Getting into characters

I remember being surprised, about eight years ago, when the boss of the research agency I worked for suggested that my colleagues and I took Putonghua lessons. At the time, almost nobody in Mumbai thought of anything beyond French or the occasional other European language lesson.

Alliance Francaise used to overflow with people of all ages wanting to parler while the Goethe-Institut had the odd student wanting German lessons to supplement those they had had at college. The early 2000s saw a mild interest in Japanese, but that was short-lived.

With the rise in trade between China and India, interest in Putonghua has surged. A recent article in The Economic Times said almost three quarters of the 1.25 million Indians who visited the mainland in the first three months of last year went for business, and during the past few years newspapers have been full of articles about Mumbai businessmen learning to say ni hao (and more, I assume). But that's not surprising.

What is surprising is that last year the Central Board of Secondary Education (one of India's main education boards) introduced Putonghua as an optional language from Year Six (children aged about 11) 'in view of China emerging as one of the major global economies and Mandarin being spoken by a large population of the world'.