MUMBAI: As a young, prosperous IT entrepreneur from Bangalore, Sunil Abraham could well be a poster boy for India Shining.
But Mr Abraham is in Mumbai for a different kind of strategic alliance—this ostensible capitalist is flirting with peaceniks, feminists and human rights activists at the world's largest socialist gathering.
Mr Abraham's participation at the World Social Forum, which is being held in the city this week, is no passing dalliance.
He is a card holder of the free software movement in India which believes that software should not be proprietary but free for users to customise, share and distribute.
Mr Abraham boycotts Microsoft, like some anti-globalisation activists boycott Coke and Pepsi which, they claim, are symbols of all that is bad about international big business. "Globalisation is also about the privatisation of knowledge,'' he says, explaining the common ground he shares with, say, a Filipino fighting against the commercialisation of water supply in Manila.
Indeed, the average Mumbaikar who seeks to understand the anti-globalisation movement which has arrived in their midst in a flurry of song, dance and dust, will be hard put to define the nature of the beast.
For, despite the preponderance of socialists on the organising committee, the World Social Forum is no dogmatic lefty soapbox but a platform for an unwieldy range of social justice issues encompassing war and peace, caste and race, poverty and hunger, democracy and globalisation.
The forum embraces people as disparate as Vietnamese Bush-basher Mai Linh and Korean health activist Cheong Meong. Mr Cheong believes that multinationals are exploiting the poor of the Third World for First World profit.
Then there is Sampath Lal Bhil from Udaipur tehsil in Rajasthan, who is here to champion his land and forest rights, and Lukas Held, a German teenager, who says that to be apolitical is to "give up on the world''.
Organiser Gautam Mody calls this gathering "a rainbow coalition from centre left to that which believes in a socialist society, and everything in between''.
Jeremy Corbyn, a Labour MP from Britain, suggests that the Forum is not defined by ideology so much as "opposition'', bringing together a huge and motley caravan of social movements, NGOs, activists and students.
Despite the diversity, some old comrades hope that the anti-globalisation movement betokens a resurgence of the left after two decades of unadulterated capitalism in the world.
And indeed, the exuberant sloganeering of the Forum might seem like a throwback to the heady middle decades of the 20th century, with its anti-colonial struggles, Nehruvian nation-building and flower power.
Other younger organisers agree. "Of course it is resurgent, only in a different form,'' says an organiser, who defines his peers as "freelance left''. "We are into causes rather than political parties, which are too dogmatic. We are into whatever is progressive.''