Evangelist in the back-office

China Club in a bleak business centre on the edge of Gurgaon is all lush granite-and-peach-marble interior, starched napkins set out in fans and intimidatingly friendly staff.

My heart sank: this looked like one of those restaurants where the food cost way more than it was worth. But this is the restaurant Pramod Bhasin chose for Lunch with BS, so here I was.

At the end of an unimpeachable meal, it was difficult not to be grateful to Bhasin for his choice. China Club serves some of the best Chinese food to be had in the capital region, the portions are satisfyingly large and the service swift and efficient.

Bhasin comes in a couple of minutes after me, and I use the time to peruse a CV bristling with accomplishments. When he arrives, the President of GE Capital and President and CEO of GE Capital International Services (Gecis, pronounced jecis) Global, to give him his full designation, proves a surprise.

He looks younger than his 50-odd years and is razor slim, a circumstance, he later explains, that has more to do with an inherited metabolism and the sheer pace of work than with any exercise regime.

Despite the trim physique, Bhasin turns out to be a foodie, pronounces China Club the best Chinese restaurant in Delhi, so the meal is ordered swiftly: mushroom rolls and sauteed chilly prawn for starters, crab with ginger, chicken in celery and a mandatory vegetable in soy, with steamed rice to go.

We start chatting about the latest developments in Gecis, the star BPO outfit that he set up in 1996. Gecis, after servicing the US principal's businesses with awesome distinction, would be looking for customers outside of the GE fold.

Bhasin says he'll be focusing on international customers, principally those associated with GE. "It could be someone in our plastics business, or our consumer business, basically anywhere where we can help cement the relationship even more, and add some value, so we're being selective," he explains. He plans to start small, recruiting about 100 to 200 people initially. "We have 13,000 people so we have enough bandwidth to handle this," he says.

The starters arrive, and live up to Bhasin's praise. The prawns are succulent and the taste is so subtle that the chilly catches you unawares, provoking an embarrassing coughing fit in me that holds up conversation as Bhasin murmurs "God bless" and proffers water.

When I emerge from my napkin, we chat about the problem of high turnover in call centres. Bhasin admits that it's an issue but adds that Gecis has a 10 to 15 percentage point lower rate than the competition because of its training programmes and, increasingly, more thoughtful hiring policies.

The IT-enabled services business (ITES) excites Bhasin like nothing else. "This is a competitive edge for GE "" it's all about efficiency and creating value, not just about cost," he says animatedly.

Gecis has already set up subsidiaries in Hungary, China and Mexico and is looking at setting up more in Mauritius, Sri Lanka and South Africa. Bhasin predicts that the last-named will be the next big destination for BPO in about five years, because it has India's advantages plus a population than can speak French, Dutch and German.

Later during the meal he talks persuasively about what ITES could mean for an economy. "Governments are realising this is a great way to create jobs "" not just in the call centres, but in transportation, meals and so on. Also, there are so many young people with money to spend, more money than I had when I was young. This is the business that is going to drive India."

He seems unworried about the global backlash against Indian IT professionals. As he sees it, US industry considers Indian ITES too big an opportunity in terms of cost-saving to jettison. But, he says, Indian service providers should be conscious of the apprehensions elsewhere and manage them. "Can you imagine what would happen if, say, India were under threat of losing one million jobs to China?"

The main course arrives together with claw crackers for the crabs, wicked-looking medieval torture instruments that we return, preferring to extract the meat with our forks. As we dig in, the conversation turns to the non-banking financial company, which is the smaller of GE Capital India's businesses.

I try to be provocative and ask Bhasin why its credit card business (for which it has tied up with State Bank of India) has slipped from number four to five, having been overtaken by ICICI. "It's possible," says Bhasin adding, "but I don't buy ICICI's numbers because they give away free cards."

Was GE Capital India looking at converting itself into a bank? "Everybody's moving towards becoming banks, but it carries a lot of baggage "" branches, operations, targeted lending and so on. Not being bankers, there are many products we don't have "" treasury products, cash-management products "" so even if we want to be a bank, the bigger question is, do we know how to run it?"

Bhasin is an old GE hand of 25 years, having come into the fold when the US conglomerate acquired RCA where he headed the international audit practice. His career is fairly typical of the high-achieving overseas Indian, having travelled abroad soon after he graduated from Shri Ram College of Commerce.

I joke that had he done his chartered accountancy from India, he could well have struggled for years to pass the exams because of the unacknowledged "quota" system that used to exist in those days when only a certain number of students "pass" irrespective of whether they had or hadn't.

"Actually, I did work for a couple of months in Calcutta with Lovelock & Lewes," he says. "I still remember those days when how happy you were with the client depended on the quality of the lunch they served you."

The Lovelock & Lewes interlude proved a salutary experience in more ways than one. Bhasin remembers doing auditing work for Calcutta Tramways which involved reconciling hundreds of thousands of tram tickets with ledger entries. "I think everybody should go through something like that at least once in his life."

Bhasin eats with robust appetite and there are many lulls in the conversation as we negotiate the crab. We chat a bit about RCA and GE. Were there transition problems? "Oh, huge, huge," he recalls. "RCA were basically financial auditors but GE's audit establishment was training ground for future managers. If you look across GE's top businesses today, 70 per cent are audit staff."

GE, he continues, is much more like the marine corps. "You work all out "" you don't have a home, you travel, you do exhaustive audits, but you cover many areas, it's not just restricted to finance. They're just a bunch of very bright people." That is why, when he was setting up Gecis, he pulled in GE's audit staff to help design many of the processes.

The Indian operations are clearly no less like an amphibious strike force in terms of pace "" it's taken weeks to get this appointment "" so I ask Bhasin whether he gets time free to do anything else.

It turns out that he plays golf "very badly" (handicap: 20) and has been co-opted into the company cricket team purely, he is certain, by virtue of his position. The team, in turns out, takes its job seriously. It boasts several former Ranji Trophy players and has won some inter-company tournaments.

Of his own performance, he says the team is diplomatically forgiving. "If someone else drops a catch, they yell and shout at him. If I drop a catch, there's dead silence. And if I hold a catch, I always ask later, 'which of you expected me to drop it?'!" More than anything else, he enjoys the after-match camaraderie which, he says, you don't really get in an elitist game like golf.

Bhasin is probably not unhappy to play in his company team because he's crazy about cricket. Despite a schedule that has him travelling something like 15 days a month, he tries to attend as many matches as he can when India is playing. He's also been trying to spend weekends at home, spending quality time (cooking pasta) with his 15-year-old daughter.

Surprisingly Bhasin also finds time to read, mainly fiction, one of his favourite authors being Rohinton Mistry. We agree that it was an injustice that he never won the Booker, despite being nominated twice.

The meal is winding down "" we're on to a rather tame caramel custard for afters "" and we chat desultorily about India's appalling infrastructure, a point that bothers Bhasin greatly. Gecis, he says, has to maintain not one but three back-ups for its operations and still manages to be successful. But "I never want to be satisfied with the way things are," he says.

Bhasin manages to maintain an energetic restlessness despite the large meal we've consumed. It was a surprise, therefore, to learn that he does occasionally take a break. Earlier in the year, he'd been on a safari to Botswana.

And the next day, he was bound for his "favourite place on earth," Dalhousie, where he has built a house. Still, the vigour with which he applies himself to the next job when we head back to the GE office is both admirable and fatiguing to watch.

Maybe it was the after-lunch cigarette that kept him going. Me, I succumbed to a deep post-prandial siesta on the 30-odd km back to the office.