I am a seasoned traveller. I have the hygienic travel habits of intrepid travellers. Habits to make sure I don’t lose things that matter: passport, cell phone, cash and credit stored in 3 places:wallet, carry on, and personal item. If traveling through Brazilian favellas – safest places in Rio are airbnbs rented from drug lords rather than tourist neighbourhoods which their residents invade – bring expired credit cards to replace active credit cards in my wallet.

Despite planning and precaution, I am doomed to lose something. Each of the moments I lose something have certain traits. Typically it will be lost early on a trip when the travel habits are not established, and when something unaccustomed happens.

I lost my iPad. Brand new, fully appointed to replace my laptop so I may travel lighter on a three month trip through South India and South Africa. The moment I lost it had a few unaccustomed variables courtesy of the new emerging India.

Firstly security in Indian airports is very competent and thorough – in part due to Israeli training – and in this case they stopped to ask me about my paper binder containing my ever-nascent novel, and also my blood glucose testing kit. Their queries absorbed my attention and I noticed the agent took my boarding pass from my security tray and jotted down my details on it – something that’s never happened to me. Lo and behold, I gathered all my things except the brand new fully loaded IPad and left.

Late that evening, in a city hundreds of kilometers away I discovered my loss. I searched frantically for a number to call at my departure airport and was relieved then astounded to have someone answer the phone! Then to speak to me in perfect English in what is a regional airport! He gave me a WhatsApp link and asked me to call in a half hour. I did. He had the iPad in hand and sent a text with an email address and exact instructions on what I need to pick it up and also exact instructions to have someone pick it up on my behalf.

As my mind eased, I reflected on my situation. As an expat – I left India as a child – on numerous trips to the subcontinent, I have seen remarkable changes in the country in the past ten years. A lost iPad suddenly shed light on the changes: a lost item at one time was just that: lost. Or rather, stolen. Baggage handlers once took bribes in concert with the check-in agents, Customs agents turned the other way at the sight of a carefully wrapped wad of cash, security was a casual affair managed by a beetle-nut chewing guard, yet I had just found my iPad with no expectation whatsoever!

The changes wrought not only herald a maturing country but one that in some ways is leap frogging into a new age: key personnel are being paid enough that the cost of deceit in too high, and furthermore the speed at which the country has moved to a cashless society due to a remarkably competent identification and banking system has reduced the cash that once ‘paved the way’ past annoying gatekeepers of state enterprises. The combination of factors seems to have made age old practices less economically viable. The rate of change portends the emergence of a nation on the verge of entering a modern economy. Yet its march into modernity, it will preserve its distinct nature: businessmen and bare-footed pilgrims wander in pristine airport malls amongst Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and McDonald’s, and the teeming middle class will find bookshelves filled with Indian English book.