As you have found, India is a very mixed bag of attitudes. I have had some great experiences there, but they are greatly outweighed by the bad ones.I am in Mumbai for 9 days already.
So far got a pretty good taste of how things work here.. from guys setting up the cable tv, buying stuff for the apartment which is like in a slum area of Kalina, ppl trying to scam me really blatantly, than people going out of the way to help me because I am foreigner. There is plenty of people being nice to compensate for those ripping you off, and that's great about this place.
Nothing has been easy so far, but I started to love this city.
Been to a few wholesale markets, but I need to take it easy and really learn how to negotiate here. This city is full of hustlers with lifetime of trying to get the best price for their products.
I will buy goods for like $150-$200 total, and try to sell through ebay and etsy, but markets here take days if not weeks or months to go around.
When negotiating, which in India is serious haggling, I have found the best tactic when the process becomes drawn out is to literally walk away. Whether in a business meeting in an office, or in a market stall, the result was almost always the same: The seller, sometimes a business executive, other times a stallholder, would hurry after me and offer a serious price.
If the negotiations are taking place with a businessman in an office, you should stand, shake hands with the top brass and announce that you are sorry that negotiations are not working so thank you for your time, but you have other people you must see. You might not even get past the door before you hear what you wanted to hear.
As for the need mentioned by @Arun Siva to hand out money for every bit of information or progress through the system, I refused to do that, and that is why I never exported to India. The "official" import duty rates would have made it impossible for an importer to succeed in re-selling my product.
It is a great pity that those with the wrong attitude have such short term vision, which is to their own detriment as well as to the country as a whole.
Walter