The Hindu Business Line : Expatriate luxury in Indonesia

Where work organisation is concerned, Indonesians are very different. Rules once laid down are strictly obeyed... at times too literally and almost robotically. Instructions have to be given to the junior levels in detail you never thought existed.

In the previous pieces I have had occasion to refer (with some thinly-disguised envy perhaps?) to the lifestyle of Western executive expatriates who were still at the top of some foreign companies well after Independence. What would it be like if Indians got a chance to play the role of a Third World expatriate, the valued guest worker, expert who is paid handsomely in not just gold and silver but luxuries such as a bungalow with a garden, a swimming pool and three or four domestic staff in attendance? One fine Saturday morning in 1990 came the phone call, completely out of the blue, that culminated in a chance for me to experience this as an executive director of a company, and ostensibly an expert in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Indonesia was then the only country where Indians were actually welcomed, with few restrictions on getting work visas. There was no consulate for Indonesia in Madras and very few people in India had heard about the country, let alone visited it as it was well off the beaten Cook's tour track. The lady at the airline office who booked my ticket had some difficulty placing the time difference between Madras and Jakarta. There were no direct flights and one had to change planes going through Singapore. One knew that there was a separate language spoken there, but it was much later that one discovered it to be almost the same in written form as Malayu spoken in Malaysia and with a Roman script. But the language, a mixture of words from a dozen different tongues, deserves a whole article by itself.

Imagine a steamy hot afternoon in Kerala — driving on the newly laid highway on from Kochi to Thrissur, with the air rather still and moist, temperature around 30 Celsius. The trees bend ever so slightly — heavy with coconut, in a canopy over the road sheltering passengers waiting for the upcountry bus. Thatched roofs over neat little shops glisten under a bright blue monsoon sky, with roadside vendors hawking coconut water, dried fish, and soft drinks. The rich green, rain-fed paddies stretch as far as the eye can see. Women wearing lungis and tops walk briskly down side streets and along the roads, with straight backs and an assured tread.

There's a hint of thunder in the air, as the 4 o'clock rain so typical of the tropics might descend any minute now. And you have a picture of Indonesia pretty much as it would be on the same day, if you went 50 km into the countryside as you go towards central Java from Jakarta.

Indonesians, as the name suggest, are much like Indians in Asia, in many ways, although refreshingly different in some. They do have the Asian characteristic of apparently vague and circular reasoning that is apt to drive the impatient Anglo-Saxon and American executive up the wall. Yet their ways of behaving and thinking are truly unusual. Indonesians are inscrutable as the Chinese are reputed to be and most businessmen do belong to the Chinese ethnic groups. Particularly good at hiding their real feelings well, smiling is said to be their national pastime. Open disagreement is rare. Though much has indeed changed as with most ancient societies, there is still a deep down sense of peace and quiet that is reassuring — as long as you are not in a hurry.

Never have I met a people who seem to naturally understand the Buddhist ways of doing everything mindfully, slowly and with grace. Watching a shop assistant gift wrap your purchase is a lesson in caring for detail, excellence and quality. They don't need to be taught the first principles of TQC by anyone. Of course, they do everything in good time. My company driver had an ordinary exercise book for a logbook, and yet he took great pains not only to draw perfect parallel lines for the columns but wrote the day and date of every day of the month, in full without abbreviations before he showed them to me for signature. No half measures would do. If you were going to a party at a remote suburb one evening, he would appreciate your letting him go for a couple of hours the previous day so that he could personally drive there and work out how to get there. Invitations always came with maps and directions as the road names and door-numbering systems were rather oriental in their randomness to say the least. Also, the Indonesian has a memory like a sieve for certain things.

On the other hand despite the slow pace, there was seldom a hint of laziness. If you had a flight to catch at 6.30 a.m., he would have to get up at 3 a.m. and be ready with the car and himself well washed and spruced up in time.

The way the ordinary worker's mind works is a study in itself. I once asked my driver to buy a bottle of mineral water and a large plastic drinking water-can of the kind that we now see regularly here. He came back after half an hour to say he could not find the bottles anywhere. But what about the plastic can? He looked perplexed. He had meant to do things in a particular order and not having succeeded in one he had come back to report.

Yet, where work organisation is concerned Indonesians are very different. Rules once laid down are strictly obeyed, at times too literally and almost robotically. Instructions have to be given to the junior levels in detail you never thought existed. "Please go and check if my car has arrived," I told my Indonesian secretary one day in Jakarta. I was due to go somewhere in a hurry and on getting no reply after a few minutes, went out to check. I found my secretary happily chatting away with a colleague. I asked her what had happened as politely as I could, controlling my irritation. Indonesians are such a sensitive race one dare not raise one's voice for fear of causing grave offence. Well, of course my car had indeed arrived. And why did she not let me know then? "You asked me to check sir," she said, smiling angelically — "I did. And the driver has indeed reported. But I was not sure if I was to report back to you as well. Maybe you wouldn't want to be disturbed."

I kicked myself mentally: I should have added, "And come back and tell me."

The same secretary had once filed away the original and copy of an important outgoing letter. I had forgotten to instruct her to mail the letter at once after signing it. So she waited, well, because who knew what the superior-looking Indian, who had taken over as a director recently, might want? So, it was safer not to assume anything! I learnt a new lesson that day. Where organisational mindset had been so mechanised as in Indonesia, one should assume that human beings imitated the computer, and so programme every act explicitly.

It also meant that if a sales manager agreed with you on a tough action regarding a dealer, you would be mistaken in thinking that he would go out of the room and get on the phone at once. He would have his own ways, devious to our eyes maybe, but nonetheless effective in the long run, of getting roughly the result that you wanted. But he would give the dealer an opportunity to save face. The dealer might be tipped off about what is coming by some one else and try to make some placating gestures, tender an apology, promise to do better and so on. If nothing worked, he might offer to take some form of penalty on his own or just resign. The sales manager for his part, if really cornered, might just delegate the task and develop raging fever overnight.

A more bizarre example happened to my wife one day when she went to the Citibank office downtown. Finishing her work after half an hour or so, she came out only to find that the car and driver had disappeared. After some fuming and fretting on everyone's part, she discovered that another Indian lady, who was a local hire of the bank from a sizeable Indian population, similarly sari clad, had walked out of the office some minutes earlier. She had got into the waiting car thinking it was the taxi she had called for. And the driver who saw a vaguely Indian form in the rear view mirror assumed it was his memsahib, and simply drove off. My wife received profuse apologies but found she did not have enough Bahasa vocabulary to let the driver get the full impact of what she thought of his ways, and that it reminded her of the disciples of the proverbial Paramartha guru of Tamil folklore!

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