India, Traffic & Tipping(Thursday Thoughts)
This is written after a trip to India and the cities Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur.
Traffic
The car trip from Delhi to Agra is the first car trip where I have become exhausted, as a passenger.
First, the traffic is less coordinated and structured than I am used to. For instance, although the road is divided into distinct lanes, these markings function more as decor than actual guidelines. A road marked with two lanes can easily fill four units. The reason I say units, is because it would be misleading to imply that the road was mostly filled with cars. Instead, it is a mix of cars, scooters, trucks, tuk-tuks, tractors, people, cows, camels and elephants. The last two are a bit of an over-exaggeration and were not that common.
This results in a complexity that eliminates the possibility of following a predictable path and replaces it with constant short-term path-planning. In tech words; Building self-driving cars is much easier in Norway.
There are two ways of solving an optimization problem; Either maximize the objective function or minimize the negative of the objective function. In the traffic, the objective function is the flow, and it is optimized in the interaction of all the individual actors trying to individually optimize their route from A to B. What is often interesting about optimization problems is to find proxies for the objective functions. One possible proxy for the optimization of traffic flow is the minimization of unused space. For instance, if there is unused space, it is quickly used by a scooter or a person to find their respective path from A to B. Note that this is more about local optimization, and for global optimization, a top-down approach like the metro-network in Tokyo is probably better.
A consequence of the minimization of unused space is the immediate closeness of everything. While I expected the closeness, the combination with stasis served a new experience. Whenever a traffic jam or a red light occurred, we often ended up-close with someone else. At first, the physical barrier created by the metal and glass of the car gave some breathing room, but it sometimes had the opposite effect. For instance, at some of the crosses, a seller or a beggar could approach the car and stare at us for a long time. Rather uncomfortable, and in these cases, the existence of the physical barrier seemed like the enabling factor.
So far, the description has been in the visual domain, but the audio domain has also been different. While a horn in Norway is used at rare occasions to signal something important, using a horn in India is more like a heartbeat; You do not have to consciously think about doing it, it just happens automatically at frequent intervals.
Tipping
The tipping culture is engrained everywhere, and for the outsider, it can be perceived in two dimensions. The first one is naive and optimistic. In this dimension, everything can be seen as genuinely nice, everybody does their best to provide superb service and make sure that everything is good. This dimension is utopian. But, a strange aspect of these «genuine» gestures are the annoyed objections if the gesture is rejected. And, if a gesture truly is genuine and on the premises of the receiving party, rejection of the gesture should be a part of the gesture itself. This leads to the second dimension where everything is done solely as a means to an end, i.e. provide a service to earn money. When the service is not done as an end in itself, the entire premise of genuine niceness seems false. As usual, the reality is seldom black or white but fluctuates somewhere in between.
And this fluctuation has been fascinating to observe. When I arrived in India my perception was definitely more in the first dimension, but it gradually moved towards the second dimension. While the service has been good, the fact that, ultimately, there is always supposed to be paid a tip, has been weird. Just as the perception during the whole trip has been a gradual shift from the first to the second dimension, the same shift has been apparent during each day as well. While the start of the day has been more optimistic, the later part has been more skeptic.
In business, there are many tricks that can be applied to earn more money. For instance, if a customer is unsure if she wants to eat at a restaurant, it is a nice trick for the server to seat her at a table while she looks at the menu. This increases the friction of walking away from resulting in a higher likelihood of the customer eating at the restaurant. It works well until the customer becomes aware of the trick. And when that occurs, a trick can be perceived as an attempt to exploit the customer and thus create distrust.
The same principle applies to the tipping culture. All the tips a person receives can be presented in a distribution with the amount of money on the x-axis and the number of tips on the y-axis. Although the person receiving the tip is perfectly aware of the most frequent tipping amount and the normal range for tipping, this information is carefully hidden from the tourist. The reason for this secrecy is the tail of the distribution, consisting of the high tips from tourists who have no idea what is normal to tip. It, therefore, makes sense to focus on fattening the tail. In this pursuit, the incentives change from providing a good service to identifying and tricking tourists. The thing is, if the tourist is aware of the normal tipping range and someone hint towards a tip that far exceeds that range, the distrust will probably result in a lower tip.
Another side-effect of the relentless search for tip-adding services is the creation of services that increase friction instead of reducing it. A stark contrast to the narrative of automation where the focus is to reduce human presence in processes at all costs.
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Have a great weekend,
Erlend