New Delhi: Talk of India to the Chinese and the image that conjures to the maximum of them is Bollywood, distantly followed by Buddhism and the software industry, claims a Harvard Business School professor. According to Tarun Khanna, Bollywood is the principle means by which India exports its soft power.

"The scale of Bollywood has eclipsed that of Hollywood. In 2003,3.6 billion people attended 1,100 Bollywood movies compared to the 2.6 billion moviegoers who attended 600 Hollywood films. These numbers attest to the success of the industry s entrepreneurship, unaided and relatively unregulated by the state," Khanna writes in "Billions of Entrepreneurs".

"What are India's channels of exporting soft power other than films?" he asks. The most obvious candidate, according to him, is the software industry, "the major reason India has re-emerged on the world economic map". He then writes about an informal survey he conducted to test the legitimacy of that channel.

"On a recent trip through half a dozen cities in central and eastern China, I asked some 40 individuals - among them doctors and academics, politicians and city functionaries patrolling streets, shopkeepers and rickshaw drivers - what images were conjured by the word India ," he writes. "A resounding 80 per cent pointed to the film industry. A distant second was Buddhism and the software industry ranked third."

Khanna says the Raj Kapoor starrer Awaara gripped China's imagination.