The cost of doing business.
Incidentally, speaking of mangoes, the first ones we bought last month were from Crawford market, which is the place mentioned in the NYT article. Actually, we were on our way back from somewhere with the car, and it was hot, so our driver cruised by the market and we negotiated for a dozen from the street vendors who buy the mangoes inside the market and sell them to passing cars at a slightly higher "convenience" rate -- which, it being the hot season and our car being air-conditioned, we were perfectly willing to pay.
When we got home, we discovered all the mangoes we bought were rotten.
Of course! Why not increase one's take by buying the market vendors' discardables for pennies per gross and flogging them to people who, blocking a torrent of extremely aggressive drivers, aren't in a position to examine and sniff each fruit?
The definitive dissection of the Indian psychology behind scam culture has already been carried out by Naipaul (An Area of Darkness...), so I won't rehash it. Instead, let me comment on the psychology of the scam consumer. This has been one of the hardest adjustments for me to make to India, and I'm still not there yet. I regard it -- not actively, I mean, just as a background part of my belief structure -- as a laudable goal to get through life being as little-scammed as possible. That mindset just won't work here. One will get scammed. Daily. I suppose I need to readjust my attitude toward simply trying to minimize scam financial damage. One has to let go of the "on principle" aspect of the whole thing, which one has problems doing. Or one could just take a leaf from K's book.
K recently stopped at a pavement bookseller'sshop blanket to get our fortnightly (that's what they call it) copy of Time Out. While browsing, he also picked up a film magazine. The seller noted his choice and recommended another picture-filled Bollywood glossy, which K wasn't familiar with but found highly intriguing and added to his stack.
"Instead of giving you your change," the seller said, "how about I throw in another choice magazine filled with great images?"
Buoyed by the seller's previous sound recommendation, K agreed, and the seller slipped something else into the bag.
On getting home, K realized he'd been sold a complimentary issue of one of the domestic airlines' inflight magazines.
He was impressed.
With so many scammers -- and with so many minor scams attached to even minor transactions -- don't the scammers get scammed, I wonder? I think the answer must be "of course" -- thus, incidentally, creating a social climate in which one must scam. In Prisoner's Dilemma terms, it creates a society locked into the lose-lose outcome -- which seems to be a characteristic of developing countries that are going nowhere (like India) and not of developing countries with coherent social codes of civil conduct, which are getting their acts together (viz most of Southeast Asia), regardless of levels of "official" corruption, which are probably roughly equivalent across regions.
The convention of the minor scam also leads to the culture of minor paranoia. Does our trusted driver, whom K has essentially befriended, have a kickback deal with the neighborhood gas station? Yes, presumably, and we don't actually begrudge him the few rupees he gets from it. But consider: our car's been in the shop three times in five months for expensive repairs and replacement of parts. Puzzled by this unreliability -- this is, after all, a Merc, which are usually pretty solid -- after the last problem, we sent the car for a second opinion to the garage that most American use, and which the car's previous owner had used. Not only did we get an amusingly higher estimate (did I mention this was the garage most Americans use?), but our driver claims the garage had far fewer records for routine maintenance of our car than the person we bought it from claimed she did. Our driver explains the discrepancy by alleging that the previous owner's driver would pretend to take the car in for oil changes while actually pocketing the money and taking the afternoon off. Certainly, this would explain why our car is experiencing multi-organ failure at a relatively young age, and also make our driver comparatively virtuous, to boot.
Unless, of course, our driver is actually in cahoots with the garage and is a far more ambitious chiseler than the previous driver.
What psychological complexity, ambiguity, and richness! It's no wonder the city has produced so many successful writers:
They need the extra income to cover the costs of being scammed.
When we got home, we discovered all the mangoes we bought were rotten.
Of course! Why not increase one's take by buying the market vendors' discardables for pennies per gross and flogging them to people who, blocking a torrent of extremely aggressive drivers, aren't in a position to examine and sniff each fruit?
The definitive dissection of the Indian psychology behind scam culture has already been carried out by Naipaul (An Area of Darkness...), so I won't rehash it. Instead, let me comment on the psychology of the scam consumer. This has been one of the hardest adjustments for me to make to India, and I'm still not there yet. I regard it -- not actively, I mean, just as a background part of my belief structure -- as a laudable goal to get through life being as little-scammed as possible. That mindset just won't work here. One will get scammed. Daily. I suppose I need to readjust my attitude toward simply trying to minimize scam financial damage. One has to let go of the "on principle" aspect of the whole thing, which one has problems doing. Or one could just take a leaf from K's book.
K recently stopped at a pavement bookseller's
"Instead of giving you your change," the seller said, "how about I throw in another choice magazine filled with great images?"
Buoyed by the seller's previous sound recommendation, K agreed, and the seller slipped something else into the bag.
On getting home, K realized he'd been sold a complimentary issue of one of the domestic airlines' inflight magazines.
He was impressed.
With so many scammers -- and with so many minor scams attached to even minor transactions -- don't the scammers get scammed, I wonder? I think the answer must be "of course" -- thus, incidentally, creating a social climate in which one must scam. In Prisoner's Dilemma terms, it creates a society locked into the lose-lose outcome -- which seems to be a characteristic of developing countries that are going nowhere (like India) and not of developing countries with coherent social codes of civil conduct, which are getting their acts together (viz most of Southeast Asia), regardless of levels of "official" corruption, which are probably roughly equivalent across regions.
The convention of the minor scam also leads to the culture of minor paranoia. Does our trusted driver, whom K has essentially befriended, have a kickback deal with the neighborhood gas station? Yes, presumably, and we don't actually begrudge him the few rupees he gets from it. But consider: our car's been in the shop three times in five months for expensive repairs and replacement of parts. Puzzled by this unreliability -- this is, after all, a Merc, which are usually pretty solid -- after the last problem, we sent the car for a second opinion to the garage that most American use, and which the car's previous owner had used. Not only did we get an amusingly higher estimate (did I mention this was the garage most Americans use?), but our driver claims the garage had far fewer records for routine maintenance of our car than the person we bought it from claimed she did. Our driver explains the discrepancy by alleging that the previous owner's driver would pretend to take the car in for oil changes while actually pocketing the money and taking the afternoon off. Certainly, this would explain why our car is experiencing multi-organ failure at a relatively young age, and also make our driver comparatively virtuous, to boot.
Unless, of course, our driver is actually in cahoots with the garage and is a far more ambitious chiseler than the previous driver.
What psychological complexity, ambiguity, and richness! It's no wonder the city has produced so many successful writers:
They need the extra income to cover the costs of being scammed.
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