In the past year I have signed innumerable contracts, written substantial cheques, and thereafter waited long, dark, infuriating hours for the goods and services promised to me to make an appearance.

But time in India, rather like a contract, is deemed of little value. Hours spent in making phone calls—baffled, conciliatory, and threatening—prove futile. Once the money is in the hands of the service provider, it is although a mechanism in his brain (the one which controls the honour gene) shuts firmly, refusing to allow honesty, integrity and self-respect to have their way.

Yesterday, while lambasting a gentleman representing Sify Broadband, for his shoddy and unprofessional services, he was kind enough to tell me, "This is India. What can we do?" I'll tell you what you can do, buddy. You can give me back my money and stop wasting my time. This conversation, which I have abbreviated greatly in the interest of space, occurred over a period of three days, innumerable phone calls and SMS messages; most of which were abusive (on my part) as a reaction to the amount of time this idiotic endevour had taken away from my own, legitimate work.

So much of our energy and so many days are spent in forcing other people to do their jobs, that invariably our own must suffer. As a result, progress in this country is consistently stalled as we're forced to call, visit, and write to those responsible (or irresponsible) for the disruption of the services we have all come to depend on and for which, may I add, we pay plenty of bucks. Landline and cellular phones, Internet, electricity, transportation—you name it, they can't get it right. According to my calculations, if I saved all the time spent calling up MTNL, BPL, Tata Indicom, Sify Broadband and their cronies requesting that they start, continue or complete the job I have paid them to, I would have enough time to build a house, travel around the world in a small boat, perhaps even get a good night’s rest. But is it not the fate of a one billion Indians to change the way we are treated by people who take it upon themselves to make our lives difficult.

Since the law appears to have its own problems—so many people, so little time—the satisfaction of suing such incompetent individuals, who are to my mind no less than criminals, is very little. With this door closed, or at least very expensive and time consuming to open, teaching thieves of this nature a lesson isn’t easy. We know this, the thieves certainly know it.

As Christmas approaches I shudder with horror at the thought of the apparitions who will appear at my front door, demanding that I pay them their festive dues for (non) services rendered throughout the year. The newspaper boy who brings me Tehelka four days late every week. The cable television operator who has been hanging up on me for 12 months every time I call with a complaint. The surly dhobi who visits me once a month and returns my clothes, grudgingly, two moons later.

Naturally, I will pay them all, smiling, cussing under my breath, praying that my displeasure is well veiled, and that when I wake up on the morrow, it will not be amidst the darkness of dirty clothes, a fuzzy picture, wet papers and the like.

But while everyone else will be busy compiling a list of presents for Santa, I will, rather in the manner of the Grinch, be compiling a list of people who owe me: All the service thieves who believe that far from the consumer being king, the consumer must be conned.