So I've been in this city called Daqing for exactly one month today. This place is basically an oil town. Oil money everywhere you look. This town is in the province of Heilongjiang which borders Russia. Anyway I have having this discussion with a client on one of my jobs in the neighbouring province, Jilin.

Amongst other things the Chinese are usually very interested in knowing how far east the use of chopsticks goes. India is usually where they are pretty unsure. A common question that I get asked after i inform people of my vegetarian origins is how we eat in India. Do we use a fork and spoon? Do we use chopsticks? And usually my answer is that we use our hands at home but I guess its beyond me to explain the fact that our choice of equipment for a meal depends on a complex set of societal norms. So I just leave it at that. But there is one issue that I need to clarify usually. At the dinner table for a chinese dinner each person has a small saucer sized plate, a cup for green tea(surprisingly 'Cha' in chinese) , a glass for juice/beer/water and the rice or noodles is usually brought in later once the main dishes have been served. The interesting part is that the plate for each person is not used much in the whole eating process. So the dishes are all placed on this rotating table in the centre and people use their chopsticks to pick up morsels of food from the dish in which the food is placed in and put it into their mouths directly. So very often the saucer size plate hardly comes into play.
Its used occasionally if the piece of food turns out to be too large. As a result of this cultural mismatch I need to quickly explain that we in India use spoons / ladles to first take the food from the common bowl and transfer it to our own plates ( a fascinating concept for many people here) and then proceed to sometimes use our hands.

Another discussion I had was regarding the India-China war of 1962. Now it wasnt a very heated discussion but it was pretty interesting to hear the other side of the story. His story was this. The McMahon line was according to him not the correct boundary between the two countries. And India he said was busy buying loads of weapons from the US and Russia in this period and acting aggresively. As a result the Chinese had to act against this agression. Who know which side of the story is right? There is probably no answer to that question. The truth as always lies in somewhere in the middle, by the wayside.