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“India Time“
Hinglish (Hindi + English) can be a difficult language to pick up. In addition to accents, one must also deal with more nuanced matters.
Hinglish: Your food will be ready in 10 minutes, sir.
English: Hope you’re not that hungry. It’ll be about an hour.
Hinglish: Don’t worry, the meeting will only take 20 minutes.
English: Cancel your dinner plans. You’re not leaving for 2 hours.
Hinglish: Ok. We’ll have the budget to you Friday night.
English: Is Wednesday morning ok?
Things just happen a bit slower in India. We have dubbed this phenomenon “India Time” and adjusted accordingly.
But why does it occur? Is it simply a part of Indian culture? Are Indians just procrastinators? It’s the easy answer but easy answers are historically (a) racist and (b) wrong.
As a student of physics, I’ve always been encouraged to never be satisfied with an “it is what it is” answer and to always think one level deeper. So where does “India time” really come from?
Infrastructure
Try cooking Channa Masala for your hungry restaurant patrons when the entire city’s water supply has been cut. Try making it to a meeting on time when the dirt roads wash out after the lightest rain and lines of cows grazing on the median create bovine road blocks. Or try writing up a budget in the dark because your power went out as soon as you arrived at the office.
Infrastructure makes up many of the little things that make life run smoothly. It makes sure your lights turn on in the evening, water comes out of your faucet when you want to wash your hands, and your bus arrives on time to take you to work. Its the magic that delivers resources right to your doorstep for cheaper than your ancestors could ever have imagined. It makes life comfortable, predictable, and easy to deal with.
But when its gone, so is the predictability. Its simply impossible to make accurate judgments on how much time something will take you if you can’t be sure of what tools will be available.
Poor infrastructure gives rise to “India Time”.
But what gives rise to poor infrastructure?
Democracy
*Note: I’m confident of the connection between between “India Time” and poor infrastructure, but this next one is a bit more of a stretch. Feedback welcome.
Thirty years ago, no one considered China and India to be modern nations. Today, that can still be said of India, but two Americans dropped in the middle of Manhattan and Shanghai would have trouble figuring out who’d been deported.
Two poor nations with billion-plus populations. Why such a big difference 30 years later?
Centralized planning.
While India and the rest of the western world were busy praising the freedoms of democracy, China’s centralized government was redirecting rivers, building highways, and carefully planning its expanding cities. When you don’t have to ask the country for money every time you want to do something, running a nation gets a little easier.
Don’t get me wrong. Electing politicians and voting on everything is wonderful, but its extremely difficult to run a democracy in a poor nation. Democracies rely on educated voters and honest, concerned officials. But when voters are too busy working to make money to survive, they prioritize jobs over schooling, and, similarly, when politicians are barely paid a living wage, they prioritize their own families over the rest of their states and graft and corruption ensue.
This entire line of argument, however, reeks of first-world privilege, as in “We here in America are ready for democracy but you simply can’t handle it” so let me make an important clarification.
Democracy in its current form doesn’t work in poorer nations. The Western world (read: Britain and the US) continually promote Western forms of democracy in not-so-Western countries, but what developing nations really need is developing-nation-democracy.
Now what exactly constitutes developing-nation-democracy, I’m not quite sure. It’s not an issue I’ve taken a great amount of time to consider, and I won’t devalue the issue by offering something I made up on the spot.
But the issue is surely an important one, and I’m sure many people have studied it a great deal deeper than I.
What features should developing-nation-democracy have? How should it be set up? Or is there a form of government entirely different from democracy that would be better suited to the task?
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That is a really good question. For starters, a developing nation democracy needs as a power structure that does not mimic that of colonial times. Care must be taken to put checks on the system, it is all together too easy for the developing nation democracy to become a developing nation dictatorship. Kenya’s members of parliament make more money than any other politicians in the world, Kenya is far from being the richest country in the world so the only reasonable explanation is that Kenya has a system of vast inequality. I think this system exists because of the colonial legacy but I think that the blame cannot fully be attributed to history. But I cannot entirely blame Kenyans for the state of their government either. As a citizen of a country, every person has a responsibility to ensure that they demand that their government be responsive to their needs. However, much like the case of “India time,” if that citizen is preoccupied merely struggling to survive and if the politicians can literally hand out money around election time, nothing is ever going to change.
So what do you do? I think you start by making the actions of government transparent. This has been happening more and more in Kenya with the new Grand Coalition and its effects are apparent.
But what do we, as citizens of Western countries do? For starters, I think that we care. Perhaps we just care enough to know that Africa is a continent instead of a country or that “India Time” exists not because “Indians are lazy.” Secondly, we pressure our country to have better aid policies. We stop giving left-over American crops and focus on development projects such as roads and other infrastructure. If there is a famine we purchase food from nearby. Giving hand-outs doesn’t solve anything, as was recently remarked on in a Times article on Ethiopia.
Anyway, those are just a few ideas. I’m happy to be home in the U.S. where I have unlimited internet access, let me just tell you that I LOVE your blog and really admire what you are doing.
~Lisa
Welcome to India | DJ Strouse // Aug 13, 2008 at 1:31 am
[...] to India, it may be difficult to appreciate these two events. I’ll address the first in a later post (India’s infrastructure deserves its own) but to give you a sense of what monsoon season [...]
Ahh… transparency. Feared by those with power and revered by those without.
Daniel Bachhuber, Shane Lofgren, and I have sat around many a campfire imagining a world infused with transparency (our conversations revolved mostly around business and the fall of advertising but that’s another topic for another post). Though its been praised for centuries, only recently with the advent of the internet has transparency in government become convenient, economical, and frankly inexcusably easy to implement. A well-organized paper government with a bloated bureaucracy like ours in the US should have no trouble making the switch.
…in theory. Two obstacles stand in the way though. The first applies to both wealthy and developing nations while the second applies primarily to developing nations.
Transparency undermines half the tools a politician has under his belt: taking bribes, granting favors, slipping some pork in that new bill… The push for transparency will not come from within governments. It has to come from outside. A new candidate, running on a platform of open government, is the most likely hope. Given the way the internet, open source philosophy, and Creative Commonseque shared IP is changed our generation’s definition of ethics, I think such a candidate could very well succeed in the US. In countries like India and Kenya, however, where internet culture hasn’t necessarily made the inroads it has in the US, I don’t know that transparency is held in such high esteem. Was their ever mention of this ideal in your conversations with Baba?
The second reason is more one of logistics. Did you have the chance to visit any government offices in Kenya? I’ve visited a few in India while searching for maps and info on local resources and inevitably spent half a day there while half a dozen men sat on the floor flipping through an unorganized heap of old, crumbling documents. Digitizing a mess of papers like that would be a nightmare and would take serious commitment by the government to succeed.