Last weekend I was in Hyderabad to attend my colleague's wedding. With me, one of my close friend and ex-boss also travelled to Hyderabad. With time I have found that I can learn plenty of things from him. We discussed different things in train about variety of people,events and ideas.
In the course of discussion he told that he has made it a point not to bargain with people those do not have better living standards than himself. For example he will not bargain for fare with a rickshaw pulller.
I wondered about the positives and negatives of not bargaining with someone who earns each penny with his sweat and blood...yeah! sweat and blood because we literally sit on his shoulders and he carries us for miles. I have seen plenty of English visitors in Benares that they prefer riding on a manual rickshaw over auto rickshaw. Because probably it gives them a sense of superiority. No I am not differentiating the behaviour of white and black skinnners for rickshaw pullers. But I have just given an example.
Coming back to the point..the first positive is when we do not bargain with rickshaw puller we directly help him in earning more. This extra money can enable him to have better food, take better care of his family or drink/smoke all that he has earned. On negative side when we do not bargain with these guys I feel that we make the life bad for lower middle class. Most of the times, middle class people really need the service of rickshaw pullers. These guys always try to save money wherever they see any opportunity. And yes I believe that people of middle class will utilise the money in more constructive way if they save a rupee.
Now I have written my reasoning for no "No bargain", I still feel that in all probablity I may be wrong. But let me continue with this logic until I get another bettter counter logic.
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2 comments:
My criterion to decide who not to bargain with would be slightly different. I would not bargain with a person if his/her basic needs are not being fulfilled with the kind of job he/she has got. And, I certainly do not consider smoking/drinking a basic need (nor did Maslow :-)). I do remember the days when I worked for a PSU with a moderate salary when one of my friends from US visited us in Noida. The auto guys insisted we pay 1.5 times the meter reading at 10 AM in the morning for a ride from Noida, Sector 29 to Cannaught Place. Now, it was not a problem for the friend from US, but the other two of us felt it was unreasonable. I certainly earned more than the auto-waala (or so I think) but for this reason alone, I could not "not bargain" with those auto-waalas. I can not believe in this theory.
I really liked the line "he has made it a point not to bargain with people those do not have better living standards than himself." but I think he(BOSS) can definitely think of not bargaining at the level he is...n I would love to implement the same at that level but there is another side of the story...there are few instances when i genuinely felt paying more than it was required but contrary to this a number of times I felt people try cheating to earn more...is that acceptable? I personally feel that's not, at least I couldn't overlook cheating for the sake of helping others...anyways I never bargain, want to learn though:-)
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