News That Stays News

The Dream of the Yellow Autorickshaw December 23, 2012

I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with cultural expectations.  When I share an expectation, through culture or choice, I accept it as a duty.  When I find I do not share it, I can choose to.  If I can make myself plain, why then I can also say something like “sorry, I don’t really like chocolate”, and be met with “oh, so you’re crazy?”, and reply “guess so”, and let that be that.  As long as my rejection is idiosyncratic, there’s no offense, whereas something categorical like “oh, who eats chocolate?”, would reject the very validity of the expectation, and thus be insulting.  I imagine vegetarians are terribly familiar with that distinction.  Fortunately, for me, the idea that I might be asking who likes chocolate is so outlandish that people usually take this the right way.  Of course, if someone had already, through ignorant good intentions, baked me a cake*, I’d likely eat some.  Likewise, if I were a guest of a guest, and were specifically offered cake, I might accept to avoid letting my awkwardness reflect poorly on my host.  The problem I have is when someone bakes me a cake and then says ‘$3.50 please’.

I have a strong expectation of being left alone.  Maybe it’s because I’m an only child, and the american northeast is cold enough to let me be that way.  That expectation is violated when a waiter comes over to put some food on my plate, momentarily empty, from another dish which is sitting right in front of me on the table.  I don’t know whether the local custom would prescribe that I acknowledge the waiter every few minutes when he did this (distracting), or ignore the waiter (to me, rude).  This one’s easy – never leave the plate empty, and I’ll be left serenely alone.  I tend to perceive this being-left-alone as a matter of not wanting to trouble someone to do something for me, but the truth is that if it were infrequent, and done by someone wishing to express goodwill, then I might well be more okay with it.

What really drives me nuts is when someone in the hospitality industry does something for me that I’d rather do for myself.  Perhaps this is because asking me to pay for a cake moves someone from the social to the commercial context.  In that context, if done purposefully it’s a ripoff, and if done accidentally then it’s just bad business sense.  Perhaps it’s because it is done in a deferential way, which feels servile to me – I’ve never been in a Chilean or American four-star hotel, so I don’t know if this is cultural.  Perhaps it’s because doing something that does no one any good is humiliating to me.  And it is this insult, the categorical rejection of the expectation as a useless thing to do, which gives me pause when I would resist.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m no good at tipping, actually.  It just makes no sense to me to tip someone who hasn’t gone especially far out of their way.  It’s like that tradition in classical music where the conductor/performers always leave the stage long before the applause ends, so that they can return to popular acclaim.  I guess this is to say that I don’t understand my own culture either: it just seems disingenuous for them to leave when they know perfectly well we’ll keep clapping.  Worse yet, they sometimes reemerge to dying applause, which promptly if unenthusiastically restarts, seemingly to save everyone embarrassment.  The whole thing feels like a low-stakes version of that guy at South Station who begs for money, and says he’ll throw himself in front of the train if he doesn’t collect enough money to catch his bus, which leaves in <however long before the next northbound train comes>.

Perhaps it’s just a result of astonishing inequality, which allows someone to offer to do something I don’t want them to do, for trivial change.  It’s like one of those behavioral economics puzzles.   I feel self-righteous refusing to do what I don’t want to do, but mean refusing to do something I don’t want to do and also to hand over 40 cents (in the old sense of mean).

And the inequality here is astonishing, even in the wealthy areas.  Somebody’s selling lunch for $1.25 in front of the 11 story tech building I work in.  The areas between the buildings are unpaved, full of standing water and low concrete construction.  Lord only knows what I’ll think when I’ve been out more.

Mind, the measures taken to oppose inequality seem somewhat counterproductive.  In a state whose GDP grows at 12% a year, it’s impossible to keep everyone supplied with all the electricity they want*.  Still, when there’s planned two hours rolling blackouts in Chennai, and blackouts of as much as 16 hours in neighbouring districts of Tamil Nadu, you know something’s wrong.  Much as I hate getting price-gouged by NSTAR, raising prices until the demand dropped to the existing supply seems like a vastly more reasonable way of dealing with this problem, not to mention one that would help pay for the badly needed infrastructure.  It’s interesting that you can see the current approach as price discrimination, where businesses that need continuous power are forced to buy generators, and so are in effect adding more production capacity to the grid, at a much higher cost to themselves than the state wants to charge ordinary consumers.  However, it’s a chaotic, inefficient way to go about it.  I admit I genuinely don’t know if poorer electricity consumers would prefer low rates to predictability – this may simply be a failure of imagination on my part.

While I’m at it, I do wonder about the elevated train which apparently looses 100% of revenue.  I guess I should hold off comment until I’ve ridden it, but the city is said to have still failed to license commercial development of the stations, and failed to convince bus operators to move routes to service the stations (no one rides the train, so when the buses routes are moved, no ones rides them to the station, so the bus operators renege and go back).  All I can vouch for is that the stations I’ve seen are huge and desolate, like somebody’d been selling cement by the pound…

One thing I have already experienced is the street.  I now accept that traffic is space filling like a falling liquid, at least in its direction of motion.  That if you pull a traffic vacuum between you and the edge of the road big enough for a motorcycle, one will appear, and just like that, where you are standing will be the middle of the road, and no longer the edge.  That if you move quickly, in any direction, you may surprise someone.  Someone driving rather fast, so that moving slowly but in plain view out of the way of a truck may be far better than surprising a motorcyclist.  That I can sleep in an autorickshaw in a traffic jam, and be none the wiser.

Speaking of streets, I have devised a maximal entropy classification of restaurants: those with doors and those without.  All the doored places I’ve been to have been chinese, and they were not bad.  But, boy is the doorless  (and anatopistic) biryani good!  I’ve had a doorless dosa, but I’ve yet to get one off a street cart, an explicit goal of mine.

* mind the qualification;  ninety-seven percenters, you know who you are