"If you listened to it one day, there was no need to listen another day,'' he recalls, citing broadcasters who raged against "American imperialists, Russian revisionists, and Indian reactionaries.''

But the 66-year old retired officer recently found a more challenging occupation. He teaches at the first Indian management school that requires all students to study Putonghua, a sign of growing enthusiasm for closer business ties between India and China.

Established last year in the southeastern coastal city of Chennai, the Great Lakes Institute of Management nurtures students' dreams of plum positions in China, either with multinational corporations or Indian firms.

``Gentlemen, I hope you are all ready with your tones,'' Krishnan says to his class.

``Yes, sir!'' rings out the reply from a co-ed class of 67 students.

Flapping his arms like an orchestra conductor, Krishnan leads the throaty chorus, advising that `the fourth tone is like an automobile wheel getting punctured.''

Next comes a quiz on six-digit numbers. And to round off the third lesson of the semester, Krishnan launches into a breathless recitation of a Putonghua radio spiel that he memor-ized in the old days: ``This is Radio Peking. Compatriots, bye-bye,'' he translates for the class.

The retired colonel is happy to see old hostilities put aside as the two nations explore greater avenues for trade and investment. Bilateral trade between China and India rose 79 percent in 2004 to US$13.6 billion (HK$106.08 billion), according to Chinese customs data.

When China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited India in mid-April, leaders pledged to boost trade by 2008 to US$20 billion and foster more collaboration in IT development.

That will take a lot more homework on both sides - but for the moment, the buzz is building demand for language lessons in both northern and southern India.

Great Lakes is a particularly odd name for a school in Chennai given that the city is perpetually short of water. The name derives from the adopted American geography of the school's backers - a group of Indian academics at some of the most reputable business schools in the United States.

The school also has a collaborative arrangement with the Ivy League, hosting visiting faculty members from Yale University in New Haven.

Launched as a non-profit establishment, Great Lakes was bankrolled by Bala Balachandran, an accounting professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management who hails from India's southern Tamil Nadu state. Chennai is its capital.

It's not the first institution of higher learning in India to offer Putonghua. But to earn a degree here, Chinese language skills are mandatory, not optional. And although students won't be fluent by the time they finish their one-year management program, their familiarity with the basics will make them more marketable, predicts S Sriram, executive director of Great Lakes.

To bolster Krishnan's efforts, the school is in preliminary talks with universities in Shanghai and Hong Kong to facilitate faculty exchanges and beef up its Putonghua teaching staff.

At present, India's claim to fame may be software design and handling back-office operations for scores of companies overseas but Sriram is more focused on the future potential of outsourcing India's management talent.

His logic goes like this: As China emerges as a great economic power, US and European investment will continue to pump up the dragon. But ``not many Americans or Europeans are willing to settle down in China,'' he contends.

``Maybe if you force them, they would leave their families for several months and go back and forth. But it's not a sustainable kind of thing.''

Enter the Indian, that versatile creature known to adapt to the far corners of Africa, cold, lonely lonely towns in the American Midwest or the chaotic corners of the Middle East.

Fluent in English and adept at mastering other tongues, thanks to the linguistic flair often required in a home country with 22 languages recognized by the constitution, the Indian manager is nothing if not adaptable.

And, of course, often willing to accept salaries lower than their Western counterparts.

``Those [American and European] companies would love to hire a formally trained manager who speaks English and does not mind living in China,'' says Sriram.

This is not to dismiss the importance of the overseas Chinese business community, either.

``In Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singa-pore and Malaysia, a lot of business is controlled by the Chinese. If you spoke Putonghua, it would be useful,'' he adds.

In Krishnan's class, the students appear transported by the same logic. In the cutthroat world of Indian corporate recruitment, they believe such skills will make them stand out from the pack. Almost all of them want to go to China after they graduate, if they can swing it, to get a first-hand look at the massive scale of operations and opportunities for market growth.

``The experience you'd get in China would propel your career by leaps and bounds,'' exclaims 25-year old Pri-yadarshi Mohapatra. Says 20-year old classmate Sai Sudha: ``I want to learn Chinese to the fullest. Getting globally confident is important in the business scenario.''

Few express any reservation about potential culture clashes, if called upon to manage a team of Chinese workers. How about adapting to one of China's industrial hinterlands?

``I was in Nigeria for 6½ years. Anywhere else would be heaven,'' retorts 30-year old Ravi Shankar.

