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 his book 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.

According to him, Awaara fans are found in abundance in China. "The film's anti-class theme particularly resonated with Mao Zedong, who declared it to be one of his favourite movies," the book, published by Penguin, says.

The author claims, unlike in India, it was foreigners who ushered films into China.

James Ricalton, an American, began screening films in teahouses. The first Chinese film - Dingjun Mountain – was made in 1905 by Ren Jingfeng, who studied photography in Japan.

"China's national cinema, after being buffeted by anti-foreign sentiment, had to contend with civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists first, and then the Japanese invasion and brutality. The normal development of the film industry finally began in the late 1920s," writes Khanna.

Predicting unprecedented future growth - about 30 per cent - for both Indian as well as Chinese markets, Khanna says the key question is whether China will be able to use its film industry as a branding and cultural ambassador for the country (something that the Indian film industry has shown it can do) given its government's consistent effort to censor movies critical of the regime.

In the book, Khanna uses on-the-ground stories and research to show "how India and China are embracing the world on their own distinct terms".

Through intriguing, often provocative comparisons of triumphs and travails in both the countries, he touches critical areas such as challenges of governing 2.4 billion people with entrepreneurial tendencies, balance between private property rights and public interest, need to encourage and fund indigenous enterprises and role of overseas Indians and Chinese in development back home.

Khanna writes another viable contender among India's primary soft power exports is the nation's intellectual tradition - of people spreading the Indian thought.

But China has no cultural ambassadors, he says, and attributes the reason to the role of the governments in culture.

"Many Indians would consider a seat at the Oscars as valuable as a seat on the Security Council and participation in an art auction at Christie's as significant as a place at the table of a White House state dinner," the book says.

"That mindset would be highly unusual in China. Filmmakers and artists in China are on the government payrolls, serving as mouthpieces of official propaganda rather than ambassadors of culture.

"On China's side the baton is passed from premiers to generals to party cadres. Team India passes it from internationally acclaimed film director Mira Nair to spiritual strongman Deepak Chopra to academic conscience Amartya Sen to software czar Azim Premji," he writes.