BackOpinion | A wake-up call for Indian timeliness
What got Narayana Murthy upset ought to make us all squirm. If we fail to get a fix on punctuality, India’s much-talked-about rise in the 21st century could take forever
PremiumWhen N.R. Narayana Murthy airs a grievance, or even hints at one, it pays to pay attention. This applies not just to the executives and employees of Infosys, the software services company he co-founded in 1981, retired from in 2006 and shook up in 2017, but for many more Indians than we perhaps care to acknowledge. The last time round, it was about how Infosys was being run. This time, it’s about time, or about timeliness, rather, an abstract noun that remains an abstraction in this country. Murthy was among the speakers at an Amazon event held in New Delhi on Wednesday that was a good hour-and-a-half off its schedule. When he finally got the mike for his turn, what rang out loud and clear across the packed venue at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium was his displeasure. “I was supposed to speak for 20 minutes," he announced, “but will now try and finish it in five minutes because I am not used to delays." He delivered a truncated speech and then walked off the stage in what seemed like a huff, before he was called back in an apparently placatory gesture as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos went up to present him a token of the company’s appreciation.
That Murthy values every nanosecond should surprise nobody. By most accounts, a work culture of clockwork precision has served him well all through his career, as also his colleagues at Infosys and its shareholders. What’s important right now, however, is that his message is not lost on the multitudes out there. In a country of slackers, it’s often a Sisyphean exercise for a leader to acquaint people with the fact that time is valuable in a way that even money is not. Once lost, it cannot be regained. This logic seems to work each time we’re served a reminder of it, but tends to slip at first brush with other thoughts—of eternity, for example, or the infinitude of time. Is that why so many of us wallow in routinely being late? Or is it the virtue we see in elasticity, with “Indian stretchable time" (an expansion of IST) taken as just another sign of our good-natured spirit of accommodation? As with many other things in the country, it may well be a question of context.
A lot of India is indeed punctual. Metro operations in Delhi rarely go off schedule and that’s just one example among many. Social norms, in contrast, stay inescapably casual. So much so that sticklers for timeliness are at risk of being cast as too robotic to be much fun hanging out with. However, there are other unspoken codes, too, that go against punctuality in relatively formal settings. Some of these arise from a misplaced sense of superiority and tend to involve status sensibilities. Murthy’s ire on Wednesday, though, is best read as being about the country’s future. After Amazon’s chief spoke of this being an “Indian century", Infy’s co-founder made it clear that the responsibility of making it happen rested squarely on Indian shoulders. Delays, he implied, were no way to go about it. Several Asian countries gave up their lethargy for dynamism to get ahead. While India may be too chaotic to undergo a quick transformation, a sense of economic urgency could yet exhaust the country’s idle capacity, so to speak. Else, India’s emergence could take forever.
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