The Dharamsala Street Con

My brain spends a lot of its free time trying various algorithms that will help explain reality and make some kind of sense out the world and the meaning of life. So far I haven’t really come to any definitive conclusions, but certain ancillary insights do arise out of this activity from time to time in the same way that the manned moon mission led to the development of Pop Tarts and Teflon. For example, its become quite clear to me that sugared breakfast cereals aren’t really good for you no matter how many vitamins they spray onto them and that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by some of the most fiendish villains ever to disgrace our planet. More on these topics some other time perhaps.

Last week when we were coming back from Dharamsala, we were discussing how history had repeated itself in a certain street-con that we had essentially fallen prey to there just as we had several months ago while visiting Pushkar in Rajasthan. During our conversation on this topic a notion about how Indians organise themselves and how it differs from Westerners came to mind. First the con story.

As soon as we walked out of our hotel in Dharamsala, a young local entrepreneur with a shoeshine kit requested to shine my shoes. The fact that I was wearing grey suede Vans should have been a tip-off that either he was not very experienced in dealing with footwear or did not have my best interest in mind. For some reason, I found his insistence so stupidly charming, I agreed to let him work on my sneakers. Despite my supervision, he pretty much ruined my shoes, trying to wax the suede and then purposely tearing the heal so he could do me a favour by fixing it. I could always buy a new pair I reasoned. When I went to pay him (for the job of ruining my shoes which were also much dirtier than before I had put them in his care), he gave some unintelligible reason for not wanting cash but instead wanted me to buy him some goods at a local shop.

Having been in India now for 8 months, I have learned a couple things:

1. Anyone that walks up to you on the streets with some kind of offer is probably trying to scam you in some way
2. Anyone whose business model is not structured normally right up front, “I will provide you with X service/product for Rs. Y” has got a major con going, you better hold on to your wallet and run as fast as you can

My shoeshine boy who introduced himself as Vijay was in the second category. When he declined my generous offer of Rs. 100 for destroying my $60 Vans, I put the money back in my pocket and told him to let me know if he changed his mind. He and a friend that had suddenly appeared then followed us down the street as we tried to casually look in the shops. Curiously, Vijay’s friend was also named Vijay and while Vijay #1 walked with me trying to engage in a conversation about how poor he was, Vijay #2 was plying Mrs. WMG with a similar story.

Now I am as compassionate as the next guy and probably a little more so, but I’m also experienced enough to tell the difference between someone who needs my help and someone who wants to use my compassion like a crowbar into my pocket. So, when Vijay and his other brother Vijay ran into a shop we were passing and started holding up bags of rice like they were models on “The Price is Right”, I summoned the shopkeeper, handed him Vijay’s Rs. 100 and told him to let them have anything they wanted in his store.

Apparently people the Vijay twins have identified as “stupid Americans carrying money that rightfully belongs to them” do not normally do this. Instead of going on a shopping spree, Vijay #1 got into a rather agitated state and chased us down the street explaining all the while how this was not the way the game was played. Eventually I had to get quite stroppy with him in explaining that his quarrel was now with the shopkeeper who was holding his 100 Rupees and not me. This all pretty much set the tone for our visit in Dharamsala.

An Insight
As I mentioned several paragraphs ago, in discussing this in the car on the way to the Dharamsala airport a thought about Indian organisation occurred to me. This seems pretty unrelated now, but it made sense then. For months Mrs. WMG and I have been trying to introduce business processes into the company that we are working for here. Generally, this effort has met with one of two results, failure and utter failure (there have also been a couple of cases of ignominious failure but these were isolated incidents).

What occurred to me in the car as we careened down the mountainside without the benefit of seatbelts, is that this is a culture organised around status. Tasks are assigned to people based on their position, their social status or their business status. For example, some of my colleagues never ever carry their own briefcase from the parking lot to their second-floor office, this is always done by one of the uniformed walas in the building. In a society or company where activities are inextricable from job and level, trying to introduce a process that doesn’t revolve around people’s status is just too abstract a concept for many people to grok. Similarly, being blind to levels and protocols, creating a process around people’s status makes no sense to us whatsoever.

I’m not sure I’ve explained this well, but since I blathered on endlessly about the Vijay bothers and their antics, I ran past by brother-in-law Trevor’s attention span and must draw a line under this entry here. I will try and pick this up again sometime.