It’s been just over a month since I left India. And before the last exotic memories are fully flooded out by the everyday humdrum of home, I wanted to get down a few more impressions of the place and its people.
Mainly anecdotes, pet peeves and things that I just can’t shake that need to be written down so I don’t have to carry them around. There are myriad frustrations in India, alongside a jubiliation of positive things, people and experiences, but if you’re not ready to face the challenges of life there, it will make for an eternally stressful visit.
Security guards, standing around and seven steps to buy tea
India is a country of security guards. I’ve never seen so many anywhere. I’ve also never seen so many that look so profoundly unsecure. Most restaurants, bars, hotels, monuments, fancy shops, homes and laneways in India have security guards. Young, old, uniformed, usually thin with a pot belly, security guards across India, are as we speak, opening doors, sleeping on plastic chairs and probably wondering what they would do if their security services were actually required.
They occupy make-believe jobs in a very real world. I can’t imagine their individual level of productivity being any lower. The Indian security guard industry, which probably makes up a few percentage points of GDP, is representative of the all-too-Indian combination of inefficiency, cheap labor and loads of folks needing jobs. Squandered resources.
It’s not only security guards either. There are probably as many personal drivers in India as security guards. Low-skilled, not particularly satisfying employment that may have made sense 50 years ago, but is not part of the wave of the future. Otherwise, there are huge groups of people in India mostly just standing around on the job.
It’s not uncommon to walk into an empty restaurant in India to find 12 people standing around. And it still somehow requires four of them to take your order and 45 minutes for it to arrive. On my first weeked in Delhi, I ordered a kebab from a streetside restaurant – three people took my order and five others watched while the sixth prepared it. I was astonished but thought I might just be imagining the scene still in my jetlagged state. Not to be, this was Indian entrepreneurship mixed with mass scale job training, all while the end user salivates for 20 minutes and considers just buying a bag of chips instead.
I’ll end my mostly superficial overview of Indan economic inefficiency with an instructive anecdote from our last day, and also provide an answer to the age old question: How many people (in India) does it take to sell you a bag of tea? Seven.
Across the street from our hotel was a multi-level government run souvenir emporium. Everything from carpets to life-sized peacocks, all the way down to speciality tea packages. These proved a perfect souvenir for a half-dozen people remaining on our list. A few masala chais, darjeelings and green teas with ginger, some in elephant boxes, others in cozy decorative sachets.
I approached one of three available cashiers to pay for my order. He waved me over to another. She then signalled towards two men hovering over a register at the far end of the row. I made my way over and get this, handed over my tea in exchange for a receipt ticket, with no money involved. I stood perplexed. He then waved me back to where I just was. I started with the lady, busy. Went back to the first guy, also apparently busy. Three cashiers, two seemingly available but not currently taking customers so I got in line behind another patron for the sole cashier appearing to do what cashiers usually do. Person 5 or so. I handed over my paper ticket, he calculated, I paid and he subsequently printed off two more receipts, in addition to the visa machine payment receipt.
I again stood baffled, not having seen the tea I had just paid for in over five minutes! The cashier directed me (with my receipt in hand) to yet another counter, the pick-up counter, 15 feet behind me where I handed my purchase receipt to one of three men standing around, who called for a fourth to summon my tea back to reality. He also stamped my receipt with a medieval red stamp and an equally medieval red stamping oomph that would make this jos the envy of every five year old on earth. Tea finally back in hand, ten minutes later and, of course, one last security guard to check the receipt and purchase before opening the door.
Just for comparison, in Canada, with two available cashiers, the interaction would have looked like this. Hello, is that all today?, ok that’ll be $25, thank you have a nice day. One interaction with one person for one minute. In India, seven participants, five observers, ten minutes, five stops and one exasperated tea-buying couple.
The cost and surcharge of spending your money
Another peculiar aspect of spending money in the Indian economy is the plethora of hidden costs for what might be called ‘luxury goods.’ Even though many of the goods are somewhere between unavoidable and nice to have.
On my first Friday night in India, I went to a local sports bar in the neighbourhood of my hotel. Young people drank, cricket matches blared and I joyfully celebrated my first full week in the country. I ordered chicken wings and a glass of kingfisher beer. The total came to about seven Canadian dollars, five for the wings and two for the beer. I gleefully imagined how fun and cheap my six week sojourn in India was about to be.
Buoyed by my find, I decided to visit another bar on the way back to the hotel. This beer list was far less friendly. In a fit of nostalgia and lushness, I ordered a Stella Artois from the ‘pints’ section of the menu. I can’t entirely remember if it was $7 or $9 but I figured that’s a fairly common price for a pint of the Belgian brew at home. Imagine my surprise when a bottle appeared instead of a pint and then the bill included a 20% VAT tax, 10% service charge and two other taxes of 4% each. My bottle of Stella set me back almost $15. My fun was ruined. I tucked tail and went to bed.
After my wife arrived a week later, we would play a game called ‘guess the extra taxes’ whenever we ordered out. Oddly enough the racked on charges usually only appeared when we were at a restaurant that was modern, or upscale, or westernish. In short, those places that cosmopolitan Indians and foreigners patronized. Besides a very odd feeling that the Indian state and media still demonize alcohol consumption (much like North America does with cigarettes), I couldn’t quite figure out why having a drink or two in India was so intentionally and prohibitively expensive. It’s painful enough that it changes your behaviour, makes you look for options with low or no taxes.
