Making sense of the subcontinent
I’m a list guy. I have 18 separate lists where I keep track of things to get done for different areas of my life. I have no faith that my brain will remember more than 3 things at a time, so everything else goes on a list. There is nothing that epitomizes a satisfying workday for me more than crossing off dozens of tasks.
However, my approach to lists has often gotten me in trouble in India.
I want my Indian team to take more ownership. Can you do a training session on that?
This is a common request from many cross-cultural managers. How do you get Indian employees to take more ownership over the work of the organization?
You may see associates constantly passing on calls and tickets to their managers instead of dealing with them directly. Your office feels like a revolving door, with people constantly coming to ask questions and seek approval. You wish people would just stand up and take a decision without you.
I was talking with a British manager in India who gave his team the task of preparing a presentation. The team booked numerous meetings with him to make sure everything was done exactly as he wanted. Their insecurity in being able to complete the project on their own led him to a much deeper involvement than he wanted.
“Since then, I’ve tried to teach them to have more autonomy,” he said.
“Is that working?” I asked.
“No.” [Read more…]
If modern Westerners could assign just one phrase to what India excels at, it would be spiritual enlightenment. Need to find answers? Need to find yourself? Need to take a break from the senselessness of the rat race? Come to India.
At some point in recent history, India cornered the market on spirituality. Perhaps starting with Vivekananda in the late 19th century, many Indian gurus have become famous on an international level. Their teachings were strikingly different from either the Protestant work ethic or traditional Catholic theology that had dominated Western concepts of spirituality for so long. Everything about Indian spirituality (and therefore India) seemed different, deeper, more mysterious, and perhaps better.
So, when someone sets off on a world tour and needs a stopover to help discover her ‘true self’, there is really only one option: India. [Read more…]
For the most part, India stayed out of mainstream Hollywood movies between 1985 and 2000.
During the same time period, India’s economy was changing forever. The economic liberalization laws of the early 1990s opened up India’s doors and paved the way for its gigantic economic climb. Anyone who has lived in a major metro will tell you that the India of the 1980s looked nothing like the India of the 2000s.
India was ready for a new identity. The dominant movie images of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom no longer held any relevance (if they ever did). This was a new country, and it needed a new narrative to tell the world. They wanted something that showed how far they had come. They wanted a story to showcase how an entire class of New Indians had emerged.
They got Slumdog Millionaire. [Read more…]
Continuing with Hollywood movies about India that educated the West, here is another from the early 1980’s.
Statistics:
While the target audience for James Bond is quite large, the UK has always had a special relationship with India. They have built-in stereotypes that come from generations of eating Indian food and buying medicine from Indian pharmacists. (As opposed to Americans, who first need to be convinced that India actually exists.)
So would a film that features a British hero naturally be a better source of knowledge about India? We’ll see. [Read more…]
“So this is where we learned about India.”
I had just returned to the US for a visit and decided to watch a movie during some downtime. I chose Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom because I vaguely remembered it being set in India. It was the first time I had seen it since I was six and my mother forced me to shut my eyes during the ‘heart removal’ scene. (Thanks, Mom.)
Watching it later in life, with a few years of living in India behind me, all sorts of things started to make sense. Stereotypes, generalizations, cultural attitudes – all nicely packaged in a blockbuster adventure.
One thing I am always amazed at is the lack of knowledge that people in the West have about ‘real’ India. Whether they see it as a land of snake charmers and turbans (1980s) or one big call center (2000s), these perceptions seem to stick. After watching Steven Spielberg’s movie, I figured out how they’ve gotten stuck in most of our minds.
So, I thought it would be fun to go back and analyze a few movies about India from the last forty years that have served as ‘educators of the masses’ for people who have never been to India. I’ve started with the big blockbusters that would have been seen by a majority of movie-watchers. [Read more…]
Most people are not prepared for India.
No amount of reading, interviewing, or cultural training can really get you ready for working and living in India.
If you choose to dive in deeply, you will see the world from a brand new perspective. You will gain knowledge and experiences you could never get from any other place.
But you are also subject to feeling like you are just running from one “emergency” to another, constantly putting out fires. You may start to become entangled in the daily power struggles at work, or amongst your househelp. You may feel like most of your job has become apologizing for offending someone and can’t figure out why everyone seems so sensitive.
You could use some help. Not a solution for every problem, but a way to make sense of it all. An introduction to the new rules of this foreign land.
Enter How to Avoid Dying in India.
What did you learn from your university?
I mean really.
While your alumni association would like you to believe you learned exclusive knowledge that set you up for success, it’s likely you’ve forgotten most of that stuff.
What you did learn was how to build a network, how to collaborate on projects, and how to convince a professor to throw out the results of a failed test.
These are the skills that have stick with you and continue to shape who you are today.
Indian universities are no different. They teach technical skills, but the ‘other’ skills are the ones that tend to stick more. Some of these skills are great for the business world, such as how to churn out a group project overnight. Others might cause you to pull your hair out. [Read more…]