Transistors don't have sex on the roof

(Although I'm now back home, I'm catching up on my posts from India while the impressions from that extraordinary trip are still fresh)

In Bombay, a hypercompressed city of 17m people (nearly the population of Australia), the value of the individual is bound to be diminished.  Even knowing that, I was struck by the casualness with which servants, driver and other laborers are deployed.

By casual, I mean this sort of thing: On the chance that you might want a car and may not want to flag one of the 65,000 taxis (true number) that circulate constantly, virtually all of them empty, a driver is asked to wait all evening outside your meeting place.  Houseboys actually appear at the ring of a bell; it's a favorite game of one friend's three-year-old. "Send your man" is the suggestion for any errand, no matter how slight. And street vegetable stands home-deliver orders of less than a dollar.

The class divide in India is extreme; democracy has arrived but not egalitarianism. Yet there is little complaining. Waiting hours on end on the whim of richer people is considered a relatively good job compared to the alternatives.

Coming, as I do, from the land of the overscheduled, the amount of idleness on display in Bombay is shocking. This is a nation of grossly underutilized labor and talent.  As I looked out a restaurant window one evening on the tide of empty Ambassador cabs lit by blue neon from within, I wondered whether this overabundance of human potential has an analogy in technology.

The enabling insight of the Silicon Age was Carver Mead' s counterintuitive 1980 call to "waste transistors".  Until then most of the focus in software was on writing tight, efficient code that made the most of the scarce (and typically shared) computing resources available at the time. But the era of the personal computer was dawning, and with it the arrival of more MIPS on the desktop than most people knew what to do with. Mead suggested that programmers imagine that transistors--computing power--were free. Rather than protecting them, they should think of ways to exploit them without a second thought.  And thus was born such computationaly extravagant eye-candy as the graphical user interface--and the Mac and Windows.

The same can now be argued for storage, memory and bandwidth. The original iPod's 10GB hard drive seemed profligate compared the flash memory of the average MP3 player of the time, but it introduced the concept of taking your entire music library with you everywhere you went, rather than having to anticipate ahead of time what mood you might be in when a moment to listen came. And that is why Manhattan is now a sea of white earbuds. Likewise, I carry a month's worth of  email on my Treo because there's no reason not to; 1GB SD cards are cheap.

In all the computers that surround us, the CPU idles virtually all the time, spinning its gigahertz wheels waiting for us to give it a command. Carver Mead's advice has been taken. Standing on the street in Bombay, I think of 65,000 taxi drivers doing the same.

Is the analogous lesson of India "Waste People"? Is India's key competitive advantage the ability to think of people not as individuals but as available resources, deployable in the millions? It may look that way from a Silicon Valley being depopulated by outsourcing,  but I think the answer is actually no.

I imagine that somewhere in one of the planning ministries of New Deli there is a technocrat who is nevetheless thinking that way. But then I think of the call center workers I've met and, more importantly, their parents, who hold the managers of the operation accountable for the moral and professional integrity of their daughters.  I think of the 90% annual turnover rate at these centers (comparable to the employee churn in the American fast-food industry). And I think of the security guards in the parking lots who are there not to protect property but to stop the newly independent 20-year-olds from having sex in the cars. The doors to the roof are locked for the same reason.

Until you come to India you cannot really understand what a traditional society it is, and how important the family remains (arranged marriage is still the norm). This is the limiting factor in India's ability to scale its outsourcing industry. The call centers have tapped out the local population of qualified kids and must now import them from around the country. Rather than living at home until they are married (and sometimes after), these young men and women are now living in shared apartments in the big city and working all night with members of the opposite sex, to say nothing of the exposure to American culture. The natural happens in a culture not yet ready to accept it.

