Indian Uber May Not Be Quite Ready for Prime Time

As a bit of light relief from politics and world affairs, here is a traveller’s tale I posted on Facebook last year. It’s the sort of thing that makes for a great story in retrospect but is just a bit nerve-racking while it’s happening.

Sometimes India can catch you out.

The work day was done. I was back at the hotel and just needed to get to the airport. I didn't have any Rupees but I had been assured by one of the new cool tech CEOs of India's cyber hub that Uber works just fine here.

I switched on roaming data and opened the Uber app. A little bit of trial and error found where I was and where I needed to be and my car would be here in 7 minutes. I waited on the roadside outside the hotel where eight lanes of cars and three of motorbikes and tuktuks were wrestling for space on the two lane road. A Maruti Suzuki drew up - the make and model I was waiting for. The first six characters of the 10 digit number plate matched the one in the Uber app and I didn't have time to check any more as the hotel security guard threw my bag into the back seat. The small dark-haired, dark-skinned driver looked more or less like the blurry picture Uber had given me. So I got in the front seat and he took off. Slowly. 

The Uber app said "Congratulations, you're on your way"* and all seemed well until about half an hour later by which time we had moved almost half a mile in traffic now at least twelve lanes wide on a four lane road. Then he turned to me and said

"Hindi, Hindi, Hindi, Hindi, Uber shake head shake head".

This was a worry. Did I mention I had no Rupees? I did to him at that point, but his English was on a par with my Hindi and I didn't think it was worth trying Spanish or French. 

So on we went. At one stage the traffic swelled to about 15 lanes across at a point where two four-lane roads met. Cars were going sideways to eke out a couple of metres of forward movement. Then we got to the toll gate where a scruffy youth came to demand something in Hindi. The driver demanded as well and I pointed out, perhaps superfluously that I don't speak Hindi. Eventually the driver gave the youth money and he got back a slip of paper that he placed on the dashboard. Less than five minutes later we had advanced three metres and passed through the toll gate. Then there were twenty lanes of traffic on a six lane road so progress continued as before. 

Eventually the traffic thinned out a bit and we took less than ten minutes to cover the last mile which included several security gates with bored-looking soldiers controlling access to the airport precincts. That's when the fun really started.

Arriving at the airport terminal the driver jumped out and took my bag from the back seat. I had been telling him for some time, in English, by mime and through the medium of interpretive dance that I had no Rupees. I offered him US Dollars and/or Euros but he didn't seem very happy about that.

"Hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi"

he said, now really quite agitated. I said

"I can't give you what I don't have"

and shoved the greenbacks towards him again but his reply was predictable. I said again that I didn't have anything else and started to walk towards the door of the terminal. This really didn't amuse him and he engaged the services of another Hindi-speaking driver who was just standing around to berate me a bit more. At least that's what I assume he was doing. Did I mention that I don't understand Hindi?

I spotted an ATM. The answer to a prayer surely. Well it would have been if it had worked. 

Then the driver spotted an ATM inside the terminal. I said

"If I go in there I won't be able to come back out",

which is true but all he said was

"Hindi hindi hindi"

so I went inside. Sure enough the ATM he had seen didn't work either. At that point I seriously considered walking away. He couldn't follow me into the terminal and, not being an actual Uber driver, he had no record of my identity. But my conscience remained in control and I reminded myself that this was just a bloke trying to put food on his family's table. So I walked the length of the terminal to find an ATM that did actually work. I drew out a thousand Rupees, way over the odds for the taxi ride but I supposed he deserved a bit extra for the buggeration. Then I hiked back to the door where I had come in and persuaded the soldier on guard to let me lean across him to pass out the loot to the driver who had been waiting patiently for my return. On seeing the bank notes he gave a delighted grin and said

"Thank you sir!"

which may have been his only words of English apart from "airport". Still, that's four more than my knowledge of Hindi.

When I eventually arrived home I had an email from Uber to say that I had ridden 0.7 km at a cost of 16.8 Rupees on Friday evening. It appears that not only did I get into a car that was not my Uber, but also that someone else did get into mine and had a free ride at my expense. I can live with that.

