My Maiden Voyage to India
I went to India several times in the last thirteen years. My maiden voyage was back in 2002. I had some bizarre experiences with people who kept asking the same question again and again and again. I kept saying no, no, no, no, no. It was like dealing with people who had part of their brain shut down. What I came to realize is that India is a land of extremes. There are people who are extremely smart, and many who are completely clueless. There are very moral people, and others who don’t have any morals. There are many different religions and castes who normally have almost nothing to do with each other. We see India as having “a culture” while in reality it is more like a patchwork of opposite societies forced to live with each other.
Sorry, Meter Broken
What bothered me most about India was that there was so much negligence and backwardsness almost everywhere. I have never been to Punjab, however, I understand that is the most organized part of India. This is because there are many Sikhs there, and the Sikhs are a very meticulous people who also have a very military attitude. 90% of the Indian army consists of Sikhs who are local to Haryana and Punjab. But, in the rest of India there are leaky faucets, piles of bricks left for months by the side of the road, police who take bribes, broken things of all descriptions, potholes, people who don’t drive in lanes, rickshaw drivers who have rigged or broken meters, and other types of nonsense.
What the U.S. Became
America has never been a perfect country, and we have never been as meticulous as the Japanese about keeping things clean or fixed. However, I have noticed that things have gone downhill in the last twenty years. There is more negligence and Unreliability here. When I hire American programmers, not one is able to meet simple deadlines or get back to me. In my apartment complex, the cement used to repair the sidewalk seems to break within a few weeks of its installation. We have to make multiple requests for the sink to be fixed. When I had my car repaired at Toyota for a noise, they fixed one noise and then didn’t double check the car for additional noises which resulted in me having to bring the car back and get yet another free rental car from them for a few days. We both lost a lot of time and money because they didn’t check their work — which reminds me of most of the programmers I hire.
India in 2002 Prepared Me for America in 2015
Since India prepared me for what I term “abject negligence,” I am more tolerant of it. However, if you run a business, you should make sure that you don’t do anything negligent and that you tolerate very little negligence on the part of your workers, especially those higher up. If you choose to not do certain tasks which are less valuable in your priority list, that is fine. However, if you neglect critical tasks, the consciousness of neglect will mirror itself into the others who you deal with. I have seen this spiritual principle manifest itself in real life so many times that I look for it to happen and try to analyze how the other person’s behavior is similar to mine. In my opinion, India is on its way slowly up and America is on its way down. I am not convinced that America will ever become as backwards as India and I doubt that India will ever become as nice as America. In the long run I believe that China will run the world and the rest of us will be their servants!