40. A Pleasure Doing Business
This story has it all: an international setting, payola, corruption, and, of course, some smirk-wiping. This story is about a friend of mine named Richard. We worked together at The Economist. He was in Hong Kong and I was in New York City.
When I’d travel to HK for work, I’d stay with him and his wife. And when we were both stationed in London, I rented their attic.
Richard is an American and was about 35 in the story, which takes place at the turn of the millennium. His wife, Jyoti, was a bit younger and from India.
After his stints in HK and London, he moved with his wife to her home region in India, and he started a business building sewers. Richard looked a bit like Michael T.
Weiss, star of the late 1990s series The Pretender.
To win contracts and get the permits to install sewers, he often had to meet with local and regional government officials. At the time, India’s officials were notoriously open to, ahem, “gifts”.
After discussing the permits, the bureaucrats would switch to Hindi and talk amongst themselves about the “gifts” they would demand in order to move Richard’s paperwork along.
This worked perfectly in Richard’s favor.
The bureaucrats would then switch back to English and tell him their requirements. They were never called bribes, of course, but it was clear that that’s what they were. At that moment, my friend would switch to fluent Hindi.
Hindi is so good that, apparently, if you were on the phone with him you would not know he wasn’t Indian.
Indeed, he told me he went to these meetings in person so the bureaucrats would take him for a sucker. When he turned the tables on them, they would be so embarrassed that they would grant him the permits at the correct rate.
His business wound up being the only one that didn’t have to pay extra.