In Praise of Experts

Yesterday the last of twelve young football players and their coach were extracted from a small ledge four kilometres into a flooded cave system in Northern Thailand. The dramatic rescue involved hundreds of people working to a common cause but it was made possible by a small number of highly skilled cave divers including Rick Stanton and John Volanthen. Like many people watching on television around the world I was in complete awe of the skill and courage of these two and the team of over 90 other cave divers they led to ultimate success. I also mourned the death of Saman Kunont, the Thai diver who gave his life as part of the effort.

Sadly, being the person I am, a small part of my response to these dramatic events was to recall the words of Michael Gove who, at the time of writing, is the last remaining Brexiter in the UK Cabinet. In June 2016 during the campaign ahead of the referendum on UK membership of the European Union, Gove said in an interview that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. 

Well here’s the thing Michael. This person in this country has not had enough of experts.

What is an expert after all? There are many and various areas of expertise to which a person may aspire. To achieve expertise requires aptitude, enhanced by training or education and followed by long practice. In his book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell proposed that 10,000 hours of practice was the magic number that would elevate a practitioner to the status of expert. Gladwell’s hypothesis has been widely criticised but whether the number is 10,000 hours or 100,000 is not really the point. It needs to be a big number.

I have encountered experts in many fields during my life and career.

In the halcyon days before 9/11 I sometimes managed to travel in the jump seat of an airliner. This was both fascinating and humbling. To see and hear two pilots work together in harmony to operate an immensely complex machine and navigate it safely through the crowded skies of southern England was an experience I still treasure. I have done a little flying myself so I could follow a lot of the conversation and appreciate the complexity of what was going on, all in the measured, confident tones of real experts. Neither I nor the hundred people in the passenger seats behind ever had enough of these experts.

One day in the 1980s I was working as a project manager for a company supplying message handling systems to the financial institutions in the City of London. One of my customers was having an upgrade to its systems and I had done all the planning and paperwork ahead of the work that was to be done on a Saturday. In those days the City was a completely dead zone on a Saturday and special arrangements had been made to give us access to the offices until seven pm. I had organised two engineers to be on site with me. One of them was vastly experienced with the system in question and the other a very good engineer but without expertise in this particular system. In a long and sorry story that I may tell another time, the experienced engineer managed to get himself stranded in Amsterdam. I arrived on site at 8 am to find the client representative and the second engineer and an old system that needed to be stripped down and put back together. Have I ever mentioned that I am a software guy? I was basically fit for fetching and carrying and bringing the coffees. A long day followed during which the system was stripped down and laid out very carefully on the floor. The engineer, Lee, was getting guidance by phone from a couple of his colleagues who were on site at a similar job nearby. The upgraded parts were fitted and then Lee tried to put everything back together again which is where things went a bit pear-shaped. Basically he didn’t have the expertise to do the job. By now time was getting tight. We were going to get thrown out of the office at seven pm whether the job was done or not. If the system wasn’t back together again and working, a major insurance company would start its new week with no communications available. This would potentially cost it millions and probably lead to my employer facing a huge bill for compensation. Lee and I were on the phone looking for help from anywhere but not finding any. By 6.30 I was convinced that I was getting fired on Monday. Then at 6.40 a miracle happened. I heard the chime of the lift arriving at the floor we were on and a few seconds later in walked the two engineers Lee had been talking to earlier in the day. They had finished their job and come over to help out. Unlike Lee and me, these two were experts. They knew this complex system inside out. The next 18 minutes passed in a haze as two people assessed the situation, determined what needed to be done and just went ahead and did it, scarcely saying a word as they worked. They didn’t need to. They knew the job and they knew each other. The system that took hours to take apart went back together and booted up in 18 minutes flat. We all got out of the door just as the security people were locking down the building.

I could quote many more examples of experts I have encountered. They operate in different fields but they have many things in common. Almost every expert I have ever met has been not only skilled but also willing to share his or her expertise. Real experts are not threatened by others gaining skills. They know that development of expertise is not a zero sum game. And just like the cave divers in Thailand most experts I have known have been willing to share their expertise with others for the greater good.

