Doing Business in India

We went to Ludhiana for a small conference at a hotel. About 400 people were expected to show up. Gopi had done a deal with the sponsor to pay for some of it in return for booth space.

Once there we were told that another ‘Digger Guy’ had asked for space too, been told there was none, so he’d booked a room downstairs for his stuff and aimed to leach off of our advertising and poach our potential customers.

I noticed after a while that lots of people were coming in to the hotel, but not a lot made it upstairs to us. I sat in the lobby and saw that the Digger Guy had taken one of his employees and strategically placed him to hand out flyers and direct them to his room.

I was furious, only half those exiting his room realized there was something going on upstairs despite the signs, half were leaving. I ran upstairs and grabbed some brochures and came back down and stood in front of Digger Guy’s guy, handed out brochures, and directed them upstairs. I told Gopi and his sponsor to send people downstairs, this was war.

If Digger Guy wants to steal customers I’ll show him that American’s can’t be pushed around. I planned on an arms race, we’ll post two people to his one. It’s a cold war, American’s are good at arms races.

But the people they sent downstairs were so passive they just stood off to the side hoping nobody would notice them instead of attracting attention and handing out brochures and directing people upstairs.

Gandhi is portrayed as some sort of genius saint in the West for his successful policy of passive resistance to British rule. But it’s obvious to me now he was just working with what he had. Indians excel in passive aggressive. They don’t react to anything hardly and just push their way around without any respect for anybody else. The British just got fed up with all the rude people and left.

At the airline counter in Delhi there was your standard line that weaves around and then you take the next available clerk. I was next in line and some Indian lady just steps right up behind a guy already talking to a clerk.

I stare right at her trying to give her dagger eyes, but she looks at me without a care in the world. She’s pressed right up to the guy to ensure she gets next service at the counter. When that guy leaves she steps up, and of course the service person doesn’t even care, and I call out to her, “Excuse me, I’m next”. She pretends she had no idea there was a line and pretends to apologize. But her face said it all, ‘Fuck you’.

With people posted downstairs I go back up and I’m checking out the conference. One of the hotel staff sidles up to me and starts asking me questions. He wants something. In my entire time in India, only one person, a little girl in Rishikesh came up to me and said, “Hallooo” and shook my hand without wanting something, everybody else wants something from me in this country, usually money, they just come up with their hands out and don’t go away, ever, nobody just wants to talk to me to be nice. Finally he gets to the point.

“It is my dream to go to America. Take me to America and I will help you in your life.”

Sorry buddy, the only person who can help me in my life is a six foot Icelandic blonde named Inga and her heavenly lotions.

I go back downstairs and realize our folks are gone or doing nothing. I take up my place and grab Kovi as well. I step in front of the little guy Digger Guy has and direct people upstairs. Digger Guy comes out and sees what I’m doing, I ignore him as I’m winning. I can play passive aggressive too, you don’t exist buddy.

He goes back and gets a second person, but I’m larger than your average Indian and I’m aggressive-aggressive, blocking the traffic flow, shoving brochures into people’s hands, and directing them upstairs.

I was trying to figure out why Gopi’s employee we sent downstairs wasn’t there. He pays her big money for India because she has an M.B.A. He had a hard time finding good people and was forced to pay up. But in India an M.B.A. is a dime a dozen now. They churn them out in M.B.A. mills because Americans are stupid enough to believe that an M.B.A. is a big deal. You should see the signs for M.B.A. schools, there’s more of them than Pepsi signs.

Gopi says that there were two Universities within 100 Kilometers twenty years ago, now there are fifty. Anybody can open a University, they do not take accreditation seriously here. And American’s don’t know if an Indian school is good or not, all they see on the resume is M.B.A. Oh, and don’t forget that I know some very smart Indians who have admitted they bribed their instructors for good grades.

I’ve always joked with my Indian friends that I’m going to write a book about Indians in America as they are the first ethnic group to come in at the top. They’re doctors, software engineers, professionals, etc. Everybody else, my ancestors included, started at the bottom and worked their way up. Their children have nowhere to go but down.

They laugh at first and then realize it’s a truism and get scared, “No! That’s not going to happen”. But look at your kids, they’re the spoiled Nintendo generation.

