Kindly Adjust Please

Kindly Adjust, Please by Shashi Tharoor

There is a phrase that every Indian knows in their bones. It travels with us from childhood to old age, from the smallest domestic disagreement to the most complex national negotiation. It is offered as advice, deployed as a plea, and occasionally wielded as a weapon. The phrase is: "Kindly adjust, please."

To the uninitiated, it sounds like a minor social courtesy — a polite request for flexibility. To those of us who have grown up navigating Indian bureaucracy, Indian families, and Indian public spaces, it means something far more complicated. It means: abandon your expectations, accept the situation as it is, make yourself smaller, quieter, less demanding — and do it with a smile, because that is what civilised people do.

I have been asked to "kindly adjust" in railway queues, in government offices, in hospital waiting rooms, and at wedding ceremonies where my allotted seat had mysteriously been given to someone else. In every case, the person asking did not see themselves as asking me to surrender anything important. They were simply invoking a cultural compact so deep and so old that most Indians obey it without quite knowing why.

The compact works like this: we live in a country of one billion people. Resources are scarce. Space is limited. Institutions are overloaded. If every individual insisted rigidly on their precise entitlement — their exact seat, their proper turn in the queue, their documented right — the entire social machinery would seize up within the hour. So we have evolved a lubricant: mutual accommodation. "Kindly adjust, please" is the verbal expression of this lubricant.

There is much that is genuinely admirable about this instinct. It reflects a wisdom born of necessity — the wisdom of people who have learned that survival in a crowded world requires flexibility. It reflects a deep cultural preference for harmony over confrontation, for relationship over rules. Indians, by and large, would rather find a workaround than have a fight.

But there is also a shadow side that we do not examine enough. "Kindly adjust, please" is not always about mutual accommodation. Sometimes it is about the powerful requiring the less powerful to do all the adjusting. The person with connections arrives late and expects the person without connections to give up their slot. The senior employee expects the junior to absorb the inconvenience of a last-minute change. The man expects the woman to "adjust" her professional ambitions around domestic responsibilities.

In these cases, "kindly adjust" is not flexibility — it is inequality wearing a polite smile. And the phrase is so deeply embedded in our cultural software that those who are asked to adjust often do not feel entitled to say no. Saying no feels rude. It feels un-Indian. It marks you as difficult, selfish, and insufficiently flexible.

I recall a conversation with a young woman from a tier-two city who had won a scholarship to study in the United States. Before she left, her extended family gathered to send her off with advice. Almost every piece of advice centred on adjustment: adjust to the food, adjust to the weather, adjust to different customs — all reasonable counsel. But the final piece of advice, delivered by an elderly aunt with the full authority of tradition, was this: "And remember — when you come back, kindly adjust." What the aunt meant was: do not bring back ideas that make the family uncomfortable. Do not challenge what has always been. The scholarship, the education, the growth — those were fine, provided they did not require anyone else to adjust in return.

This, I think, is the crucial question about our culture of adjustment: who bears the cost? In any society, flexibility is valuable. The ability to accommodate, to improvise, to work around obstacles — these are genuine strengths. India would not function for a single day without them. But when the burden of adjustment falls systematically on the same people — the young, the female, the poor, the first-generation professional — it ceases to be a social lubricant and becomes a form of structural oppression.

The ideal, of course, is a society where adjustment runs in all directions — where the senior adjusts as readily as the junior, where the man adjusts as readily as the woman, where the powerful are as willing to be inconvenienced as those with less power. That is not the automatic meaning of "kindly adjust, please." But it could be.

The next time someone says those words to you — consider, for a moment, who is being asked to adjust, and whether the request is truly mutual. You may find, on examination, that it is. India at its best is exactly that: a billion different agendas negotiating their way into a liveable shared space, each one moving a little, nobody insisting on everything.

But you may also find, on examination, that you are always the one adjusting. And on that day, with all due respect to our magnificent cultural inheritance — it may be time to politely, firmly, and quite deliberately decline.