So, Mr Gove, I must profoundly disagree with your assessment that British people have had enough of experts. Experts are the exact opposite of the political chancers who pass laws to set the value of Pi to exactly 3.0 or who write easily demonstrable lies on the side of a bus to ride populist sentiment for their own gain. Experts deal with the world as it actually is and not how they just wish it to be.  If anything I think we need more experts and an economic system that encourages more people to grow expertise. I suppose that in some great yin and yang endeavour to find balance in the universe we might also need some idiots. Fortunately the career of Michael Gove assures us that there is unlikely to be any shortage of those.

Us and Them?

I had a revelation while listening to the radio this morning. I can’t claim that it was an original thought and it may well be that many others have understood this before but it made me stop and think for a while. 

The politicians and the pundits on BBC Radio 4 were talking about the latest twists and turns in the Brexit saga. In particular they were referring to the position that the British Government has now adopted on the relationship between the UK and the European Union after March 2019. This is no more and no less than a proposal that Mrs May and her ministers will take into a discussion with the European Commission. It will probably change and develop once serious discussions are under way. I have an opinion as to its merits but that isn’t what my revelation was about. I was struck by the way that everyone speaking – whether politician, journalist or BBC presenter, referred to the European Union as “them”, as opposed to the “us” which was the United Kingdom. This was true whether they were talking about the current situation in which the UK is preparing to leave the EU or past times in which we have been full members of the Union with significant influence on its policies and aspirations.

And this was my revelation. There is a significant body of opinion in the UK that sees national sovereignty as the paramount goal of policy and furthermore sees sovereignty as a strict zero sum game. Any gain for someone else must necessarily mean that “we” have lost something. And then I joined the dots. This is exactly the same mindset that drives President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric. He appears to view the world as a series of transactions in which “we” can ether screw or be screwed. The idea of win-win is as alien to him as the idea of shared sovereignty is to the Brexit diehards.

This is all tied up with the question of identity. How do I identify myself?

I am a living creature on a particular planet. I am a member of the species homo sapiens, one of some seven billion currently alive on Earth. I am of western European descent with pale skin and blue/grey eyes. I am for the time being a citizen of the European Union and a subject of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. I am English. I was born in a medium sized industrial town in Lancashire. I support Oldham Athletic, Lancashire County Cricket Club, Harlequins RFC, The Boston Red Sox and Mark Cavendish. I am a graduate of University College London and the Open University Business School. I am married with two grown-up children and I have a mother, a brother and a sister.

All of these things and many others go to make up my identity. Some are more important than others but it is my strong preference that none of them should dominate to the extent that I, or anyone else, lose sight of the rest. This is where I differ from the Brexiters and the Trumpsters. In their world view it appears that one characteristic is so important that it must override all of the others. In the case of Brexit that is being “British” and for the followers of Trump it is being “American”. In both cases the definitions of national identity are carefully constructed to exclude groups that are considered unworthy on racial, socio-economic or other grounds. By establishing a principle that this nationalist identity is overwhelmingly important it becomes possible to condone terrible and/or stupid things done in its name. Make no mistake, the impetus for both Brexit and Trumpism was a set of very real problems that affect real people in their real lives but it was distressingly easy to sell the message that solutions could be found in simplistic nationalism.

I have long thought that the most important divide in politics is the balance to be struck between the individual and the collective. To what extent do we want our society to take care of everyone versus creating the conditions for each individual to take care of him or herself? To this I now add the divide between recognition that we all belong to many different categories of identity and should look to all of them versus the belief that solutions are to be found in a simplistic label to which everything else must be subservient.

That was the revelation that I had while listening to the BBC this morning. The world is a complicated place full of complicated questions. Those who would have us believe that there are simple answers are simply wrong. There is no “us” and “them”. There is “us” meaning you and me, “us” meaning him and me and “us” meaning you, me and her all together. They are all valid and they are all important.