A friend wanted to know why people in India tend to be angry and rude in interactions. Why can’t they exchange some pleasantries and be nice? Why do they have to begin a phone conversation with “bolo” or something synonymous with “tell me?” Oh, you won’t understand, I fumed inside. They just don’t get it. Hundreds of years of plenty and indulgence makes one snigger, not empathise with how those who struggle lead their lives.
You wake up in the morning and get ready for work. You find that your boss wants you to reach office 30 minutes early. That message was sent at 1 am when you were asleep. You begin to wonder if sleeping was acceptable. You leave the house without time for breakfast. You may or may not get a cab. Even if he agrees to come, he may or may not find you. And if you found him and got in, you may or may not get stuck in traffic. The air conditioning may or may not work. When you reach it may or may not get wet. Then, you may or may not get a long line before the lift. And then you enter the cool and decorated office premise. Now tell me, if you managed a smile and a bright good morning, aren’t you being extremely nice, courteous, gracious and generous?
We do not pause to think about how dealing with uncertainty is an everyday affair for most of us. The stress it creates is another thing. But how it modifies our behaviour, even without our pausing to see the damage it does to our attitude to life, is something those who live outside India will not know. We still wear the brightest, cheerful clothes in the whole world, care quite a bit about the other to reach out and help, and get by our days without cursing and whining. But putting on a plastic smile and saying good morning to a stranger, no Sir, we don’t do it. We are dealing with too much already, to be nicer like that.
The conditioning from the environment that we grew up in creeps on us, in stealth. We then stare at it in disbelief. We spent a good number of years dealing with the ill-thought policies of the government. There were absurd restrictions on who can do what, how, where, when. Every business had to comply with innumerable rules and laws that made little sense to the businessman. It seemed like making money was a crime and taxes were prohibitive. This regime lasted too many years and what we have today is the famed Indian jugaad.
We have become so adept at twisting any rule or law, that speaking about rule of the law could be a joke. There is no faith in any proposal the government makes, that we find a loophole, a short cut and do what we believe is right. This creates an unfair, uneven, inequitable society, but we do not quarrel with it much. Integrity is so tough to find, but we curse and move on. The trust quotient in our social and economic transactions is low, but we live with it. The government’s best laid plans will fail, for we are like that only.
Sometimes, our solutions are ingenious. Like the missed call. Nowhere in the world would people have come up with an ingenious method to connect without paying, all completely legally. To a stranger, the Indian traffic is a nightmare. But to the one that navigates it every day, it is not a rule-based lane-based system. Given the number of people waiting at the signal, it is not even possible to impose it. I live close to the blessed Elphinstone bridge traffic signal in Mumbai, and ask me about it.
The traffic in India has a mind of its own. It is like a living, moving thinking creature that needs to make decisions on the fly. And thus it moves with a sense of purpose that is driven by an unknown collective will of everyone on the road. It has a city-wise character. It breaks safety rules set up all over the world, but it is the only way so many millions can get from one place to another. We can curse the migration, the city planners, the lack of public transport, and the potholes, but we keep moving on.
It is a combination of all these that also determines how we deal with our finances. We want to save for the children, because we think we should protect them from the hardships we went through. Providing for the next generation permeates every profession, politics to cinema, small to large business, and in obsessive savings for the most. We do not believe that they actually have a better future than us, on their own, and will be proud to make their lives themselves. We like to indulge and spoil them instead.
We hate paying taxes, since we do not believe the government has any use for our money other than spending on its own establishment and paying salaries to its large staff. Worse, it may waste it on projects we don’t care about. We fight, plan, evade, hide, cook and do what we can to keep our money. Anything that saves taxes is a great investment in our books. The government struggles to break this.
Our money habits have quirks and contradictions that others may find amusing: We do not borrow much. Even what we borrow we pay off early. As a nation we are quite under leveraged. Credit does not reach many either. But create schemes that target the underprivileged, it is all misused grossly. From priority lending to farm loans, microfinance to NBFCs, gold loans to margin lending, we have scams after scams engineered by those out to exploit a situation. We clock one of the thickest densities of trading at the stock markets, furiously trading derivatives and stocks. But count the number of people out of the total population that even does equity investing, it is a small single digit. Are we honest or not? Hardworking or not? Judicious or not? Maybe both.
What is precious in all of this is our freedom, forbearance, entrepreneurship, never say die attitude, and willingness to go the distance. We are not super proud of who we have become. But we know that if 30 years of prosperity has brought in more smiles and more comforts, we will get better. Take a breath and stay ethical, it is the least you can do to contribute.
