There was a time when you could tell which company belonged to which country. Ford, of course, was American, and Rolls-Royce was British, Volkswagen couldn't be anything but German and Toyota was as Japanese as Sushi. And where else could Tata Steel come from except our good old India?

But you can't be so sure now. Ford is said to be up for grabs and could end up in Japanese or German hands. Rolls-Royce is already a German brand, though the car is still made in England. And there are Volkswagen plants all over the place, including one in Poland.

But it is the British who are fast losing their companies. In fact, they hardly make anything except fish and chips. How long since you bought an authentic British product or saw the label “Made in England” on any of them? Before the War, I used to purchase British fountain pens, British bulbs, British cutlery, British bicycles, and, of course, British tooth paste and soaps. Now they are all made either in India or somewhere else, but rarely in England.

For a country that is supposed to be the home of industrial revolution, this is really quite a comedown. But it doesn't seem to bother them. Recently there were reports that a famous British company, Imperial Chemicals (ICI) was up for sale and would be taken over by a German group. But the Britishers are apparently more interested in the amount of money they would make out of the deal rather than the loss of a famous industrial heirloom.

I suspect that the British really are salesmen at heart and like to sell anything for, as Napoleon once said, theirs is a nation of shopkeepers, whether it is selling groceries or companies. For the last quarter century, they have been on a selling spree, even if it is their own companies.

There was a time when English salesmen sold Vanaspati in India. Years ago, when I was a schoolboy in Mumbai, I was returning home one afternoon when I saw a big crowd outside our building. On the footpath, a man was frying pakodas in a pan held over a kerosene store and going around asking us to sample them, free, of course. He was frying them in what he called Vanaspati, some kind of cooking butter we had never heard of.

The man frying the pakodas was an Englishman, as pink as they come, in spotless white shirt and trousers, and a dark brown tie, straight out of Harrow, or may be Eton. He was working for Lever Bros, the predecessor of Hindustan Lever, and would, in due course, end up as its boss in India one day, and probably did do so. But on that hot day, he was just an English salesman, doing what comes naturally to English salesmen, selling soaps, toothpaste and Vanaspati to Indians on a hot afternoon five thousand miles away from Shakespeare's green and pleasant land.

Now English salesmen are selling their own companies, not Vanaspati. They sold Corus steel to Tatas and will one day sell Lever Bros too, if they get a good price. Surprisingly, this has not affected their economy, which is booming, just as all the chicken tikka shops did not affect their fish-and-chips businesses. In this age of globalization, things work in strange ways, and the more you try to get rid of your own companies, the more you prosper.

What will they sell next? Buckingham Palace, Tower of London, Trafalgar Square? You can't really stop them. Once a salesman, always a salesman, even if you have made a start with selling Vanaspati on a sizzling Bombay footpath!