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LETTER FROM AMERICA

Will India Lose Its Charm as It Becomes World Class?By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: May 21, 2009

WASHINGTON But you havent eaten anything! Come, come,

you m ust have something. At least take some bread. Please.

They barely serve peanuts aboard American airlines these days. Butjust a few years ago, in India, it was not uncommon to encounter

flight attendants who took it personally when you did not eat.

Their behavior was not that of a pre-programmed employee

following a script. It was the universal response of an Indian to an

Indian, a horror at the thought that someone in your charge might

go hungry.

Then the I ndian airline industry became what business-book writers label world class: it

got with the global program, signing on the dotted lines of the contract w ith modernity.

Delays waned. Aerobridges were erected. New a irlines were born.

Thinner, younger flight attendants were employed. Miniskirts replaced saris. To fly the

Indian skies today is to have a perfectly modern experience.

But it is not to have a very Indian experience, because they dont care if you eat anymore.

These thoughts stirred as I traveled in America in recent days, on a short break from life in

India. Here, of course, the notion of flight attendants caring if you eat sounds laughable,

since they dont even serve you food much of the time. And yet it is toward this colder,

more detached relationship between customer and employee that India is heading.

India has long been a jazz republic, functioning without a written score. People involve

themselves in each others lives without regard to propriety or privacy. They insist on

feeding you even when you want nothing. They insist on paying a price other than the

price listed.

They pack as many cars onto a road as possible, without regard to the painted lanes. They

pay as little tax as they can get away with.

If you call Dominos after closing time, you can sometimes cajole them to reopen and

deliver a pizza anyway. Everything is a negotiation; everything is improvised. Things are a

no in India until they are a yes.

But a kind of modernity is coming to India, with a Western emphasis on regimentation

and formalization. The flight attendants now walk down the aisles carrying out their

detailed training, offering food if you want it, moving on if you dont. A new breed of

companies resists hiring the cousins and friends of senior managers; they insist on

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childrens educating themselves and working hard in order to inherit the family business.

More and more people faithfully pay their taxes.

And yet now when I visit America, where I grew up until moving to India six years ago, I

wonder if this is where India is bound: a society that is fairer and more ordered, but in

which something of the warmth of improvisation is gone.

It is especially visible in customer-service relationships. In India, those relationships are

often hierarchical and tinged by a blend of fear and reverence in the service givers eyes.

But I ndia has not yet crossed that line beyond which such transactions lose their human

aspect.

Moving through America, I was struck again and again by the superficial politesse and

underlying coldness of so many customer-service moments.

In restaurants, the w aiters have become performers, not merely hosts seeking to tend to a

guest: May I ask if its your first time dining with us? Wow! Well, its wonderful to have

you here. Can I begin by telling you about our wonderful specials? And then the

sparkling-or-still-water dilemma, and the practiced Disappointed Look when you want tap

water. And the 50-percent-too-elaborate Are you finished enjoying that?

Language was invented to connect us, but it sometimes drives us apart.

You see it, too, when you fly. There are the airport-security officials who grimace at you

with a What? You think youre better than me? face when you ask them to replenish the

stack of trays. Or you finish your glass of water on a flight, and now you wonder about

asking the flight attendant, who is now just moving forward to the next row, for a refill.

She might do it; but she might, glaring at you in the manner of a headmistress, tell you

that she has to serve other customers first and that she will get to you, sir, thank you very

much.

And she is right, in a way. Why should you drink twice before others drink once? The

attendants fidelity to her training is impeccable.

But one senses something robotic at work, cutting between what are, at the days end, just

two human beings.

And yet, with India as the foil, one can see a deeper meaning in the brusqueness and

coldness. So much of this behavior seems intended to draw a red line of dignity around the

individual, to declare to the world that she is somebody w hom no one can push around,

that no one is better than anyone else.

But which is more real, this cold dignity or Indias warm servility?

In my six years there, India has begun to go the formal way. An oversweet, artificial

politesse is audible now on certain airlines and customer-service calls and in restaurants

and bars. The rules, which have long existed in abundance in India, are no longer things

to be broken. People seek space for themselves and give space to others.

They fuss less and less over others, including over whether they have eaten.

And one wonders whether, as modernity comes, India will lose a certain warmth, a

certain tender involvement of everyone in everyone. Is the warmth that lingers just a

product of this stage of history, residually feudal and agrarian and poor, a stage from

which India will eventually move on?

Is destiny the barriers between us?

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