temporary blip on the radar screen of the greatest industrialized nation on Earth? Or was it just the beginning of the new world to come, a world in which globalization was an inexorable fact of life and, in fact, a phenomenon to be embraced and not cursed, as is currently the mantra of the Democratic left wing?

There were plenty of questions we couldn’t wait to get answered, especially since we had just left Mumbai — the British called it Bombay, so did the rest of the world until recently — which gave new meaning to the word “paradox.”

In Mumbai there was commerce wherever we turned, but we couldn’t turn very far because there was no infrastructure in place to allow room for such a maneuver. It was a clash not unfamiliar to Nevadans — growth beyond our wildest imagination coupled with a leadership vacuum that refused to recognize the need for the kind of infrastructure investment necessary to fuel that growth.

In India’s defense, it is her wide-open democratic form of government in which all sides are heard, respected and then heard again that is the cause of the inaction or, at least, the slow, very slow-motion construction. In our case it is just a failure of leadership.

Would Bangalore be any different? Would the place that has insourced American jobs and centered the youthful brain drain from Silicon Valley to someplace in the south of India be able to answer the question that was on everyone’s mind? Could India keep up the momentum?

An answer was not slow in coming. As soon as we pulled out of the airport and practically to a dead stop, we knew there was still a way to go. Bangalore was indeed an island of intelligence that could be reached by boat almost as fast as by car. And there isn’t a body of water in sight!

Yes, it was an answer and one we would see repeated throughout India — with the notable exception of British-planned and built New Delhi — but it wasn’t the answer. You see, Friedman was right.

And all the folks in the United States who are trying to protect America from losing jobs to India and places like it are just plain wrong. Not for wanting to keep the jobs in our country, but for not recognizing that those jobs are already gone and doing something about creating new and better ones.

When we finally reached the city, what we saw was nothing short of amazing. It wasn’t what Christopher Columbus might have seen when he reached the shores of the New World; it was much better than that.

When I was last in India, in the mid-1990s, the one thing that overwhelmed me was the extreme poverty that was everywhere. With almost a billion people, it was hard to ignore. In those days I would guess that 90 percent of the people were living on barely a dollar a day.

Twelve years later, there are 1.2 billion people but only 60 percent of them are stuck at that dollar-a-day, or less, number. That means there are hundreds of millions of people who have moved and are steadily moving into the fastest-growing middle class in the world.

Think about it. In the United States, a country of more than 300 million men, women and children, our middle class comprises the vast majority of those folks — between 200 million and 250 million people.

In just 12 short years, some 400 million people have moved into or very close to India’s middle class, with millions more joining the club every day. And they are getting there by hard work, an indefatigable entrepreneurial streak and incredible brainpower. For certain, they are still a fraction of the United States’ financial output, but the signs are there and the facts are clear — they will get there.

Two of the companies we visited in Bangalore brought this fact home. The first was a clothing manufacturer. It was a multigeneration business — that is the way many of the best companies have evolved, family businesses driven by a work and moral ethic that we would be proud to call our own — that belied the stereotypical “sweatshop” that we would normally associate with the Third World.

It was clean, it was huge and in it were hundreds of men and women who were as skilled at what they were doing as any of their counterparts in any other First, Second or Third World locale. All we needed to do was look at the labels — the companies and designers for whom these workers were sewing — to realize that these folks were working for some of the highest-end clothing people in the business.

Of course, what I remembered most were the prices at which these companies sold their products to their American customers and the prices at which these stores sell to us. Oh well, hooray for capitalism!

Here’s the real story. In the factory was a medical clinic and a child care center that is mandated by law. Working conditions are not only contractually determined between the companies and their customers but also mandated by Indian law, and they are as quality-oriented as our own.

The people who work in these factories, most of whom worked for less than $30 a month just a couple of years ago, are making double and sometimes triple that amount. It doesn’t sound like much to us, but it has moved these factory workers into that huge and growing Indian middle class.

They all have cell phones, TVs, apartments, motor scooters, cars or bikes, and they all have enough time with their families. But, unlike most Americans, they save their money. These people are determined to better their lives. Now.

Our next stop was Infosys, one of India’s IT giants. When we entered the Infosys campus we knew we had arrived someplace special. It is not unlike a Google or a Microsoft campus. Except this place is in the middle of Bangalore — a place you can’t get to from the United States without flying 15 hours and a place you can’t get to once you have made that flight without driving for another hour or two because the roads don’t work! But boy, do the people.

They are young, they are smart and every year India turns out 500,000 new engineering students to fill the growing demand for their kind of jobs. Compare that to the 70,000 or so we graduate in the United States and you should get the idea that we are in for a world of hurt if we don’t decide to educate our kids on something other than the latest Paris Hilton or Britney Spears meltdown or some other such nonsense.

Tom Friedman wrote at the end of his book about his parents’ admonition when he wouldn’t eat. “You had better eat all your dinner because there is a child in China who is starving,” was their advice. We all heard it growing up. Tom says all that has changed and now the admonition must be about education because there is a child in China, India and other places around this globe who is starving — but this time it is for our jobs.

If you look at the front of the Infosys annual report it says simply, “Think Flat.” Inside it explains:

“Once upon a time, the world was spiky. Opportunities were unequal across countries, information was often walled and new economies were unheard of. But around the mid-1990s, things started changing.

“Wealth began to spread, opening up fresh markets. A Baby-Boomer generation aged in developed countries while a Gen-Y exploded in emerging ones, rebalancing the workforce and propelling new economies. Technology became ubiquitous, connecting people and information.

“Together, these disruptive forces rearranged and leveled the global business-scape. Braving the waves of complex regulations and changing customer expectations, a new breed of entrepreneurs arrived to claim the unexplored land. They found a flat world. We live in exciting times.”

Welcome to India. There is so much more to this story, but it will have to wait until next time.