It is statistically tempting to look at the 30m Indians entering the workforce each year, many of them college educated and English-speaking, and see them as cheap and available labor on a scale unimaginable in the West. Yet meet a few and you are reminded that each one of them is a person with a family, and culture sometimes takes precedence over economics. Carver Mead's slogan created Silicon Valley, but its analogy may not work in India. Outsourcing will hit its limits in India's traditions, and their ability to absorb the social effects of globalisation. There is no Moore's Law of culture.  Transistors don't quit under parental pressure. Transistors don't have sex on the roof.

Comments

[David]

Chris, sounds like there's a huge unexploited market in India for guardless parking structures.

[JD]

Wonderful, wonderful post!

I have quite a few thoughts rushing in my mind about this post, but here is the single reason behind all these problems:

Lack of education. Yes, once you make people capable of reading/writing (so that they know their rights), India will be a much better place.

JD

[Rags Gupta]

It's more complicated than simply providing education, which I agree is vital. The caste system and the broader themes of Hinduism, entrenched over, oh a few millennia, is something to be reckoned with, and is behind much of the cultural inertia. Hinduism and the caste system provide people with a sense of 'place' for better and for worse. On the one hand, it is much easier to come to grips with one's lot in life. OTOH, it can lead to a kind of fatalistic acceptance and resignation.

[rambler]

In Hinduism always the solution lies within and introspection is the key. To an outsider it may give the appearance of acceptance and resignation but it only strengthens the resolve and ensures a better solution

[Ben Hyde]

Great post. There is something fascinating at the intersection of the poor (who are on the long tail of the income/wealth power law curve) and the hyper-dense cities which are on in the elite of the population center power-law curves. Cities are the real hubs. It is painful to observe it when the income inequality is so severe though.

Always reminds me of Orwell. http://xrl.us/e2xy "... the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more ..."

[Dilip D'Souza]

Chris, actually I do think that is our key competitive advantage now (and also what makes middle- and upper-class lives in India so much more comfortable than in the West).

But I'm not sure it can remain that way for much longer. One of the big things changing in India is (or are) aspirations. It's causing its upheavals, sure. But I actually look forward to when we in Bombay won't look outside our restaurant window, as you did, and see that line of taxis waiting. That's still some time away, but I believe it is coming.

It's odd: when that time comes, I think this will be a much fairer, much more just country -- but also in many ways a far less interesting one, especially for a writer. So be it.

[nandish]

first, the value of individual is not diminished, its enlarged. u need to be an indian to understand dat.

true, the economic difference btw the rich and poor is huge.
democracy has established itself and india stands as an epitome for democracy with all its + and - .

To say bombay is idle is a joke. It means u didnt get to know it properly. A view from d window of a restaurant is far from what bombay actually is.What u need to know is how many aspirants find bombay der home to meet der dreams. U need to know d true spirit of Bombay, to go on ....

As for cheap labour, its bcos of d population we have. literacy rate is increasing rapidly. so i understand the hue and cry of local ppl who loose der job to outsourcing.

As for culture, its not that we dun wanna carry it with us wherver we go, its like we r proud of it to have it.

sorry for writing so long

[Mahesh Shantaram]

Chris, that's a beautiful analysis of labour utilization in India. I understand your point perfectly, and I know why Nandish hasn't quite got it.

Just one correction: the tide of empty cabs that you saw from your restaurant were Fiats, not Ambassadors. In any other city, such as Delhi or Chennai, they'd be Ambys, but in Bombay, 99% of them are Fiats.

[v]

Interesting observations. I don't think culture would be as limiting as you seem to think. The India today is very different from the India of the 1980's that I grew up in, and it is even more different than the India my parents grew up and made their careers in. It is far less traditional than it used to be (at least in the bigger cities). As an example, 30 years ago women were not commonly to be found working and having careers, while today this is increasingly common (at least in urban india) and, in many cases, even expected of them. This is a slow, and major break with existing tradition. India is in transition, and facing major cultural changes, which become quite clearly manifest over a period of a decade or more.

[Kaleberg]

It is interesting the way that industrialization brings young women into the cash economy and makes everyone worry about sex.

