Why do we Indians have to suck at providing quality service?

I have always realised, that we in India - don't give a damn about quality.
I don't exactly know why, but I am guessing it has something to do with the demand always exceeding the supply - considering, we're bursting at our seams with the large population.
So, as long as the goods keep coming, the manufacturer (and not the customer) is king - and they can keep dishing out crap - because there will always be someone to buy it.

I have a complete live example to give - hence this post.
This is about the Pune International Film Festival (PIFF website).

Last year, we guys from college had gone for the 4th Pune International Film Festival and it was tonnes of fun (even though the organisation had a lot to be desired).
So, when it came around this year - we went for it again (It is still going on - at the time of writing this).

This time around, the movies are pretty good and we're having lots of fun again - but nothing has changed organization side.
And considering it is an "International" film festival, the standards are far from it.

The schedule of movies was available extremely late - just a day before the festival and the catalogue (which has the synopsis of all the movies) - only a couple of days after the festival started.
The schedule is given only for the next 3 days (out of the total 7 days of the festival).
So, if I am working and need to really catch a movie and need to inform my boss about it, there are chances that I would be doing it only hours in advance

Quite a few movies had their running times mis-reported in the schedule - which caused a mix up of our plans.
Then, the schedule (or the catalogue) ends up having movies in the wrong category - so you never find the movie you're looking for (there is no index or a table of content).

In 3 days the festival has been running, the schedule has on been changed on 2 occasions , on the fly. They exchanged the timing of a couple of movies minutes before they started - which again threw all our plans out of the window.

Their website (which I think is one of the most important things) is totally un-updated and you have news from PIFF 2006 lying around.
It also has a schedule section - which lists movies which have already finished showing and a catalogue section which contains information on only 1/10th of the movies running.

But, the icing on the cake is this - which actually prompted me to write this blog.
I wrote the organizers, the following email:

Dear Sir / Madam,

This is a very humble request to the organising committee to please put up the complete schedule of films on the website (preferably in the document / excel / pdf format) which is also up to date.

Today (18th), the schedule for the remaining days became available at the venues (19th onwards), but the website still shows the schedule only till the 18th.

I request you to please update this - so that we can better plan which movies to go for.

Thank you and regards,

- Saurabh Jain

To this, I got the following reply from a Moti Irani:

Please stop visiting our website we are all far too busy collect the schedule from INOX or Esquare

Hah!
Hows that for providing shoddy service and having the audacity to tell your customers to F*** Off? A perfect case of demand more than supply.
I don't know, but if something is worth doing, its worth doing well.

In my opinion, if they have a website running, it should be updated - otherwise there is absolutely no point in having it in the first place.

[ Min number of posts to go till Mar 17, 2008 : 88. Why am I counting? ]