Mexico and India Talk on the Phone September 7
Well, not exactly the countries. The other day I had a chance to talk to a man in India while he was helping me resolve some problems with my Microsoft product. We were waiting while my computer slowly downloaded a file and had some time to compare notes about India and Mexico.
“Where are you?” he asked me.
“I’m in Mexico.”
“Oh, what’s it like there?” he asked. I told him a bit and then he told me that he was in India and it seemed a lot alike.
On the surface it seems that things are similar between the two countries. Labor is cheap and material items expensive. People work 6 days a week. Rich kids go to private school and learn English, poor kids go to public school and don’t.
The man I spoke to spoke three languages and understood two more. He told me to imagine the United States with a different native language spoken in each state. Imagine that.
One major difference we found between the two countries is that telecommunications is relatively cheap in India and expensive (read exorbitant) in Mexico.
This is one of the things that I think is really holding Mexico back. It’s so expensive to make a simple phone call that business doesn’t get done because people avoid using the phone–and hence communicating with one another–at all costs. Even messages are expensive at 10 US cents a minute.