"By 2025, the number of English-speaking Chinese is likely to exceed the number of native English speakers in the rest of the world." This is what visiting UK finance minister Gordon Brown said last year.

Well, as Brown said, the Chinese are doing the heavy lifting and learning English. And rightly so, because language, it seems, is going to play a vital role in the future world.

But, unlike what Brown feared, the rest of the world is not content with lightweight lifting, even though gen tianshu yiyang is no longer considered that ethereal by the Chinese. The French saying, "C'est du chinois" literally "it's Chinese," but meaning "it's unintelligible" is a thing of the past for the rest of the world.

And of late, joining the increasing ranks of this "intelligible" brigade are the Indians. Indian students and professionals, even though late, have awakened to the needs of the "language."

The reason for that is there for the world to see: China could surpass the United States as India's largest trading partner. Bilateral trade between the two Asian giants has been growing at a healthy 35-40 per cent much ahead of the targets. It is projected to reach US$20 billion by next year, one year before the target of 2008.

China Bhavan (Palace) in Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's university at Santiniketan in eastern India used to be the best-known place to learn putonghua (standard Chinese) in India. No more!

Now, one can just walk into an institute in any major Indian city and enrol as putonghua student. In the Indian capital of New Delhi alone, 60 per cent of such "students" are working professionals from the software and tourism industries.

Earlier, only Indian universities, more than 95 per cent of which are run by the central and provincial governments, could afford to have link-ups with their counterparts in China to get native teachers. But today even private institutes are doing so, indicating the huge demand for putonghua in that country.

India's premier seat of learning, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has been offering graduate and masters programmes in Chinese language for more than 30 years. In fact, it is in talks with the Chinese Ministry of Education to set up a "Confucius Institute."

As if that was not surprising enough, a management institute in South India has made Chinese compulsory for students in its one-year postgraduate programme.

All this makes perfect sense.

More and more jobs are being created for teachers and translators in the IT, pharmaceutical and chemical industries and in scientific research projects in China. And Indians, with their advanced knowledge in software and relatively strong experience in many other fields, are ready to take whatever China has to offer. All this should naturally make us feel proud!

But it should set us thinking too. India's economic growth is second only to China's. India enjoys advantages in areas that we are still trying to catch up with and vice versa. This seems to be the right time to have more exchanges between the two neighbours to learn from each other.

To be fair, we do enjoy a lot of advantages over other developing countries. But that shouldn't stop us from a reciprocal exchange of ideas and know-how.

If the elephant wants to shake hands with the dragon, let's extend our right hand. If the Indians are eager to learn Chinese, let us help them do so.

But also let's start learning more about India in return, for that's the only way to form a bond for the future.

(China Daily 09/15/2006 page4)