Same Same...but Different!!

It’s a different world. Two weeks after coming back from China, I'm still speaking English without any prepositions and articles. I reckon I’ll hate noodles for some months now. I don’t give a disgusting look now to see people eating anything that crawls (snakes, lizards, cockroaches!!). But I am slightly jealous. No matter what anyone tells you about the latest microchip invented by Intel — size does matter. Let's stop fooling ourselves — as of now, the Chinese Dragon is bigger, better and smarter than the Indian Tiger. I’m sure that must be the motivation behind my purchase of a Chinese shirt with big dragon embroidery over it. Shanghai doesn’t look like a city of an emerging economy but a developed country.

China will stop at nothing to prove a point to the watching world after Beijing Olympics 2008 and a run up to Shanghai World Expo 2010. And we won't need fortune cookies to tell us what China has in mind outside the sports arena. Simply put: China is all set to dominate the world. The new aggressive mood is most evident in Shanghai, which is bursting with frenzied construction activities that literally takes one's breath away — a thick pollution haze hangs over the city, but nobody minds. It's all for a good cause. In a meeting with Austrade officer, he showed us the two pictures of Shanghai, 25 years apart. We could only imagine how the entire forests must have been razed to change the color of the city from green to multi-color. There is now everything from stadiums, hotels, pools, bridges, underpasses, super-luxury hotels with not a beggar in sight. The priciest designer brands from US and Europe have set up their shops and can't keep up with the demand. If anybody is complaining, you certainly don't hear it. Yes, the counterfeit markets have been moved out of the city centre, but we certainly don’t care the location. Young girls dance fearlessly in the infamous KTVs wearing T-shirts that declare: 'Let's go out tonight and get laid'. The cops look the other way.

In fact, that is a Chinese specialty. Everybody is trained to look the other way. Locals insist the massacre at Tiananmen Square never happened. It's all a part of Western propaganda. I took a cab at a busy crossing to go to my hotel. I sat in the car and asked him to drop me at Motel 168. No answer. I tried repeating the name of the place without any other English words so that he may comprehend better. He would not utter a word and just sit silently in his driver’s seat. Must mention, his face looking the other way. He is eating an apple; least bothered about what is going through me or what would I do now. It took me literally 10 minutes of continuous shouting – “Does anyone know English?” - on that busy Shanghai street to get his taxi moving. I never went out of my hotel without my destinations written in Chinese characters on a piece of paper.

As my Chinese flat mates tell me, since there is zero access to the real world and a tightly controlled media that stresses on personal sacrifice, discipline, progress, the young don't know they're supposed to be rebellious and raise their voices like their counterparts everywhere else in the free world. Chairman Mao is still worshipped. I didn’t get the chance to see but my flat mates tell me that his body is still preserved and available for public viewing in Beijing. Despite that, one is pleasantly surprised to see familiar symbols of ostentation as Prada and Gucci billboards compete with Nicole Kidman wearing a luxury watch. Sure, China is bizarre and contradictory. While cynical expats laugh at cultural absurdities, young Chinese go about their slightly ambivalent existence in a state of denial. A German lady I met who teaches English in Beijing said, "Nobody wants to confront the truth. The young don't want to deal with communism... there is much confusion about values."

But in the Olympics 2008, Dragon has proved to the world that scale equals power. Do Indians need to worry? My Chinese takeaway from the trip: ‘Let's face it. We can't march to Beijing and they can't march to Delhi.’ Confucius should agree!