CHAPEL HILL - Two luxury cars, one a Jaguar and the other a Land Rover, pull up in front of one of the swankiest hotels in the world, the Pierre, on Fifth Avenue at 61st Street across from Central Park in New York City. The drivers hand over their car keys to valets and head into the sumptuous lobby of the Pierre. One of them is an executive for Corus Steel, Europe's second-largest steel producer; the other is an executive at Daewoo Commercial Vehicle out of South Korea.

They sit down in overstuffed chairs and wait for another executive who works for the telecom company VSNL, one of the world's largest VOIP services and business-data providers. That executive is coming down from Boston, after having spent the night at the Ritz-Carlton. He's late. Not wanting to drink any alcohol so early in the day, the two execs, while waiting, ask for some tea -- nothing fancy, just some Tetley. They're impatient to get on with the meeting because they've got to fly to San Francisco later in the day for a meeting the next day at a fancy hotel in that city, the Camden Place.

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What do all of the italicized words in the fictitious scenario above have in common? They all are names of companies or properties owned by the Tata Group, India's largest conglomerate, much in the news these days because of its efforts to build and market an automobile in India later this year, the Nano, for a price of "one lakh" -- or about $2,550.

What does this mean down the line for the Big Three? To quote Lou Dobbs -- I mean Kurtz, the dying adventurer in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" -- "The horror. The horror."

Until recently, few Americans thought much about -- or thought much of -- the Indian economy, much less Indian-owned companies. To the extent that we gave either any heed, it was in the context of IT and offshore outsourcing.

Thanks to demagogic politicians and simplistic newscasters such as Dobbs, the only economic news we heard about India related to IT firms such as Infosys, Wipro and, ahem, Tata Consulting and the business they were "stealing" from America as a result of their backdoor dealings with traitorous "Benedict Arnold" U.S. corporations.

It was seldom mentioned that, on balance, most serious economists view offshore outsourcing even today as beneficial to the U.S. economy. Similarly overlooked was the fact that in 2005, for example, over 5 million workers were employed here through "insourcing" by foreign multinationals or their U.S. affiliates. No tit for Tat(a), in other words.

Instead of insulting us through their vapidity or their mendacity, politicians and TV journalists in recent years might have given us a little context about how and why economic globalization proceeds as it does and about the place of India and Indian firms such as Tata in the great scheme of things.

If they had done so, fewer of us would have felt blindsided by the Nano, much less terrified by the rise of Chindia (China and India) or the so-called BRIC economies -- Brazil, Russia, India, China -- and more of us, arguably, would understand that opportunities as well as challenges accompany globalization.

We would have learned something as well about the potential opened up by India's economic reforms of the early 1990s, and, more to the point, we might also have understood a little something about where the Nano was coming from. After all, Tata dates its history to 1874. Its market capitalization is about $61 billion, its yearly revenues are about $30 billion (about the same as Alcoa or Northrop Grumman) and the group's 100 or so companies operate in a vast array of industries all over the globe.

In other words, it's one of the world's largest and greatest business conglomerates. And as suggested earlier, it's no stranger to the United States. Who would have thunk it? Not anyone listening to Lou Dobbs, that's for sure. Tata, schmatta. The Pierre? Au contraire! Nano? Nah!

(Peter A. Coclanis is associate provost for international affairs and Albert R. Newsome professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill.)