My septuagenarian uncle was in a fury. His credit card company had made a mistake in its billing and was being obtuse about rectifying the error. But that wasn’t what infuriated him most. It was an explanatory letter from said company that addressed him as “Dear Rajat”.
My uncle’s grievance was that the company had no business addressing him thus in a formal letter written by someone he did not know, had not given permission to use his first name, and who was probably a lot younger. Since the credit card company in question was of American provenance, its staff may have been puzzled if he had insisted on being addressed more formally as Mr Datta (which he did in an irate letter).
Obviously, like many of his generation, Mr Datta has different standards of social interaction. But he is increasingly in a minority. Being on a first-name terms with anybody and everybody is trendy business social etiquette that appears to have been wholeheartedly embraced by India Inc together with the strategies and techniques of global corporations. Formal conventions like Mr, Mrs and Ms are increasingly becoming passé; these days it’s first names only, whether you are a 20-something addressing the CEO of your company or vice versa and irrespective of whether you know the person or not.
Like all social mores, the changes jar with professionals of an older generation habituated to respectful formality. In India, the case is more complex since using first names or not is only one aspect of the formality/familiarity paradigm. Like the French, most of India’s myriad languages, northern and southern, include the formal (aap in Hindi, to name just one example) and informal (tum/tu) modes of address. Their usage involves a nuanced understanding of social interaction and relationships.
Obviously, this knowledge comes instinctively to Indians in their social and personal milieu and the incursions of globalisation in social behaviour have scarcely influenced these traditions. Even today, most Indians are unlikely to address older relatives, or anyone older for that matter, by their first names (certainly, I would hesitate to address my uncle as Rajat).
But where adapting, say, TQM or JIT or any management concept to the Indian environment has some measure of certainty, things become complicated when social mores are transposed into our semi-westernised corporate environment. There are no fixed rules here. Even today, forms of address in the work environment remain a confused welter of Mr, Mrs, Ms, Sir, Ma’am and first names.
Who uses what depends on the inclinations of the corporate leadership, the national origins of the company (Asian, American or European) or the industry in which it operates. IT and PR, for instance, are at the cutting edge of such trendy social practices; no one is being cheeky when she addresses senior executives by their first names. But Business Standard, for instance, follows the very British convention of using Mr or Ms before the surname only on the edit page. This mystifies me. How does it change things if the news pages say: “Raju confesses to fraud” and the edit page renders it as “Mr Raju confesses to fraud”?
There are other uniquely local complexities to this issue. In Bengal, for instance, it is quite normal to suffix the name of older men and women in the workplace as dada (or da) and didi (or di) respectively (note how Mamata Banerjee is often addressed as Didi). Senior men could also have their names suffixed with the term “babu”. How do I know whom to call what? Well, I just do! But to address a senior male executive in Delhi as babu would be a faux pas and using dada or didi would be wholly inappropriate.
All over India, the Mr/Mrs/Ms confusion is compounded by the caste factor. In India, surnames typically denote caste, so Indians tend to avoid using them as much as possible. But how to be respectful without using the surname? The solution is a uniquely Indian one of adding Mr or Ms to the given name, a practice that puzzles foreigners. Thus, the representatives of the credit card company that so exercised my uncle could well have addressed him as Mr Rajat. Then, of course, there’s the question of the greeting. The term “Dear” is increasingly being replaced by “Hi” (though “Hi Rajat” would have rendered my uncle incandescent).
If you are unsure what form of address to use, Shital Kakkar Mehra, author of a hugely useful book called Business Etiquette: A Guide for the Indian Professional suggests it’s better to err on the side of formality. “Play it safe,” she says, “When in doubt, be formal.”
On the whole, I would say the use of first names and jettisoning Sir and Ma’am within the workplace is good practice. In an environment that is increasingly calling for flat organisations, it would do senior leadership inclined to self-importance a power of good not to enforce respect; it must be earned by virtue of ability, not form of address. That, at least, is the raison d'être behind American and Australian informality. But when it comes to unknown outsiders, it’s Ms Datta to you.
