When I visited the main bazaar near the New Delhi Railway Station, many of the storekeepers greeted me with a cheery ni hao ("hello" in Chinese) and invited me to peruse their goods.

The greeting left me feeling honored that the Indians knew something about my home country, even though they were undoubtedly looking to make a sale.

Some of them even managed to go further by putting bulletin boards in front of their doors, that bore hand-written Chinese characters that read: "We have accessories made from xiao ye zi tan (red sandalwood, which is highly valued by Chinese collectors). Come and have a look, and you will find that the owner is meng meng da (an online phrase used to denote 'lovely and cute')".

I was a little embarrassed that, as someone who studied in college for seven years, I didn't even know how to say "hello" to Indian people until last year, when I watched the TV series 2 Broke Girls, in which a shopkeeper greeted a customers with Namaste.

A student of Chinese at the Jawaharlal Nehru University told me that when he worked as a part-time tourist guide earlier this year, he was shocked by the purchasing capacity of Chinese travelers.

"Some of them threw all of their old clothes in the trash to make more room in their suitcases for the new-bought clothes," he said. "On good days, I was able to earn large sums from the local shopkeepers by guiding Chinese tourists to their stores," he said, although he declined to provide detailed figures.

Many other students in the university's Chinese department expressed their willingness to come to China - a country they regard as mysterious, but attractive - to seek their fortunes.

In the opinion of Professor B.R. Deepak, China's rapid development in recent decades could provide an example for India.

Many rural Chinese now lead more-prosperous lives thanks to the thriving labor-intensive industries such as clothing and textiles, and the Indians can learn from this development model, he said.

And that's exactly what the Indian government is doing: attracting capital, from home and from overseas, to create more job opportunities. It will be some time before the reform efforts take effect, though. Based on China's experience, economic reform will be tough, with conflicts among different interest groups - however, it is also irreversible since nothing can stop people from pursuing a better life.