Sunday, May 9, 2010

Do not pay bribes! (continues...)

(Continues from previous post*)

In one of our past posts, one of our good readers told us that he learnt more about India in the past three months reading our blog than in his entire life.

While certainly flattered, I have to say I feel quite the opposite, i.e. I have the feeling that three lives would not be enough for me to really understand India.

Vishnu and Shiva, Islam and Sikhism, the British and the Mughals, Ghandi and Kashmir, the ‘biggest democracy of the world’ and the cast system, 9% GDP growth and 50% of the population below poverty line, the world’s first woman prime minister and the widow’s ashrams, thousands and thousands of students sent to study in top universities worldwide and arranged marriages... as soon as you have the feeling to have finally understood something, there is suddenly something else that contradict your belief, and you end up as confused as before**...

Bribing. Bribing is another of those things that it is impossible to understand if you are not Indian. Officially punishable by law, socially accepted: it is very difficult to understand when it is a social norm, necessary to 'speed up' things (a ‘shadow cost’, as an economist would define it), and when on the contrary it is a real abuse of power.

An example. We were about to purchase a train ticket from Jasailmer to Delhi, where we spent a week end with our friends Riccardo and Patricia. Unfortunately there were not four seats close to each other anymore, and the only available option was to purchase two tickets in second class and two tickets in third class. No problem, we thought: once we are on the train, we’ll ask Riccardo and Patricia's neighbours in third class if they mind to exchange their seats with our two seats in second class. Who would refuse a free upgrade?

And that’s what we did: we asked the two neighbours in third class if they wanted to exchange their seats with ours in second class, and of course they were very happy to do so.

However, after some time, they came back to their original seats telling us that the ticket inspector didn’t allow them to sit on our seats. No problem, we thought: we’ll go altogether to explain the ticket inspector that we deliberately exchange seats to sit close to our friends.

With our great surprise, the inspector didn’t want to hear us, keeping on repeating that it was not possible to exchange seats in two different classes. Despite our insistence, he was inflexible. With great disappointment we thus returned to our second class seats.

The interesting thing is that Mathilde and I gave two opposite interpretations on the inspector’ stubbornness. In my opinion the ticket inspector was playing hard expecting a little bribe to allow the exchange - bribe that of course we didn’t give. For Mathilde on the contrary the inspector was afraid of being unjustly suspected and accused of having received a bribe to have allowed two passengers moving from the third to the second class - bribe for which he could be liable to prosecution.

Of course we’ll never know what the truth was, but this episode gives you a good example of how difficult is to understand the unwritten rules of this country, to penetrate into the social norms of this society, to behave correctly according to the situation in this mishmash...

And you, just for curiosity, how would you have interpreted the inspector’ stubbornness?

(*) http://www.matteoandmathilde.org/2010/02/do-not-pay-bribes.html

(**) I take this opportunity to signal an article that was recommended to me by Emanuele some time ago, and which well describes this strange feeling of ‘everything and its contrary’ that I am experiencing here in India... (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/opinion/15iht-edsebastian.html?scp=1&sq=tim%20sebastian%20&st=cse)

8 comments:

  1. hm, interesting - perhaps I have been away too long but I may not have linked his rigidity to the bribes issue but more to the general inflexibility of India's babudom (officials or babus). But who knows may be you are right and this is a way to collect. One pet peeve - it is Gandhi (a common Gujarati name) not Ghandi (the two spelling correspond to different phonetic sounds so not only is is a misspelling it is also a mispronunciation). I don't know why but that misspelling is widely used by the 'western' world and it grates on me particularly when all other details about him tend to be correct except his name!

    ReplyDelete
  2. strange that you didn't learn much about bribes when you were in Italy... probably you moved too soon!
    you wrote "Bribing is another of those things that it is impossible to understand if you are not Indian"... I would add: "or Italian"...

    non vorrei generalizzare, ovvio... magari hai incontrato davvero l'unico controllore inflessibile (o forse solo stupidamente rigido)...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I should have said "Bribing in INDIA is another of those things that it is impossible to understand if you are not Indian".

    I didn't mean to imply that bribing is a phenomenon that does not exist in other countires (on the contrary!), and didn't want to imply that my homecountry is exempt from it (even though, according to my experience, I have the feeling that it exists at a different scale: you bribe to win a tender, you bribe a judge, a tax collector, etc. - you don't bribe a functionnaire to have your certificate issued faster... but I stop here, as i know I would enter into very dangerous terrain, I can be easily contraddicted, and anyway, the purpose of the post was not to discuss about corruption in India).

    The purpose of the post was to show, with a stupid example (Arati and Anonymous, you are right, bribing may have not been the issue in this specific case, and we may have simply met a particularly stubborn inspector), how difficult is for us to understand and interpret correctly the unwritten social norms of this country and behave accordingly, and - to get back to beginning of my post - to describe the strange feeling "that three lives would not be enough for us to really understand India"

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ps: btw, the picture of this post was taken at a railway station

    ReplyDelete
  5. hm, interesting - perhaps I have been away too long but I may not have linked his rigidity to the bribes issue but more to the general inflexibility of India's babudom (officials or babus). But who knows may be you are right and this is a way to collect. One pet peeve - it is Gandhi (a common Gujarati name) not Ghandi (the two spelling correspond to different phonetic sounds so not only is is a misspelling it is also a mispronunciation). I don't know why but that misspelling is widely used by the 'western' world and it grates on me particularly when all other details about him tend to be correct except his name!

    ReplyDelete
  6. strange that you didn't learn much about bribes when you were in Italy... probably you moved too soon!
    you wrote "Bribing is another of those things that it is impossible to understand if you are not Indian"... I would add: "or Italian"...

    non vorrei generalizzare, ovvio... magari hai incontrato davvero l'unico controllore inflessibile (o forse solo stupidamente rigido)...

    ReplyDelete
  7. I should have said "Bribing in INDIA is another of those things that it is impossible to understand if you are not Indian".

    I didn't mean to imply that bribing is a phenomenon that does not exist in other countires (on the contrary!), and didn't want to imply that my homecountry is exempt from it (even though, according to my experience, I have the feeling that it exists at a different scale: you bribe to win a tender, you bribe a judge, a tax collector, etc. - you don't bribe a functionnaire to have your certificate issued faster... but I stop here, as i know I would enter into very dangerous terrain, I can be easily contraddicted, and anyway, the purpose of the post was not to discuss about corruption in India).

    The purpose of the post was to show, with a stupid example (Arati and Anonymous, you are right, bribing may have not been the issue in this specific case, and we may have simply met a particularly stubborn inspector), how difficult is for us to understand and interpret correctly the unwritten social norms of this country and behave accordingly, and - to get back to beginning of my post - to describe the strange feeling "that three lives would not be enough for us to really understand India"

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ps: btw, the picture of this post was taken at a railway station

    ReplyDelete