The Great Indian Irate Crowd
This piece originally appeared in the New Indian Express on 20th Feb 2009
This is a scene that, like the proverbial policemen arriving on the scene well after the Indian hero has done his um..heroic deeds, repeats itself daily in several airports around the world. An Indian airline runs into a problem - engine trouble, tire puncture, wing falls off et al, a flight gets cancelled, and the perennially financially challenged airline’s pared down staff have to deal with the Great Indian Irate Crowd.
A small bunch of unempowered and underpaid employees of the airline first have to deal with a mob of people, all of whom believe that their need for alternate flying arrangements is the most pressing. They form a line, not perpendicular to the counter, but parallel to the counter and soon several arms are waving all manner of documents in the face of the harried airline reps.
As the shouting match intensifies, the harried airline employees build defensive fortifications around themselves. Whatever little hope they had of even marginally addressing some of the crowd’s concerns has by now vanished and emergency shutdown procedures are initiated for their collective auditory apparatus.
Once people are done with trying to (and failing to) prioritize their need to immediately travel from point A to point B, the digressions start. One or two elderly, and eloquent gentlemen will bemoan this state of affairs and paint the entire airline company as a bunch of child molesters. More folk will chime in and provide more anecdotal evidence to strengthen this accusation. “This happened to me last time also. These people, na, will never change.”
After a few more ad hominem accusations are thrown around, one chap will now, almost on cue, raise his voice a few notches and start doing the whole rage routine. “My son is getting married tomorrow, and because of you, his life is going to be ruined”, he will scream. The moment that happens, a few more will realize that articulating a potentially traumatic and life-threatening need to fly right now is a good strategy to pursue and soon, someone will add “My daughter has an entrance exam tomorrow” or “I have a heart-bypass surgery in a few hours”.
Once the invading horde realizes that the airline staff’s castle is not easily breached thus, the crowd will bring in the battering rams. “I demand to speak to your supervisor RIGHT NOW”. Yes, now that it looks like this lot is not going to fly, what better to do than insult one’s only hope of a seat by pulling rank and hierarchy and refusing to accept that they might just, given a little chance, address the problem.
The sad thing is that Indian crowds do not do this to non-Indian airlines when they mess up. They will behave like civilized folk, form lines, ask politely for compensation (and use received compensation to do some duty-free shopping) and travel happily on the next flight. Somehow, when dealing with our own kind, we go in with a preconceived notion that it’s all a grand conspiracy by the airline to cheat us and that showing a few clueless employees that the angry Indian can be a force to be reckoned with is the only strategy that is available to us.
50 years of red tape and inefficiencies may have held India back economically, but in my opinion, the more damaging effect it has had on our psyche is the Great Indian Irate Crowd’s inability to believe that improvement is even remotely possible. Yes, our people, na, will never change
30 April 2010 · Comments
Hi-tech schools, low-tech admission process
This piece originally appeared in the New Indian Express on 20th Dec 2009
It’s a cold day in the Madras winter, well, at least what passes for “cold” and “winter” in these parts, but you get the mood I’m trying to set. The queue snakes its way from a small window on a tastelessly designed cube of a building to a large, foreboding gate and out into the chaotic street where cars and two-wheelers are not “parked” as much as being generally “stacked” like clothes in a teenager’s closet. The middle aged folk in the queue are twitchy and nervous, and could collectively make a year’s worth of housing loan EMI payments for a doctor who specialized in reducing blood pressure. They keep looking anxiously at their watches (and mobile phones) and soon enough, a huge pile of nails liberated from fingers forms a snake like skin around the queue.
To add more drama to this already volatile mix, a watchman hovers around, and taking inspiration from the spiritual calmness of those good folks at Tirumala, suddenly screams the Tamil equivalent of “Jaragandi” at this queue. The crowd is flustered, and some attempt to politely ask the watchman how they are supposed to move when the small window at the mouth of the queue still remains stubbornly closed. The watchman does not seem to pay attention. It is only once a year, on this particular day, that he gets to treat adult humans like children and he is not going to be swayed by some trivial logic about closed windows.
Then all of a sudden, the small window creaks open and the crowd gets agitated. All semblance of a queue disappears as people madly rush to the window to receive their manna from heaven, an admission form to a “prestigious” school in Madras.
The clerk at the window, who has been carefully chosen for his ability to transfer anger arising from domestic troubles at his home to the hapless person currently on the other side of the grilled window, now demands to know the parents’ antecedents. A 10-generation family tree and affidavits from the Shankaracharya (or the Pope) are apparently mandatory. The parent must also produce a letter from their employer to the effect that their jobs are non-transferrable. They must also personally connect with GPS satellites and estimate the distance from the footstep of their home to the gate of the school within a 1 nanometre margin of error.
Some of the more “prestigious” schools will even have TV media stationed outside, to advertise to the rest of the world that, even more so than proving Fermat’s last theorem, which kids graduating from these schools will likely not be able to do, the most difficult thing in the world is getting an application form to admit one’s kid in one of these (Tirumala like) temples of learning. My suggestion - if schools are taking the Tirupathi approach, they might as well learn the art of managing queues from them.
The real irony - schools that now charge for “Computer classes” from L.K.G onwards apparently do not possess the common sense to make admission forms available on a website, you know, on that thing we now call the internet?
30 April 2010 · Comments
Peaceful Troublemaker
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