How many Indians do you need to repair an air-conditioning unit?

In the office where I work, one of the air conditioning units conked off. This was being fixed over the last couple of days. There was a swarm of around 5-6 guys who hung around for nearly 6 hours after which they took off. Another day with 5-6 guys in the hallway jabbering away on their cell phone and voila, the A/C was fixed.

I was reminded of another A/C project I undertook last summer when I was here. My parents were scared to get a unit fixed in the living room. Since I had been out of the country for a while, I naively undertook this project. What followed gives me nightmares to this day. It began innocently enough. My close friend's friend sells electronic goods. I called him and ordered a unit and gave him my Amex card number. My mom pleaded with me, saying I still had a chance to back off. I waved her off, saying this is how the new India worked and we would be eating lunch and watching TV as the A/C was humming along. I think she left for the temple to pray for me.

The installation was sub contracted to this guy who called and said he would be come in at 11:00 am. He showed up around 4:00 pm that evening and said we needed a different kind of plug point. I told him to go ahead and do it. He instructed me to call an electrician get the new plug point ready and then call him. My dad then worked the phones and got an electrician. He came in and said it would take him half an hour to get the plug point done…after it was wired properly…which obviously was done by a wiring guy. He knew a guy who would be in at 9:00 am the next day.

After repeated phone calls to the wiring guy whose response usually was that he was just 5 minutes away, work commenced around 1:00 pm and the plug point was ready by 4:00pm. I promptly called the A/C chap who showed up around 7:00 pm. His next demand was that there needed to be small hole for which we had to take the ventilator to a glass cutter. My dad got it done with great difficulty the next day, and the A/C guy showed up around 1:00 pm and said the curtain rods had to be moved. He stripped them and finally the A/C was up and running. I told him to drill some holes and fix the curtain rod. He did not have a drill and also this supposedly was the work of a carpenter as he did not have the “expertise”. I got a chance to spend a couple of hours in the chill of the living room as I was packing to head back to the US. It had taken 3 days and countless phone calls with real progress being made after I started getting nasty.

The whole experience had taken a toll but I did sleep through my journey in the plane. The curtains are still not fixed and so it gets really bright in the morning. These days, along with the ear plugs, I also use the eye patch that I got during my flight to Mumbai. I don’t know if I have it in me to get them fixed. Most of all I cannot stand the look of fear in my mom’s eyes when I bring this up. So here is a tip for those of you visiting your aging parents in India. If you really love them, do not threaten them by saying you will get something fixed in the house.

The mysterious lady walker with a mobile

In Mumbai, house usually refers to an apartment. My parents live in an apartment in "Arun Building". No, I wish, but do not own the building. If I did, I would be too busy counting money instead of blogging.

Most of the tenants are senior citizens with their kids settled in different parts of America. In addition to his full time job, my dad is also the secretary of the Arun Building Housing Society (or something like that). This job involves chairing monthly meetings and making decisions like, should the night watchman be fired since he sleeps through the night. Since most of the tenants are retired, they stay at home full time and watch the happenings with an eagle eye. If something is not to their liking they may bring it up during the meeting. Usually, an auntie may visit my mom during the afternoon and during a cup of tea; bring up issues that are not properly addressed by my dad. They usually succeed in getting my mom worked up. My mom may call my dad at work when he may be in a meeting to tell him that the bulb in the doorway has not been replaced as per his orders.

The latest incident involves this mysterious lady with a cell phone who despite not being a tenant is seen walking around the compound as it is called here. A few people have complained to my mom about it. A couple of days back when I returned home with my dad from work, this issue came up again. My dad’s response was “Why do we have a watchman?” He should not allow her into the compound. To which my mom retorted that the rascal was no good as he is usually out running errands for somebody in the building. To which my dad’s response was that if people want the watchman running errands such things would happen, anyway he had had a long day and was not in a mood for this. My mom’s response was that she had to answer to a higher power, the aunties and uncles who live in the various apartments. As the wife of the secretary she was in a delicate position on such issues.

