Satyam bruyat priyam bruyat, na bruyat satyam apriyam. Priyam cha nanritam bruyat, esha dharmah sanatanah. Speak the truth. Speak what is pleasant. Do not speak an unpleasant truth. Do not speak a pleasant untruth. This is the eternal law.
The verse is from the Manusmriti, the ancient law book, chapter 4, verse 138.
On January 7, 2009, B. Ramalinga Raju, chairman of Satyam Computer Services, wrote to his board. He admitted that the company’s books showed cash and bank balances of Rs 5,361 crore, of which Rs 5,040 crore did not exist. “It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten,” he wrote.
In July 2010 his lawyers told a court that he had never written the letter.
When a patient in India has cancer, relatives sometimes ask the doctor not to tell the patient. Doctors call this collusion. A 2018 study in the Indian Journal of Palliative Care found that “the prevalence of collusion was 37%, i.e., in more than one-third of the palliative care patients.”
The study, by Victor, George, Inbaraj and Norman, is titled “Benefit or Harm?” Patients under collusion had lower quality-of-life scores.
“Indians have a difficult time saying no or that you’re doing it the wrong way,” Kris Gopalakrishnan, a co-founder of Infosys, was quoted as saying in the American magazine eWeek.
The outsourcing author Mark Kobayashi-Hillary described what follows: “There is not that hard edge that says, if you’re going to fail, then you’d better communicate that right away.”
In 2006, a study by Peter Schumacher and Eric Olsson of the Value Leadership Group looked at European IT firms that outsource work to India. Every company named the tendency of Indian staff to over-commit as a significant cultural issue.
“We saw several examples of missed deadlines and project failures that the companies attributed to this trait,” the authors said.
In one of the Akbar and Birbal tales, Emperor Akbar’s pet parrot has died. No courtier dares to tell him, because he has ordered that anyone who brings news of the parrot’s death will be hanged. Birbal goes to the emperor and says: “Jahanpanah, your parrot is neither eating anything, nor drinking anything.”
When Akbar asks whether the parrot is dead, Birbal replies: “I did not say it. You said it.”
In February 2012, staff at Kingfisher Airlines had not been paid since December. Its chairman, Vijay Mallya, wrote to them that he had organized funding for their “seriously overdue salaries.” “I hope these efforts will be successful early next week,” he added.
In May he promised that pay would resume on May 9. That date passed. A new email promised salaries by May 15. Staff told Business Today: “The management intentions are questionable.”
When Hanuman returns from Lanka in the Ramayana, Rama has been waiting for news of Sita. Valmiki describes Rama and Lakshmana hearing from Hanuman the “nectar-like” words drishta devi, the queen has been seen. Both were overjoyed.
An article in the Free Press Journal explains why “seen” comes first: “Seen was most important for Rama, hence ‘seen’ first.”
In 3 Idiots (2009), the student Rancho has a simple creed: Aal izz well, all is well. He repeats it whenever his friends grow scared and the stakes rise.
Bas paanch minute. Just five minutes. In its video series Desi D, The Quint jokes about Indian stretchable time and about people who “say they are just five minutes away” when they are not even ready.