When a bathroom towel restored an Indian bureaucrat’s pride

From the new memoir of Kaushik Basu:

The use of the word, sir, is very common in Indian officialdom.

During a government meeting, Prof Basu recounts, he decided to keep a tab on how many times the word was said.

A senior official, he counted, was saying sir, “on average 16 times every minute (there was a minister present)”.

Assuming it took her half a second to say the word, Prof Basu calculated that 13% of the official’s speaking time was spent saying sir.

And:

Professor Basu found it is “impolite to knock” in officialdom. “Either you have the right to enter a person’s office or you don’t.”

So if you have the right, the “norm is go right in”.

“It has taken me a while to adjust to this custom, it being such a strict norm in the West to knock before entering,” he writes.

And:

But he faced a small problem, adjusting to the new norm.

“What made the adjustment harder is that, given the high humidity in India, many doors are swollen and jammed, and so one needs to push against them for them to open,” he writes.

“The upshot is that not only do you not knock when entering someone’s office, but you often end up entering the room like a cannon ball, as the door suddenly gives way.”

Here is the full story, via Malinga Fernando.

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