Browsing through a half-critical, half-adulatory article on the Beijing Olympics on the Daily Telegraph website, I also read some of the "reader responses" that accompanied it. There were the usual quota of anodyne reactions: "I have better things to do", "Why did the BBC devote 20 minutes to the opening ceremony when there is a war on in Georgia?", et al. However, one three-word response tickled me greatly. It read, "Wait for India". The reader's name suggested it wasn't an ultra-nationalist NRI doing a boring number.

The suggestion that a resurgent Indian elephant will make the spectacularly choreographed opening ceremony in Beijing look like a Sports Day extravaganza of the local Kendriya Vidyalaya seems quite preposterous. Those living in Delhi know that India is on the verge of making an absolute hash of the Commonwealth Games due in October 2010. Apart from the event exceeding every budget and becoming a money-spinner for well-connected fixers, there is every possibility that it will end up as a national embarrassment. In China, the authorities feared the aerobics of the outlawed Falun Gong, the "splitists" from Tibet and the condescension of the West; in India we are confronted with institutional sloth and colossal incompetence. A poll of Delhi-ites will show a marked indifference, verging on disgust, with the sports of an English-speaking Union headed by an old lady whose father was our last King-Emperor.

So, is China naturally better than us? Has Hu Jintao finally demonstrated the fallacy of the theory that robust economic development is inevitably preceded by democracy? Has competitive politics sapped India's national will to the point that we are now incapable of organising the proverbial piss-up in a brewery?

The answers are mixed. I have no doubt that a dynamic CEO with a handsome budget and powers to ride roughshod over the incompetent and corrupt will be able to get the Commonwealth Games off the ground. He can make it a very passable show, even if it is not considered memorable. However, there is no CEO who can do what China has done with the Beijing Games: Make it a showcase of national pride.

Of course, there are many things about the Chinese way of showing off that we will find completely reprehensible and unacceptable. We will not be able to tailor all domestic and foreign policy to one goal; we will not be able to bulldoze the illegal shanties that have come up in the middle of our cities; we will not be able to summarily deport all dissidents to the forests of Bastar; we will not be able to gag a naturally insolent media; and we won't be able to impose a dress code on the obese and the emaciated.

In short, we won't be able to do those hundreds of little things the Chinese have done to make the visit of the Gandhi parivar to Beijing such a memorable one. When the starry-eyed Rahul baba returns home he will perhaps even be encouraged to give a powerpoint presentation of the lessons from Beijing. But apart from abstract principles, there is precious little a rumbustious India can learn from a regimented China.

When it comes to organising spectacles, dictatorships always do it better. Hitler came to power in January 1933. Yet, in just three-and-half years, he put together a great show in Berlin.

Unlike the stiff Chinese Communists, the Nazi leadership even organised the most wonderful Page Three parties to inform the world that the Third Reich was actually quite kosher, even if its apparatchiks did have a strange penchant for wearing jackboots in summer. For confirmation, just watch Leni Riefenstahl's wonderful film documentary of the 1936 Olympics, a celluloid classic.

Unfortunately, the Nazis didn't turn out to be over-dressed teddy bears and there may be more to China than what Sonia Gandhi will get to see. India will never be China but at least we will remain human. And like the tortoise, there are reasons to believe that blundering humans will eventually prevail over super-humans without souls.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, August 10, 2008