Devil's Advocate

The title says it all. It gives away everything. Yes, its a no brainer. India v/s China. Neighbours. One time friends. Lack of trust. Enemies. Prodigal competitors. Et all. Did anyone say competitors?!! Well I don't think so.

The pretext first which made me sit up and spam the world wide web with yet another blog post. A discussion in my Retail & Services class prompted the professor to venture into the now much travelled and battered path which led to the inevitable- the Elephant v/s the Dragon. And since every other person is now an expert in Indo-China geopolitics and understands the dynamics of how trade is facilitated between two countries, head nodding was inevitable.

But there is no competition as such between the two countries. Here's why. China opened its market in 1978, the same time when the Morarji Desai government was busy driving IBM and Coke out of India. Capitalism is an evil. Or so we were made to believe. Deng Xiaoping gave this famous quote then- The color of the cat does not matter as long as it catches mice. And the cat did catch some mice and how. We opened our markets in 1991 and that too coz our forex reserves had hit an all time low. Well lowest to survive, to be precise. Maths says China has a head start of 13 years. Some gap there.

Also the Chinese model is that of cost arbitrage due to mass production. Quality can wait. Nothing hi-tech. We on the other hand specialize in quality production and hi-tech too in some areas. Infy, TCS, Bharat Forge, Aditya Birla and the numerous others have done us proud.

Their internal consumption is humongous unlike ours. The lesson we learnt the hard way during this current ongoing recession (argh).

So its pretty clear. Comparing the two is like comparing apples to pears. We have our own niche and they have theirs. Segmentation. And hence this post.

As such, dragons are mythical creatures but elephants can be touched and felt in flesh and blood.