Customer Carelessness

The delivery personnel frequently claim to have arrived at my doorstep despite the instructions being comprehensible and uncomplicated, yet remain conspicuously absent. Incorrect items are routinely delivered, while attempts at resolution are obstructed by an interminable circuit of transfers, reassigned executives, and prolonged periods on hold. A matter that should require mere moments of attention instead consumes hours of needless interlocution. Dented, torn, stained, and even expired products arrive with alarming regularity, transforming the supposed convenience of modern delivery into an exercise in patience and persistence. Despite providing receipts and evidence of purchase, consumers are often met with the peculiar demand to prove the absence of what was never received.

Similarly, with ride-hailing apps: they subject us to interminable waits, fail to materialize within the stipulated time, remain conspicuously unreachable, and finally induce us to cancel lest they incur a penalty—a neat inversion of service, in which dereliction is outsourced to the customer; their own stratagem, however, is often betrayed by the evidence they leave in messages, while the app ensures that the fare-paying traveller is left financially unencumbered by their manoeuvre.

A system created for consumer grievance resolution risks becoming an avenue of protracted justice—where the only thing successfully delivered is “delay.”

Behind every delayed delivery is a human story, not merely a tracking update. Torrential downpours, unexpected illness, physical disability, harsh winters, scorching summers, and unpredictable traffic can challenge even the most determined worker. Yet many delivery personnel operate without adequate rain gear, insulated bags, nourishment, or proper transportation, while earning modest incomes and facing public censure. We often demand speed at the click of a touchscreen, overlooking the unseen agony endured by those whose labour transforms convenience into an unnoticed experience.

In an era before the proliferation of digital connectivity, the manipulation of cables, antennas, and physical infrastructure in the 1990s offered a far more tangible relationship with technology than today’s increasingly abstract service models.

These services, often engineered and marketed by immensely powerful corporations, leave consumers to discover that the only connection that works flawlessly is the one between the invoice and their bank account—payments arrive instantaneously—while the internet connection they paid for remains a distant possibility.

In The Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow has often been interpreted as an emblem of the dispossessed farmer—anchored to the soil yet bereft of agency and political voice. The parallel with India’s farmers’ protests is resonant: those who sustain the nation through their labour can nevertheless find themselves peripheral to the structures of power.

Not every individual possesses the privilege of digital literacy or the resources required to navigate increasingly complex technological systems. Many platforms have failed to accommodate those facing socioeconomic disadvantage, advanced age, displacement, physical or personal adversity, or differing abilities, designing experiences that often presume access, stability, and support that not everyone possesses. Excessive demands for documentation and verification further alienate those whose records may have been lost due to demolished dwellings, disrupted schooling, displacement, or circumstances beyond their control. For those already deprived of fundamental necessities—education, nourishment, clothing, shelter, medical care, and social support—the response is too often reduced to procedural barriers, empty assurances, and promises that never materialise.

Store launches, often shaped through collaborations between founders and public figures, reveal a curious disconnect when those entrusted with representing a brand struggle to articulate even the most fundamental aspects of the products they promote. This deficit of candour frequently extends to their teams, who may display scant cognisance of the origins of the curated gastronomic hampers they present, at times mispronouncing terms in ways that inadvertently distort their meaning or resemble offensive profanities in other languages. Such oversights reflect a broader neglect of authenticity, cultural literacy, and respect for the very traditions these establishments seek to commercialise, while simultaneously invoking narratives of sustainability, heritage, and homegrown values.

One is often drawn into debates with brand representatives who confidently advocate their products while displaying meagre comprehension of the very elements that define them—the ingredients, organoleptic qualities, provenance, and traditional methods behind the cheeses they promote. The conversation frequently becomes less an exchange of culinary knowledge and more an exercise in relentless importunity, where the objective would appear to be the completion of a sale rather than the cultivation of informed appreciation.

In the pursuit of conversion, the consumer’s preferences, requirements, and even digestive sensibilities are often treated as ancillary concerns—a marketplace where persuasion is fully matured, but understanding remains unaged. Now Matilda has been reduced to a confection, before she was a character. Roald Dahl and Bruce Bogtrotter are often served, the cake avariciously ingurgitated, but the novel scarcely read.

A book shop says the book is “available.” Except they won’t deliver it because they need the author’s approval—even though the author, inconveniently, has been deceased for quite some time.

I can only assume a graveyard lined with headstones on a full moon night, with customer service politely hovering over the planchette, possibly escalating the matter to a bat courier service.

At this point, I don’t need a bookstore—I need a specialist in paranormal logistics, a procurement officer for the deceased, and whatever department handles posthumous bureaucracy in triplicate and paperwork that has been “pending” since the Enlightenment.

