I do read books on a smartphone, but I don't own an Eink Reader. Well, I did; I had two. But some fiends stole it from me. They had initially posed as the sons of ministers in Assam. They usually do this in India to impress people, especially foreigners and NRIs who are not fluent or amnesiac about these nefarious enterprises. I was conned.
Anyway, long story short, I also got beaten pretty badly with hockey sticks, and a local taxi driver and his friends saved me from getting killed. In 2014, when Modi visited the US, I thought, like many who do now, that India had morphed into a place suitable for business. It has not. It's still the same corrupt shop it used to be, and you need to be a company as big as Amazon or Google or well versed in the Indian ecosystems to get anywhere or to absorb the shocks.
What works elsewhere doesn't work here, and the picture postcards are a lie. Indians are also very power-, race-, and wealth-centric; if you have a white partner, have a BMW, and have affiliations with real ministers, a lot of people will see merit in you, even if there's none. Indian businesses don't invest in startups; you have to come prepared with your own pool of cash, and if you run out of it, don't think it's going to be at all easy trying to raise money in India. All the grandstanding and pledges are brazen, untruthful statements; the government only wants the companies that have money to splurge to come to India so that a lot of that can get funneled into the dark alleys of corruption and nepotism.
You could become one of them. I was invited to cheat Americans, and funds were offered to me to start yet another clandestine operation, given my command of the language and my accent. When I refused I was lectured on the principles of business as they apply in India—an Indianized version of the Machiavellian end justifies the means. Kolkata has in fact become a center for fraud, and these centers are still doing brisk business thanks to the collusion with the powers that support them. I'd rather starve than be a conniving crook.
It's just a bad taste in my mouth when I see that I'm surrounded by people like this who think this is as viable a method of existence as any. And the kind of idiotic history that some of them have been fed, where anyone with white skin is a colonial villain and therefore stealing his or her retirement funds and credit cards can be morally justified, makes me throw up. What kind of distorted worldview people have. This is the reverse side of racism that people don't talk about.
