Letter of Resignation

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Most travellers come to India at a crossroads in their lives, searching for answers, meaning or wisdom. After a few short weeks of train journeys, temple visits, and long intense conversations with other travellers (most of whom are stoned) they think they’ve figured India out. They haven’t. Indians haven’t figured India out.

I’ve given up. India is a beautiful enigma that I will never figure out. I’ve been a traveller, a writer, a wife, a daughter in law, and -  most recently – a corporate employee here. Yet from all these perspectives, I still find the more I try to quantify and understand India, especially from a socioeconomic and commercial perspective, the more upset I become.

Kiran and I are moving back to London this summer. And for me, it’s time to find a new way to co-exist with this confounding place. It will forever be a part of my life.

 

 

Looking out for number one. Shopkeepers strike over “fair” taxation

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Local shopkeepers are on strike in Pune today to protest a new local tax. When I asked around, I learned that shopkeepers normally declare the receipts from their stock purchases to the government and pay tax on what they buy, not what they sell.

But this system doesn’t account for the large proportions of cash sales that take place without receipt. So there’s a large amount of goods being traded informally. The local government’s gotten wise to the tax revenue they are missing out on, so they are now requiring shopkeepers to declare their sales and pay tax on their profit.

Shopkeepers are understandably annoyed and have close their doors for two days on strike to protest this, but they have to give notice to the government first ;-)

Medical shops and milkmen can’t strike without special permission, so basic survival necessities are not disrupted.

Its easy to think this is all just about money, but it is in fact just a symptom of living in a place where you feel the government is out to exploit rather than to serve and protect.

India is famous for its corruption and that is one of the reasons why India is one of the most difficult places to live. But in a place were you can’t trust your government at all, you have to rely on yourself — figure out your own shortcuts to get ahead however you can. I’m not saying that justifies black money or tax loopholes. But I do understand that the system, if the ever really was one, is broken.

We are like that only

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In India, this is the famously common response to nearly any question about why people are the way they are or why India is the way it is. At first, it may suggest a certain apathy or resignation to the status quo. But it also typifies a flexible go-with-the-flow attitude that brings a sense of peace amid the chaos, frustration and contradictions of daily interactions in India.

India may be a fast growing, changing society, but certain habits and attitudes remain constants in this society — so constant it is worth celebrating and smiling about.

This short film brilliantly celebrates some of those classic Indian traits and quirks. They are some of the little things that have endeared India to me over the years — far beyond the stereotypical spiritual India that we’ve all read or heard about.

What made me smile again was when I realised this is an ad film from Trueroots telecom, an international calling service aimed at Indians abroad. No surprise it’s a Tata company, a large corporation that manages to consistently remain plugged into the culture, the zeitgeist, the needs and desires of Indian society. Bravo.

The Five Worst Reasons to Work in an Emerging Market

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“I’ve applied for two jobs in China and one in Singapore. I think Shanghai could be good,” says my friend on the phone. Neither she nor her husband or kids have ever been to China or Singapore. They have no particular interest in the language, history or culture of either place. But they are intelligent, reasonably curious and well-travelled folks, not given to rash decisions.

When I ask her what about Shanghai seems like it would be good, her reasons are typical of every American or European friend, relative or colleague who asks my advice about living and working in an emerging market. I know they shouldn’t go. Here’s why:

Generally, they are dissatisfied with their present circumstances, bored at work, scared by depressing headlines about shrinking Western market economies. They think they will find a better lifestyle, a bit of adventure, and maybe some bragging rights later on, if they move to another market now. They are on the run from their lives or from themselves. And this is the worst frame of mind to be in when making big decisions.

So if you’re thinking about moving to another part of the world for work, consider this:

1. Don’t move for money. You can expect a degree of financial gain from working on an expat contract, especially in a developing country where general cost of living is lower than Western economies. But if you think you can live an austere life and save like a squirrel while you are abroad, you are delusional. We all quickly get used to all the things our extra money can buy and adapt accordingly. Every single person who’s worked abroad on expat contract, myself included, says they saved less than they’d expected.

