Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

Privacy issues aside, it's kinda cool reading about how Indians use their phones, and also how they use English. I'd never heard "beyond the pale" before, and I'm still not sure what the idea of "multiple Indias" means when some of them are Mexico and some are Africa...?

I've also never heard of the majority of the apps being analyzed or tracked. Must be such a different world out there.

From the context, what I gather was meant by the idea of "multiple Indias" was the socioeconomic status of different demographics in India and their app usage. The presence of specific apps gives a tell to which demographic they belong to.

In other words, the richest demographic used certain apps and was equated to folks in Mexico, followed by the less rich equated to folks in Indonesia and the poor to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Beyond the pale is commonly used in English. A pale is a stake, and it means beyond the boundary (set out by a fence with stakes, hence the phrase) of what is acceptable. It gaines popularity in the mid 19th century. It may be related to the term "the Pale" which referred to the better controlled more Anglicised part of Ireland around Dublin, but there isn't enough evidence to be sure of this. Certainly not an Indianism anyway.

>I'm still not sure what the idea of "multiple Indias" means when some of them are Mexico and some are Africa...?

Is it not pretty obvious? It is like the phrase "middle America". It doesn't literally mean a different country. It means different wealth categories: the Indians that when considered as a whole are economically equivalent roughly to Mexico, those roughly equivalent to Indonesia (poorer) and those roughly equivalent to Sub-Saharan Africa (poorest). There are ~1b Indians that are still so poor they aren't realistically in the market for your startup app if it wants its customers to ever spend anything, there are ~300m Indians that could be in the market for some apps, but probably mostly free ad-funded ones, and there are ~150m Indians that are quite a good market because they will happily spend money on something that provides value.

I got all this just from reading the post btw.

Makes sense, thanks! I love reading about how other cultures do software.

It's the average cooldude marketing of self-proclaimed "India 1", denigrating their own people and can't think outside of labeling others as something else.

These people are extremely snobbish in person when you go past their sweet talks, who don't understand much about people. I hated the "real" interactions and went back to being an IC in big tech.

Part of it is because they don't understand them, part of it is because they "understand" via someone else who told them stuff (like a redditor assuming everything on r/india is true), part of it is their own contempt of culture due to previous reasons ("ah these people are beyond any repair!"). Basically, ignorance in elites.

In some former colonies, the dialect can be a snapshot of the language back in colonial time. Happens to names as well as expressions.

I learned this watching a stand-up routine by Malaysian comic Nigel Ng. He was explaining his first name.