India Is for Bullies

India is where everything gets stress-tested. A road gets tested by trucks, bikes, cows and people walking against traffic at the same time. A software product built for tidy users gets tested by unfathomable edge cases. An entrepreneur’s bold bet gets tested by a market that changes its mind every few months, and lots of trolls who have nothing to do with the product. People get tested too.

Lately, what comes out is anger.

Well-to-do NRIs who live in Singapore fly in for a visit for a happy wedding and get shot over a parking issue. That happened a few days ago. These are people who live calm, orderly lives somewhere else. A few days here and they’re in a street fight in front of a liquor store. That tells you more about the street than about them.

Take a car out on any road. Three cows walk onto your path. A child comes running out of nowhere. Someone is driving straight at you on the wrong side. Every few seconds the road asks you to react to some or the other thing.

The anger is a response to unpredictability. When nothing around you behaves the way it should, being defensive is the only sensible choice. Being quick and hard to push around becomes a survival skill.

I’ve written and read a lot about how the rich in India spend their money isolating themselves from the poor. From the outside it looks like snobbery. Underneath, it’s an attempt to buy predictability. If the country won’t give you a stable environment, you build a smaller one and put a gate on it.

But the gate needs a guard, and the house still runs on maids and delivery boys. The isolation depends on the working class, and that’s where the low trust shows most.

Rich households don’t pay their security guards, delivery boys or part-time maids enough. They don’t trust them, and they don’t talk to them in a polite tone. They’re ruthless with them because they expect ruthlessness back. Pay someone what they deserve and you start assuming they’ll cheat you eventually. The other side feels all of it and plays the same game.

I see and hear these stories every single day. An owner treats his staff well, and in exchange he gets taken advantage of. Every story like that teaches one more employer to be harder next time. Low trust and low income have built a society that hurts the people inside it first, on both sides of the gate.

So there’s no space for politeness. Politeness only works when you can predict how the other person will respond. Take that away and the polite person is simply the one who loses first.

India is a country of bullies. There’s no other way to survive here.