The consensus among residents of Arun Building is that it is time my dad quit his job as he is old. That way he would be able to focus more on such pressing issues like confronting this illegal walker with the cell phone. Watch this space for more developments .

The Istri-walla saga

In India people usually do not iron as they depend on the Iron-walla or the Istri-walla. Since space is at a premium in Mumbai, people usually do not keep an iron at home. So if you have an ironing emergency, which I did have once, you start knocking on the doors of neighbors. Usually you will get strange looks, but by the tenth house you should hit pay dirt.

Like every group in India they are well organized and have territories clearly marked. If your Istri-walla disappears to his village without properly appointing a replacement, you may be out of luck. The Istri-walla who operates a block from your building will refuse to iron your clothes unless he has been properly "designated". So there is this code that no one violates at the expense of the customer. Looks are always deceptive in India. My mom was trying to catch a cab and encountered this Istri-walla, working near a building that looked abandoned. Wondering why anyone would set up shop in this location, she spoke to the guy. He said that a huge apartment complex was coming up and it would bring him lot of business, so he had marked his territory. So when the building came up no he would be the guy ironing clothes for the people living there. Guess, one would need an MBA to figure out what this strategy is called.

I got the idea to write about these Istri-wallas because of a chaotic incident on the night before we were leaving for Bangalore. Our regular guy took the clothes including a couple of my mom's expensive saris and did not return it. It was around 10 pm that my mom panicked and summoned the watchman and asked him to go in search of the Istri-walla. He came back and reported that he had locked up his ironing shack if you could call it that and disappeared. My mom was in a state of panic convinced he had disappeared for good with her saris. Anyway, the day we returned, the guy showed up with the sarees saying he came looking for us the last couple of days and it was business as usual. My mom yelled at him, saying I told you we were heading out of town and you said you would bring the saris within an hour. He said he wanted to but it was getting late. My mom was like then why did you just not return them without ironing for which his response was a guilty look. I guess turning away business is never good...and it is not like my mom has a choice of using another Istri-walla, unless she moves to a different location.

Irrational over-exuberance at India Inc?

Over the last couple of months I read books about India, in part as preparation for my first job in India. I just finished reading The Elephant Paradigm by Gurucharan Das. Before that, I read In spite of the Gods by Edward Luce and also India Unbound by Gurucharan Das. All these books tout the supposedly phenomenal growth rate, the booming middle class, democracy, business process outsourcing (BPO) etc. I came across an article titled Bye Bye NRI written by someone who lives in Washington DC like me. There are reams of writing like this, all based on a core central theme, that the Indian elephant, note, it is not the tiger anymore, cannot be stopped. They sometimes also briefly touch upon on the problems but the overriding theme seems to be India will be a super power to reckon with.

I am not sure if all this writing is based on hope because these authors seem a little carried away and I would add a "Reader Beware" in bold. Before being dismissed as a pessimist, I would like to say I am more of a realist. On the other hand I hope the day comes when 1 rupee will fetch 2 dollars. But I have doubts about whether these authors really tried living and working like the "bright young professionals" who are part of the “India Shining” brigade.

I had to visit Bangalore for a couple of days. The flight to Bangalore was for 7:30 am and I left home around 5:30 am. There is this turn to get into the airport and at 6:00 am on a Friday it was chaotic. The traffic lights were not working and there were no cops and it was surreal. There were cars, cabs buses trying to get into the airport and people walking to the airport. There was also other traffic in different directions held up in the middle and there was this mess with vehicles separated by an inch or two honking and people yelling. This was in Mumbai, India's commercial capital. It took around half an hour with people getting out of cars to direct traffic.

People rushed into the plane, as usual and the door was closed at 7:20 am. Then the same scene was repeated as there was a traffic jam with planes taking off and landing and our plane finally took off at 8:40 am, more than an hour behind schedule. The fun continued in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, where it took us 45 minutes to get out of the airport, amidst the wild honking and smoke from the exhaust.

I can go on and on with many such stories, but the point is the infrastructure is crumbling as it was when I left the country. You can get a cell phone in a day, but the number of dropped calls is too many to count. You can walk out with a high speed wireless internet card in 10 minutes, which at times is slower than a 28 kbps modem.