You will be able to enjoy a few more luxuries in Beijing or Mumbai than you would in London, and you will want to do that because you’ll be looking for comfort in a strange place. But will that bring you real satisfaction? Studies show that increased income has very little effect on overall life satisfaction.

2. Don’t expect friendships with expats. When you land on new shores and find out that the reality of the job is totally different to how it was described (and it almost always is) you are stuck for a while. Whether you love your job or you hate it, you’ll need to build a social life.

The expat scene in developing countries creates its own separate and contrived world in which few, if any, have genuine friendships with anyone who is born and raised in the country where they are presently living. It’s also a very transient group of people, coming and going on short-term contracts, so it’s hard to forge a community of meaningful friendships. Spending time with people who really know and understand you is what brings us the deepest sense of satisfaction. So consider how valuable and hard-won your network at home already is before you walk away for a while.

3. Don’t move to prove you’re independent. You might enjoy the challenge of navigating the vagaries of daily life in a completely foreign place and need to demonstrate your bravery to yourself or your family. This is an OK thing to do when you’re in your 20s. After that, it’s a sign of immaturity.

4. Don’t move because you’re bored and looking for an adventure. Yes, it’s exciting to be in a new place, but companies move you because you have a specific skill set they need, and you have to deliver. If you want an adventure, go on vacation. And if you think you will enjoy travelling in the region where your new job is, think again. Your job will leave you with time to do a fraction of the travelling you are dreaming about while reading about your new potential destination.

5. Don’t move to prove you are important.  Few people will admit that this motivates them, but many like knowing that they are senior enough and special enough that a company wants to pay to relocate them to another country to do a big job. THere are hundreds of other ways you can get a pat on the back without such disruption.

There are only two reasons you should move country for work. First is because you have an undeniable career opportunity in that market that you wouldn’t have if you stayed at home. Follow a few basic tips on how to research and prepare. The second, and most important is, because you absolutely love the culture and the people who live in your destined country. If you pack an unquenchable curiosity, you will stay motivated to keep discovering.

Know that you’ll learn a lot more about life from hanging out with locals and you’ll have a richer experience that will make you able to empathise with people more readily in the future. That will make you better in any job in the future because anyone who wants to make any kind of difference in the world has to learn how to relate to people who are totally different to them.

Go, sit, be quiet, watch, and listen. You’ll be delighted at how welcomed a humble and curious foreigner is in most places. But first you have to get honest with yourself and steer clear of the expat bubble.

Three lessons from an international marriage

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When we first met and decided to get married, people told me I was a fool because international marriage is more fragile and likely to fail. So we eloped, but secretly I worried they were right.

The day we got married, I told him I felt happy. He told me he felt responsible (for me, my welfare and my happiness.)

We moved to London to settle on neutral ground (neither my hometown of New York nor his Mumbai). I quit freelancing, got a corporate job and, overnight, the power balance between us shifted as I became the provider and the protector of my husband. I didn’t mind supporting us for a short time while he figured out how to launch his photography business in a new international market. He did.

As weeks turned into months and years with no strategy or direction in place, I worried.

We argued a lot and a few friends thought we’d break up. But we didn’t. So now people ask me how we continue to overcome our differences. For what it’s worth, here are a few top tips from my own experience.

Learn about Power Distance because it shapes how you both relate to authority and leadership in your marriage.

Power distance index (credited to G H Hofstede) measures the extent to which the less powerful members of society accept and expect power to be distributed unequally.India is a high power distance culture, so it is simply understood that some people have more power than others. That can make it really difficult to collaborate at work, in government or, in a family.

Even though we both said we should have an egalitarian partnership, I am the primary breadwinner in the family and where he comes from, the one with the money has all the power and makes all the decisions. So he deferred to me, resented me, and loved me all at the same time. What a fine mess.

