Pradeep left on March 18. I had a lot of fun with him and I told him he would be welcome back anytime.
I did not want him to go but he was concerned about returning to Mumbai to get a job on salary. Salary jobs are easier to get in Mumbai than Varanasi, definitely. If I had less experience with Indian people I might have had trouble understanding his perception of this pressure, but at this point I understand some Indian attitudes. My perception of Pradeep’s situation is that he would have a much easier time getting the kind of work he wanted and getting a huge increase in pay if he stayed at least a few more weeks in Varanasi surrounded by foreign researchers and people who work in that industry; I would have loved for him to be a contact in Mumbai when we have people there who want services like we provide in Varanasi.
There is a lot of societal pressure on Indian people to get a salary from someone else, even when the salary is low and there is an alternative opportunity to make money from entrepreneurship or from a temporary job. Very few people in India can even name a job where a person would work regularly for a single employer and get paid an hourly rate; employers typically just consume the lives of workers. Government jobs in India have a social significance in India which is unlike anything I have ever seen in a Western country. Anyone wanting to learn more should read any of the huge body of literature about the bizarre and complex government employee system in India. One short and incomplete explanation is that there have been many times and places in India where the only people who had good financial status were government employees. This system came to be from a history of the entire country having only a few tax payers, but then having a central government distribute the taxes across the entire country where the majority of people had never even met anyone who had ever made money. Thus the government employees were the only people who had a link to an income source outside of their geographical community. Government jobs are not necessarily good jobs, but they are secure, and they did not depend on local economic conditions.
When Pradeep was here I introduced him to everyone around me, including a lot of foreign researchers. In every case I explained to him why the foreigner was in Varanasi and what kind of expenses the foreigner had and what problems the foreigner was having in not being able to find necessary goods and services for purchase. What I hope that he saw was that local people who work with foreigners work very hard but comparatively less timewise than most Indians. That is – these people often have efficient intellectual jobs instead of the typical Indian 60-hour work week jobs which primarily require physical presence in a location and following orders. Also for some fields there is more money in entrepreneurship than in salary earning, plus the work is a lot more meaningful.
There were multiple times while he was here when Pradeep saw Nandan make in a few days what he made in a month doing little more than shaking hands and having conversations. I also set Pradeep up with some researchers doing translation and interpretation work, and Pradeep seemed to like it and the researchers loved the help. I told Pradeep exactly what he should charge for the services. I also had Nandan tell him exactly what to charge, and he explained foreign employment systems to Pradeep while I was present. I even prepped a foreign researcher to give money, as this person knew very well the social customs around paying money for services. I did everything but collect the money myself and put it in Pradeep’s hands, and I did all this knowing that I attempting to push Pradeep across a lot of cultural barriers for imagining what constitutes work.
Pradeep would not take the money, despite him telling me that he would on several occasions and me asking him what was wrong. Pradeep actually turned down offered money. I know why he would not take the money, but I do not know how I could have taught him that the kind of work that he was doing was valuable and in extremely short supply and worth money. It would be complicated to explain, and still I do not understand this culture and cannot write about it fairly. It might not have been fair for me to even write personal information about Pradeep in this post, and despite the experience I have I cannot generalize about the attitudes of all Indians in all places at all times. Also I have to say that having a dating relationship with Pradeep was confusing for both of us in terms of ensuring distance between our private lives and my ability and his willingness to create a job for him sufficiently far away from our personal relationship, but I do not think that was among the strongest causes of his hesitation.
But for the sake of my own edification and to potentially help other people who are sure to share my experience if they try to do what I do, here are some stereotypical observations which I have experienced and which other foreign people have reported to me with regards to hiring Indians for intellectual labor. Again, these things are not about Pradeep, but the issue with Pradeep made me reflect on a lot of what I had already experienced and heard.
Indian people sometimes do not differentiate a foreign friend from any other foreigners they meet through the foreign friend in the sense that they do not quickly discern a distinction between accepting money from the friend and accepting money from a friend’s business contact. This is because of a family system in India which does not exist in the West, whereby Indians give familial social status to people connected to their friends. In contrast, Westerners make a sharp distinction between casual friends and even close business partners.
Indian workers have difficulty understanding that a person can engage in a task with an end point they do not see and that a contribution toward finishing that task can have monetary value. The problem with the translation work was that it is often part of a body of hundreds of hours. If the service had a finishing point then Indians like the idea of billing for a known body of work, but as an American I would prefer to measure a person’s rate of work, expect that rate in the future, then expect to pay the person an hourly rate while they continued working at that rate indefinitely. But the idea of hourly billing is unthinkable to most Indians, so if they do some work, do not find a clear endpoint, and then someone tries to pay them for the hours they worked, then they get confused because there is an idea that time worked is worthless and product produced does has value.
Many Indians have low motivation to working in research, especially social research, because they see no value in data other than as a curiosity. Since research has no monetary value to the worker, workers feel very unstable in taking a job where they produce something they think is without worth.
Indian people want the backing of their families, and the older generation looks down on any kind of work which is not familiar to the experience they have. I have heard a lot of stories about someone who makes money in information technology and then gets family advice to invest their money in something outdated, like opening a mom-and-pop local store as if the infotech money could be cut off but small locally-owned businesses will be around forever. In any case jobs in new fields are just considered risky.
Indians have trouble understanding that new types of intellectual work never end when spread across many clients. When someone opens any kind of business, it is possible that the person will never sell anything and go bankrupt. I think Indian people understand this concept for physical goods, and for some familiar services, but the idea that there could be a huge body of foreign researchers steadily coming into India and like clockwork requesting interpretation services is unthinkable. Also I often hear them say that foreigners just hire anyone off the street to translate for them, since so many Indians speak English. This is possible neither for translation nor interpretation as Indians who speak good English but do not understand Western culture share huge problems with whatever Westerner hires them.