At the risk of looking like a walking cliché, I am reading The World is Flat during a personal trip to India. And not just to India, but to Bangalore, the IT haven that inspired author Tom Friedman’s catchy title.

I am not an expert on India. In fact, my colleague Jeremy Smerd wrote an authoritative package of stories about people management trends in India last August. But my coverage in Washington often requires writing about globalization—and, hence, about China and India.

I decided a couple years ago that I had to get at least a glimpse of each place. I traveled to Shanghai in March 2006 and am in Bangalore now.

What I am offering is not academic analysis but my impression of India in the first days of my first trip to the country. After reading the beginning of Friedman’s book, I was expecting that Bangalore would be a mecca that rivals U.S. cities.

Maybe that’s what I’ll see later in IT office parks. But the images here that strike me are the paradoxes that infuse most developing countries. Expensive sports cars compete for the road with the teeming auto rickshaws.

I am staying in one of the “posh” sections of town with a friend. But a couple blocks over, a Louis Vuitton store is about to open on a dilapidated street.

On tours of the city, it is clear that many of the people here—perhaps a majority—live in abject poverty. Their neighborhoods aspire to step up to gritty. Your heart goes out to those who are battling such grinding poverty while making less than $2 a day.

Of course, I know that there is another large section of the town that is thriving in an IT boom. I am staying down the street from a call center. I see the workers there coming and going. Every day in the paper, there are stories about IT companies making billions of dollars and expanding their operations.

One of the primary reasons they can do this is because of a talented technology workforce. Many of the world’s best engineers and scientists come from India. Even in the first few days here, I can tell India is a society that values education.

Colleges dot the landscape. Billboards call out for people to enroll in courses. All around Bangalore, I get the feeling that education is seen as central to advancement.

Many thousands of Indian students also come to U.S. universities.

That brings me around to an issue I have covered extensively: the annual controversy over H-1B visa caps. U.S. technology companies—and firms in many other sectors—say that they are desperate for talent and can’t hire enough foreign-national workers.

U.S. computer programmers complain that H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants reduce wages and job opportunities. That could be true.

But there’s another subtle argument that employers are making: By and large, foreign-national students are more talented and numerous than their U.S. counterparts.

Leaving aside whether that quality assessment is fair, there doesn’t seem to be any excuse for U.S. workers not to compete effectively with those from India. For one thing, Americans have a tremendous head start.

In the Bangalore area, down the street from signs encouraging enrollment in local universities often is a neighborhood that illustrates the dire economic straits of most Indians.

Just look at the numbers. The literacy rate in the U.S. is 99 percent. In India, it’s 60 percent. There’s 54 percent enrollment in Indian secondary schools, compared with 94 percent in the United States.

After seeing Bangalore for a couple days, it’s clear to me that a kid from a randomly selected American family has a much better foundation for success than a child from a randomly selected Indian family.

The complex and difficult task Washington must tackle involves reforming education and workforce development policies so that more Americans take advantage of the country’s blessings to become the talent that U.S. companies crave.