Starting Tuesday, 135 nations -- representing three-fourths of the world's population -- will haggle over access and markets and subsidies and tariffs on everything from shoes and ships and sealing wax, to cabbages and things.

Fasten your seatbelts for the Battle in Seattle. This beautiful Pacific city, also an American analogue for rain and romance, is already boiling with 100,000 people with agendas as wide-ranging as trying to win universal access for tax free e-commerce to raging against genetically engineered products.

On one side in this turbulent debate are globalisation hefties who are members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which critics say is a fast-emerging capitalist club that puts corporate agenda over all else.

Ranged against it is a rag-tag army ofmavericks, protectionists, bleeding hearts, zealots, ultranationalists, and an assortment of naysayers who are lumped under the generic term protesters.

The corporate heavies -- mostly big firms backed by big governments -- want to ensure that the WTO promotes the freest possible flow of trade. In plain language, it means ensuring US insurance companies or European telecom companies or Japanese automakers (or even the desi milkman, now that India is world's biggest milk producer), can access markets worldwide with the lowest possible taxes and tariffs.

The protesters represent causes mostly aimed at protecting small society and sovereignty of communities -- from the heavily subsidised French farmer to the hapless Indian vendor of indigenous coffee who could be driven to extinction if the ubiquitous Starbucks, also headquartered in Seattle, decides to open shop in India.

Many critics of WTO argue that protectionism and barriers actually define nationalism and that it is the right of every country andcommunity to protect itself against more powerful interests.

More than 500 organisations from all over the world have descended on Seattle, making it a stomping ground for a bewildering -- and often contradictory -- array of issues. They are espousing causes ranging from saving sea turtles to disappearing rain forests, making what was once considered an unsexy event into what someone described as the ``Woodstock of trade and commerce.''

So while the gray-suited international babus and eminence grises are trading deals in the quiet of hotel conference rooms and banquet halls, out on the streets, demonstrators and protestors are readying a medley of raucous slogans opposing global pillage: corporate buccaneering and mindless liberalisation.

The groups range from the better known NGOs like Friends of the Earth and the Humane Society, to obscure groups like Anarchists in Eugene, Raging Grannies, and Ruckus Society.

Later today, an organisation called the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers of Americawill stage what they call a Seattle Tea Party with the slogan ``No Globalization Without Representation.'' The protesters are throwing steel imported from China into the sea in a symbolic gesture reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party, because they say allowing foreign steel import without adequate barriers is killing American jobs.

Soon after, there will be a demonstration that will be of particular interest to the Indian delegation that has trickled into the city behind Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran. The American labour behemoth AFL-CIO will hold a protest march to ask the WTO to allow trade sanctions against countries that violate core labour standards (like allowing child labour), a long heard rant in which India is one of the usual suspects.

Which brings one to the Indian agenda. Home to the rock group Nirvana, Seattle may be where India finds its economic salvation. Stripped of the coy barriers of protectionism in the liberalised '90s, New Delhi suddenly finds itself approaching the WTO in anentirely different frame of mind than any time before.

The milk example alluded to before is just one area which defines what experts say should be the country's new outlook. As the world's biggest milk producer, and with tons of it to spare, it would now be in India's interest to access the diary products market worldwide -- a prospect that would be anathema to many western countries where it costs more to make butter and cheese.

Similarly, from being a basket case in the 1960s, India suddenly finds itself a potential foodgrain exporter and now needs to redefine what its interest is. Again, in a sunrise area like e-commerce, New Delhi will be looking to back the US move to keep tariffs at zero because it is set to emerge as a significant player in a field that's expected to generate $ 5 trillion a year trade by 2005.

Against this, experts say India has to maintain vigil against efforts by the Clinton administration to make labour and environmental issues a central part of the negotiations.

In plainlanguage, many western nations will try to begin enforcing new labour standards (better wages, working conditions, no child labour etc) on countries like India and China, which in turn believe they are being robbed of their competitive advantage of cheap labour. Similarly, environmental militants and ecobullies want to raise the issue of how nations progress at the cost of nature and habitat.

Primarily though, the three-day meet is expected to focus on the world's oldest and newest industry: Agriculture and electronic commerce.

But no one is expecting a major breakthrough. In fact, experts say this is only the start of a three-year jaw-jaw that will continue well into the start of the millennium.

So contentious are some issues that the contending countries are even split over what to call this meet: The US wants to call it the Seattle Round; the EU prefers Millennium round. In either case, just how important the jamboree is, is evident from President Clinton's two-day presence here. There is also theintriguing prospect of Cuba's Fidel Castro coming here, in what could be a fascinating final debate of the millennium over which way mankind is headed: Global or Sovereign.

The smartest nations will pitch for the best of both worlds.