Retailers often confirm the availability of a particular item based on a reference image or specification provided by the customer, only to reveal upon arrival that the product is no longer manufactured or obtainable. Such inconsistencies reflect a deficit of candour and disregard for the time expended by consumers—particularly those who value precision, technical details, or have specific preferences regarding their purchases.

The inconvenience lies not in the non-availability of the article, but in the remarkable journey from confirmation to contradiction—where the only thing reliably in stock is uncertainty.

India’s growing ecosystem of curatorial spaces, interior ateliers, gastronomic venues, bibliophile havens, couture houses, and wellness clubs often invests heavily in curation, aesthetics, and exclusivity, yet neglects the most basic form of refinement: consideration.

The dereliction of correspondence—whether through unanswered missives, unreachable channels, or unattended enquiries—reveals a deeper imbalance, where accessibility itself becomes a privilege. In an age where social media and instant messaging platforms are designed to facilitate connection, their purpose becomes questionable when messages remain unread, ignored, or selectively acknowledged. In spaces that claim to celebrate culture, creativity, and community, communication should not be reserved for those with status, influence, or proximity to power.

On Teachers’ Day, we were invited to a college where my grand-uncle’s philosophical and foundational works were being exhibited and sold. A distinguished scholar and former President of India, he was being commemorated. Yet, the solemnity befitting the gathering was conspicuously absent; instead, it was marred by lascivious dancing and thoroughly indecorous conduct. For a seat of learning—so coveted, contested and apportioned by the intricate arithmetic of merit and caste—it proved remarkably adept at teaching the wrong lesson—an unwitting testament to the inadequacy of erudition when unaccompanied by discernment. Its disregard extended even to those who had come in attendance to acquire its books.

The particular programming assumes an altogether more disquieting import, as though an otherwise sacrosanct relationship were being rendered susceptible to precisely the sort of insinuation that ought to have been beyond contemplation. To dismiss the episode as innocuous would require a degree of willful obtuseness scarcely consonant with the intellectual seriousness and moral discernment expected of an institution devoted to learning.

A billionaire’s repository of vernacular artisanship, with corners devoted to the diverse traditions of India—an arresting juxtaposition of village ingenuity and conspicuous opulence.

At the threshold, a till attendant claims to accept every conceivable form of payment—a rather artful way of embellishing the truth. Much like hand-blown glass baubles, embroidered stockings, or pine-and-berry wreaths. The promise looks whimsical enough until the moment of reckoning, when the nutcracker reveals the rather hard kernel of truth. Apparently, what they really wanted was a Santa’s sack stuffed with cash.

Along the periphery, a client advisor is prodigal with their oud, repeatedly decanting it from a glass pipette onto the wrist, leaving patrons saturated in oil but with neither soap nor scrub with which to divest themselves of it. For those with asthma, hyperosmia, vestibular migraine, hyperventilation syndrome or anaphylaxis, such generosity is hardly benign. Their olfactory sensibility, it seems, evaporated long before the incense did.

Beyond the main thoroughfare, a brand ambassador offers agates as a cut-and-paste compendium for one’s disposition. Each is said to resonate differently with the seeker who wears it. For something reputed to hold energy, one might reasonably expect some discernment in how it is held. An impressive amount of mysticism, delivered with remarkably little alchemy.

A consecrated alcove situates a sculptural designer’s immersive spatial installation in hand-blown glass, recontextualising traditional Indian artisanal practices through the austere vocabulary of contemporary minimalism to create a luminous dialogue between inheritance and reinvention. Yet glass, for all its transparency, can distort as readily as it reveals; what appears to illuminate culture may, at times, merely refract it through the prism of contemporary sensibility.

And when that refracted vision is presented as cultural truth, it can splinter more than glass—it can unsettle the inherited sensibilities of those whose faith and cultural memory are rooted in the traditions of South India. Such vacuity appears less a study of culture than a ceremonial procession of assumptions—grand in display, yet curiously bereft of substance. Aesthetics, ideology, gendered experience, and spiritual consciousness are invoked not as sacred pillars of understanding, but as convenient bells rung for attention.

A temple is not sanctified by the height of its gopuram alone; it is the depth of its sanctum that reveals its truth. Its pigments constitute a chromatic vocabulary; its ascending oblong tiers, alive with celestial sentinels and mythological creatures, form a vertical narrative, each level unfolding another register of cosmology, folklore, collective memory, and inherited wisdom. Within the inner precincts, the deity is adorned in resplendent raiment, its silken folds lending movement and dimension to the sacred image, while gemstones articulate a visual language of devotion, ancestry, and veneration.

Culture cannot be deciphered through the latest liturgies of outrage; its significance resides in the deeper strata of custom and embodied experience. Without context, discernment, and reverence, the most magnificent edifice becomes mere spectacle when its forms are removed from the cultural inheritance that gives them significance; even the loudest invocation remains but an empty chant echoing through the corridors of history.

Apparently, consideration is a currency not universally held in tender.