If we want better trade with India we'd better stop talking about cricket!

A number of trade pundits have suggested that Steve Waugh’s celebrity should be used to sell Australian exports to cricket-mad India.

This idea seems obvious, and indeed, one Australian insurance company has used Waugh’s endorsement in its bid to crack India’s market.

But if Australia and India are to gain a deeper understanding of each other’s business or culture, Steve Waugh — and cricket — must be dropped.

Using cricket to understand each other is like viewing a painting through a magnifying glass: you see the detail, but you miss the wider picture.

Talk to any Delhi auto-rickshaw driver and he could probably easier recite Ricky Ponting’s batting average than name Australia’s prime minister.

India is so consumed with cricket that most conversation about the game is actually small talk. It is like the English whingeing about the weather. When Indians and Australians talk, cricket is the fallback topic when all else fails.

So let’s not fool ourselves that just because Indians and Australians can share a long conversation about Shane Warne’s weight that this is the same as knowing each other.

Few Australians would know that India’s Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, an accomplished Hindi poet, is not a known cricket fan. And Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the opposition Congress Party, if she ever becomes Prime Minister, would never describe herself as a “cricket tragic”.

Cricket should therefore be no more than a conversational icebreaker, or else Australians will know little more about India than hoary chestnuts about wristy Indian batsmen and wily spinners.

As a start on the road to understanding, Australians should demolish two misconceptions. The first is a negative one of India as a land of dust, diseases, and destitution - contradicted lately by the bullish cliché about India as a booming economy emerging from years of socialist rule. The truth, of course, is that it’s a mix of both.

India’s annual economic growth rate has indeed ramped up to China-style speed levels of eight per cent; each month some 2 million Indians are getting telephone connections, mainly via mobile phones; and Indian car-makers are starting to make models destined for western markets.

Yet around 900 million Indians remain without a telephone, and several hundred million people remain mired in subsistence farming. Many fine Indian writers have certainly tried to convey to the world this complex story of a country straddling village and city life.

This is a story that Australian diplomats are now coming to terms with. Australia’s High Commissioner to India, Penny Wensley, said to a business audience last year: “Australia and India do not know enough about the contemporary reality of each other…the larger picture is not in focus. It is blurred by outdated impressions, simplistic stereotypes and assumptions.”

Last week, a contingent of senior Australian officials, including the head of the foreign affairs department, met with their Indian counterparts to discuss weighty issues of state. No details of this so-called “strategic dialogue” were released to the media.

But you can bet that cricket was not on the agenda, underlining the yawning gulf between what officials discuss, and the topics that consume average Indians and Australians.

So, to help further mutual understanding, here are some suggestions:

First, if sport must be used as a medium to get to know each other, Australia should send the Socceroos, or better, the Matildas, on a tour to India. Soccer is a growing sport played by millions in India, and as a game in Australia, it attracts a much more socially and culturally diverse base of players than cricket.

Second, spend more money funding Australian diplomacy with India. Diplomats have managed programmes that have brought to India popular Australian films and writers such as Booker-prize winner Peter Carey. Many Indian journalists have been sent to Australia to work in local media. This scheme should be extended to include other occupations.

And finally, Australia must accept India’s growing expertise in information technology services, and not put up barriers stopping young Indians from being among the first in their generation to benefit from globalisation.

One these things are done, we should get back to playing — and talking — cricket.