TRIVANDRUM, India — It is fashionable these days, particularly in the West, to speak of India and China in the same breath. These are the two big countries said to be taking over the world, the new contenders for global eminence after centuries of Western domination, the Oriental answer to generations of Occidental economic success.
Indeed, two new books explicitly twin the two countries: Robyn Meredith's "The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us" and Harvard business professor Tarun Khanna's "Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures — and Yours."
Both books view the recent rise of India and China as shifting the world's economic and political tectonic plates. Some even speak of "Chindia," as if the two were joined at the hip in the international imagination.