America- The Great Polluter
Everybody casually says that all Americans drive cars, and statistically, they're almost vindicated. There are more than 270 million cars on the roads, and the population is just 300 million. The only reason the cities are not as polluted as Indian cities is that the former are a lot less dense than the latter. And the US being a huge country, driving distances are large, which means an insane amount of gasoline is burnt every day. To compound the problem, the absence of public transport in most cities means you have twenty cars plying instead of one bus. What is also stunning is the careless use of plastic bags. Unlike in India, where the supermarket wallah will stuff all your saamaan into two or three big plastic bags, the counter waalis here put only 1 or 2 items in a bag, and on average, you come home with 8-10 plastic bags. I've already accumulated more plastic bags in 3 months than mom has in 27 years!
Why do people shop like there's no tomorrow?
For the simple reason that there is no tomorrow. If you finish your gallon of water on Wednesday, it means you have to go to Walmart, park your car, walk all the way to the relevant aisle, and stand in line for anything between 10 minutes and an hour- all for a gallon of water! So people take a deep breath on weekends, and ransack the racks, pick up more than their immediate needs warrant; just to escape the ordeal of shopping on weekdays. I'm not attempting to generalize here- it's just something I've been observing. I'm sorely missing kirana stores.
Why Indians don't have lane discipline
You have to hand it to the Americans. The road network and quality is excellent. You can drive at 120 kmph without being on steroids. The signals on the roads are very helpful, and people new to the city can also navigate fairly easily. The facilities for interstate travel are excellent- there are small exits from the main interstate roads, that have gas stations, supermarkets, and food outlets. But even if India manages to build good quality, wide roads, it's impossible to inculcate lane discipline along the lines of the US or Europe. The only reason is the number of 2-wheelers on Indian roads. Out of a 90-page driving rule book here, there were only 2 pages devoted to motorcycles- and reading it made me realize that if the roads here had half as many motorcycles as India does, all hell would break loose. The lack of lane discipline in India has less to do with Indians' 'driving sense' and more to do with the nature of roads and kind of vehicles driven.
Dignity of labour
One of the favourite tea-time discussions in urban India is how people in the US work as waiters or taxi drivers without any stigma, and how it would be unthinkable to have your son work part time in the neighbourhood dhaba in India (though, thanks to CCD, the idea is catching on). This difference is not because of the famous 'dignity of labour' argument. It's a more blatant and in-your-face reason. The US is a consumption-driven economy and private saving is very less, unlike India which has a much higher savings rate. Parents are understandably keen to see their children fend for themselves when they are old enough. Also, parents can't spend on their kids' indulgences beyond a certain point, which is why you see teenagers working in restaurants. And they are paid well, and tipped very well (15% of the bill). They use the money they earn either to support or to indulge themselves, unlike in India where parents take care of you till you actually start taking care of yourself, and not just till you're physically capable of doing so. Once the trend catches on in India, I'm sure parents won't mind their children earning that extra buck.
Why American parents are reluctant to spend on their kids' college education
Another famous Indians-are-better discussion revolves around American parents not sponsoring their kids' college education. There is a very valid reason for this. College education is offensively expensive here. It generally exceeds the annual income of the family. It's very much like the MBA colleges in India, whose fees too generally exceeds the average middle class annual income. Just like Indian students take loans and pay them off after their MBA, students here do it after high school. It's a combination of unaffordable fees, low savings, and a general encouragement to earn your own living as early as possible.
