To say that many engineers in Silicon Valley are angry about outsourcing to India--and to "insourcing" engineers from India under the H1B non-immigrant visa--is to say that it gets warm in India. Yes, many people are very, very angry, and yes, it gets very, very warm in India.

Beyond these cliches, though, it was interesting for this reporter to find a certain defensiveness among many members of the IT community with whom I spoke during my recent trip there.

"So you guys are here to blame us Indians on taking all of your American jobs, right?" Thus we were greeted by a software engineer in the city of Hyderabad.

It was also interesting to hear the opinions of some of my colleagues whose jobs are not threatened by India but who nevertheless have harsh opinions as to the wisdom of any company working with companies there.

"Whatever you save in labor costs, you'll more than make up for in extra management," a soccer-dad friend and longtime Silicon Valley engineering and marketing executive told me upon my return. "I simply can't see it, I don't think you'll ever get the quality you will need," said a colleague who doubts that the sub-continent will ever deliver something worthy of Western standards.

Another colleague put it more succintly: "India will fail, and any company outsourcing business there will fail."

Well, I don't think so. And I hope I don't sound like a starry-eyed idealist whose pro-globalization stance is clouding my judgement as to the reality of what can be accomplished in India, for India, for the U.S., and for the global IT industry.

I think everyone just needs to be a little more patient. This quality, patience, has never been in long supply among business leaders, pressured for eternal growth and positive quarterly results, whether or not their investors are public or private. The average large-company C-level executive--or entrepreneur of any size company--possesses extreme willfullness and the attention span of  a house cat, in my experience.

Too many things to worry about, too many things to do, no time for thoughtful deliberation when the day-to-day goal is company survival. Business is a tough, proto-Darwinian world, and there's no time to waste on people or processes that don't function with at least 100% of expectation.

Yet a measure of patience is needed for one to understand India and to work with India. Most members of the technology community are familiar with the samurai/farmer duality in Japanese business culture. A company needs both types, placed in the right roles, to survive. Similar dualities exist throughout the global business world--"Mr. Inside/Mr. Outside," front office/back office, good cop/bad cop, strategy/tactics, sales/operations, etc.

Hundreds of such dualities exist, but all come down to raw, impatient aggression vs. stolid, patient execution. Put a "farmer" in a role that needs a "samurai," and you have IBM in the 80s before Lou Gerstner came along, or Apple between John Sculley and the return of Steve Jobs. But, put too many samurai in place and you get the excesses of the dot-com era, where anyone who actually wanted to see a business plan or an org chart, or maybe even a profitibility prediction, just "didn't get it."

Indian IT needs to be eyed with patience. Because it is clear that some companies have been very successful in utilizing the country's IT resources. There are at least three multi-billion dollar India-based IT companies--TCS, Wipro, and InfoSys--who have emerged in these still-early years of the India IT boom. There are many other companies who are striving to reach this status. In Hyderabad, there is a commercial and residential building boom that rivals Silicon Valley during its highest growth years, replete with new hillside mansions dotting the landscape.

This success is said to come mostly from so-called "back office" IT. System maintenance, much routine coding that can be done at a fraction of the price compared to the U.S. or Western Europe, and a lot of processes not considered to be mission-critical. The country hardly seems embarrassed by this sort of success, with local newspapers continuing to tout outsourcing as a source of national pride.

Yet one executive we met said on camera for us that about half of India's IT industry was based on more creative coding and application development and will earn higher shares of the overall industry in the years ahead. He is looking to the days when India will be a full-fledged software giant that can compare itself favorably to the U.S.

Meanwhile, this is a country of more than 1 billion people that seemingly doesn't think it has a population problem, a country with millions of people living on the street in its largest city Mumbai, and a country characterized by an ingrained  command-and-control culture that can drive Westerners mad with its endless bureaucratic procedures and uncomprehending stares from rank-and-file employees confronted with a question or problem to solve that has not been specifically detailed in the instruction manual.

It takes patience to get through customs in India. It takes enormous patience to ride in its traffic, let alone drive in it. It takes patience to get served a meal--the classier the restaurant, the slower the service, it seems. None of these observations is original, and they can make the writer come off as yet another imperialistic, condescending Westerner doing his best at noblesse oblige.

Yet these observations are true enough, and they extend to software development, where it takes patience to get an Indian company to deliver the precise software solution you've requested, and yes, in the early stages you will spend more overall, when considering management time, than you would have had you simply done the project at "home" as you did in the old days.

But if you set up a realistic timeframe, one that has a bit more patience built into it than your company's normal timeframe, and deliver the specific instructions to your new India-based partners-in-arms, you'll find an earnest, well-educated workforce that aims to please and that takes great pride in doing its part to lift this country from its failed "Third Way" policies of the past into the top ranks of global economies.

India's GDP measured on the basis of local buying power, is not among the top five or six in the world. This did not happen through development of uniformly crappy products.

Fear of negative media coverage and workforce backlash may cause major companies such as Oracle and Microsoft to downplay their recent hirings in India. But go to Hyderabad, for example, and you will witness real construction, real software development centers, and real benefits being derived for U.S. companies.

India's recent GDP growth happened because enough companies were patient enough to sow the metaphorical garden, give it enough metaphorical water (and literally enough sub-continent sunshine), and reap a harvest that was produced more efficiently than it would have been back in the U.S. India IT companies are contributing in a positive way to recent IT industry profitibility, even if stock prices do not yet clearly reflect these contributions.

I am, for better or worse, old enough to remember when Made In Japan meant "cheap." But the "cheap" phase was only one step in that country's long journey to establishing itself as the not-so-cheap world quality leader. Despite its recent decade-long economic slump, Japan remains at or near the top of the world in terms of quality of its products and worldwide recognition of that quality.

Some people will say that India has too much diversity, too many problems, too many badly ingrained habits, etc. to become another Japan. The notion is laughable, some will argue. OK, so I won't argue that India will become the precise equivalent of Japan, whether in my lifeitme or ever.

I do think, though, that the country is on the road to becoming much more than a simple outsourcing backwater, and that Americans threatened by its workforce need to focus on how they can provide homegrown quality and efficiency that stays ahead of this emerging competitor. India will not fail, even though many of us may fail to understand why.