I did visit Leela Palace in Bangalore and it was great though the cocktails were close to 25 dollars, due to the weak dollar, oops I mean the “strong rupee”. It was more like the world described by these authors. A world that is very far out of reach for about 99 % of the population. Maybe that number has improved from 99.7% from before. Unfortunately, once you get out of the hotel in your air conditioned, chauffeured car you will enter the life of the rest of the Indians: potholes, traffic jams, honking and the heat and dust which fortunately, the authors and I, do not have to deal with while getting excited about reading an article about the number of cell phones in India exceeding 250 million.

Ear Plugs, Chini Kum and Yes Sir!

On my flight to India from NY to Mumbai, I got ear plugs which came in handy during the flight. I put them in my pocket and forgot about it. After eating some nice dosas with some chutney and piping hot sambhar, I tried to get some sleep around 4:00 am. Since Mumbai is a city that never sleeps, the noise never stops. This is when the ear plugs came in handy and have been using them ever since. In fact these days I can manage up to 6 hours of continuous sleep. All the honking outside is muffled and you should be able to sleep through a few of the doorbell chimes which begin around 6:00 am. I usually manage to sleep through the newspaper guy and the milk guy and sometimes even the guy who delivers flowers for puja. Soon I hope to sleep through the ironing guy and the chappati lady and maybe the daily thrash collection. So remember to buy nice earplugs before booking tickets to India.

In the office where I work, there are always these peons or attenders as they are referred to in this part of the world. This is common in most companies. One of their jobs is to keep asking you if you need coffee or tea. Depending on what you ask for you either get coffee or tea flavored milk with around 5 table (not tea) spoons of sugar. You need to usually say "Chini Kum" (less sugar). One afternoon after a meal with my dad and his colleagues, I needed some caffeine and ordered black coffee to outwit these guys. I got a nice steaming cup of dark coffee and I sipped it and nearly spat it out. Since I was not taking milk, the attender out of concern for me added extra sugar than usual (7 - 8 table spoons?). Diabetes is an epidemic in this country but they are still trying to figure out what the cause could be.

Another bit of advice I received was to never say "No" to any request from bosses. I am here to implement software for a business and while it is not building a space shuttle for NASA it is a pretty intricate system. In my first round of meetings I was asked if things would be up and running in 2 months. Being out of the country for a long time I gave an honest response saying it would not be possible, which was the wrong answer. The correct approach supposedly is to agree and then take your own time to do it (or not do it for that matter). What is more important is to agree to the demands of the higher ups.

So, most of the times you will never get a direct or an honest response. I remember talking to the jeweler a couple of nights before my sister's wedding. I made the mistake of asking him if I could pick up a necklace at 9:00 pm. Obviously his answer was an emphatic yes. I showed up at 9:30 pm ready for pick up. The jeweler informed me it would be 10 minutes. I said OK and sat down. Twenty minutes later he asked me if I wanted coffee or tea or juice perhaps. I said I am fine, just let me have the necklace and go home and sleep and he said...Just 10 more minutes sir, some final polishing. Twenty minutes later I started getting fidgety and asked him if there was any point in me waiting and I started getting angry. He said I could go home and his man would deliver it in an hour. He did deliver it in a couple of hours. The story finally ended when he showed up a week after the wedding. My mom then gave him "wedding" sweets and said Oh I need to pay you for the necklace and the guy was like no way I came to ask about the wedding, not to collect money. After a little bit of coaxing he finally took the money acting as if he was being wronged. I guess you can only shake your head and say "Only in India".

Blogging from India

You keep hearing so much about India these days and finally when I got a chance to get a software project off the ground in my hometown at the company that my dad helped to get off the ground, I jumped at the chance. It has been nearly 14 years since I left Mumbai and like other Indian expats these days, I too hoped to come back one day and spend some extended time back "home". I want to chronicle this trip so that I could refer to this and maybe others who may harbor this romantic notion can get information on what to expect if they land here.