Understanding Value differences of the developed world

By: Procyon Mukherjee

Zurich

Recently my sixteen year old had a tryst with the values in an Indian setting while she
was doing a project on Community Development in Kolkata. Some of the value
differences that she observed when she compared the same values with the developed
world where she now lives stunned me and therefore this account.

Her story starts with the incident of a security guard who had been deputed by one of my
friends to escort my daughter to one of the villages (clearly an act of overdoing things
that I could not quite comprehend) and this particular security guard reported for duty at
my house in Kolkata (with a large gun at his shoulder and bullets on his side) with a huge
salute to my mother and said, ‘Maiji, jo hokum ap kijiye meye ap ke liye hajir’, which
means, ‘Dear Mother, whatever you demand that I do for you, you may ask me to do
that’, which is almost the same words that great Hanuman, in the epic Ramayana used to
say to Sita. My mother however retorted back, ‘Baba, amar kajer lok to aj neyi, tumi baba
du jora dab ektu kete debe’ which means, ‘Son, my domestic help is not available today,
could you break two pairs of coconuts for me?’ The huge guard knelt down to break
coconuts and then joined in the drinking of that (including the eating of the shell inside);
it must have been quite a sight for my daughter!

A security guard reporting for duty for escorting any daughter would never utter such
words in any part of the developed world and nor would the grandmothers ask for such
favors as mentioned above. The world is really different in many corners. Her second
example is even more thought provoking. During her stay my daughter’s hair drier
stopped working and there was a need for an electrician to come to the house to repair it.
This electrician who happens to live close by took care of the problem and at the end
asked what else he could do to my mother, to which my mother asked him, ‘Baba, could
you buy some medicines for me from the nearest store, my domestic help is missing
today?’

The electrician happily complied, and he did everything just for free.

I remembered my experience with the Swiss Electrician in Zurich (or should I say
inexperience?) when the first electric bulb stopped functioning when I tried to turn the
bulb too much to one side and the wire snapped inside. Not knowing how to fix this
without any wire or soldering iron or tape, I sought the help of the ‘Relocation Agency’
in Zurich and phoned them up. The agency came back after a few minutes ‘fixing’ the
appointment with an Electrician in Zurich who would come over to the house. I chanced
to ask her what the ‘expected’ fees would look like and she chirped it could be in the
region of Swiss Francs 150, since the person had to drive all the way from Oerlikon and
was anyway quite busy and was not quite used to such errands. I took the opportunity to
cancel the appointment.
My second encounter with the plumber was a bit more memorable, the wash-room cistern
stopped functioning and we had to call the plumber through the Relocation Agency again
and this time he did come at the appointed hour and fixed the problem in a minute. I later
on got the invoice for Swiss Francs 130 for the services rendered.

I was glad that he did not ask me whether he could do anything more.

It is just not about cost of living and the price one has to pay in the developed world, it is
more about values and how they differ. There is nothing as good or bad, in these
examples, it is just that the examples talk about two different value systems in place.

Not everything is about money where poverty is more rampant and earnings are
moderate, services could be given for free, as relationships are valued more than the
return to be sought from services rendered; where development had taken men to
different levels of cost of living, there is little chance that services could be rendered
beyond the principles of economics.

In fact many things in the developed world are constrained by the principles of
economics, like supply and demand or the theories of surplus value; human relationships
are confined by their boundaries and stretching beyond these boundaries, no matter how
much one would desire, would be difficult. But I was particularly interested in the
examples of behavior of people under identical conditions and how these behaviors
differed as the values did.

My mother in law has an endemic problem with her bone structure and continues to
suffer. She has a perennial problem when she tries to walk and would be able to do that
with a lot of difficulty. My wife was almost always at her side escorting her throughout
her walks in the various cities that she visited. She held her hand and walked at her pace
and this was perhaps the only reason why my mother-in-law could walk such long
distances in all the cities, which she would never be able to dream of doing in Kolkata.

I frequently see old women in trains and trams with walkers and sticks in Europe and I
have almost never seen any one including their spouses helping them when they struggle
to walk. I think the difference lies in values. In these parts of the developed world, people
value independence and being proud to be able to stand on one’s own feet without any
help. In our part of the world we value dependence and we value getting care and help
from others, and specially our own children.

But why would such behaviors be so different? There is nothing wrong in any of these
behaviors, but the impact of these behaviors on the character of a nation is deeper.
Imagine what happens when a child turns sixteen in these parts of the world. She
becomes independent to do things and considers herself a grown up. The world around
her celebrates this growing up; in fact there are two other celebrations that had already
taken place in the past, the graduation ceremonies at the school when she moved into the
middle school and the next one when she moved into the high school. I think in the
Indian context, there is nothing ceremonious about this event, because no father would be
happy thinking that the daughter is now independent at the age of sixteen and would
leave her to pursue things on her own and stop supporting her. In some of the extreme
examples in the developed world I have seen children doing menial work to be able to
pursue studies or even do things that they love. They value independence and they
lovingly start supporting themselves instead of ‘depending’ on their parents ( I saw the
richest kid in our locality serving in the departmental store throughout the summer).

I think this value has got to do with economics as well. Where demand is constrained,
and we have excess supply of labor, there is a need to constrain supply of labor. That is
not the case in the developed world, where labor is in short supply as hordes of people
move from lower income levels to higher income levels and this value addition attracts
new labor needs at the bottom of the pile. If this progression continues, there would be
the constant need to supply labor at the bottom of the pile. This menial labor force if I
may call it, is temporary, as more skill, knowledge and expertise is garnered the upward
movement is propelled. The rest of the system actually supports this activity for its own
good. The values of independence are actually created by this economic necessity, not the
other way round.

