Subir Roy: First impressions

OFFBEAT

Beijing looks and feels temperate. So, at times when you drive down its main thoroughfares with all the built-up space, you may be forgiven for imaging that you are in some western country and not Asia where beggars are supposedly ever-ready to poke their hands through the lowered windows of the car.

But it is better to keep the windows up, not just because that goes with traffic moving fast but because there can be a fair bit of dust in the air. The dust settles down on parked cars and after a light drizzle the city can look as if its car owners are careless about washing their cars regularly. The authorities have made attempts to tackle the problem but with all the construction and a lot of the tree cover gone, dust has staged a comeback.

The dust and the towering buildings, not to speak of the many more coming up, capture the essence of China, so far ahead with new prosperity, but also with the odd neglected agenda still around. I have long passed up chances of going to China for a quick trip. You do not casually encounter what is, perhaps, the most complex civilisation in the world. You approach it with reverence, time and preparation, so that you come back not just with trinkets but with mementos full of meaning. But a family tragedy meant my landing up in the middle kingdom at literally a day's notice and struggling not to form quick impressions.

The view from my hotel is not pleasing because there is a gash down the middle of the huge boulevard, dug up to lay a mammoth sewer. Taxi drivers mutter to themselves as they have to make a long circular detour to get to the hotel, shifted to a slip road with the main road all dug up. But everyone knows that the disruption will soon be over, well in time for the 2008 Olympics through which China will arrive globally as post-war reconstructed Japan did with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

It has already done most of that and it is easier for an Indian to get into China than to get back to his own country. The immigration checks on entry are swift and nobody even collects my customs declaration. Young people are as trendily attired as their counterparts in Bangalore, the shops are full of well-designed garments and dirt cheap state-of-the-art consumer electronics items.

I am quite adventurous with food but my relative is not, and our Chinese hosts helpfully point out that there is a McDonald's less than 100 meters away. But even inside its standardised precincts there is a hurdle. The pictures of fritters and burgers are helpful, but the labelling in Chinese is not, and English across the counter is non-existent.

China will meet all its pre-Olympic targets and transform itself but I wonder what will happen to the aim that there is a minimum of English around. Changing planes at Shanghai on the way back, I leave my book behind. Thereafter starts an odyssey trying to show my boarding card to explain that I left my book "there" and could someone use his walky-talky and have it brought "there" (new boarding card). By the time I find someone who can understand me, the gates are closing.

China is way ahead in becoming modern and prosperous. But images linger. People read newspaper put up on dingy public stands as they do in the more modest parts of Kolkata where the Marxist local committee holds sway. Some hunched old people here or there are gaunt and cheerless, left out of the shine. And the odd cycle rickshaw pullers are a bit better fed than their Indian counterparts and not much more.

sub@business-standard.com