I wanted him to have ideas and opinions about what we should do with our life, but he didn’t even have an opinion about what he wanted for dinner. Knowing theoretically about power distance didn’t help me take any new actions, though. I still had more learning to do.

Understand that Individualism is not universal

American and Britain both value and emphasise the achievements and the rights of the individual.  India, by contrast, is all about the collective, at work and at home. Even the language reinforces this. In Hindi, your family calls you by the title of your family designation. My nieces call me “Mami” which means wife of mother’s brother. My husband is “Dada” (older brother) and no one ever calls him by his given name, Kiran. He exists, to a large extent, as his role in the family: the elder brother and first born son.

Deferring to the collective also means you develop a willingness to adjust, which incidentally is one of the most popular qualities sought in brides when Indian families post matrimonial ads for their son. So you can imagine that when my husband hit massive culture shock after moving to London and I called in a shrink for help, he resisted.

Even though I explained that therapy is confidential and therapists are impartial experts, at first, he thought it was airing our dirty laundry to a stranger who would later use it against us.

There are great resources to learn theoretical differences between cultures like this one aimed at a business audience. The theory gives me good context for dealing with international markets at work and an international marriage at home. But when I had to put it into practice in my personal life, I was still out of my depth.

Learn about your spouse’s culture by talking to an expert (other than your spouse.)

On my own, I recently consulted an Indian-born psychologist who practices in the United States for a deeper perspective. She taught me, in detail, the profound self-defeating beliefs that can arise from being raised with the unquestioned belief that your destiny –your place in the world, your options for career, friends and marriage — are all set from birth. And if your family happens to come from a lower caste, you quickly learn not to fly too close to the sun because you will get burned. Ambition is risky. Success equals death.

My husband wasn’t ready to talk about this, but learning about it was invaluable for me.

The most important thing the Indian therapist taught me was how not to pity him. The line between compassion and pity is very thin. “I feel for you” is compassion. “You poor thing” is pity. Pity weakens people. And my husband interprets my attempts to help him out of a rut as pity or parenting, not partnership. So I have to notice when I want to disect one of our problems and fix it. It’s what I do for a living in business as a researcher and a strategist, but I have to stop thinking of my marriage as a project to work on.

The more I learn about intercultural and international marriage, the more I realise that it’s like any other marriage, but you just have more intense challenges around language, meaning and cultural beliefs. Sometimes I just need to be curious and ask more questions of my husband than my girlfriends who married the boy next door. They can assume and infer a lot when they talk to their husbands because they share more contextual knowledge and experiences.

The most common sentence in my household is, “help me understand what you mean by that.” Why? Because chances are, I just don’t know. But finding out is what makes it interesting.

Ravi Shankar’s legacy on the new generation of globalised India

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I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with the sounds of Ravi Shankar’s sitar coursing through the hallways of my home. My Mother wasn’t a hippie. She didn’t practice yoga or chant or follow a guru. Music was her meditation, records were her respite, and for many years she played few albums more often than the Concert for Bangladesh. That concert and album marked the music industry’s first public act of philanthropy at a monumental scale (with all its attendant complications.) The talent line up was a famous combination of Western rock and Hindustani classical music and was a milestone in the forging of the world music genre.

The album wasn’t the greatest recording quality, as I recall, but the Indian music section of that 3 part album gave me a tiny glimpse into a world outside my own through the tone and rhythm of the sitar and the sarod. I dreamed of discovering the land, the people, and the culture that gave birth to those beats. And here I sit in Bangalore.

Art and literature are integral to any culture, and culture is everything that comprises how we live.  UNESCO’s definition of culture is perhaps a more specific and enlightened one, describing it as  ”the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.”