A word on college education. The fact that many high school students in the US do not go to college might surprise many Indians. In India, the concept of 'at least a degree' is so deeply entrenched that it may seem unthinkable that you can lead a comfortable and fulfilling life without a degree, unless you're the heir to a business or you're Sachin Tendulkar. This notion leads many parents to force a B.Tech down their kids' throats. In the US, vocational courses and diplomas (stuff you find printed on dirty yellow paper and stuck inside RTC buses) are pretty popular, which means you can focus your energies on acquiring a particular skill, and live off that skill for the rest of your life. If you want to build on that skill or move on from it, you can always join college at the age of 30; which brings me to another must-reform area for India. The idea of finishing all your education in one go and then settling down into grihasta, vanaprastha, and sanyasa sounds perfect, but makes our education system extremely inflexible. My mentor in office started his career by building swimming pools, then became a welder, and when he got more curious about welding, joined college at the age of 28 to learn metallurgy. He's now a very successful materials engineer. This is when I resent the decision of the IITs to admit students till only one year after their Class 12. College education is not the norm here, and the citizens are better off for it. By opening up colleges to students of all ages, and encouraging vocational education, we can not only give our adults the opportunity to enhance their learning, but also give a cushion of comfort to 17 year-olds who can't afford / are not interested in college. There are constraints like the limited number of college seats, but it's not a problem that cannot be tackled.
Why don't American households have maid servants?
The biggest dread for any bachelor / single girl moving to the US is the prospect of having to cook, clean, and dispose trash themselves without having recourse to a servant. The main reason for this is, whether a person works as a servant or a CEO, they need a car (how else will your servant commute?) and they have to pay insurance premiums for their car, their home, their health, their life, and everything else imaginable. Can you, or four people together, afford to pay for these 'basic necessities'? The minimum amount you need to earn to live comfortably is so high that it rules out odd jobs like istriwala, naukrani, or kachrawala. The absence of cheap public transport is a handicap the American government must take more seriously than it is. If there was no public transport in India, can you imagine your maid driving a Maruti 800 to your house every day?
Sue, sue, everywhere
I mentioned insurance in the previous paragraph. One reason people are able to save so little here is insurance. Apart from insuring their homes, vehicles, and self, people insure their property like laptops, appliances, etc. People have to get health insurance because healthcare is insanely expensive (a routine consultation can cost more than $100). Healthcare costs are high because doctors have to insure themselves against their patients' wrath. I heard doctors can end up paying $100,000 per year towards malpractice insurance (an insurance that covers the doctor's damages if a patient decides to sue them). Obviously, they have to charge obnoxious consultation fees to recover this. Apart from this, America is, in general, a very sue-happy country- and this is not my observation, it's what almost all my colleagues told me. A woman, who in a moment of extreme negligence spilled coffee on herself thereby burning her skin, sued McDonald's for not informing her that the coffee was hot. In another case, Heinz was sued for $180,000 for not filling a ketchup bottle completely. The long and short of it is, people and corporations spend thousands and millions of dollars respectively in insuring against possible damages. As a result, the real winners in this tamasha are lawyers and insurance companies.
Scarcity of diversity
You can get an idea about how diverse the country is when the people of the North and South differentiate themselves by the way they pronounce the word 'ask'. When everybody in your country speaks the same language, celebrates the same festivals, and eats more or less the same food (though some diversity exists), you are missing the diversity only a country like India has. There's another trivial point I'd nonetheless like to mention. Throughout the country, addresses have the same format: Building no., Street name, Apartment no., City, State- Zip Code. Though there's not much scope for diversity here, addresses in India are a lot more romantic because you'll have a Near Indira Park, or Opposite Gandhi Statue, or Behind Purana Masjid in some addresses. Then you have the Nagars, Baghs, Galis, Vihars, Estates, Bazaars, Puris, and other pointers to the locality you live in. You might live in Sector C, or Pocket A, or Plot no.27, depending on the whims of the developer. When all addresses are in the format 1234, XYZ Street, Apt. 123, New Orleans, LA- 12345, it can get boring.
Being a politician
I might be jumping the gun, sidestepping various issues, and being naive when I say that being a politician in the US is a lot easier than being one in India, but I can't help feeling that way. It's so much easier to reach out to the public here and keep a tab on their pulse. 99% of the American households watch television. Therefore, publicity campaigns, presidential debates, smear campaigns, etc. have such tremendous penetration that you can address the entire electorate in an 8 p.m. show. Also, most of the people here speak the same language, i.e. the President can crack a joke about, say, football, and 300 million people will laugh; he can praise Jesus and not raise eyebrows. This is a huge advantage, because it eliminates the effects of his place of birth and his upbringing. Contrast this to India where you have to travel by foot to address lakhs of people, communicate in a language that a majority can understand but you might not be comfortable with, and know what's music and what's Greek to the public's ears.
