But when he arrives in India next month for his first visit to an increasingly important strategic ally, the security zone that President George W. Bush will inhabit could prove profoundly misleading. He needs to understand the country that his advisers tell him will rival China as the coming Asian superpower. He needs to comprehend India's limitations as well as its potential. And he'll never really understand them from inside the bubble.

India is a country of 1.1 billion people whose economy is growing at 8 percent a year, whose stock market is booming, which is a net exporter of food, a nuclear power and a robust democracy with a free and outspoken press and TV.

India is China without the secret police and the labor camps and the Communist Party's monopoly on power. India is the kind of country that the West always dreamed the best places in the developing world might one day become, a land that is learning how to be become prosperous and educated while remaining proudly and noisily free.

Bush will see all that, and understand it, and it will be just as his advisers told him back in Washington. This is the country that may become America's most important ally in the course of this century, a bastion against Islamic fundamentalism, against terrorism and against the prospect of aggressive Chinese expansion.

But there is another India that Bush needs to see. India is also the complete chaos of a transport system that has camel carts and bicycles, three-wheeled scooter rickshaws called tuk-tuks and trucks and Mercedes limousines and pedestrians and donkeys and holy cows all vying for right of way in the endless traffic jams.

It is being stuck in a locally made taxi while the traffic tries to edge its way around a cow that has chosen to snooze in the middle of the road, while another cow defecates loudly and messily just outside the car window, and a small boy dashes into traffic and scoops up the cowpat as it still steams, to take it proudly back home to his delighted mother, where it will be patted into shape and dried and added to the stack that makes up the fuel on which a very large fraction of India's families still cook their meals.

It is coming to terms with an economy that is forging its way boldly into the 21st century, on the foundations of an infrastructure that is still stuck in the late 1940s.

It would be worth Bush's while to dismiss the police outriders on the motorbikes and try a short ride up the highway to Jaipur, a city of some 4 million people just 130 miles from New Delhi. Mostly it ain't bad, as Indian roads go, with stretches of divided highway and traffic lights that work sometimes. But there are potholes so big that even Bush's limo might never be seen again.

And there are places where it dwindles into a single lane highway, and not only where the locals decide to force the traffic to slow and stop and maybe buy something by erecting temporary barriers in the middle of the road. That's when the hawkers and the beggars come out to thrust emaciated babies at the car windows or to try and sell some cheap trinket or some sweet pastry covered in flies.

It is heat and dust and four and half lanes of traffic in a road designed for two, and large trucks coming at you fast on the wrong side of the road while two tuk-tuks each carrying eight people and two goats and a very large sack of grain decide to cross the street ahead of you without looking and then have to dodge the cow, and the bicycles, some of them carrying sari-clad girlfriends riding side-saddle on the crossbar. And then there are the pedestrians, quite a lot of lot of them, shepherding other forms of livestock through all this glorious, chaotic, noisy and bustling and indescribable mess.

It is, in its teeming and energy-filled and human way, quite wonderful and exhilarating. But it is not quite what President Bush's briefing on the new Asian superpower will have led him to expect, and he needs to understand just how many different ways there are to see this extraordinary new India. Because while his advisers are right and India is the Asian ally that America needs, it is also a desperately poor and still very much under-developed country which is at least a decade behind China in the growth stakes, and maybe 20 years behind China in infrastructure.

India will need to invest $50 billion a year for the next 20 years in building highways and telecommunications and electricity and sewage systems, and maybe as much again on education for the hundreds of millions of the rural poor.

Right now, India is a hybrid, an advanced high-tech economy about the size of the Netherlands, perched atop three or four Third World countries like Bangladesh. It may have nuclear weapons and a space program and an aspiring middle class of some 300 million people with incomes of $10,000 a year and plans to buy a home and car and take foreign vacations. But that still leaves 800 million who are living in poverty so extreme that few Americans or Europeans can imagine it.

Their time will come. Indeed, you can see it now, with battery powered TV sets in the villages getting satellite versions of "Desperate Housewives" dubbed into Hindi and children dressed in rags who already know how to operate a computer, and also how to milk a goat and persuade a sleepy cow that it's time to get off the highway.

India is all these things, and if Bush does not get to see these extraordinary contradictions, he's going to get what could be a dangerously mistaken idea about how far India is yet ready for the geo-political prime time that some White House strategists have in mind.

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