Shades of Diner?

Remember the movie "Diner," where Eddie gives Elyse a 140-question test about football (the Baltimore Orioles, actually) as a condition of going through with the marriage?  (If you don't... )

Well, it appears that a bride in India gave her man a pop quiz.  He failed, and she bailed. 

(The quiz was, "What is 15 plus 6?"  His answer, "17," is indeed a disqualification for someone who claimed to have gone to college.  UNLESS, I should note, the person went to college at an "elite" U.S. school and majored in any of the "Indignation Studies" curricula.)

Just as a lagniappe, the story also mentions a different wedding, where the groom had a seizure and the bride asked for volunteers.  I wonder how that went:  "Look, I got the dress, and the henna, and Dad paid for the feast.  It would be a shame to waste it.  Anybody wanna step up here?  You?  Can you do simple addition problems?  Okay, let's do this."

To be fair, it may well be that the Indian conception of marriage makes sense, in the context.  And their divorce rate is lower.  But that may be because you have to wait 15 years, and risk being killed by your husband or his relatives.

Pelsmin Guest Post: The Paradox of India

Frequent commenter/long-time reader Pelsmin is visiting India, and shared these thoughts.  More below the fold...

THE PARADOX OF INDIA

This week I visited Bangalore to tour facilities of my new employer, an outsourcing engineering firm with most of our employees based in India. Companies use us to develop technology better, cheaper and faster.

When President Obama rails against un-patriotic American companies “outsourcing” their work, he’s referring to our customers. And incidentally, he means “offshoring.” Outsourcing is the completely un-objectionable process of allowing another firm, possibly based across the street, to handle non-core business activities. Peter Drucker championed the concept half a century ago and it has led to vast improvements in competitiveness and productivity, and countless American job gains.

 Offshoring can be done without outsourcing, by changing the location of a company’s own employees to India, and outsourcing can be done without offshoring, by transferring work from your own employees to more productive labor situated in the US. They may originate from another country. Think H1 visa.

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The culture that is India: Luxury living edition

Fascinating article in the NYT about booming property values in desirable areas of New Delhi, where teardown properties can allegedly go for over $10 million.

There are some specific points in the piece that do not bode well for India's chances develop.

First, the best areas of New Delhi seem to be government owned and given out to politicians as perks:


Few properties come available in the leafiest, most prestigious section of the capital, known as Lutyens’ Delhi, because the area is mostly dedicated to government housing. Powerful government ministers live in British-era bungalows with stately lawns of several acres, while lesser officials are eligible for different categories of government housing in an oasis largely separated from the rest of the chaotic capital, where many people live crowded into slums or shanties. “This is the best part of Delhi, the core of Delhi,” said Munish Kumar Garg, who oversees the allocation of government housing. “If these properties in Lutyens’ Delhi were put on sale, there would be a queue two kilometers long.” Mr. Garg, the director of the government’s Directorate of Estates, controls one of the more valuable residential real estate portfolios in the world. Asked how many New Delhi properties fell under his agency, he shrugged. “It would be difficult to know,” he said. “Maybe 10,000.”

Yes, in 2013, the Indian Government is managing 10,000+ residences for government employees, just in New Delhi.


Second, the process of buying a house is not extremely transparent. There aren't often public real estate listings and purchases frequently require large amount of unreported cash payments that avoid tax issues:

Though India’s economy has cooled, the demand for property in elite areas remains so strong that even finding a house for sale is tricky: formal listings do not exist; prices usually circulate by word of mouth. Transactions often require some “black” money, or stacks of cash paid under the table to avoid taxes. The buyers are often Indian industrialists looking for a trophy property, a real estate Rolex. Or, real estate agents and sellers say, they can be politicians or their proxies, who often pay with trunks of cash.