Tech & People #4 - Churchill in Bengal and a late Night Support Call
Here's a short story that really happened to me. It is about open minds and tolerance, and about seeing things from a different perspective.
When I was working QA in Mercury Interactive (RIP) around 2003, one night I was asked to stay late with a colleague from the support team, and take a call working on a bug discovered at a customer site.
We quickly understood that there was an issue with the database schema in that particular instance, and I hacked a SQL fix for it. We couldn't connect directly to the secured DB of the customer, so I opened an email and sent the SQL script to the engineer on their side.
(As an aside, isn’t it nice how SMTP is the one true universal messaging system you could always count on?)
When you send someone an email, there is often a signature appended to that automatically. Back in the day, my signature was a clever quote from Churchill. I don't remember exactly what quote. God knows Winston was no short of clever quotes. So along with my email went this quote.
We are on the phone with this engineer confirming he received the email and ran the script. His name was Vinod. He runs this script, confirms the fix, and then asks me out of the blue: "so you're a Churchill fan?"
Yes, I said. I had all these romantic ideas from reading books about how Winston was steadfast and saved the world from Nazism etc. etc. Now my new friend Vinod was from Bengal, and he told me to go read up about Winston's colonial record. To many many people he was a racist and guilty of an untold number of deaths.
Now the point of this post is not to pass historical judgement. If you are interested, read this piece. The point is I had no idea that people from India had a very different appreciation for Churchill's legacy than I did. In my line of work, I have since had the chance to work with many amazing people from India and let's just say I don't quite go around waving my Churchill quotes so cavalierly any more. I’ve also had the chance to pass this on when I saw others Americans and Israelis quote the great (or not so great?) man in corporate settings.
The lesson is to be open to the narratives of all, and to use chances when your ignorance is discovered. They are opportunities to learn! As I write this, our colleagues in India are going through another rough time, with the pandemic raging as bad as it has anywhere. My thoughts are with them. Hopefully today if the world needs to lend a hand, or at least not make it worse, it will not be like the Bengal famine all of again.