Ben Arnoldy: I first arrived in India through Mumbai, and it was the beginning of a long series of surprises and shocks. Though I considered myself cosmopolitan through extensive travels in Europe and living in big city America, it was the first time I had been to Asia.

Not a particularly sensual person, I never anticipated that my first impression from the real, modern India would be the smell. The airplane cabin filled with an aroma that my nose interpreted as rancid yogurt.

Rohit Gupta: True, India is a nasal adventure. I can close my eyes and tell the city by its smell sometimes. Almost.

BA: The second impression was visual: the anachronistic condition of the Bombay airport. I suddenly moved within a terminal that must have been built in the '50s and had never been renovated. I suddenly realized I was accustomed to a physical environment under constant renovation.

Living in Boston and Washington, there's simply an assumption that the environment is feeble in the face of the individual, not vice versa.

As I walked out of the airport at 3 a.m., I stumbled into a swarm of motorized rickshaw drivers that saw my white skin emerge like breasts at a college frat party. I hadn't just attracted a crowd, I was thrust into a cultural dynamic shaped by more than 400 years of history. I could tell by the fawning and excited shouts of "sir" that I represented Wealth and Western power.

This was terrifying and absurd, since I was already insecure about how little money I'd managed to scrounge together for this trip. And my youthful life to this point was entirely devoid of power — always the student, the son, the younger brother in a world of professors, parents, and other adults.

Suddenly the boy who could barely get a Washington taxi to stop for him was the center of a milling mob. Had the imperialism that I had dissected in history classes really ended?

RG: I beg to differ. What you saw was not a residue of Western imperialism. No man can be enslaved without his will. We have chosen to remain servile, because it is easier than fighting against a civilization that is no more than a corporate brand, which has always asserted commercial infinitude over cultural vicissitude.

BA: Mumbai at night through a rickshaw window: nothing could have prepared me.

Perfectly still bodies, wrapped entirely in shrouds, lined like sardines on all available sidewalk spaces. I thought they were corpses, so perfectly did they resemble mummies from a distance. Of course they were sleeping, families sleeping on the street. Of course. Of course. No! There couldn't be that many people living in that kind of poverty passing before my eyes.

RG: A factoid — some of them do not wake up, every morning. My family home is in Jaipur, 45 degrees centigrade (113 degrees F) in the day and 4 degrees (39 degrees F) in the night. In the daily newspaper there is a column for how many destitute froze the previous night.

BA: The driver eventually stopped the rickshaw and ran over to a group of men standing at a corner. He was apparently asking for directions to my hotel. He returned with a 10-year-old street urchin who looked at me with a devious grin.

"I can bring you to another hotel. Very nice, good price," he said.

Nobody, including the boy, seemed to know where my hotel was. I was leary of the offer of a different one. We drove on, the boy asking other folks on the streets who were awake. I worried that I now was retaining the services of two people, one of whom had an unknown agenda — unless it was hospitality.

We stopped on a street that seemed more residential than commercial, though the house the boy ushered me towards was admittedly large. The boy opened an iron gate, and the two of us plunged into a dark courtyard. He lead me into the building, and he began knocking on doors. Inquiries about the hotel were received with angry sleepers yelling back that we were in fact at an apartment, not a hotel.

I now assumed the worst about the boy. He had led me to this dark place, pretending it was the hotel, and I had visions of spending my first night in India camping on the sidewalk, penniless.

Unnerved, I strode into an opening and somebody turned on a light. As my eyes adjusted, I saw heads pop up from behind a counter. One man rose from slumbering on the floor and strode over to a wall with hooks and keys. Another faced me behind the counter and opened a reservation book. This was the hotel, and yes, the price I was quoted over the phone in London was wrong. It was, of course, more expensive now that I appeared in the flesh.

"Sir, sir," said the forgotten boy behind me. "Backsheesh," he said, looking deadly serious lest I thought about protesting his tip.

Was my disappointment as I turned in for the night heightened because my prior impressions of India were gleaned from the heights of Indian civilization? Probably. Would I have still felt a huge disconnect even if I came with no prior knowledge? Definitely.

RG: Hmm, I go through this too. It wasn't your privilege. It is not an example of a cross-cultural interaction, it is a expression of how classes perceive themselves. The Crossroads is a hip mall in Mumbai whose owners got tired of lower-middle class window-shoppers. To ensure revenue and end nuisance, they made the following rule — no man or woman without a cellphone or laptop can be allowed inside. The numbers of visitors dropped like lead in water, and they had to retract the policy in about a week.

These gadgets were indictors of a certain financial status. You think the white man imposed himself on us. Ben, we imperialized ourselves. I am fair by Indian standards, and if I wear formal clothes and officewear with a mobile phone, I find myself on that same pedestal. The worship that accosted you was not worship, it was a sales pitch.