For a Bengali expatriate who has lived the better part of his life willingly, and I might add, happily, submerged in the Western culture -- thus I hope both B. Hajarika and my little brother will both accommodate my appropriation of jajabor -- the rise of China represents a bit of a conundrum.

Notwithstanding the clever coinage of the term "Chindia" by the keynote speaker at the academic conference that I was attending in Beijing, viewing China from afar, the subcontinental mind cannot but feel a sense of, not necessarily envy, but something akin to the proverbial train having just left the station with you, of course, in the platform.

So while to my Western interlocutors I am an (quasi) unabashed champion of China rising, a parallel, unsaid question sometimes remains suspended, Why can't we say the same about the other billion plus below the Himalayas?

Beijing. I should add that a fortunate, and perhaps necessary, by-product of being a jajabor is the capacity of finding the ways and means of your hosts unexpectedly ingenious. Thus the gentle reader is forewarned that my recollections of my days in China may not pass the critical eye test -- but it remains my personally felt observations.

Beijing was grand (of course), polluted (though less so than five years ago, as I was told by an ex-Beijingese), and (somewhat disappointingly) entirely less "foreign" to a (primarily) Western eye. A recurrent refrain from my fellow visiting conferees was how much of an "any city of the world" feel that the Beijing we saw emanated, the Forbidden City and other monuments aside.

The streets were clean and straight and large -- larger than anywhere that we had ever seen -- and a great majority of the structures were modern and (again) large (and yet again, larger than we had ever seen). But apart from the sheer scale of the city and what is within, it was difficult to pinpoint how it was any different from the scores of cities of the Western world.

The only line of separation I could gauge was the careful and well-used bicycle lanes alongside most of the major boulevards. Though one cannot call the modern Beijing a beautiful city by any means -- clean, (surprisingly) orderly, efficient, and massive are the adjectives that come to mind more readily in describing this city of 15 million -- one does get the sense that instead of merely being the northern capital (one meaning of Beijing in Chinese) of the Middle Kingdom, Beijing has laid the groundwork for being the capital of the world.

Kunming. The daily China Eastern flight from Dhaka to Beijing stops at Kunming in southwestern China, which has become a regional transportation hub; from my flight of a hundred or so passengers, just four of us continued onto the second leg for Beijing.

As the first port of entry into China, one has to clear immigration in Kunming, where I had my first, and a rather, mixed experience with Chinese bureaucracy.

The immigration officer was puzzled to see a US passport-holder with an Arabic name on the flight from Dhaka (95% of the passengers were Bangladeshi, the remaining Chinese), particularly one that was born in Karachi (one of the few words I could comprehend from the animated exchanges among the officials that were examining my passport).

After 20 minutes of rubbing, pressing, pulling and handling of my passport by various officials -- all the while I had the distinct pleasure of standing next to the cubicle watching all my fellow passengers with Bangladeshi passports move on -- it was decided that the passport was legitimate, and I was led by my friendly China Eastern escort to re-board the flight for Beijing.

On the other hand, landing in Beijing around midnight I was impressed favorably by the pirouette performed by the various functionaries to separate the international travelers from the domestic ones for customs clearance.

On the return trip to Dhaka, I decided to take advantage of the routing and make a one day stopover in Kunming. Known as the Spring City for its amenable climate (average annual temperature of 15 Celsius), Kunming is the capital of Yunnan province, with a population of about four million people.

A rapidly growing regional trading centre -- with the rising affluence and aging of the eastern seaboard, Chinese and foreign firms are increasingly making large investments in the previously neglected, and thus, less costly hinterlands -- Kunming, to me, was in many ways even more astounding.

A remarkably livable, orderly, and pleasant city, it has handled a tripling of its population over the past decade in -- especially so to one who has observed the contemporaneous (mis)management of rapid urbanisation in Bangladesh -- an enviable manner. The streets are absurdly clean, the planning rational and forward-looking, all seemingly geared at attaining the delicate balance between modernisation and the alienation that it so often engenders.

While some of the main thoroughfares in the central commercial district approximated global financial centres such as New York or Hong Kong, a turn on to one of the side streets brings you to street scenes resembling mid-size European cities with cafes, tea houses and boutiques providing a more leisurely atmosphere.

Though brief, it was sufficiently enticing to make me want to return, more so than Beijing. Kunming, in many ways, made me think about our own cities in Bangladesh, insofar as a model that our planners could do worse than to emulate.

Albeit a sample size of two is hardly the basis to form generalizations -- though on my flight to Dhaka a Bangladeshi businessman on the next seat related the same story of orderliness and efficiency in even poorer regions deeper in the interior -- but China would appear to be creating a hundred Singapores as it transforms itself into an urban society.

Hyperbole aside, the rise of "Chindia" is not an unlikelihood among the possible futures. The media quite reasonably draws attention to the environmental risks (though the high incidence of zero-emission electric bicycles and scooters and solar water-heaters suggests an impressive, if nascent, effort at environmentalism) posed by China's industrialisation, and the sacrifice in freedom inherent in its top down political system.

However, as a member of the Indian diaspora -- and I use the term advisedly and perforce in its subcontinental sense -- I couldn't quite avoid the sensation that the Indian part of the dyad is even less prepared, perhaps due to institutional or political or cultural differences, in negotiating the significant challenges posed by wholesale industrialisation and urbanisation.

Manzur Rahman is a professor in San Diego, California.