Welcome to Ahmedabad

On Dec. 26, I'd never heard of Ahmedabad, but on Dec. 29, I was in the back of a car, driving there, mainly because the city's airport offered the most reasonably priced flight to Delhi two friends and I could find. Turns out Ahmedabad has nearly four million people, is India's fastest-growing city and is one of the world's fastest growing cities. And after spending three days there, I think I know more about the city than anyone in the U.S. who isn't Indian-American or an India specialist, which is only a tiny fraction of this country and a generally astounding thought.

At an event the World Economic Forum hosted last fall, a professor noted that not only are developing countries growing at a rate to compete with the U.S. globally, but they each have many cities we've never heard of that rank among the world's fastest-growing. Sure, everyone knows about Dubai, Mumbai and Shanghai, as they're now international capitals of finance, but closely trailing them are ... Sana'a, Ahmedabad, Karachi, Abuja and so on. This has major implications for global politics, commerce, urban development and human rights.

While walking and driving around Ahmedabad, I couldn't stop thinking, This is what the Indian middle class, hundreds of millions deep, looks like. People dress well, drive nice cars and, as superficial a judgment as this is, look comfortable. Buildings are being built everywhere. Pleasant neighborhoods abound. Business is good and the doors are open, and there are billboards everywhere plastered with the governor's face, promoting the state's economy in a vaguely autocratic way. (The governor is also vaguely autocratic. He and his political party are tied to the religious cleansing of the city's Muslims in 2002.)

The airport's new international terminal is about to open, even though the only direct international flight from Ahmedabad is to Muscat. (I'd love to know who's on that plane and why.) Everything at the airport is glass and ostentatious -- I saw the biggest grass lawn of the whole trip there -- and at least for now, totally unnecessary, which enhances the vaguely autocratic feeling. We were about two levels of repression and a bit more oil money, of which there's already quite a bit in Ahmedabad, away from a laughably gaudy, egocentric strongman state.

Traveling to Ahmedabad on one's first trip to India is akin to visiting Charlotte or Salt Lake City on one's first trip to the U.S. -- newly prosperous, growing and conservative, and while attractive, generally unexciting and not the place one would visit unless there to see family or do business. And that's what makes Ahmedabad so fascinating, especially considering it might, in our lifetime, join the list of global capitals, which can't be said of the other two. Lesson for the U.S.: Keep looking in the rearview mirror.

Oh, and the food there was excellent. Above are two photos taken in Ahmedabad.