One could argue Indian classical music hits many of those points. It is spiritual, as the artist performs as an offering to god, material in its creation of instruments and artefacts, intellectual perhaps in its pursuit of meaning often in the context of myths, and emotional in the way that music of any kind hits your emotions. If you want to understand a culture and a people, music is a pretty good place to start.

So, when I heard that Pt. Ravi Shankar died, I felt it was a loss not only for the world music scene that he built through his many international collaborations, but a loss specifically for India. The Prime Minister of India called Ravi Shankar a national treasure and an ambassador of India’s culture and heritage. It woke me up and inspired me to find the other great musical talents who are still around. I mean, I’m here already, right?

So I started looking up my husand’s top three favourite Indian musicians,  Pt. Hari Prasad Chaurasia, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, and Ustad Zakir Hussain, hoping it would be as easy to get concert tickets in India as it is in Europe or America. (You’re laughing at me already, right?)

At first, it seemed more likely to hear Amjad Ali Khan play the sarod in Michigan than Mumbai. Why is that?

All of these great artists do play events in India, but they are not exactly easy to find and book. Look, there is no audience for Indian Classical music more proud than in India where people are more than happy to espouse the superiority of Indian culture, heritage and wisdom to anyone who will listen. So there’s an appreciation, for sure. But it’s also a place that functions almost entirely based on relationships, so I’m more likely to get tickets if I know someone who knows someone or if I’m invited.

I know the market for Indian cultural arts is completely different in India than it is abroad. The obvious answer is to say that, despite its economic growth, India is still a developing nation with a high level of poverty where most people are focused on meeting their basic needs, not paying for art. Demand for and access to the arts comes when people have the resources to enjoy them. Fair point. But that answer seems a bit too easy to stand on its own.

An Indian-born musician told me that there is an unspoken expectation in India that music concerts will be given for free, so it’s challenging for concert organisers to get a paying crowd large enough to sustain the livelihoods of the artists. (I don’t have a link for this. It’s what I’ve been told thus far.) So maybe there’s a lack of market demand.

All I really know is that finding and booking performance tickets is proving a challenge and this concerns me not just because I selfishly want to hear some music, but because I believe that we should have access to the music and the arts that define cultures and, by extension, our sense of place in the world.

I don’t want to live in a world of global vanilla where everything looks and sounds the same – where music is sanitised and synthesised in studios, where everyone wears the same jeans and reads the same magazines with slick airbrushed images of people who don’t really exist. I want to live in a world of different textures, colours and sounds that looks, feels, sounds and smells different from place to place.

The best way to find that is through music, art and craft. So if the masters are ageing and dying, what is the new generation going to carry on? This is what I’m looking for.

There’s a new wave of young Indians moving back to India that gives me hope for this place, not because they came from abroad but because they want to be here. They struggle with repatriating. Many of them come looking for financial opportunities, or to explore their roots and a deeper sense of self. Having watched this repatriation trend become a phenomenon over the last ten years,  Prashant Argrawal offered a bit of advice to the New York Times earlier this year. He said, “you may come because of the opportunity, but stay because you love India.” I hope that “knowing India” comes from knowing the culture in its entirety, but especially the craft, the traditions, and the music.

I’m A Power Hog (and so are you)

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I am a power hog. I was raised by a grandmother who survived the Depression and obsessively turned lights off, even if you were still in the room. She reused tea bags and saved every scrap of food that passed the sniff test (“it’s perfectly good, dahling.”) I thought I learned how to live comfortably with minimal resources from her example.

I was wrong.

Having spent so much time in India over the last six or seven years, you’d think I’d be used to conserving energy, but I was in Mumbai for most of that time and that urban economic engine of India never shuts down. Like New York and Paris, the lights never go off in Mumbai. When I was working anywhere outside Mumbai, where I was subject to frequent power cuts, the biggest issue I worried about was conserving the battery life of my Macbook, which at the time only lasted a measly two to three hours. Battery life suddenly became a greater need than all the fabulous things I could do on my laptop. Every time I wanted to launch Photoshop and Illustrator simultaneously, or any other application for that matter,  I asked myself if I really needed to. How could I find a work around? Scarcity does that to you, no matter how brief the taste may be. But I’ll be honest with you — I always thought scarcity was temporary for me because I was going back to a big city with a great big power back up.

