So, this is my son here. I want you to give him all my money. He travels a lot and can’t come back when I die. So, in your form, you can write I have died and instructed my money to go to him’. The son sat quietly, only saying, for no particular reason, ‘I’m an NRI.’
The customer service person was quite confused. ‘On someone being deceased, we have a procedure of…’ The lady cut him off, ‘I am telling you, I am dead. I am willing to sign a form to say I am dead.’ Rather than asking, ‘What on earth are you saying?’ the bank person replied, ‘I’ll need to call my senior’.
The senior, a replica of this manager only about four years older, appeared. With no emotion, the junior repeated the lady’s plea. The senior, equally nonchalant, asked, ‘When did you die, madam?’ ‘You know, in the future,’ certain that she was conducting a complex financial transaction. ‘Oh, like that,’ said the senior, adding, ‘Form 463’ to the junior, and walked off.
Much later, I asked the senior what Form 463 was. It turns out there is no Form 463, but sometimes you have to pretend to do something just so that customers with unreasonable demands feel satisfied.
India is the most impossible country on Earth for customer service. A man urinating in Air India business class, or a fight breaking out among Indians on Thai Smile Airways, or an angry IndiGo customer calling a stewardess a servant is just the tip of the iceberg.
I was once on a flight to London on an Indian airline. A man next to me, smashed on four whiskies and no food, started shouting ‘Sunaina!’ and taking off his clothes. The Indian crew tolerated his nonsense till he sobered down. When I could speak to him later, he explained Sunaina was his girlfriend who’d dumped him and was about to marry someone in London.I tried to explain that being nude on a flight was no way of getting her back. He agreed. This being Indian insanity on board an Indian flight, everyone understood. If we were on a foreign carrier, the pilot would have just dropped him off in Uzbekistan (over which he’d started undressing), and told the consulate to handle it, as Air France did, dropping off an Indian drunk man in Bulgaria in 2021, when he was praising our PM, inebriated.
Perhaps, the most fantastic examples of customer service folks are from people who handle customer complaints at any Indian government office or railway station. They don’t even look customers in the eye, quite certain that some abuse will be hurled. If they can get home alive, that by itself is worth a promotion.
The same population that takes shouting in hotel receptions, check-in counters, at restaurant waiters for granted — rooted in the idea that we are paying and so can treat anyone badly because we now own them – become scared servants themselves in front of foreign customer service. It is not uncommon for passengers to literally ‘beg’ for a glass of water on any American airline, which lies on the other end of the spectrum. The main expectation for Indians expecting foreign customer service is: be docile, polite, and grateful. Sadly, their needs are vast, inexplicable and maverick. Only other Indians get it.
At a mobile store, the guy in front of me told the customer service person that he’d lost his phone in a fight, but somehow he managed to steal the other guy’s SIM card, so could the customer service person use this stolen SIM and call his antagonist to retrieve his phone. This being India, the guy used the stolen SIM to make the call: ‘I’m calling from X mobile company. Have you stolen the phone you are using?’