The single tentative note comes from one of the more experienced members of the class, 43-year old B Rama-krishnan. Having previously worked at a local company that dispatched two IT engineers to China in the 1990s, Ramakrishnan vividly recalls their complaints about the food.

In India, many practicing Hindus are also vegetarians and some even recoil at the idea of eating vegetables from a pan that had contained a sizzling portion of fried pork. This is hardly a mainstream notion in eat-anything China.

``The length of stay of a person in a country is largely dependent on food,'' says Ramakrishnan. Lack of vegetarian choices in China ``is the apprehension in the mind of a lot of people.''

One employer that came knocking at the doors of Great Lakes is Nasdaq-listed Cognizant, which has nine soft-ware development centers in India and recently acquired office space at the Pudong IT Park in China.

Among others drawn from India's top business schools, the firm recruited three students who graduated from Great Lakes last April.

``We believe that over and above the attributes we look for in professionals working knowledge of a language like Chinese is an added advantage,'' says Cognizant managing director R Chand-rasekaran.

``Cognizant plans to get a cross-section of its employees skilled in the Chinese language and it does fit very well into Cognizant's long-term business plans.''

At the same time, crash courses for business travelers are also picking up speed. From New Delhi to Bangalore, dozens of private academies are revving up their courses in Putonghua.

So far, however, they are drawing on a limited pool of teachers, mainly Indians who graduate from a few top universities that offer Chinese studies, plus a smattering of Chinese and Singaporean nationals who have gone to India as students, traders, or spouses of transferred executives.

It appears that the Chinese government is keen to address the shortage.

One major project in the works is a Putonghua language laboratory at the University of Mysore, in the southern state of Karnataka.

Slated to open in August, the lab comes under a memorandum of understanding signed in January with five Chinese universities, primarily aimed at facilitating IT studies for Chinese students in India.

Meanwhile in New Delhi, China's Ministry of Education has proposed a new Confucius Institute at Jawaharlal Nehru University, which would also include a multi-media language lab and host seminars and films. No starting date has been announced.

For now, though, the diversity of Putonghua teachers in India is striking.

In Chennai, for example, a newly established company called Foreign Lan-guage Services has recruited Lily Srinivas, a woman of Chinese origin who was born in Nicaragua, studied in Taiwan, and eventually became a naturalized Indian citizen.

Then there's Niraj Sinha, who began his career as a cartoonist who sketched a Hindi version of the Pied Piper for local newspapers in India's northern Bihar state.

One day he switched on the TV and caught a program about Chinese characters. Intrigued by the idea of ``a language within art,'' he enrolled in Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, graduated with a masters' degree two years ago, and is now working on a pilot project to teach traders in India via video-conferencing facilities in Internet cafes.

Backed by Reliance Infocomm, a unit of India's mighty Reliance Group, the pilot program begins on June 22. The brochure teases: ``Now, learning Chinese is as simple as drinking tea.''

Organizers say that video-confer-encing is an ideal way to make up for the shortage of Putonghua teachers, particularly in smaller cities and towns where traders of textiles and agricultural products are to be found.

``None of us had a doubt in our minds about people wanting to learn Chi-nese,'' says Udaya Kumar, who de-scribes his job as brainstorming new ideas for Reliance Infocomm. Many traders, he explains, run family busi-nesses and hope to see the next generation plunge into new opportunities in China.

Short on funds for interpreters, some traders are already dealing with relatively small companies in China where their counterparts have not mastered English. The idea of learning a new language for business purposes is not particularly alien to them, since many switch from one regional tongue to another.

``Mentally, this is what we are conditioned to accept,'' says V Muralid-haran, a retail adviser to Reliance Infocomm.

There is a slight problem with the business model, though. The video-conferencing facilities, which are normally tapped by corporate groups for recruitment interviews, are considered pricey at 2,000 rupees (HK$356) per hour.

But management at the 255 Reliance Web World outlets found that the dinnertime slot of 7pm to 8pm was downtime for video-conferencing, so the company was willing to swallow a 60 percent discount off the rate. The language lessons, to be held three times per week, will cost 10,000 rupees per person for 24 hours of classes and debut in eight locales.

This might be too much globalized synergy even for flexible, tech-savvy Indians to swallow. Will cashew traders in Cochin really rush to an Internet cafe to study Putonghua? And will they really absorb anything from a distance-learning model? At Great Lakes, the retired colonel has his doubts.

``It can't be a success,'' scoffs Krish-nan, hunched over a whirring machine that displays a transparency of a China border map sketched with coloured markers.

``It has to be taught in a classroom like this, with equipment like this. The brain needs interaction with a human being.''