In the UK recently, I was having an interesting conversation with my cousin’s family They live near London. Her husband said something that stayed with me. In India ‘you can never take people at face value’!

He said the difference between western countries & India is that in the West, you can assume that people mean what they say & you don’t need to constantly watch out! Deadlines are met & mostly there is no cause to be suspicious of people’s intentions!

On my way back I began to think of that afternoon’s conversation and if that was an exaggerated view of a young man who had spent the last fifteen years in the UK.

He had said whenever he is back home his family tells him to discount what people say. Another friend on the same trip mentioned to me that it seems people in India tend to exaggerate about their work on LinkedIn and post untrue stories many a times.

What is it about us which is giving the world this impression? Is it something about our education system or the values we are inculcating in our children?

My belief is all people are good unless they give me reason to mistrust them. If they do then I too watch out for hidden meanings and subtle undertones in their conversations. One does what you got to do to survive the corporate politics but in my life the majority is still the former kind of people - those I believed in have seldom wronged me! I have noticed how for my NRI friends, time stand stills, they often look at India from the prism when they left. So things seem costlier & as if every one is out to get them.

In the last few decades, there has been advent of new generation franchises across industries where prices are set - you don’t haggle for discount at Malls and department stores as you did in the old Mom and Pop stores, the UrbanClaps of the world have done the same to all facilities that you hire help for. The haggling for best price would squeeze the person of his margin and he would then quote a buffer to the customer which people felt was a badmaash fella! An odd ball of a taxi driver or rickshaw person would pull a fast one which is also disappearing with the likes of Ola’s and Uber’s. This generation also values the service even if it comes at a cost unlike the baby boomers and the traditionalists.

I believe wherever we go we create an ecosystem of the people - doctors, healers, shop keepers, even restaurants and helpers we like and trust. There needs to be mutual respect and value for money in every equation. Either party can get up and leave and it’s understood that it wasn’t working out but that is the case world over not just in India as I have found.

(This article first appeared on the WiP page on 21st November, 2022. I am the founder of WiP which is a cohort of like minded talented women who help each other grow in a fun filled, judgement free manner!)