Liar revisited

When I first came to India I wrote a post about how people just lied straight to your face; the last couple of weeks that has been reinforced. Lots of people have promised a great many things with very few of them actually delivering on their promises. It’s been terribly frustrating, as it has meant that our project has been unnecessarily delayed by weeks at a time. We think we have something in the bag and then we very quickly come to realise that we were far too quick to assume success.

What is more, even when they do agree to do something and really do it, what we often find is that they don’t do it on time! They will say ‘we’ll meet tomorrow morning and work out the legal details’ next thing we know, they haven’t called back till the evening that same day, to say that they need more time.

They have no concept of being in a hurry. Everything here takes a lot longer than it needs to. For example, take the traffic. I think most people in Bangalore waste at least an hour a day stuck in traffic jams. They take it good naturedly, but that’s actually just an indication of how they think. Everything here moves at a bumbling pace that, after Singapore, I find very difficult to work with. This might sound like racism and it probably is, but I’m going to say it anyway: the Indians are intelligent, sophisticated and cultured; but they’re also dishonest, materialistic and bad at meeting deadlines.

Every country, I’m sure, has its drawbacks. It’s just a matter of learning to live with them. The problem is that I’ve still not learned to live with the negative aspects of Indian culture. I just hope that we can still pull this project out of our asses and get everything finished by the deadlines that we’ve set. We’d better, as we’ve already booked the cameras, the studio and the actor. To try and move those to another day might prove extremely hard (though they don’t meet their deadlines themselves, they certainly expect you to live up to your obligations.)

What’s more, I’m really not up for moving my date of going to Goa back any further. I want to get out of Bangalore. It’s a nice place and I’ll certainly come back, but I’m supposed to be traveling around, seeing the sites. So far I’ve only seen a traffic choked city and lots of meeting rooms.

Life is not all fun and games and if it was, we’d get bored of them real fast. Still, it would be nice if things would actually work out as we’ve planned them.