"India Time"
Hinglish (Hindi + English) can be a difficult language to pick up. In addition to accents, one must also deal with more nuanced matters.
Hinglish: Your food will be ready in 10 minutes, sir.
English: Hope you're not that hungry. It'll be about an hour.
Hinglish: Don't worry, the meeting will only take 20 minutes.
English: Cancel your dinner plans. You're not leaving for 2 hours.
Hinglish: Ok. We'll have the budget to you Friday night.
English: Is Wednesday morning ok?
Things just happen a bit slower in India. We have dubbed this phenomenon "India Time" and adjusted accordingly.
But why does it occur? Is it simply a part of Indian culture? Are Indians just procrastinators? It's the easy answer but easy answers are historically (a) racist and (b) wrong.
As a student of physics, I've always been encouraged to never be satisfied with an "it is what it is" answer and to always think one level deeper. So where does "India time" really come from?
Infrastructure
Try cooking Channa Masala for your hungry restaurant patrons when the entire city's water supply has been cut. Try making it to a meeting on time when the dirt roads wash out after the lightest rain and lines of cows grazing on the median create bovine road blocks. Or try writing up a budget in the dark because your power went out as soon as you arrived at the office.
Infrastructure makes up many of the little things that make life run smoothly. It makes sure your lights turn on in the evening, water comes out of your faucet when you want to wash your hands, and your bus arrives on time to take you to work. Its the magic that delivers resources right to your doorstep for cheaper than your ancestors could ever have imagined. It makes life comfortable, predictable, and easy to deal with.
But when its gone, so is the predictability. Its simply impossible to make accurate judgments on how much time something will take you if you can't be sure of what tools will be available.
Poor infrastructure gives rise to "India Time".
But what gives rise to poor infrastructure?
Democracy
*Note: I'm confident of the connection between between "India Time" and poor infrastructure, but this next one is a bit more of a stretch. Feedback welcome.
Thirty years ago, no one considered China and India to be modern nations. Today, that can still be said of India, but two Americans dropped in the middle of Manhattan and Shanghai would have trouble figuring out who'd been deported.
Two poor nations with billion-plus populations. Why such a big difference 30 years later?
Centralized planning.
While India and the rest of the western world were busy praising the freedoms of democracy, China's centralized government was redirecting rivers, building highways, and carefully planning its expanding cities. When you don't have to ask the country for money every time you want to do something, running a nation gets a little easier.
Don't get me wrong. Electing politicians and voting on everything is wonderful, but its extremely difficult to run a democracy in a poor nation. Democracies rely on educated voters and honest, concerned officials. But when voters are too busy working to make money to survive, they prioritize jobs over schooling, and, similarly, when politicians are barely paid a living wage, they prioritize their own families over the rest of their states and graft and corruption ensue.
This entire line of argument, however, reeks of first-world privilege, as in "We here in America are ready for democracy but you simply can't handle it" so let me make an important clarification.
Democracy in its current form doesn't work in poorer nations. The Western world (read: Britain and the US) continually promote Western forms of democracy in not-so-Western countries, but what developing nations really need is developing-nation-democracy.
Now what exactly constitutes developing-nation-democracy, I'm not quite sure. It's not an issue I've taken a great amount of time to consider, and I won't devalue the issue by offering something I made up on the spot.
But the issue is surely an important one, and I'm sure many people have studied it a great deal deeper than I.
What features should developing-nation-democracy have? How should it be set up? Or is there a form of government entirely different from democracy that would be better suited to the task?
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2 comments:
I enjoyed your commentary. I wonder what that form of democracy might look like?
Better governance could address a lot of society's ills, and not just ills in other countries but worldwide, which impact us directly--economic problems, terrorism, and the backlash against immigration.
In the sense that Democracy means that the state is ruled by the people, there are many types of democracy. The democracy in the U.S. is but one form (representative democracy), and many would consider it a very half-assed one at that (I'll leave further commentary on that for another discussion). Democracy in the U.S. involves a powerful federal government, less powerful states, and weak local government and elected officials to fill these positions. For this reason, I'll call it a centralized representative democracy.
A form that I believe would work better for developing countries would be a decentralized civic/representative democracy. By decentralized, I mean that the federal government would be weak, and mainly in charge of defense; states would be more powerful, in charge of large scale infrastructure; local cities and villages would be most powerful, in charge of most infrastructure and public goods (like schools, hospitals, etc). The purpose for this is based on a few simple theories. The first is that, in developing countries, accountability and transparency decrease with distance from tax-payers. At the federal level, it will be the easiest to hide corruption and inefficieny because the people you're taxing don't necessarily know what you're doing or expect to see their tax money spent in their own village. Thus, you could tell village A that you're spending money in village B and vice versa, and it'd be harder to track that. Conversely, tax dollars given to local collectors in village A are expected to be spent in village A. If they're embezzled or wasted, it's a lot easier to notice that. Furthermore, assuming that the quality of a politician is based on the information in the voting base, the voters would be able to make the best decisions about local politicians, thus making local politicians the best. Couple this with the theory that it's a lot easier to run a small town than a large nation, combined with the fact that you know a lot more about the needs of your small town, then it makes sense that the most effective leadership is local leadership. Thus, put the power in the hands of the local leadership. Phew! Okay, that's the decentralized (and also the representative) aspect of my definition.
Going along with this is the notion of a civil society. This refers to groups of people that have voluntarily chosen to organize with a social purpose (that is to say, they're concerned with the good of others besides themselves). Generally, this social purpose is locally based. Think of the Rotary Club, The Chamber of Commerce, The Lions Club etc. In ancient Greece, many city-states even had a volunteer militia for defense, a prime example of civil society (in fact, Greek city-states are the prime example of everything I've talked about here). These civil groups would, hopefully, take over/assist many of the functions of the state. People would join them and acquire a sense of community, a sense of ownership and pride in their community, and, most importantly, a desire to improve the community and the organization to begin doing it.
In my mind, the thing that could transform the developing world would be a mindset change. If people began to feel like they really could improve their lot and organized to do it for themselves on a local level, I think the results would be incredible. I've been reading about an EWB-SFP project in Tanzania where the local villagers in a town have organized into a civil group (with many women members) devoted to the improvement of the town. They're the ones who contacted EWB, and all throughout the EWB report are mentions of how extraordinary the people in this town are--how many show up to workshops and educational sessions, how willing to work, how smart and how much they care.
Caring supports a local democracy and civil society, but how do you build caring? Well, partly you build it with civil society and local democracy. It's a self-strengthening loop (until everyone gets rich like we are in the west and stops giving a damn about anything). NGOs also help, I think, but I think that NGOs have to go into their work with the desire to help empower people, to make them believe and want to improve their lives, rather than acting on a mindset that you know what's best and that you're the one who can solve all the problems. Initiatives that try to start civil groups, perhaps tied to certain activities the NGOs teach, like a "Society of Mechanics" tied to maintenance of wells and solar-panels. To aid in the development of local government, NGOs could provide lawyers to lobby for more local power (I don't know as much about this one).
Get people involved, show them they can make a difference, give them the mindset. That's the most powerful thing.
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