The breadth of issues to be tackled by politicians here is minuscule in comparison to what our netas have to handle. Here, there a few very broad issues, and very few local ones, which is the exact opposite of what we see in India. The President here has to mainly tackle public healthcare, defence, external affairs, national debt, education, and the environment- and each citizen understands the implication of each. In contrast, our Prime Minister has to deal with all this, and in addition, tackle coalition politics, communalism, agriculture, casteism, poverty, malnutrition, cross-border tension, infrastructure woes, cottage industries, unemployment, 'inclusive growth', and a lot lot more. If you step back and think about the variety and depth of issues in India, you'll realize how difficult it is to be a good politician. When the economy is doing fine, they have to deal with farmer suicides; when agriculture is doing ok, they have to worry about shortage of power; when industries are flourishing, they have to worry about giving schedule castes their due; when everything is ok, they have NGOs clamouring for the protection of tigers; when they too are quiet, homosexual groups are out on the streets. Hats off to the PM for having the sheer courage to face up to all this! When Manmohan Singh talks about the credit crisis, less than 1/10th of the population knows what he's talking about; when he discusses tax cuts, only half the country understands; when he talks about nuclear power, less than 5% can figure out what he's saying; in other words, the number of issues he has to address in order to ensure there's something for everyone, is much much more than what his American counterpart does.
In Conclusion
I do not intend to compare India and the US per se, but these being the only two countries I've stayed in for reasonable lengths of time, comparisons are inevitable. I've made these observations and assertions from an eye that is only 3 months old in the US, so I may be inaccurate or blatantly wrong in many places. I invite my readers to contest / correct any of my points in the comments' section.
Everybody casually says that all Americans drive cars, and statistically, they're almost vindicated. There are more than 270 million cars on the roads, and the population is just 300 million. The only reason the cities are not as polluted as Indian cities is that the former are a lot less dense than the latter. And the US being a huge country, driving distances are large, which means an insane amount of gasoline is burnt every day. To compound the problem, the absence of public transport in most cities means you have twenty cars plying instead of one bus. What is also stunning is the careless use of plastic bags. Unlike in India, where the supermarket wallah will stuff all your saamaan into two or three big plastic bags, the counter waalis here put only 1 or 2 items in a bag, and on average, you come home with 8-10 plastic bags. I've already accumulated more plastic bags in 3 months than mom has in 27 years!
Why do people shop like there's no tomorrow?
For the simple reason that there is no tomorrow. If you finish your gallon of water on Wednesday, it means you have to go to Walmart, park your car, walk all the way to the relevant aisle, and stand in line for anything between 10 minutes and an hour- all for a gallon of water! So people take a deep breath on weekends, and ransack the racks, pick up more than their immediate needs warrant; just to escape the ordeal of shopping on weekdays. I'm not attempting to generalize here- it's just something I've been observing. I'm sorely missing kirana stores.
Why Indians don't have lane discipline
You have to hand it to the Americans. The road network and quality is excellent. You can drive at 120 kmph without being on steroids. The signals on the roads are very helpful, and people new to the city can also navigate fairly easily. The facilities for interstate travel are excellent- there are small exits from the main interstate roads, that have gas stations, supermarkets, and food outlets. But even if India manages to build good quality, wide roads, it's impossible to inculcate lane discipline along the lines of the US or Europe. The only reason is the number of 2-wheelers on Indian roads. Out of a 90-page driving rule book here, there were only 2 pages devoted to motorcycles- and reading it made me realize that if the roads here had half as many motorcycles as India does, all hell would break loose. The lack of lane discipline in India has less to do with Indians' 'driving sense' and more to do with the nature of roads and kind of vehicles driven.
