Why are techies in India unproductive?

Specifically Indians when working from India.
I used to joke to my American colleagues that it’s because we have the self-imposed “difficult” task of keeping up with pop-culture and memes of both countries - India and USA. On the Indian side we give our mindspace and time to know what the deal is with Uorfi Javed and the Bollywood Wives, watch CTRL and Ulajh and the latest season of Panchayat, taking breaks in between only to watch Aatman Desai’s latest reels only a few hundred times each. And once we are done with that, we start over again and read about SF’s homelessness for the umpteenth time, worry about Sunita Williams, watch Jennifer Aniston’s ATLAS and the latest season of Bridgerton (remember the scam party?) and finally spend hours reading articles on Hacker News. Oh wait did I forget Anime and Korean Drama - those are 2 separate entire countries’ worth of content. And don’t get me started on gaming, although we do pick and choose our poison and I have yet to come across someone who watches series AND does gaming - well maybe if you are a game streamer, or basically lukhha - then you might be those rare ones who do both.


But recently, I came up with a new hypothesis. I just read this article and watched a youtube video:

• Is Population Density the Reason Americans Can’t Discuss Politics? — Stuff George Write
• Why you’re so tired

Combining thoughts from both of these and synthesising: us Indians live in crowded neighbourhoods and it’s difficult to avoid stepping on each other’s toes or scratching - no, tearing off - each other's bumpers and fenders. Just commuting to work daily is an adventure you “embark on”. (Note my use of embark, it's a strong word to be used sparingly, only for adventures which might cost you your life limb or at least your sanity, more on that in a later blog post) By the time you reach office, you have exhausted most of your context switches. If you want to draw an analogy alongside computer games, then basically your health is down to 60% by the time you reach office (an recent AevyTv video which explains this better is ₹16,000 vs ₹10,00,00,000 In India | The Real Game Of Wealth) and then in the evening, if you have calls that you want to attend at night to sync up with your up and fresh American colleagues, best of luck. You need to get home first with minimal expenditure of attention and decision making ability. And if for whatever ungodly reason you live in the northern part of India and you decide to stay late in office and leave for home only after the sync up call - there is good news and bad news. Cows take over and rule the roads post 10 pm, this is good news because you now get to play Mario Kart IRL (save money on that PS5 you were meaning to buy) but bad news because you are running on fumes w.r.t. number of decisions that you can take per day - If ramming into a cow doesn’t kill you, a mob will.

Speaking of population density, a colleague (let’s call him J) once made an observation: “USA has 4 times the area of India but 1/4th the population of India. So everything in the USA is 16 times of that in India - in the supermarket, you will see 16 times the number of flavours and brands of packaged foods that you get in India, 16 times the number of open spaces etc..”

I don’t know how much more productive the same techie becomes when she moves from India to the USA, but their salaries (and probably also their cost of living) do become 4 times as much.

Speaking of the devil, J just raised a JIRA ticket - a reasonable request from the user point of view - that will need me to get consensus among a few people before it is implemented. So I need to sign off, and get on a few calls and waste a few context switch cycles of my colleagues, tiring them out until they relent - which should be easy, since they are working from India.