All she wants is a packet of green tea
Ravi s. Narasimhan China Daily  Updated: 2006-01-06 06:17

When I was going home to India last year, I called up my mother to ask if she wanted anything from Hong Kong.

It was a holiday ritual in the days when India had not opened up its markets to the world (almost a decade and a half after China) I carried suitcase loads of Head and Shoulders shampoos, Ray-Ban dark glasses, Levi's jeans and gold chains. Thankfully, all these are available freely there now, so all they want is the latest Canon digital cameras.

Still, her answer surprised me: green tea.

Now, this was a woman who, as long as I can remember, roasted coffee beans and ground them fresh. She didn't even drink Indian tea.

I dutifully bought a big packet of Longjing and headed home to hear the story. My mother and her brother, both avid newspaper readers, had convinced themselves that green tea was the panacea for all illnesses thanks to Sunday supplements that were full of the virtues of the beverage.

The same papers had more. Along with matrimonial and property advertisements there were new columns: on feng shui. As if the centuries-old vaastu (Indian variant of feng shui which determines property prices) was not enough, buyers and sellers had to grapple with a new phenomenon.

At the turn of the millennium, I can vouch that China was not really embedded in the consciousness of the average Indian. Despite the long border they share, it was a remote country.

How things change. And how soon.

Now everyone seems to know Haier and Lenovo. And every town of any size seems to have a "China bazaar." And everyone is talking about China from its manufacturing prowess to the well-documented fastest transformation in history.

The government of India is scheduled to send a team of civil servants to China to see how things are done.

Increasingly, China figures the most in many economic debates in India. The country's finance minister, speaking at an economic summit two months ago, said India must draw upon the lessons from China that routinely achieves 9 per cent growth. India must open the doors for more foreign direct investment and such a step would "work wonders as it did for China", he said.

The country has been going down that path. Displacing the United Sates, India has emerged as world's second-best destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) after China, a recent survey of executives by a global consulting firm AT Kearney shows.

But it's a two-way street. Everyone, it seems, is also talking about India in China.

The typical person I meet in a plane or a pub assumes that I'm into software (Word is as far as I've gone). And the typical story I'm told is about a thousand Shenzhen civil servants who have gone to India to train in software. Tellingly, the place they went to, Bangalore (dubbed India's Silicon Valley), was the first stop of Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to India.

As Haier and Lenovo become increasingly high-profile in India, all the major Indian IT majors are establishing a strong presence in China.

As Satish, the manager of Indian Kitchen restaurant in Beijing, tells me, he sees new young IT guys every week moving into the country.

No wonder that trade, which was only in the millions just a decade ago, is expected to hit about US$15 billion for last year and US$20 billion by 2008 a target set by both governments.

No wonder that China is set to take over from the United States the mantle of India's biggest trade partner, according to a leading trade body's survey.

No wonder, as my colleague Zou Hanru wrote some weeks ago about this being the Sino-Indian century. (Till 600 years ago, when Europe was insignificant and America was yet to be discovered, the two together accounted for 75 per cent of the world's GDP, after all).

No wonder that the two countries launched on January 1 the Sino-Indian Friendship Year.

But what is still a wonder to me is my mother sipping Chinese tea.

Email: ravi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/06/2006 page4)