When Starbucks announced that it was coming into India as part of a partnership with the Tata Group, there was a lot of excitement in the country’s coffee shop segment....Meanwhile Dunkin’ Donuts, another U.S. coffee and baked goods chain, beat the Seattle-based company to the punch: On May 8, the Canton, Mass.-based Dunkin’ Donuts opened its first restaurant in India, in city center Connaught Place in Delhi.

India's soft power has now been on display for at least a couple of decades: ... Bollywood's prodigious celluloid fare has long drawn huge audiences in significant parts of Asia, Africa, and beyond; India's English-language novelists have often edged out native British writers for the prestigious Man Booker Prize; and, of course, yoga studios have become all but ubiquitous in the United States.

It was an exercise in grass-roots democracy in which sections of the public could question a political leader in public about issues of interest and concern to them. It was also an exercise in public diplomacy in which a political leader takes advantage of the opportunity provided by such interactions to explain his or her thinking and views on issues of public concern.

With U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton having visited India this week in an effort to secure its cooperation on a range of international issues, it is time to start thinking of India not as a beneficiary of the world's charity (though it still is) -- but as a major donor.

Fundamentally, this relationship between the world’s largest and the world’s oldest democracy is very sound. It is not only being carried out on a government-to-government level, but a business level, a cultural level, a professional level, a people-to-people level. So I am very confident that this relationship will only get deeper and broader as time goes by.