The Vigilance Tax

There’s a phrase in Hindi, chalta hai. It translates roughly to “it’s fine” or “let it go,” but the connotation is closer to: this is broken and we both know it, but pointing that out would be exhausting, so let’s pretend it’s acceptable. The unofficial motto of Indian urban civic life.

For years, I was fluent in chalta hai. The autorickshaw meter that doesn’t work. The plumber who’ll come tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The government office that requires three visits for something that should take ten minutes. You learn to factor it in. You build the workaround before you encounter the obstacle.

A few months ago I wanted an international driving permit. I submitted my application to the RTO. Six weeks passed. Nothing. I sent a grievance email. I called. No movement. Eventually I found a guy on Google Maps who claimed he could help. I paid him ₹6,000 and had my permit in under two hours. He just went and bribed the babu. The system worked exactly as designed. Just not for people who follow the rules.

But lately, the things I used to ignore have started to stay with me. There was no single incident. Just an accumulation.

The standard framing is economic. You pay 36% effective tax and still need private backups for power, water, and internet. The state extracts first-world rates and delivers third-world services. True, but that’s just the ledger. The larger cost is the vigilance tax.

Every interaction requires a background thread of suspicion. Is this food safe? Is this driver taking the long route? Will traffic add forty minutes or ninety? You can never simply trust that things will work. The cognitive load is constant and invisible, like a process you only notice when you visit somewhere it’s absent.

I’ve traveled to Europe, America, Japan. By day three, I realized I hadn’t been on alert once. No scanning for scams. No contingency planning. No low-grade suspicion. Just… being somewhere. The relief was physical. I hadn’t understood how tense I was until I wasn’t.

Then there’s the two-tier system. Rules exist, but they apply selectively. You sit in traffic while a politician’s convoy clears the road. You wait in line for a passport appointment; someone with connections doesn’t wait for anything. A GST Commissioner drives on the wrong side of the road because he can. The law is a tool of power, wielded downward.

You learn quickly that following rules is a competitive disadvantage. You wait at the red light at 2am on an empty road. The guy behind you honks, overtakes, runs it, gets home faster. The system selects against civic behavior. Play by the rules and you lose. Defect and you win.

Injustice exists everywhere. What’s particular here is the visibility of it. The openness. The absence of even the pretense that the rules are meant to be followed.

The sensory environment compounds everything. 150 AQI is a good day. Footpaths, where they exist, are obstacle courses of broken concrete and parked motorcycles. You cannot walk. You cannot breathe deeply. Your nervous system is under constant low-grade assault, and because everyone around you is enduring the same thing, there’s a collective normalization that makes you doubt your own perception.

And the exit itself is taxed. An Indian passport opens 58 countries visa-free. Every trip abroad requires financial disclosure, invitation letters, appointment slots. You must prove, repeatedly, that you intend to return. The message is clear: you are not trusted to leave.

This creates a particular psychology. The people who could most easily leave, the ones with options, with skills the world wants, are exactly the ones who feel the friction most acutely. And so they do leave.

And yet. In India, life is extraordinarily convenient. Domestic help is affordable. Food delivery appears in twenty minutes. Your friends are here. Your family is here. The chai, the festivals, the specific rhythm of how people talk and joke. Irreplaceable. These comforts lull you back into chalta hai. The friction fades. You forget why you were upset.

But convenience is not the same as quality. And the defense I hear most often, “it’s so much better than the 90s,” is an admission that the improvement curve is generational. The implicit ask is to spend your one life waiting for infrastructure that works, for systems that treat you as a citizen rather than a subject, for air you can breathe.

I don’t know if I’m willing to make that trade anymore.

The honest answer is that I haven’t decided. I have a startup that’s doing well. I have friends I can call at midnight. I have family I’d miss in ways I probably don’t understand yet.

But I’ve also started noticing things I used to filter out. The chalta hai muscle is weakening. Maybe that’s the real signal. The reasons to go are legible and enumerable. The shift underneath, the slow refusal to keep pretending that this is acceptable, is harder to name but impossible to ignore.

The vigilance tax compounds. At some point you have to decide whether you’re willing to keep paying.