A little more than a week ago I returned from my first visit to India. I went for business—a chance to hook up with some brethren from our parent company, WPP—but I was fortunate enough to have some time away from the work that brought us there to absorb the people and places of this amazing country. Please bear with me going a little bit off-topic today, but I think it’s important once in a while to share something personal that does connect with what is at the heart of “marketing with meaning”: Understanding people, society, and life.

I’ve done a decent amount of travel in my life, and have visited developing nations including Vietnam, Argentina, and China. But none of these experiences is comparable to what I saw in India. Here are a few of the things that stood out from our handful of days in the country in and outside of Delhi:

• There is humanity everywhere. This is a little difficult to describe, but India is a place where there are many people, and they live out in the open. Drive down the streets and within a block you will see people eating, drinking, buying, sleeping, changing, fighting, cooking, and washing clothes. While it is unusual and quaint to hear dishes clinking when you walk through a Western neighborhood, India is a continuous, rich display of human life in all of its triumphs, tragedies, and chores.
• Infrastructure is far behind, but people don’t seem bothered. I was amazed to travel down one of the major highways outside of New Delhi and see only two lanes. This is a country of 1.2 billion people, and one of the growth miracles of the modern world, yet the interstate a few miles away from my home in Cincinnati is 10 times more developed and in better condition. I was also surprised that few people speak English even though this is a historic and secondary official language of the country and education is highly prized. Nevertheless, there is little concern or “hurry” to improve. Maybe this is a good thing, as it allows India to grow at a pace that allows it to adapt, rather than upending everything they hold dear.
• There is poverty everywhere, but the people smile more than we do. I was blown away to see the amount of people living in small quarters in dirty streets strewn with mounds of trash. Cows, dogs, and people sorted through these trash piles. No vehicle looked less than 10 years old. There are many poor people sleeping on the road median at night. Yet there are no riots in the streets and the people seem to find a way to get by. I will never forget taking a camel-driven cart through a small village at the base of a castle-turned-hotel where our meeting was held. Adults and children smiled and used what little English they knew to say, “Hello, mister!” A little boy with no pants defecating in the gutter of the dirt road waved to me.

It was most interesting to me to see the very rich and very poor living side by side in this vast nation. Fancy cars with leather interiors vie for a driving lane along with dilapidated bicycles hauling propane tanks. And we visited a Sikh shrine and joined people of all classes in bathing our feet, washing our hands, and paying our respects.

I look forward to visiting India again and gauging the progress it makes. I just hope that this unique culture persists through the inevitable wave of development and Westernization that is already sweeping through.