Noted Hindi poet-critic Ashok Vajpeyi on Friday said cultural initiatives are important to improve ties with Pakistan in the long-run and hoped the two neighbours can be comrades in arms in the sphere of art.

This month, the Chinese government plans to introduce codes for some 3,000 Chinese characters as part of a grand project, known as the China Font Bank, to digitize 500,000 characters previously unavailable in electronic form. Until now, only 80,388 characters have been encoded in the international computing standard, Unicode.