Land of the Free
A surgical strike on negativity.
Some people like to spread the notion that Indian society is conservative, regressive, and repressive. Nothing could be further from the truth. To expose the falsehood of these pessimistic and anti-national claims, I have discussed below just a handful of the multitude of freedoms we have been blessed with that we take for granted, which most citizens of the other 194 countries (a.k.a lesser countries) of the world can only dream of.
I recall getting into a heated argument once with a tourist from the Far West who scoffed at how Indians drive on the left side of the street, like the British. I promptly corrected him. We drive on the right side. It’s always the right side, even when it’s the left side. In fact, we sometimes drive on the right side, and it’s still the right side. Occasionally we drag our vehicles from the left side of the street, over an inadequate divider, on to the right side of the street on a whim, clumsily moving our intrepid cars, bikes, autos, and tempo travellers diagonally across like crabs on a beach at sunset, into oncoming traffic. Nobody bats an eyelid. It’s business as usual. That’s freedom.
While the poor souls in the so called developed world treat vehicular travel like a mundane and precise task with the focus being on efficiency of movement and zero usage of imagination, the Indian approach involves maximum creativity, spectacular improvisation, and constant reinvention. Their approach is classical music, ours is jazz. Their approach is left brained, ours is all right. Nowhere else on this place we call Earth would you find freedom of motion at such a large scale.
You’re a shopkeeper of some kind in some happy Scandinavian country, selling pastries or some other Scandinavian thing. The customer pays you 2 Euros for an item that costs 1.75 Euros. You don’t have change. Can you use this opportunity to sell your customer some cheap confectionary that nobody cares for worth 25 cents? I suspect not!
Now, if you were to relocate your affable self to India and set up a shop selling kachoris or some other Indian thing, you could boldly dispense Cadbury’s Eclairs or some other cavity inducing thing in lieu of the money you rightfully owe your patron. So leave behind the land of the ice and snow and come to the land of the rice and …. phones (I tried, okay?) and experience some real freedom.
The bogus western concept of work-life balance is frequently mentioned gleefully by India deserters living in parts of western America named San <Insert Hispanic name here> as the best thing about their lives since their ultimate betrayal of the Matrubhoomi. This approach to work/life where deadlines are actually meant to be met all the time and nine-to-five actually means nine-to-five encourages a level of rigidity befitting the A.I. super-bots that will soon take away their beloved jobs. They are playing into the hands of Skynet.
There are no real nine-to-five jobs in India. Work and life are intertwined and often indistinguishable. Late night coffee meetups with friends are regularly interrupted by work calls. Early morning office work is just as frequently interrupted by coffee meetups with colleagues. Significant loss of efficiency is a small price to pay for the liberating feeling of being in control of your own life. Work deadlines are negotiable suggestions. Boring beach holidays turn into exciting remote work-from-home sessions at the drop of a hat, allowing one to neglect their family for the day citing non-negotiable deadlines.
Much like the C.I.A and other intelligence groups, people in an Indian office tend to have partial information on at topic at best. Simple IT related issues require an employee of the company to navigate through a complex web of red-tape and built-in inefficiencies. Often, the simple matter of getting a security update may require one to interact at length with six or seven IT folks, each of them passing the buck on to the next, claiming that security updates don’t fall in their job scope. Payroll issues are redirected to an HR Single Point of Contact (SPOC) — a mythical creature who many claim to have seen but few can get a hold in their time of need. Must we crib about these roadblocks? No, we must not. These inefficiencies ultimately provide job security for all involved. If nobody has a complete solution, nobody gets fired. And if the system is fundamentally inefficient, it’s harder to replace individuals with computers. Mark my words — when the A.I revolution does happen, we will be the last bastion of human freedom.
About 225 million years ago, India was an island in the middle of an ocean which, I’ll admit, all islands are. Over the next few million years, she drifted North at breakneck speed (9 meters per century — a pretty solid pace for a goddamn island) and eventually crashed into Asia, where she felt she belonged, forming, as a by-product of her migration, the highest mountain range ever. How about that?! The very landmass we stand on displayed an independence of thought and hunger to excel (not second highest mountain range … she didn’t settle) that fills me up with patriotism to the point where I feel like I may explode into a tri-coloured supernova. It’s a sentiment we need more people in this country to share. We are the real land of the free. Accept it now, or we will eventually use force😊
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