But now here I am in Bangalore, where the lights never stay on 24/7 and where the power cuts out at least half a dozen times a day, often more. Today, I worry more that I can’t get online when the modem has no power.

So, if internet access has now been deemed a human right, then we have to figure out how to keep the power on so people can stay connected to the wonderful world on the Web, right? The solutions for this will come from the grassroots — from those living with limited resources in the informal economy. It’s coming from those who have no choice but to figure out a work around for the challenges they face — those without the luxury of time to wait for infrastructure to catch up or governments to provide for their needs. In other words, the people outside my doorstep who I wish I could get to know better, but that’s a separate issue.

Economists look at China and India and the rest of the BRICs and the so-called “next 1″ for economic growth, especially from growing middle class consumers. But in the last five to six years, the design and business communities are looking to the informal economy for new ideas and smarter ways to do things we take for granted (like keeping the lights on). In fact, a recent Quora thread asks if we are developing renewable energy solutions fast enough to anticipate a dearth of fossil fuels. And while many philanthropists and social entrepreneurs see these inquiries and solutions as a way to “do well by doing good”, let’s not forget that it’s not just about feeling good. This is way more than philanthropy and social work. This is also a purely practical exercise in securing the future survival of the next generation and beyond. As someone at the Skoll World Forum said to me last year: in 10 years, China and India will be living green off the grid and I won’t be able to take a bath in Britain.

Video Killed the Radio Star and Twitter Stabbed Blogging in the Back

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Microblogging on Facebook and Twitter became effortless on-the-go. And then, as if overnight, stringing a few thoughts together every week in a sustained narrative or point of view became a chore.

Status updates are like passing notes to your friends in class, a collection of disparate thoughts that may or may not have a theme, but are usually intended to insult, annoy or entertain. It’s more like thoughting, if such a word exists, not thinking. And I’m as much at fault as the next guy.

Sound familiar?

The Affordable Tablet That Failed to Deliver

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Every Sunday, I exchange a dozen words in broken Hindi with my father-in-law and swear I will finally learn the language fluently. And then every Monday, my pesky demanding day job ruins my plans for South Asian linguistic mastery. Obviously, it’s hard to connect with my in-laws because we don’t share a common language, but it’s even more difficult because we see each other infrequently. That’s where video calls could make a huge difference, if only the technology would work.

For years, I have taken video VOIP services like Skype and Facetime for granted. What was just a bit of fun with Skype in 2004 became a necessity in 2006 and 2007 when I was separated from my husband for long periods of time while we sorted out work and visas from different countries. Skype held my marriage together in the early days when separation could have caused tremendous anxiety. Now, weekly video chats keep my mother from freaking out while my husband and I trapse around the world.

My in-laws are a different story, though. They are retired school teachers in a suburb of Pune. They had never gone on the Internet until we took them to a Cyber cafe in 2007 and, until a year ago, never owned a personal computing device or had broadband at home. It wasn’t something they valued enough to be worth the bother of shopping for a device and paying for broadband, which also happens to be fairly expensive where they live. So, last year, we dipped their toes in the water, got them hooked up at home and bought them one of the many a low-cost ($100) tablets, especially made for the Indian market.

So, on Christmas of last year, my husband fired up his iPhone and started a video call with his family. I was thrilled to finally be able to see their faces, but every 90 seconds, the app cut out. We couldn’t use Skype on their tablet, only a crappy second-rate application called “Fring”. The only IM application that would work was Yahoo! Messenger, which has to have the most complicated user interface on the planet.  Low cost, in this case, also meant low value. The tablet now collects dust in their house and may be occasionally used as a coaster when guests come to visit, for all I know.