Indians had two things going for them in the modern world economy, first the British colonialism made English the default common language. India has dozens of recognized languages but since English was spoken everywhere it became the default. And second they had the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). IIT had an incorruptible test which weeded out all but the best and the brightest among one billion Indians. And when you start with a billion people and whittle them down to a few thousand, you’ve got a lot of smart Indians.

The first batches of these IIT grads started showing up in the 1980’s. The U.S. only allowed 16,000 H1-B (work) visas a year. This was doubled and then doubled again, and then doubled a third time when employers saw the quality they were getting.

H1-B visas are supposed to fill skilled positions that American companies can’t find skilled people for already in the U.S. They have to be able to prove this too.

What few people know is what a slavery racket it has become. An Indian guy named Balaji would open up a company, get one hundred H1-B’s allocated and import people. When asked by Immigration why they were needed he would refer them to his friend Alok who said he needed 100 Java programmers. At the same time, Alok was doing the same thing, he would refer Immigration to his friend Balaji and they’d get to import 200 people between them.

The imported Indians wanted to stay in America and applied for permanent residency. It was almost impossible to switch jobs once here without starting over on your green card application. It’s still difficult to do. Thus Balaji and Alok would contract out these employees at high rates, pay them nothing, and get rich. Quite a racket, H1-B slavery.

By the late 90’s there was a veritable flood coming in as the H1-B’s reached over 128,000 and quality was dropping fast.

One day my friend Harish said, “I’ve never met a stupid Indian in America”.

“I have”, I responded. I’d noticed that no longer were the top people coming in, everybody was bringing in his cousin’s brother-in-law as a high tech candidate because he could spell ‘software’. But by then American managers had been hornswoggled into believing all Indians were brilliant.

I sat in a meeting one time with an Indian project leader who could barely speak English, mumbled to make it worse, and had no idea what he was talking about. When I pointed this out to his bosses, they were uncomfortable with my accusations; after all, he was Indian, he must be brilliant. The fact they couldn’t understand him proved it.

A few days later Harish came in to my office, “I see what you mean”.

So Gopi’s M.B.A. wasn’t downstairs. Why? Because she felt uncomfortable doing such a menial task, after all she was an M.B.A. Gopi pointed out to her that I was down there and it was not beneath me, but like Gandhi, she could not be moved.

Gopi was super frustrated with her and his other M.B.A. as they couldn’t produce a thing. They expected to come to work late, do nothing except say ‘Yes, Boss’, and get paid; after all, that’s why they got an MBA, right? And these were the best candidates out of 25 he interviewed!

Digger Guy knows he’s licked, he sees I’m being successful and kind of declares a truce. His guys direct people in both directions as do we. I’m still pissed, but now he’s impressed with me and asks me to sit down with him.

“What software can you give me?” he asks. He doesn’t even want Gopi’s software, he wants something even more new and exotic and thinks I’m hiding it.

Oh good grief, everybody wants something from me here, and they don’t want to pay for it, and they want to make sure you don’t sell it to anybody else. Gopi has people trying to bargain him down on price for everything.

“Twenty dollars a month is too much”, they say.

“How much do you think it is worth”, he responds.

“Eighteen dollars”

Yes, that two dollars a month will break them. They don’t understand that he can’t keep track of a different negotiated payment plan for each customer. The price is the price. That goes against Indian tradition.

Most of them are still trying to game ways of stealing his software. It’s tradition in India, everybody’s got a friend who can hack any software available. Or they say this friend can create the same thing for $70, even though it has cost Gopi a thousand times that already. And the best one is when they get their software installed for a pittance and insist that he not sell this to anybody else. Yes, there’s a good business plan.

To make it worse, good customer service, calling the customer and being prompt and courteous is considered bad form. They think ‘he needs me more than I need him’ and don’t return his calls. Or he makes an appointment and they just don’t show up.

So poor Gopi’s taken to not answering anybody’s call until the third time they call him. The fact that he’s not returning their calls means he’s an important person. He puts people off and acts like he doesn’t care. Then they clamor for him.

When the day breaks off, Digger Guy comes up to the sponsor of the event and thanks him profusely in front of us for ‘allowing’ him to be part of the event. “I owe you so much”, “I thank you very much”. What a cad.

“Thank you for allowing me to fuck you. I really enjoyed fucking you. If given an opportunity again I will fuck you even harder”.

And that, my friends, is how you do business in India.