主题：【原创】印度崛起：神话与现实 -- 晨枫

This is a week when I feel especially hopeless about India’s future. A week in China has caused this gloomy mood. I have just returned from the World Economic Forum’s ‘Summer Davos’ in the city of Tianjin. I had not heard of Tianjin till two weeks ago and, because I was told that it was near Beijing, expected an obscure dormitory town. So when I found myself in a magnificent, modern city of shiny skyscrapers, spectacular bridges and fine boulevards, I was stunned. Even more so when I heard that the city has been built in the past decade and then I found myself reduced to speechless wonder when I heard that Tianjin’s amazing, futuristic Convention Centre took just nine months to build. There were Indian officials and businessmen at the meeting whose mouths fell open when they heard.

We chattered amongst ourselves in Hindi about why such a Convention Centre would take ten years to build in India and agreed that it could be because democratic processes take longer than totalitarian ones. Then we went to Tianjin railway station to take the high speed train to Beijing and we stopped making excuses for the Motherland. Tianjin railway station looks like Delhi’s new international airport and the train that covered the 130 kilometres to Beijing in thirty minutes is faster and more modern than any I have ever been on. When we got to Beijing, the Indians I was with, were as angry as I was at how far India had been left behind by a country that till the seventies was at least twenty years behind us.

Meanwhile, the country from which our Lefties, Liberals and Maoists get inspiration, has moved with spectacular success towards a market economy. When I twittered about this, someone twittered back that perhaps we should lease India to the Chinese for the next 200 years. It might come to that if

we do not buck up.