Dignity of labour
One of the favourite tea-time discussions in urban India is how people in the US work as waiters or taxi drivers without any stigma, and how it would be unthinkable to have your son work part time in the neighbourhood dhaba in India (though, thanks to CCD, the idea is catching on). This difference is not because of the famous 'dignity of labour' argument. It's a more blatant and in-your-face reason. The US is a consumption-driven economy and private saving is very less, unlike India which has a much higher savings rate. Parents are understandably keen to see their children fend for themselves when they are old enough. Also, parents can't spend on their kids' indulgences beyond a certain point, which is why you see teenagers working in restaurants. And they are paid well, and tipped very well (15% of the bill). They use the money they earn either to support or to indulge themselves, unlike in India where parents take care of you till you actually start taking care of yourself, and not just till you're physically capable of doing so. Once the trend catches on in India, I'm sure parents won't mind their children earning that extra buck.
Why American parents are reluctant to spend on their kids' college education
Another famous Indians-are-better discussion revolves around American parents not sponsoring their kids' college education. There is a very valid reason for this. College education is offensively expensive here. It generally exceeds the annual income of the family. It's very much like the MBA colleges in India, whose fees too generally exceeds the average middle class annual income. Just like Indian students take loans and pay them off after their MBA, students here do it after high school. It's a combination of unaffordable fees, low savings, and a general encouragement to earn your own living as early as possible.
A word on college education. The fact that many high school students in the US do not go to college might surprise many Indians. In India, the concept of 'at least a degree' is so deeply entrenched that it may seem unthinkable that you can lead a comfortable and fulfilling life without a degree, unless you're the heir to a business or you're Sachin Tendulkar. This notion leads many parents to force a B.Tech down their kids' throats. In the US, vocational courses and diplomas (stuff you find printed on dirty yellow paper and stuck inside RTC buses) are pretty popular, which means you can focus your energies on acquiring a particular skill, and live off that skill for the rest of your life. If you want to build on that skill or move on from it, you can always join college at the age of 30; which brings me to another must-reform area for India. The idea of finishing all your education in one go and then settling down into grihasta, vanaprastha, and sanyasa sounds perfect, but makes our education system extremely inflexible. My mentor in office started his career by building swimming pools, then became a welder, and when he got more curious about welding, joined college at the age of 28 to learn metallurgy. He's now a very successful materials engineer. This is when I resent the decision of the IITs to admit students till only one year after their Class 12. College education is not the norm here, and the citizens are better off for it. By opening up colleges to students of all ages, and encouraging vocational education, we can not only give our adults the opportunity to enhance their learning, but also give a cushion of comfort to 17 year-olds who can't afford / are not interested in college. There are constraints like the limited number of college seats, but it's not a problem that cannot be tackled.
Why don't American households have maid servants?
The biggest dread for any bachelor / single girl moving to the US is the prospect of having to cook, clean, and dispose trash themselves without having recourse to a servant. The main reason for this is, whether a person works as a servant or a CEO, they need a car (how else will your servant commute?) and they have to pay insurance premiums for their car, their home, their health, their life, and everything else imaginable. Can you, or four people together, afford to pay for these 'basic necessities'? The minimum amount you need to earn to live comfortably is so high that it rules out odd jobs like istriwala, naukrani, or kachrawala. The absence of cheap public transport is a handicap the American government must take more seriously than it is. If there was no public transport in India, can you imagine your maid driving a Maruti 800 to your house every day?
Sue, sue, everywhere
I mentioned insurance in the previous paragraph. One reason people are able to save so little here is insurance. Apart from insuring their homes, vehicles, and self, people insure their property like laptops, appliances, etc. People have to get health insurance because healthcare is insanely expensive (a routine consultation can cost more than $100). Healthcare costs are high because doctors have to insure themselves against their patients' wrath. I heard doctors can end up paying $100,000 per year towards malpractice insurance (an insurance that covers the doctor's damages if a patient decides to sue them). Obviously, they have to charge obnoxious consultation fees to recover this. Apart from this, America is, in general, a very sue-happy country- and this is not my observation, it's what almost all my colleagues told me. A woman, who in a moment of extreme negligence spilled coffee on herself thereby burning her skin, sued McDonald's for not informing her that the coffee was hot. In another case, Heinz was sued for $180,000 for not filling a ketchup bottle completely. The long and short of it is, people and corporations spend thousands and millions of dollars respectively in insuring against possible damages. As a result, the real winners in this tamasha are lawyers and insurance companies.
