What elevator use says about the Indian psyche

Hindustan Times

3 days ago

It's a weekday morning, you have just reached work dressed in formals and are waiting for the lift on the ground floor with a bunch of others. Nobody talks, minds weighed down by the coming work day. As per Google Maps, you have reached; but the map doesn't factor in this painful vertical journey to the work desk.
Suddenly, a hotshot executive walks straight to the already glowing lift button and presses it 2-3 times again, and stands back — people waiting don't know the button needs to be pressed to summon the lift is, perhaps, the assumption? Or is it that, by pressing it, they have magically ensured that their floor is prioritised over the others? Everybody loves to press a button, and hence how we use lifts is a good window into the Indian psyche.
Lifts have been there throughout history. Unless those late-night TV conspiracists are right about aliens building the Pyramids (perhaps under an 80:20 subvention scheme?), those stones must have been lifted to the top using some pulley mechanism. Even Archimedes tried it in 236 BC. But only in 1852, Elisha Otis and his sons came up with an elevator design that employed a safety device. If the ropes broke, a wooden frame at the top of the platform would snap out against the sides of the elevator, essentially functioning as a brake. This safety device is what led to the mass adoption of lifts. Elisha Otis is, I guess, the only inventor who followed up an invention with business sense, and now Otis is the largest lift manufacturer with a revenue of $14 billion. John Logie Baird, the inventor of colour TV, must be looking at your TVs bearing a Korean last name and shedding a silent tear.
The first lift in India was installed in the Kolkata Raj Bhavan, the official residence of the Governor of Bengal in 1892, and since then, the lift design did not change in India for the next 100+ years, you had to slide two iron collapsible grills to get inside a lift, only to find a person inside sitting on a wooden stool, whose only job is to press the buttons for you — the lift-man. When you look at him, you realise quick-delivery services will survive for long. Labour is cheap.
As our cities started growing vertically, they built gates with security guards to keep the other India out. Elevators were needed to stack up more and more Indians waiting for their long-term visa. The only solace — they could afford aristocracy here, so they invented the concept of a service lift. To allow the other India to come and cook for them, clean their houses and leave without being visible. Just get a valid Aadhaar card — maybe a passport these days.
Nobody teaches lift etiquettes, though; it's like an email sign-off you copy from others. Similarly, how you behave in the lift is learnt the hard way.
The moment a lift arrives at the ground floor, the guys waiting there won't stop for the people inside to disembark; they would rush immediately — a vertical local train. Scarcity builds muscle memory and eats civic sense for breakfast.
It is the same when someone at the back has to get off the lift; the guys in front will appear reluctant to step out to let the person out, lest some exhale and claim his 15 square inches of space. So, the former must squeeze himself out, rubbing shoulders with all in front.
Another key trait is people pressing the down button when they want to go up. It is to bring the lift to them instead of indicating where they want to go. This is classic aristocracy, where buttons are pressed to summon people — like those babus with a bell in their cabins in the 1970s. Indian society spent 75 years transitioning from a British colonial system to the American way of working. It's a spectrum. Just like how this article uses elevator (American) and lift (British) interchangeably.
Lifts are mini dressing rooms for a lot of people. Life-size mirrors let people check their make-up or a receding hairline or an unmitigated paunch. This is a network-free zone, where there is time to introspect with phones lying in the pockets — unless, of course, when you must stare into your phone to avoid verbal or non-verbal interactions with a fellow lift passenger, especially one of the opposite gender. Nobody seems to know how to give a polite smile or a nod or voice a hello.
We are still evolving, still learning. By the time we master elevators, another daunting task surfaces, to convince parents — with socialist-era knees — to use the escalator. One step at a time.
Abhishek Asthana is a tech and media entrepreneur, and tweets as @gabbbarsingh. The views expressed are personal.