The Hindu Business Line : ‘Doing the needful’

An excerpt from a business e-mail I received: “Hi Ashok, as discussed I am sending you information regarding the XYZ account. I have included some data that we have available, but the client is expecting more detailed projections for our next meeting. Please do the needful. Regards, Shubha.”

A recent conversation with an expatriate friend prompted me to write this piece on the most Indian of Indianisms — the proverbial “please do the needful!” When I came to India in 2001 having lived and worked in the US and Europe for most of my life, my first encounter with the ‘needful’ occurred in an intra office e-mail exchange soon after I joined an Indian company. My immediate reading of this phrase is illustrated by the exclamation mark I have used after “please do the needful” in the first line of this paragraph, coupled with a strong sense that this closing remark was inappropriate and unexpected. Surprised? Well, looking back, so am I.

However, when an expat friend of mine (we’ll call him Gary) expressed a similar reaction “on the same” (also a very Indian phrase), I found myself digging a little deeper into this cross-cultural misunderstanding of sorts. So I went back to the beginning (six years ago), and recollected my own communication difficulties when I joined an Indian company for the first time in my career. A few memories stood out, namely irritation at badly written e-mails from my analysts and surprise at receiving this peculiar “do the needful” from a fellow manager. My feelings on reading this are best translated with a few key words ‘command’, ‘instruction’ and ‘formal’. This is how I interpreted this phrase and it left a strange pit deep in my stomach. I imagine Gary felt something very similar.

Fortunately, in my case, the manager who wrote the mail had her desk adjacent to mine. More importantly, she was not merely a colleague but also a friend. It was therefore easy for me to clarify “intent”. I remember doing so using a formal tease. I said: “Shubha, I got your message. Please be assured that I will certainly do the NEEDFUL!” With my strong emphasis on that word, along with my own brand of modulation, I was quite confident that I got my feelings across. I expected some clarifications and explanations to ensue. Instead, Shubha replied “Euh...ok Ashok...Fine... thanks.” Sure enough, she did not understand either the meaning or the purpose of what I had just said. I, on the other hand, now felt much less confused. In fact, her friendly smile (albeit with some confusion) spoke volumes and I quickly understood that there was no such ‘command’ or ‘instruction’ embedded in her phrase.

In communication, we always teach that 55 per cent of the message you convey is in the way you appear, 38 per cent is in the way you talk and the remaining 7 per cent is in the words you use. Until I spoke to Shubha, my feelings had relied on HER written words (7 per cent), infused with MY own reading (38 per cent) to derive an essentially contrived meaning.

In a nutshell, spotting a cultural ‘ism’ such as this Indianism is to recognise the face (or culture) in a word. Comprehending the cross-cultural context therefore leads to clarity, whereas inferring meanings based on self-culture can result in unproductive misunderstanding.

When Gary spoke to me and shared his difficulty with “do the needful”, he had not identified it as an Indianism. As a result, he felt he was reading “Gary YOU NEED to do this” or “This NEEDS to be done, please take care of it Gary.”

The self-cultural reference for both of us was the US, where ‘informality’, ‘low hierarchy/equality’ and ‘participative decision making’ are among the values that are generally highlighted. Since we had never encountered such a phrase in our experience abroad and had failed to see the India context as well, it felt inappropriate. In our reference, it stood for ‘instruction’ and ‘command’, and some element of power. Values quite opposite to what we had known.

In all this emotional complexity, the simplicity is that it is just a writing form and one that happens to be distinctly Indian. It showed in Shubha’s smile and came across again today when a friend e-mailed me his wife’s resume and asked me to do the needful. On the Internet, this phrase is described as an Indianism with possible roots in 18th Century British English. In the 21st Century, it is an example that cultural misunderstanding remains the greatest barrier to business success.

(The writer is Senior Manager-Training and Development of Global Adjustments, a company that offers integrated India destination services and cross-cultural education.)