Scarcity of diversity
You can get an idea about how diverse the country is when the people of the North and South differentiate themselves by the way they pronounce the word 'ask'. When everybody in your country speaks the same language, celebrates the same festivals, and eats more or less the same food (though some diversity exists), you are missing the diversity only a country like India has. There's another trivial point I'd nonetheless like to mention. Throughout the country, addresses have the same format: Building no., Street name, Apartment no., City, State- Zip Code. Though there's not much scope for diversity here, addresses in India are a lot more romantic because you'll have a Near Indira Park, or Opposite Gandhi Statue, or Behind Purana Masjid in some addresses. Then you have the Nagars, Baghs, Galis, Vihars, Estates, Bazaars, Puris, and other pointers to the locality you live in. You might live in Sector C, or Pocket A, or Plot no.27, depending on the whims of the developer. When all addresses are in the format 1234, XYZ Street, Apt. 123, New Orleans, LA- 12345, it can get boring.
Being a politician
I might be jumping the gun, sidestepping various issues, and being naive when I say that being a politician in the US is a lot easier than being one in India, but I can't help feeling that way. It's so much easier to reach out to the public here and keep a tab on their pulse. 99% of the American households watch television. Therefore, publicity campaigns, presidential debates, smear campaigns, etc. have such tremendous penetration that you can address the entire electorate in an 8 p.m. show. Also, most of the people here speak the same language, i.e. the President can crack a joke about, say, football, and 300 million people will laugh; he can praise Jesus and not raise eyebrows. This is a huge advantage, because it eliminates the effects of his place of birth and his upbringing. Contrast this to India where you have to travel by foot to address lakhs of people, communicate in a language that a majority can understand but you might not be comfortable with, and know what's music and what's Greek to the public's ears.
The breadth of issues to be tackled by politicians here is minuscule in comparison to what our netas have to handle. Here, there a few very broad issues, and very few local ones, which is the exact opposite of what we see in India. The President here has to mainly tackle public healthcare, defence, external affairs, national debt, education, and the environment- and each citizen understands the implication of each. In contrast, our Prime Minister has to deal with all this, and in addition, tackle coalition politics, communalism, agriculture, casteism, poverty, malnutrition, cross-border tension, infrastructure woes, cottage industries, unemployment, 'inclusive growth', and a lot lot more. If you step back and think about the variety and depth of issues in India, you'll realize how difficult it is to be a good politician. When the economy is doing fine, they have to deal with farmer suicides; when agriculture is doing ok, they have to worry about shortage of power; when industries are flourishing, they have to worry about giving schedule castes their due; when everything is ok, they have NGOs clamouring for the protection of tigers; when they too are quiet, homosexual groups are out on the streets. Hats off to the PM for having the sheer courage to face up to all this! When Manmohan Singh talks about the credit crisis, less than 1/10th of the population knows what he's talking about; when he discusses tax cuts, only half the country understands; when he talks about nuclear power, less than 5% can figure out what he's saying; in other words, the number of issues he has to address in order to ensure there's something for everyone, is much much more than what his American counterpart does.
In Conclusion
I do not intend to compare India and the US per se, but these being the only two countries I've stayed in for reasonable lengths of time, comparisons are inevitable. I've made these observations and assertions from an eye that is only 3 months old in the US, so I may be inaccurate or blatantly wrong in many places. I invite my readers to contest / correct any of my points in the comments' section.
16 comments:
this is like reading the book "freakonimics"... only more interesting.. :)
@pavan
That's a huge compliment :) Thanks
Excellent notes! You hit the nail on its head! thats what happens when you actually travel to such places and see, rather than hear all through tea-time-discussions. There is a lot to american philosophy than what meets the eye.
@vivek
Glad you liked it. You realize that it's not so much culture-related as it is economy related- India will become just like America a few decades down the line not because we 'ape the west' but because we will be more prosperous.
