It has taken me 27 long years to get the enlightenment that I have got today. I am an Indian, and I should help the poor people in my country, or others will come forth and do what you can do but don’t do, and they will project the whole country as a charity case.
India is not such a bad country. Well, thanks to the lazy politicians and the bad government officials, the roads and the garbage bins are not always clean, and due to the lack of awareness of people and ofcourse, thanks to a bit of shortage of money, the homes of the people of the lower income group people do not really look like five star hotels.
What should the government do about this? If the politicians stop thinking about feeding their pockets for a while and start thinking about how to improve the income of the country or the state, the money problem can be solved easily, and when there is money with the government, it can easily provide useful constructive work to everyone, pay them all well, and that way the social status of people would improve naturally. But the government is not doing this. It is just wasting money to help people without making them work for it, at the cost of the tax payer. And the tax payer doesn’t even get a Thank You when he pays his taxes properly. In fact, the tax payer gets nothing at all. He pays 30% of what ever he earns to the government, and 50% of what is left will be used up to his costs of living, and the remaining money he spends in paying interest to his housing loan or to what ever financing he has got.
The banks get richer, the government officials get richer, and the poorer keep on getting poorer. People who know this much invest their knowledge in making movies like Sivaji, and they put the money in their own pockets. Any family under the poverty line would not stay away from watching a movie like Shivaji. It is after all a Rajni Kanth movie. The Super Star of Tamil Nadu. When the Tamil Nadu government gives rice to the poor at Re. 1, the money that the people save from that goes to the movie stars or to liquor shops. And when the bread winner of a poor family becomes an alcoholic, the family falls into poverty. The children are malnourished, dont get good education, and at times are sent to child labour, and in more pathetic situations, girl childs are sent off to far away places from their homes to do flesh trade at very young ages.
If Rajni Kanth earns about a hundred crores from a movie or from any business that he does apart from acting, he might give off 1 crore to charity, and that is just 1 % of what he has made from the people. But to the poor man, this 1 crore is a lot of money, and when he hears that his Super Star has given off a crore to charity, he naturally spreads the word and he becomes even more famous and in the next movie he would earn more money. He donates with a business aspect, and probably for tax gains too.
Well, my enlightment came this morning. In an email from an American lady here in Pondicherry called Michelle West with whom I have been communicating for the past few days for her website. About a week ago, she came to our office with someone else and said that she has a domain name called mustardseedalliance.com and has just got a wordpress blog in it, and that she wanted to revamp the site and put up a new template and stuff. We had quoted her Rs 8000 for the work, which would come to about $200 and she had agreed. She refused to pay any money in advance, and had said that she would pay on completion of the work. She doesn’t have a mobile number, we dont know where she lives and all that we have got is her email address. We have a few projects going on already, and those are a bit higher paying, and we did not want any wastage of time, but still, since this was for a charity organization, we decided to go ahead with it, and our designer had made good layouts for the site, and the lady liked it and called us for a discussion on how to take it further.
She refused to come to our office for the 2nd discussion, and invited myself and our senior designer to a coffee shop near the beach. Personally I never go to the client’s place for any meeting. It is a policy of mine. I treat the office as a Temple of Saraswathi, and if the client wants something from the temple, its the client who has to come to the temple. If the client doesn’t want to come to the temple, well there are always emails and phones. I will never go to a clients place. But I did go yesterday, since a meeting with an American lady who should be about 50 years of age sounded good. She took about 2 hours of our time, and all the type of content that she wanted for her website seriously offended me.
She wanted a miserable starving child in rags on the home page, and she was very particular that there should be no happy face on the site, every one should look real sad and starved and pathetically desperate to live. With these photographs, her texts would read that Michelle is the woman who is helping all these people and without Michelle, these people would have died, or would have become enslaved and become victims of child labour and sexual abuse and stuff.
But Michelle cannot do all these alone, and she needs money. So there is a donate page at the end of the site, and you can click in there and donate with your paypal. And once she sets up a trust here in India, I am sure that she would bring in a lot of funds from every rich country in the world, which if you look closely, will be filled with Indians working for them day and night.