Remember the Lowell factory girls with the tedious mill work and sobering sermons?

What about the high middle ages and flax culture, with women assigned the spinning and men the weaving. If a woman didn't get married, then she remained a spinster.

Sometimes the sexual anxiety ran deeper. Consider the tale of Rumpelstiltskin in which a young lady is reputed able to spin straw into gold. In other words, she gets paid in gold for spinning retted flax. In the fairy tale, her fertility is put at risk. Her first born child is claimed.

There is something about a woman getting paid that incites anxiety, and sometimes backlash.

[uspeed]

Its like a spear,
no, its like a wall !!
absolutely not, its like a rope !!
a fan, a fan..
a pillar,
a snake !!

ur post was cause for much silent mirth.. thank u :-)

[phaedrus]

The analysis is surprisingly static for someone who is looking at evolving trends - this is a common error in any outside view of India- people seem to assume things are going to stand still there while everything else changes....if you factor in the techno-cultural evolution underway in India with a democratic context then the conclusions are completely invalid

[Arun Pai]

Chris,
Much of what you say about Bombay would apply equally well to many parts of New York City, albeit at a higher economic level (the cabs, the inequalities, the fast food workers delivering $1 burgers with a smile...). Making conclusions about India looking out of a restaurant window is as accurate as making conclusions about the US looking out a LES restaurant window.

[rabbit]

asfasdfadfadf

[Chris Jon]

The fact is, Americans unlike Indians do not screw their own on the path toward progress.

India would be a rich and much more progressive nation if it weren't for the exploitation of the masses by its own.

When you look out of a NYC restaurant, at least the level of hygiene is 100 times better than what you may find in Bombay.

Idle cabs! Who cares!

[oyo mamo]

Way to go chris jon, don't let them trample FREEDUMB.

[shalini]

Dear Chris
An incisive recap of India but won't agree with the analysis and analogies.

We are in fact very similar to the West as individuals - with perhaps the same aspirations and end goals. But are a stymied lot because of lack of forward planning of the very same technocrat who is a thinker but not a doer.

At heart each Indian craves for convenience and comfort for self - just as you guys do. So you carry the entire month's email in your treo and Manhatten carries its entire music library with it and we have drivers waiting on us the whole day. Because we don't want to suffer the inconvenience of driving in the heat amongst narrow, congested areas on badly maintained roads and then look for parking space in the same melee. You won't do that either. Won't you much rather have a driver do that for you. It is no wonder then that whenever we visit countries such as yours, we marvel at the discipline, road sense and thoughtful planning that has gone behind making driving a pleasure.

As for the drivers, even they are seeking comfort - they would much rather wait and not stress themselves out in a private job where there is no pressure on the employer to follow any strict labor laws because he does not fear persecution as he knows there will be none.

Because we are vast in numbers, we don't value life itself - and this shows in the exploitative employers, labor laws, deaths caused by incorrect diagnoses and medication in hospitals, biased insurance schemes, hit and run trial settlements, et al.

You may call it Waste People and give it a tag of idleness, we call it Struggling People trying to draw whatever little comfort from the struggle itself.

No wonder, you guys seek different challenges - adventure sport is something you guys invented beacuse you were bored with what your regimented, organised and predictable lives had to offer - so you go bungy jumping, you visit strange countries like ours to add to your varied experiences...we on the other hand are living a new challenge each day...

...and the long queue of taxis you found 'idle' were not really that but working and waiting to tank up with CNG as only 1% gas stations have that facility for the 65k numbers of taxis - another manifestation of that 'thinking' technocrat who made it mandatory for all taxis to run on CNG, without the forward planning of equipping all gas stations with that facility...because even he thinks like most of the West that we have an overabundance of human resources who can be taken for a ride!!

India needs to value life first ... and that which is in over abundance often gets misused, ne c'est pas?

[sniper]

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