Culture Shock 2
Looking at India as a United States resident, one month in
In Culture Shock I wrote about my observations about life in the United States as an Indian.
Having now lived in the US for three years and having recently been back in India for a month-long trip, here’s a short list of things I found newly different about India that I’d always assumed to be the defaults worldwide. A lot of these might be specific to Pune.
It’s way dustier, man. This isn’t new, everyone talks about this, but you really feel it once you get used to things not being as dusty anymore. This dustiness is also the main reason that a photo taken in the US looks so much better than a similar photo taken in India - the air is just cleaner. And that’s before we even get into AQI numbers or mention New Delhi here.
Inflation in just the last couple of years has gotten crazier in India than in the US.
Having lived in the same city all my life, I had a pretty okay sense of how much things used to cost in Rupees (₹), but that’s gone out of the window now. I was going back after just two years, but every time I tried to guess how much something would cost on this trip, even simple stuff like groceries and restaurant food, I’d end up underestimating the actual price. I made a joke with some friends that these inflated prices make me feel like India is using a new currency called Rupee2 (₹₹) now, because the entire paradigm I had of Rupees in my head is now outdated. At this point I have a better sense of how much things cost in US dollars, which is kinda weird and arguably a bit sad.
Naturally there’s more people on the streets, which is expected given the differences between the US and India in both the total population and population density, but what I noticed newly is that there’s so many people on the streets talking on the phone at any given time. Who are they all talking to? What are they talking about? I mean, I’m on bullshit phone calls with friends all the time, but that’s always when I’m chilling at home and not outdoors at a tea stall on a business day at 2pm. The reason I felt this difference is that I hardly see anyone in the US talking on the phone in public - most people are looking into their smartphone screens.
My experiences with domestic flights and airports also had slight differences.
Most domestic flyers in India check in their luggage, even the carry-on sized bags. Indian airlines - at least IndiGo - don’t charge extra for checking in baggage even on domestic flights. In the US this would be unthinkable as most airlines will charge you $50 or more for each checked-in bag, and I’ve hardly seen anyone do it. I don’t know what the cause-effect is for either country here, whether the airline costs determine what people do or whether the culture of carrying bags with yourself or not causes airlines to price things accordingly.
This is purely vibes based and I could be wrong, but I feel like airport-inflation in India is much higher than it is in the US. Generally things in American airports seem to cost the same or just slightly more as everywhere else. In Indian airports you feel the extra markup.
I noticed new things while eating at restaurants as well.
The US simply does not have these “udupi-style” restaurants where you’re seated outside of the restaurant’s building but with a tarp or a corrugated roof sheet over that section, so you’re technically indoors but get the outdoor-ish benefits of sunlight and pleasant weather. Any US restaurant is either completely indoors or with optional European-cafe-like outdoor seating, which doesn’t really hit that sweet spot.
Having women wait tables in restaurants is common in the US, even the default maybe, but unheard of in India. All my life the waiters I’d seen everywhere were men. The first and only female waitress I ever saw in India was on this trip, which felt odd for some reason, which is how I realized that it was new.
Waitstaff in restaurants in India actually serve food from a large serving dish into your plate, like they literally scoop gravy and rice into a spatula and serve you your servings till you ask them to stop. I’ve never seen this in the US and it feels unthinkable here; either you get your meal in a plate itself and there’s nothing to serve, or you get a large dish and serve it onto your plate yourself.
Similarly, if you want to take food home they’ll transfer your leftovers into a disposable container for you, and hand you the packed container. In the US they just hand you an empty to-go box and you pack the food yourself.
Mango lassi seems to be the staple choice of drink for Indian food in the US and I don’t know how that happened. Nobody in India drinks mango lassi, I’ve never even seen it on a menu in my entire life. In fact if you ask for one in a restaurant they drag you into the back kitchen and shoot your kneecaps.
Parking is so much more easier.
In the US, if I want to park a car on a street I have to find an empty spot, decipher the complex parking sign nearby to find out if I can park there on that hour of that day, shove my car in, pay on the meter nearby, and then later on make sure I haven’t exceeded my time limit.
In India, all I had to do was check for No Parking signs, then check for P1 and P2 signs (P1 indicates that you can park on that side of the street on odd-numbered dates, P2 on even-numbered dates), and shove my car in. Street parking in India is free. No meter, no ticket (as long as you don’t block an entrance), no hassle. I always took this for granted.
Another reason parking is easier is that I go to most places on a two-wheeler and they’re even easier to shove into open spots.
Ride sharing apps like Uber and Ola have an OTP (one-time password) system. When you get into an Uber the driver doesn’t bother asking your name to confirm that you’re the guy who booked the cab. Instead you just give them a 4-digit number that’s displayed on your app, they enter it into theirs, and the ride (and your identity) is confirmed. Pretty slick, though a strong indicator of a low-trust society if there ever was one.
I was at a bank and a customer walked in and started literally screaming at this bank employee for having made some mistake earlier and it reminded me that I’ve seen verbal abuse of staff regularly in public places like banks and stores throughout my life in India but never once in the US.
I never noticed this before, but in Pune when you’re talking to a stranger, you start talking in one of three languages depending on context, really. And if the person doesn’t speak the language you started with, they won’t tell you that directly or ask you to repeat yourself, but rather they’ll reply to you in their preferred language and then you can continue the conversation in that language. This isn’t a big deal but this language-friction simply isn’t there in the US, though I have had people in some places start a conversation with me in Spanish to which, like Kanye, I always reply with “No hablo”, which is the only Spanish I know.
