Column

Last week I was Shanghaied. In other words, I found myself gob-struck in the Chinese city, overwhelmed by its sights and sounds and skyline.

Never mind why I went and what I went for, the bottom line is that what I saw convinced me that those who compare Mumbai with it ought to have their heads examined.

First of course is the infrastructure. New adjectives have to be invented to do justice to the mammoth and post-modern structures that dot the landscape. In this respect
Shanghai reminded me most of Dubai.

But let’s leave aside hardware for the moment: airports, expressways, roads, over bridges, sky trains are harbingers of a booming economy but not the only evidence of it.
There is after all (we like to tell ourselves) a few other parameters with which we can convince ourselves of our superiority over the Chinese: our sophistication, our command over the English language, our democracy and our civil society.

‘The Chinese may have their shiny roads and airports and infrastructure’ we tell ourselves -’but we have that certain factor X that gives us the edge.’

But you know what? Like a lot else that we tell ourselves (we’re all natural born software geniuses, spiritualists and yoga experts) it’s a crock of gobbledygook.

Because along with everything else that China has by way of its hardware- it also has the Chinese way of doing things.

My friend Deepali, an economist from Delhi University currently researching her PhD, has been a resident of Shanghai for the past year where her husband, an executive with a luxury brand, has been posted, put it quite simply,

“I think we’ll never catch up with China because basically we Indians think too much.”

How so? “Well, tell a Chinese to stand in a place, he will continue to do so until you state differently.

Tell an Indian the same and he will give reasons why he should be standing everywhere but there.

We make for a very indisciplined and undependable work force.

In India, every one is a leader; in China the Cultural Revolution seems to have indoctrinated everybody in to becoming followers-and there is no individual assertion and really very little dissent.”

In simple terms here’s what this means.

I go to Shanghai’s legendary Fabric Market, a warren of little shops where its tailors famed for rivalling their counterparts in Saville Row sit.

In a matter of minutes I choose from a King’s Ransom of exquisite fabrics, in a jiffy a catalogue is produced and from it I pick a design, I am measured, my order slip is written, and next morning a completely ready, beautifully tailored, suit is delivered to my hotel room, not a minute later than promised.

Now consider the same scenario in India: you beg cajole threaten a tailor to take your order.

He says it will be done in a week. Two weeks pass-no sign of him, fearing the worst you track him down at his kholi, he says he’s sorry but he fell ill and had to go to his village, what about the suit? you ask, ‘ Oh that,’ he says, nonchalantly, ‘that will be ready in another two weeks.’

And then finally you get it and its cut all wrong and doesn’t fit.

The Indian approach to things is a bit like that.

—s_malavika@dnaindia.net