Are Indians unnecessarily more tolerant?

“We Indians are a tolerant lot and we can live and adjust anywhere – right from single room flats to places in downtown Manhattan, from roadside tea-shops to CCDs”. How many times have you heard this?

My earlier reaction to these statements was more of approval and pride for being able to ‘adjust’. But of late, I’m thinking that such a tolerance has lowered our expectations and we stop dreaming big, just because we are satisfied with what we are, particularly when it comes to the ambience we live in.

Thanks to Jam, I was reading a book called ‘The Purple cow’ by Seth Godin.

It starts with an interesting story line. Godin was traveling across the French countryside and was initially fascinated by cows on the field. But the fascination went down after seeing a string of similar looking cows. His argument is that a purple cow in the middle would’ve been much more visible because of the difference. He implies that companies have to new expectations and stand out.

It’s very similar as far as our expectations are concerned. How many times have we accepted a lower or moderate quality service as our ‘Indian’ way of life and tolerated it and moved on without being assertive? Following are common examples.

• Losing out 30 paisa on petrol


• Standing in the queue for hours together without complaining to the counter people. This happened in an Indore railway booking center where I was made to stand for 2 hours in a queue. No one else seemed to care. Everyone accepted it as a way of life. One person complaining about the need for more counters might not make a difference, but all the 100 people complaining day in and day out might make the difference between more counters and perpetually standing in queue for hours.


• I’ve read a lot about the inability of Indians to say ‘no’ and doing a patchy job in the end. Why do we assume doing a patchy ‘lesser quality’ job is okay when the other option is to be assertive and do a better quality job?

I’m not suggesting solutions for all this, and I might even be miserably wrong in some of my examples. But it was just a random thought I had that we Indians think tolerance is good and hence settle for a lesser quality service. Maybe the quality of service improve manifold if we start being more assertive and demand what we really deserve?