Then there's Steven from Honfeiga in Guangdong who's hoping to sell us "long-distance doorbells". Among the various enticements to win our business, Steven writes, "We also offer OEM service, tell us what's you wanted, we will produce for you and can be you OEM factory at any time" (grammar in original).
Mr Steven Huang of Angel Dream Hardware Co Ltd (ISO 9001& 2008 TUC Certificate Manufactory) asks: "How we can be your mattress supplier?" (syntax in original).
More From This Section
Possibly the most interesting offers to arrive in the letters@bsmail.in mailbox are from Linda of Shandong Ivy Hair Products Co.
"Do your academy and company need mannequin heads? As the Chinese experienced factory, we can supply the products with good quality & competitive price," she asks eagerly one day (emphasis in original).
The very next day Linda sends us another one of those desperately buoyant messages. "Attached is our 100% Human Hair Extension Quotations and Hair Color Swatches, please kindly check it. Many thanks!"
This is accompanied by a jpeg file showing a photograph of something resembling a seriously creepy tropical spider. Look closely and you discover that Linda's marvellous company can supply blue, tangerine and beige hair extensions to any taker anywhere in the world.
Gum rosin. Zinc ingots. Shower heads. LED underwater fishing lights. Gas station lighting. "Fashion lady bag". Mold Products. "Color-Grain Decking". Carbon Black. Wind Turbines. Aluminium pipes and forgings. Turpentine. Industrial Instrumentation. Laboratory Items. Stone. Perfume Bottles. Medical Equipment …
Tellingly, these mails to Business Standard starting making their appearance from 2011 onwards when China found dramatically fewer buyers for all the useful and useless things on which American and European consumers spend their money (from industrial machinery to iPods to salad leaf dryers). In a sense, they represent both an opportunity and challenge for India as it eagerly waits for achhe din to arrive.
Right now, and even as the Chinese leadership struggles to stimulate the world's second-largest economy, India's challenges look like a bigger deal than its ability to take advantage of China's slowdown. If this growing barrage of emails underlines anything, it is a depressing reminder of the distance India has to travel to be plugged in quite so strongly and, more to the point, effortlessly into the global supply chain.
To the average Indian middle-class consumer, the ascent of Chinese manufacturing has been in evidence in their homes for at least a decade. A range of Chinese products - from thalis to locks to bric-a- brac, images of gods and goddesses to even saris - that have wiped out India's tiny and small-scale sector producers.
In a while, as Chinese "manufactories" turn their attention to markets that are growing - and India figures among them - medium and large domestic producers are going to feel the pinch of competition from the Middle Kingdom, where sheer scale enables them to take a hit on margins to build newer markets.
That is why the "Make in India" campaign urgently needs to move beyond the optics of colourful brochures, frenetic meetings with industry representatives and the setting up of multiple task forces to examine various problems Indian industry faces. All the impediments to transforming India into at least an Asian Tiger, forget a China competitor, have been known for 15 years if not more.
Early last month, Nouriel Roubini told Bloomberg Television that he reckons the Indian "tortoise" will soon overtake the Chinese "hare". Economic growth in China, with its aging population and an investment-driven economic model, is going to fall to 6.5 per cent next year and will drop below six per cent in 2016, "while in India … it could go to seven per cent", he said. "So for the first time ever the tortoise becomes the hare and the hare becomes the tortoise."
Now, Mr Roubini's looks and accurate prediction of the global economic slowdown have made him something of a rock star in the realm of the dismal science, so his views make people sit up and notice. But before we start crowing, consider his caveat: India can power past China only "with the right reforms" ... . But those "right reforms" have mostly been so elusive in recent years that you begin to understand why Rudyard Kipling's poem If remains a stock favourite among our businessmen.