Sundays at the Office

In October 2023 the Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy said on a podcast: “My request is that our youngsters must say, ‘this is my country, I want to work 70 hours a week.'”

In January 2025 a video of S.N. Subrahmanyan, chairman of Larsen & Toubro, reached the public. He told employees he was sorry he could not make them work on Sundays. “How long can you stare at your wife?” he asked, Moneylife reported.

Business leaders, among them Harsh Goenka and Harsh Mariwala, criticized the remarks. L&T replied that “extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary effort.”

The Family Registers

In Haridwar, around 2,000 pandas, priests of the holy city, “preserve the lineages of their clients in the ‘Bahi khatas’,” the registers they keep. “The clientele of a particular panda is decided on the basis of the village, district and the state they come from,” DT Next reported in 2021.

Before written records, the pandas “used to memorise the names, clans and places of origin, and pass down the information orally to their next generations.”

Attested by a Gazetted Officer

Indians applying to government offices often needed copies of their mark sheets, birth certificates and other papers attested by a gazetted officer, a senior government official. An affidavit was the alternative.

In July 2014 the central government asked states and union territories to accept self-attested copies instead where possible. The change was to come in phases. Attestation stayed where a law requires it.

Jugaad

In rural Punjab, a jugaad is a vehicle built from what is at hand. One kind bolts a farm trailer to a diesel engine of the kind that drives water pumps. Another, in Moga, fixes a 10 horsepower irrigation pump engine to the front of a wooden cart. It carries about 40 people.

The word means a workaround. In 2017 the Oxford English Dictionary added it: “A flexible approach to problem-solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way.”

Jaan-Pehchaan

Jaan-pehchaan means knowing people and being known by them. A study by Berger, Barnes, Konwar, Singh and colleagues surveyed managers at more than 300 companies in India.

It describes three parts of the practice: pehchaan, recognition, len-den, give and take, and bharosa, trust. Together they shaped how satisfied companies were with their business relationships and how long they planned to keep them.

The Head Bobble

In India a side-to-side movement of the head often answers a question. Wikipedia’s article on the head bobble says that “most frequently it means yes, or is used to indicate understanding.” It can also take the place of a thank-you.

The meaning depends on context. “An unenthusiastic head bobble can be a polite way of declining something without saying no directly.”

Yes, But

In 2008 the British magazine Information Age asked why Indian outsourcing staff seemed to agree so readily. Girish Vadya, head of the leadership training institute at Infosys, was quoted: “The way an Indian will say no is to say Yes, but…”

The article added: “They find it very difficult to say no directly.” It called this a deeply engrained part of the culture. Some Indian providers had begun to train their staff to be more assertive.

understand-culture
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