I didn’t like the meeting at all. I didn’t like the way she spoke. First she was too proud that she was white. Then she behaved like she was the only hope for India. And then she bargained that we were charging her $200 when there were others who said that they could do it for $100. What she doesn’t realize is that our company doesn’t really have to do $200 websites to survive, and actually we are too busy at the moment, and that 2 hours for our designer at the client’s place is a lot of time and money for us. I came back to the office and that night she mailed me saying that she needs to see some developments today, and I told her that I could meet her by 12.
Looks like she didn’t read that mail properly. I did not reach the office today till 12, and when I sat at my desk once I arrived, I saw a huge bunch of emails in my mail box starting from 10 am today from Michelle. Ravi where are you? Ravi when would you be coming? Ravi I have a lot of things left to do, Ravi blablabla. I just checked at my office and replied to her mail saying that I would not be coming but my designer is on the way and he would meet you, show you the developments and needs to return back in a few minutes since he is busy with another work.
She shot back a reply immediately. Do you know that I have been waiting here for 2 hours shooting mails at you? You show up after 2 hours and say that you are not coming but your designer is on the way? Everyone told me that Indian companies like yours and its people are just like this. This is exactly why I refused to pay any money in advance. I was really worried about this, and it has hapened. They do something at first, and they never show up when they give you an appointment. I cannot meet your guy now as I have another appointment, and I have to go.
That was the end of the email. And anyone would assume from this tone without any indication to a possiblity for a future meeting that the project has been called off. Well, waste of time as expected, I thought, and called my designer on his mobile and made him come back. She still has the design layouts, and any one with basic html and photoshop skills can make that into a good looking website.
I replied saying sorry for the delayed replies, but I thought that the appoinment was at 12 pm, and why have you been sending mails from 10 am itself?
It was clearly a misunderstanding. She had not read my mail properly, and thought that it was scheduled for 10 o clock this morning. She replied with a No, and said that we had agreed at 10 am. I pasted the text of the previous mail in which I had given her the time, and then she replies and says ‘My Mistake’. The 2 words showed how pale her face must have been. Had she forgotten to take her acne pill by any chance?
I just went hoem to Lunch.
At home I have this habbit of checking mails, and when I did, I found another mail from her saying that the designer has not reached her yet, and that she had been waiting for another 30 mins. What the bloody hell? Didn’t she just say that she had another meeting and wouldn’t want to meet my designer? I replied telling her that I have called the designer back. And I also added a few lines saying that I didn’t like her contents one bit, and I feel like I am selling my country, putting up pathetic photos so that you can beg money with it, and God knows how much you would really spend for the children on the photos and how much would go into your pocket.
She replied to his mail saying that she respects Indians and that the website projects only the poorer class of people in the country and that she respects me as a businessman and that she is a christian here in India to do charity and that I have worked and that deserves to be paid and stuff. Pathetic. What do these bloody Americans think about Indians? It made me feel really really bad. So this is the value that India and its computer guys have got globally. Think of all the Indians who are working in the US. Do they really have to do this? When I, just one guy, cannot stand this when I am sitting here in India minding my own business, how do Indians in the US tolerate all this? Dont they feel ashamed when their bosses call India as a land of poverty, a land of starving children? What would these people do? Defend themselves? Or just laugh along with their bosses? Or don’t mind what is being said and just do their work and count their money?
If all those bastards who belong to India and are working for other countries come back here and work here, India would become better than the US or what ever motherfucking super power there is. If someone says there is no work here, fuckin create work. Bring out all the bloody Indians working in Microsoft, make a company in India and promote a bug free OS that is better than Windows. Improve the standards of the lower class people, and make them work for their bread, and let them not depend on such stupid charitable organizations and government aids. Charities just come about, shoot photos and videos and they just leave. No one ever makes sure that the money reaches the poor.
If you are reading this and are not an Indian, and wish to donate to India, please donate to Unicef and to organizations like CRY, and not to these small scale NGOs with just 1 woman and with not even an office.
who is lacking professionalism here?