I agree that UPI as a payment system is absolutely revolutionary but Apple Pay is so much easier because I don’t have to type in an amount or a PIN anywhere, I simply have to tap my phone near the card reader and voila. But that said, UPI is truly more “universal” because I can use it for all transactions, personal or business. I don’t need separate apps like Venmo or Zelle to send money to friends, just one UPI app is enough for literally everything.
There seems to be a lot of overemployment. As soon as I landed in Mumbai, I saw so many policemen and staff in different parts of the airport just sitting by idly. I only noticed this because it felt new somehow. Even at the parking entrances of shopping malls, where the driver is simply supposed to press a button at the gate to get their ticket and gain access, they have a person hired who stands next to the gate arm and presses the button for you and hands you your ticket. Why?! My cousin said that “India is AI proof” because any automated solution will still be somehow implemented manually LMAO.
A new crop of delivery apps like Blinkit and Zepto have come up in the last couple of years that deliver most kinds of groceries, food, and other goods to your home in less than fifteen minutes. Yes, literally. Apparently these companies have multiple warehouses stocked with these goods in different parts of each city, which is how they’re able to get riders to deliver so quickly, but it’s still absolutely bonkers.
In general, because of the abundance of both labor (see point above) and of bikes (which are way faster and easier to park), any kind of B2C delivery experience in India is miles (kilometers?) ahead of that in the US. I miss Swiggy every day.
There’s way too much SMS spam in India, dude. We abuse SMSes. I get an OTP through SMS any time I want to make a credit card purchase and another one confirming that I’ve made the purchase. I get a confirmation SMS even for UPI transactions, even though I can see the confirmation on the UPI app itself. And this is without mentioning offers, scams, and other SMS spam. At this rate in the future I’ll get a text every time I take a dump.
In the US I don’t get a text for any transaction at all. My credit card could get stolen and the thief could purchase $500 worth of crystal meth on my name and I wouldn’t find out till I checked the statement. That said I actually prefer this (not the meth).
Speaking of taking dumps, I miss my handheld bidet spray so, so much. It’s insane that Americans don’t use bidets at all.
Maybe the only thing I miss more than my bidet is the thing that causes me to use it in the first place: food. There’s no shortage of good grub in most places in the US, but in terms of optionality and availability there’s really no comparison. I legit have better snacking options at 4am in any major Indian city than I do even after 11pm in most places in America. In fact if you dare search “food” on Google Maps after midnight anywhere in the US they lower your credit score by fifty points.
I think a broad observation I have of India via US, *including the ritzy parts of India* is that in a similar way that Japan is just a bit nicer than the US (things are cleaner, there's conveniences like double press on elevators etc), the US is just a bit nicer than India. Things like the floors in rich shopping centers will regularly be uneven in India or you'll have someone trying to pull you into their car at the Uber line at the airport (don't even get me started on Indian airport security). I don't have a good explanation of this anymore than I can explain why Japan is nicer than the United States.
This is very interesting to see as a counterpoint to your original culture shock post!
On checked bags: It used to be universal for domestic U.S. flights to offer free checked bags (with certain weight limits), and Americans did more routinely check bags then. I feel like the change toward charging for checked bags happened sometime around 2010 (although maybe I'm off by a few years) and may have been an imitation of European discount airline practices. The fees have definitely reduced Americans' use of checked bags.
On restaurants: There are many restaurants in the U.S. that will pack leftover food to go for the customer. I don't know how to describe the difference between those where the waiter packs the food and those where the customer packs the food, but I've seen both forms. I feel like there's a trend over time toward having customers pack their own food in more and more restaurants, though.
An interesting side note: apparently in earlier generations it was considered embarrassing for customers to ask to take restaurant leftovers home, so they invented the euphemism "doggy bag" which implied (as a face-saving measure) that they were going to feed the leftovers to a pet dog. Actually, they were going to eat the leftovers themselves, but they got to pretend they were taking them home for the dog.
On the super-fast delivery services: There were some startups in the U.S. that experimented with having delivery drivers drive around all the time (with food in their cars) in anticipation of receiving an order. Some also tried having their own warehouses in city centers, I guess like the Indian services are doing. To my knowledge, all of these U.S. startups have failed or changed their business models, so I don't think this service is widely available in the U.S. It could very well be partly because of labor costs here.
On food delivery in general: South America is also amazing for very fast and cheap delivery of a wide range of stuff, normally by a guy on a motorcycle or a moped. Probably also labor costs. I hope more of those mopeds will be electric soon, because the air quality in many of those Latin American cities is also pretty bad.
On texts for transactions: As Shelly B said, you may be able to opt into this with your bank. My impression is that some banks offer it as an opt-in service, while others will only send alerts when their machine learning systems consider a transaction unusually likely to be fraudulent, rather than for every transaction. I believe some banks are also concerned that these text alerts are themselves an avenue for phishing, since a criminal could send a fake warning from a bank about a suspicious transaction, with a notice to call the "bank" (really the criminal) in order to resolve the matter (by giving one's account details and contact information).
I definitely agree that SMS is less used by businesses in the U.S. than in many other countries. I don't know all the reasons for that; one odd theory is that U.S. consumers are much more likely to sue businesses for causing them to incur carrier charges for the SMS (and I think there have already been several large lawsuits related to that, using the class action system where a "class" of consumers can notionally sue a business for a kind of harm that all of them have experienced). If so, this may have made businesses afraid to use SMS for any purpose that customers might consider frivolous or unnecessary, lest lawyers claim that the business must pay for causing mobile carrier charges!
I'm sure you can find some differences between the U.S. and other countries that are downstream of U.S. litigiousness. I certainly remember my sense in Brazil that people were more willing to allow people to be exposed to risks, which I thought probably had a lot to do with personal injury and negligence lawsuits being much rarer in Brazil.