The absurd taxation model was most saliently on display when I settled my portion of the hotel bill. As I was travelling for work, my hotel was paid for but I did have to cover the additional occupancy of my wife for one month. Our beautiful hotel charged a very reasonable fee for a second occupant but other colleagues had warned about the stunning tax portion unleashed at checkout, so I held out on the unpleasant experience until the last few hours of our stay.
All in all, I wish I had a forensic accountant by my side to double check (and explain) the bizarre escalating cost of staying at one of Delhi’s most storied hotels. And then a psychologist and a monk to help de-escalate my annoyance.
The initial tax for the second guest was 18%, already not an amount to scoff at, almost a one-fifth levy. Then at some secret threshold of the total, the tax jumps to 28%, close to one-third of the bill. And then the true kicker, according to some formula by which we can surely transport butter chicken to the moon, the grand total increased past some level beyond what the bill would have been for me staying solo, and the tax on my employer’s portion jumped beyond the threshold but of course, they weren’t covering it so it fell to me. To clarify for the stumped layperson, it cost $30 a night for my wife to join me, plus $25 in tax. That’s a whopping 83%!
India charges you heavily for being wealthy (by Indian standards) and charges you more and more the more you spend. It’s bizarre and backwards and feels almost personally insulting. The surcharge for fees at tourist sites is understandable and quite appropriately proportionate. But God forbid you choose to leave any disposable income in India’s creative, comfortable or casual sectors, you will be burned and may think twice in future. I don’t know much about investment and couldn’t tell you if this is macroeconomics or micro or neither but I’m pretty sure it’s not smart.
It goes without say that the visibility of this tax base out in daily India isn’t always clear either. The public sector, health and education in the country are not only substandard but truly from another era. I really did love the country but you can’t leave with too much optimism about its development with absurd financial management like this from the most mundane level on up.
I can’t say much about India without touching on gender and gender roles. Not because I have any particularly profound insights, but more because it’s one of the things India is infamously known for these days, one of the main challenges a visitor and his wife prepare to expect when planning a trip. And on this one I can only conclude that a few weeks is only enough time to see the surface and make one or two limp scratches into it. But coming from a country like Canada, progressive by almost any measure, the contrast to a decidedly more traditional one like India is inescapable, in ways both large and small.
The headlines in Indian newspapers are horrific on a daily basis when it comes to women and girls. Partially, sensationalism sells, but the daily stories would be truly historic (awful) one-offs in most western countries, and yet they’re everyday in India. In a country of over a billion people, it’s important to remember proportionality but these are also ‘ one is too many’ type incidences.
Life out and about in Delhi was far less fearful than the headlines. But for a woman (according to my wife) they are never far from mind. Is a tuk-tuk taking a shortcut or taking you for a ride? How do you interpret an invitation from a friendly salesman to come see more scarves in the backroom? My wife eventually became quite comfortable going out and about in our neighbourhood but it took a few weeks and then a few more to de-program her mind from being overly cautious upon return to Canada.
As for me, my lessons in gender came mostly from my female Indians co-workers. Asking if mind was a love marriage. Wistfully complaining about their weekend workload of cleaning, washing and cooking. Waking up early to prepare meals for their family and their husbands’ families, before their own full workday. Joking with their husbands that if they emigrate, they might have to learn how to cook, iron, take care of themselves. And these were educated, successful women.
These situations left me stifled, silent and awkward. Not really having a ready reaction at hand. Acknowledging, trying to be empathetic, but not judgemental. I still don’t quite know what to make of these experiences. In my own contemporary world, we’re empowering people to express their gender along a varied spectrum and for the most part society is accommodating. In India, the reality that women move in with their husband’s family, in-laws and all, after marriage remains unquestionable. These are vastly different places and mental spaces and travelling between the two is slightly surreal.
In a country as big as India, with so many people, such diversity and a relative lack of development, wealth, stuff, there are many non-commodified status indicators that lubricate interactions and act to place people in the societal hierarchy. Some of visible and well-known like language, skin colour and gender, others like caste, powerful but largely invisible to foreigners, and still others more subtle but perhaps even more informative. I tend to denote these somewhere on the spectrum of posturing for power.
To watch any given Indian oscillate roles throughout their interactions is almost awe-inspiring. In one moment, deferent and sir-ing and ma’am-ing to a perceived superior, in the next abrupt and dismissive to someone perceptibly in their service. This is most obvious amongst the elite and elitely obnoxious, who seem to live life waiting to deride a hapless worker for a too foamy latte or poor understanding of English. It is the outsized persona and flippancy of the popular, the political, the posh. Status wars are often played on the battlefield of the symbolic and it’s been a while since I’ve witnessed it quite as fiercely as in India.
The currency of confidence or just as often, false confidence, might actually be the most valuable in India. Typically aligned pretty well with its financial complement, but also exchanged outside of any financial transaction. Collected, earned, stolen, spent, wasted, splurged, demeaning, appreciating. There is a rawness and honesty to people’s self-realization of their strata within Indian society. And it gives you a lot to consider as a temporary foreigner falling in for a visit, mostly oblivious to the oh-so-obvious rules.
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