Nobody will argue that devices like netbooks and tablets are bad. Internet connectivity is now a human right, according the UN. What’s interesting to watch is the rate of rapid iteration and product innovation coming out of the Indian market. Just this week, a new wave of even lower cost tablets has been announced. Price is what grabs the headlines because lowering the price makes these devices affordable to the masses in a country where the average annual income hovers around the $1,100 mark. But consider for a moment that price is a design constraint, rather than a marketing or sales hook. The designer has to create an innovative user-friendly device that a complete novice or first-time PC buyer could figure out intuitively. That kind of innovation requires an understanding of the user group that you can’t get from sitting in a corporate design office in the US or Europe. It comes from contextual knowledge in the Indian market. That’s what this article suggests as well.

“The revolution will come from the developing world to the US,” says Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur and academic. “These tablets will kill the markets for high-end players—for Microsoft in particular.”

I’ve been tracking developments in mobile for years. In 2010, I ran a series of ethnographic studies based on street research that convinced me that we don’t need to focus on the $100 laptop, we need to make a $10 phone or a $25 tablet that’s easy to use and desirable enough that people will buy one and keep it, not let it gather dust or become a coaster like my in-law’s poor tablet.

It’s my father-in-law’s birthday soon. I think we’ll buy him a proper laptop this time that runs standard applications and maybe even Skype (!). In the meantime, our Sunday chats in broken Hindi will have to remain on the good old-fashioned mobile telephone.

Latest Digital Stats from India

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Facts and figures are like little tiny presents to me. Of course, in the interest of honestly, I should also tell you that an understanding of statistics does not come naturally to me. It was the one course requires for a psych minor that flattened my burgeoning interest in the field (well, that and the horrifying thought of dealing with people’s incurable ennui for the rest of my life.) Anyway, a friend recently sent me this sweet little report consolidated by ‘We are social’ with the latest numbers on Internet users and usage in India.  So, here it is. Download to your little heart’s content. A few highlights that are good to know, perhaps for the next time you want to keep someone like me interested at a cocktail party:
  • Number of internet users in India: 137 mil
  • The number of internet users in India is growing by more than 1.5 mil every month (source: Comscore – Aug 2012)
  • Number of internet users in Rural areas – 38 mil and 82% of India’s rural netizens go online at least once per month 
  • The smartphone penetration in India is less than 3% but Indian smartphone users spend on an average 81 hours per month on their mobile devices (Source: Nielsen 2012)
  • Indian women spend 150% more time using Instant Messaging on their smartphone than men do; Men spend 50% more time browsing the internet on their phones than women
  • 56% of India’s population is under the age of 30.
  • 30% of today’s Indian population is under the age of 15

It’s really those last two points that always get my attention. Every 2 seconds in India, a child is born and a new person starts to use the Internet. The sheer pace of population growth is staggering. I’m a child of the feminist movement, so I was raised to believe my purpose in life was to find and express my purpose, not marry and bear the next generation. But in India, there is fierce pressure to produce a child within the first year of marriage, regardless of whether or not you are emotionally, psychologically and financially prepared. So, on the one hand, you have a lot of kids born to what people where I come from would consider less mature or equipped parents. However, on the other hand, as a result, you’ve got this huge population of energetic young people, many of whom are very entrepreneurial, tenacious, and determined to achieve more in less time than their parents did.

So, I wonder how youth in India compare to the global norms of Gen Y and Gen Z. I’d like to think they have a sense of ambition rooted in self-study and self-knowledge. There is certainly huge pressure to perform and compete academically. My twelve year-old niece in Pune regularly stresses herself into stomach distress over her marks on tests. I wonder if she is learning to perform on tests or if she is learning to question and think. If it is the latter, in fact, then she and her generation will be well poised to create and lead and do great things. If not, well, we’ll have more of the same.