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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

It's true that no one will sue you for rounded corners in India. No, why go through the expense and publicity of a lawsuit, when you can simply bribe the local government and telecom monopoly to deny all your requests?

Electricity went out? Sorry, sir, but all our technicians are busy and we won't be able to come fix the lines for another two or three days. Need a faster internet connection? Sorry sir, we're not handling those requests right now. Need to move into a larger building? All of a sudden the building inspectors are looking very closely at the interior plans of the new office.

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This shows what a cliched mindset you have about an entire nation. Electricity doesn't goes out as much as you think. It's hardly an hour in an entire month and it depends on where you live more importantly. And as always you can get inverters for dead cheap here for un-interrupted power supply.

Faster internet connection? Again you have a cliched mentality. You can get an 8Mbps connection with 5min so far for this entire month for $20.

Wake up buddy, this idea that an entire nation is full of shit just because you read articles about a particular place in the news doesn't make sense.

By that logic, everyone in the United States should be eating only burgers, be ridiculously obese and die of heart attack before 30.

What the comment was highlighting was a culture of evasiveness and plausible deniabililty. ie, classic beuracratic tricks of the trade. the electric/internet/etc examples are just placeholders for any problem (mission critical) where you might be at the mercy of this type of behaviour. So, to summarize the stereo-typing is about a certain type of social-interaction, not about technology or intelligence or what not. You may (or may not) want to take issue with the accuracy of this claim, but at least such would be more en pointe.

An hour a month? I wish I lived in that part of India. When I was there, Thursday was typically the day we lost to power cuts. 1 paise for travel? Within city travel was 50-200rs. And $200/month for a good developer? Anyone I'd consider letting near my codebase was at least a lakh a month.

(All numbers for Pune, about 1-2 years ago.)

I did a startup in India, mainly for the cheap labor. I'd happily expand and set up shop in India again, depending on the circumstances. But lets be realistic, rather than pushing hype.

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