The Washington Post takes a look at India's growing retail market today. It appears that the growing middle class in India prefers to shop like Westerners.

While his wife cooed over the shiny tomatoes, Mehta said he didn't miss India's infamous open-air bazaars, with their buzzing flies, haggling peddlers and surging crowds. Even the friendships -- with the fruit seller who provided health advice, the bookseller who kept reading lists and the carpet man who offered loaners -- were, "frankly, a huge amount of pressure," he said.

India has a growing middle class estimated at 300 million people. With a total population of 1.1 billion and economic growth rates of 8 percent a year, the country is emerging as one of the largest consumer markets in the world.

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Inside Spencer's Hyper Books and Beyond, instead of a wise bibliophile offering up dog-eared copies of Bengali literature and Islamic philosophy, there were teenage workers. They gathered around a computer, playing the profanity-laced hip-hop rhymes of Eminem. All the while, Indian families nearby blissfully thumbed through Disney storybooks.