Hindi-Chini bhai bhai gets going in Pune

Abhay Vaidya / TNN / Sep 23, 2006, 18:29 IST

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A large number of management and IT professionals are arming themselves with the Mandarin in Pune.

<arttitle><i>Hindi-Chini bhai bhai</i> gets going in Pune</arttitle>

PUNE: Want to scale the "great wall" of your career? Learn the Chinese language. Hindi-Chini bhai bhai is beginning to acquire deeper connotations in Pune where a large number of management students, businessmen, corporate and IT professionals are arming themselves with Mandarin.
Be they door frame importers or students of foreign trade and management, an unprecedented 300-odd Puneites are currently learning the Chinese language at various institutes here.The dearth of teachers in Mumbai is also drawing students from the metropolis to Pune.
Leading the pack is the Symbiosis group of institutes, which is not only teaching the language at three of its centres, but has big plans of establishing India's first Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK, literally Chinese level exam) centre that will enable it to give internationally-accepted Chinese language certification tests.
For many years, the National Defence Academy (NDA) was the only place in Pune where the Chinese language was taught. Now, however, the Symbiosis Institute of Foreign Language (SIFL), Institute of International Business (SIIB), the Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development (SCMHRD), Sri Balaji Society's Indian Centre for Management and Human Resource Development (ICMHRD), Crysalis and the Institute for Foreign Languages and Computing (IFLC) are among those offering basic and advanced Chinese language courses.

Haryana

Jammu & Kashmir

Haryana

Alliance View
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Party View

Seats: 90

Results

Majority: 46

BJP

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Results: 90/90

BJP WON

Source: PValue

"There's an acute dearth of teachers of Chinese language in Pune or you would have seen more courses and more institutes offering programs in Chinese," Anneel Bhidey (41), one of the leading teachers of Mandarin said.
Qualified with a Bachelors and Masters in Chinese from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Bhidey is popular with students and draws Rs 500 per hour. He began learning Mandarin informally in 1995 from a retired Military Intelligence officer after his elder brother visited China on business and sensed the coming wave of excitement and opportunity.

Both, Bhidey and Beena Menon who heads SIFL, told TOI that students knowing Mandarin were getting a preference in the job market. "Business with China is booming and many management students, businessmen and corporate representatives are now learning Chinese," Menon said.
Adeleena Massey, co-ordinator for foreign languages at Chrysalis institute told TOI that as against 40 students in various batches since May'05, she expects at least 60 students this year.
"Earlier we had a demand from exporters and importers; but now, the demand is coming from all sectors including IT," said Massey, adding that Chrysalis had trained a batch of 10 IT professionals from Kanbay Software.
Sachet Mehta (24) who was browsing through Chinese dictionaries at a Pune bookshop said he joined a Chinese language course as "in 3-4 years I plan to start my own business."
Almost every institute teaching Chinese has its own success stories in the form of students and businessmen having benefited enormously after having learnt the language.
Apart from job offers in India itself, employment opportunities are opening up with multinationals in China and also as English-language teachers in China. Menon said that Symbiosis is now negotiating with Indian multinationals with operations in China to start an English language institute there. "These firms need to employ local people with a knowledge of English. So we are trying this two-pronged approach where we teach Mandarin to Indians and English to the Chinese," she said.
Bhidey said that those learning Chinese at the JNU get lucrative offers from the tourism sector and international banks and, therefore, do not prefer to get into teaching.
"Even RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) has 20 vacancies for people knowing Chinese, but nobody wants to go there because of paranoia and all the restrictions," he said.

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