Something fishy in the heart of Mumbai

Seminars on the theme of ‘China and India’ may appear to some to be overdone, but they continue to be top-draw billings, reflecting the huge curiosity in each country for the other — and for ‘outsiders’ about both. Prof Tarun Khanna, who is Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, was in town for one such event, and to promote his new book, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours.

To illustrate his point that China and India work differently, Khanna recalled how, growing up in Mumbai, he’d come across the machimar (fishermen’s) village in the heart of South Mumbai, and wonder how long it would last. But even 35 years later, he noted, the fishing village thrives, thwarting every effort to relocate it and develop the area. “Such a thing would be inconceivable in Beijing or Shanghai — a slum in the heart of the city.”

Khanna’s point, which he articulated in nuanced fashion, was that in conflicts that pit the individual’s needs against society’s, China errs on the side of public interest, whereas India makes a diametrically opposite choice by protecting the individual’s rights. “I don’t know whether one system is better than the other,” Khanna said, “but each comes with a set of costs and benefits.” Perhaps, he argued, the time was ripe for the two giants to enhance their “economically symbiotic relationship”, overcoming “mindset barriers” of the past 40 years.

I  have to say I’ve taken Prof Khanna’s message to heart and am doing my bit to help at least one Chinese person make the crossover to form a better relationship with India — by teaching her Hindi. It’s a linguistic quid pro quo arrangement, because Lowan Chan, a yoga teacher who grew up in Xiamen (in mainland China) but now lives in Hong Kong, is also my Chinese tutor. Spurning my ‘gurudakshina’ — invitations to MTR rava idli breakfasts at home — Lowan let it be known that the only ‘tuition fee’ she would accept was a course in conversational Hindi.
 
Now, I grew up in Tamil Nadu (which literally means ‘Tamil Nation’), where an anti-Hindi agitation raged in my formative years. And I’m particularly gifted in the art of mangling tenses and genders in Hindi. Nevertheless, I owed it to Lowan, so I’m gamely teaching her what little I know. 

One thing strikes me though: there’s a certain logic to the nomenclature pattern for the numerical system in the Chinese language that clearly bypasses Hindi. In Chinese, if you can count from one to ten, you can recite numbers up to 100. Eleven, for instance, is ‘Ten-one’; 58 is ‘Five-ten-eight. But in Hindi, it isn’t just enough to learn Ek, do, teen... up to dus. After that comes gyara, bara and so on — and still later, ekyavan and ninyanve. If the Chinese had their way, gyara would be dus-ek, ekyavan would be paanch-dus-ek, and ninyanve would be nau-dus-nau. And perhaps even I might have become proficient in Hindi...