But the developed world had gone far and may be a bit too far on this; not caring for
parents is something that goes beyond needs of economics. The Western world had gone
far on marital values as well, but that is itself a complex subject matter, which cannot be
so easily explained. But I would like to touch upon the concept of family in the
developed world and how it differs in the other part.

In the past I have had the privilege of mixing with families of colleagues in my earlier
jobs in India. The transparent environment made it possible for people to know about
families, just not through parties but even more as the families informally met as well.
But I found it queer that such free mixing with families is not in the culture of the West,
in fact knowing about what happens to kids or parents of colleagues is not a common
thing. I came to know later that family is more a private thing and openness that one
would expect as in the Indian world, is something not so desirable here.

Taking this forward one would find the preponderance of individual boundaries that the
Western world puts to island itself and the relative importance that an individual space
carries more than the collective space. The difference between the individual and
collective space is what differentiates the two cultures, no wonder it creates a difference
in creativity as well.

Let me now move to another set of values that differ and this is more meaningful in the
context of business. In the developed world leisure is valued, while hard work is in the
developing world. Here again I see that when productivity rises there is always the less
need for men for any work and more the need for people who normally do hard work
reduces. This helps to create more leisure hours for all categories of men and this had
been turned into a positive business proposition in Europe as more people enjoy leisure
and holidays the service economy is helped to prosper through this.
The striking difference that we attach to various hierarchies of work and its complete
absence stunned me. Our domestic help in Switzerland, who works for us for three hours
every fortnight, started explaining to my wife how she knew about the books that I kept
in my study. Later my wife learnt to her utter bewilderment that she was actually a
primary school teacher who quit her job to pursue more leisurely work styles like
providing domestic help (which could be having very flexible hours, while teaching
would be very stressful and time consuming). This example is odd for an Indian setting
where every work is associated with a social hierarchy and actually distinguishes people.
In fact the caste system created this work hierarchy and for centuries that segmented the
society on these terms, with almost no possibility for breaking some of the rules. Adam
Smith’s division of labor assumes a different connotation given this example.

When choices can be made between freedom and basic needs, when hierarchy of needs
could be fulfilled, I do see such examples surfacing in our part of the world. I would like
to end with two examples, the first one on Indian values, one that happened with my
Indian colleague when he suddenly discovered that he was given two hundred Euros
more than what was due from the bank where he was exchanging dollars. When he came
back from his trip from Germany he went back to the bank to return the money. The guys
at the bank were quite taken aback by this gesture and asked him from which country he
was coming from. Later they gave him a beautiful set of Swiss knives as a good gesture,
since they had no hope of recovering the money that they had written off as bad debt. I
assume that they did not expect anyone to return a sum of 200 Euros which had been
transferred wrongly but with no strings of a legal entitlement that could be progressed if
the money was not returned.

Another example I would take is on the Swiss values of caring for nature. Once when I
was passing by the trees around the lake in the peak of winter, I found that an old lady
was putting some food for the birds at the base of the tree, for the birds to eat; it would
have been quite difficult for these birds who had not migrated to be able to gather food,
with snows all around. It was not possible for me to know whether this was a government
sponsored program, but whether or not it was, it was a sparkling gesture to do with nature
what many would not do for their own. Examples are galore how the nature is preserved
here in Switzerland through deeply seated values that talk about frugality and doing
things for others without any direct economic link.

I explored this example to my younger daughter’s spring field trip where she went to
South of Switzerland and lived in camps. She had to do all the daily chores like a
villager; milking cows, sweeping floors, cleaning toilets were part of this routine. The
responsibilities included caring for nature, preserving what needs to be preserved, just not
for self, but for the community and also being timeless in content. At her impressionable
age, I believe it will stay for a long time, as it does with all the people of Switzerland.

The school curriculum extends the social responsibility example in more ways than one.
So while on one hand there are extremities seen in terms of individual freedom, there is
equal focus on social responsibility, no wonder no one would ever dare think of making a
place unclean by throwing unwanted things. The 5 S Example at the country level, there
is perhaps Switzerland alone, which can think of achieving.

But the crux of the puzzle lies in the understanding of the fact that people attach far less
importance to titles and status, every individual can take pride in what he is, regardless of
what he had achieved relative to others and there is no need to attach special strings to
these titles by way of privileges that a common man cannot enjoy. There are only six
ministers in Switzerland and none of them travel in pomp and glory like in any other
place, in fact most of them avail public transport like buses and trains; the ex-CEO of
UBS who lives close to my place always used to take the same tram that I take for going
to office every day.

I would like to complete this essay taking a more mundane domestic example to
demonstrate further how values differ. Cooking one’s own food and cooking a lavish
meal for guests is an act of great satisfaction that we value in our part of the world. In this
part, cooking is an act that does not exist beyond the bare necessities (baking, heating,
etc), in fact most people spend not more than three hours on this act per week on
weekdays and eat out on weekends. Now compare that with what an Indian household
would do, it would be at least 14 man hours per week, this difference of 11 man hours
translates to 572 man hours per year or almost a full month of employment in a year. It is
the wife in India or the domestic help who takes up this job, but not in the developed
world. In absence of domestic help, the job has to be shared equally between the spouses.
The eating habit thus changes to more semi-cooked food and thus the cooking time
further comes down. Actually this stimulates the economy in terms of moving towards
more value added food for week days and using the hospitality services for the weekends.
By staying in the low value add content of food, our developing world values have stayed
where they were in the past. But that is perhaps changing, but changing slowly. As we
start to outsource services we would be gaining very precious hours that could be
gainfully employed by an individual for the pursuits he or she enjoys. This would be the
start of the individual space to widen and the collective space to shrink.

It must start from our kitchens!

Procyon Mukherjee
Zurich
23rd July 2009