On the domestic help front:
I think the whole point is that you have to pay your velakaari so much because there aren't 10 more clamouring for here job. Unlike India where there are 100. Same reason haircuts cost 16$ here - labour-based stuff is expensive because there aren't many people to go around. And yeah, I miss kirana stores too. Do you have to search through a football field every time you want some biscuits??
Great post da
Awesome! I don't think I would be exaggerating if I were to call it your most lucid post! Man, with such clarity of thought, you wouldn't be a misfit as an administrator any place! Made for wonderful reading!
Too good boss ! Made me wanna comment
@Arun
You're right- it's more of a supply and demand thing. And about the haircuts- I ended up paying $2 as a tip. With that amount, I could cut my hair 4 times a year for 2 years in Banaras.
@Varun
Thanks man! I too wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that you are benchmark I strive to reach when it comes to clarity of thought. Seriously.
@timu
Glad you liked it timu. Keep visiting!
America- The Great Polluter:
Well Said Akshay...owning atleast one home and one car for each individual(Yes each individual) is something that is a must for living. One of the reason for the current economic crisis is this necessity of Americans.
Why do people shop like there's no tomorrow?:
I would like to add something on this. The thing is that Americans have too too many choices. You go to wal-mart and you will be amazed to see the options available for each consummable commodity. Almost every possible flavours you can buy in these super markets. And you can't stop buying things that you won't need immediately. It just happen that you came to buy certain things and your cart is almost full when you leave the store.
Why Indians don't have lane discipline: Akshay it's true that we don't have such dedicated lanes in India but there is something to do with driving sense. You won't mind parking your car anywhere. You won't mind stopping the hell lot of traffic behind you if you need to make a U-turn. Well, the roads are also not user friendly. But you don't need any navigation in india, just stop and keep asking along the way and you are there.
Dignity of labour & Why American parents are reluctant to spend on their kids' college education:
consider the labour cost in America:- typical labour cost in America is 30 $ a hour (yes 30$ a hour) ; In India it is less than a dollar per hour. One important thing is that Parents want their kid to support themselves. They think that in that way they will become responsible, strong and confident in their life. How many of us have enough guts to choose our dream. How many of us have enough guts to follow the path which are not conventional. Why do people in India do Savings? Because they don't have enough money to support their basic necessities. Most of us save money for buying a car or home or marriage or for their children.
Why don't American households have servant maids & Sue, sue, everywhere & Scarcity of diversity & Being a politician:
Fully agreed.
Well Akshay, the article was excessivley interesting. Good job. Appreciated.(American style)
@sudhanshu
Thanks. I agree with your additions. I too go to Wal-Mart intending to buy a couple of things, but come out with a full cart.
And your point of Indians saving for their kids' marriage is very important too. Parents here don't often spend for their child's marriage.
Way to go dude.... awesome observations. Gives a lot of insight on what really goes on there. Surely, the observations were pretty 'freakonomical'.
@Sonam
Glad you liked it :)
I like your observations. I would say though that one thing the American President has that his Indian counterpart doesnt is oversight over world affairs. In India, the PM has his hands full with domestic issues, here part of his job is foreign policy and being a key decision maker in foreign affairs, something that our netas don't do.
One other thing, American citizens do have access to different types of media but this is a nation built very largely on ideology and less on common sense. A good portion of the people blindly believe in the policies of their party affiliations and very few people question their leaders. So in a lot of ways, I would say ignorance is quite rampant here too. People live in a bubble and especially in and around your area, most people don't know what is going on outside of their immediate town, much less the whole country.
Great write up!
@Kartik
Thanks for the additions. I have a vague idea of what you mean when you say people are loyal to ideology. I have a colleague here who says he'd rather vote for Sarah Palin than for Obama.
In terms of foreign affairs, the reason the US had such a clout was because of their financial hegemony and their liberal policies towards migrants. Now that the economy is taking a beating, I doubt it will continue to have the same sway in international affairs.
How True!!! been in this place only for 10 days and I can relate so much of what you said.
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