The last three Uber rides I have taken have been taxing exercises in self-restraint. All three times, from the second I boarded, for the 60 or 80 minutes it took to reach Gurgaon from Delhi, the drivers, like politicians campaigning in Bihar right now, subjected me to intense speeches about the cleanliness of their cars and the cleverness of their driving skills, before ending with first a request and then a strict instruction that they be given a five-star rating. While the first two restricted themselves to the great qualities they had demonstrated (“Did you see how well I navigated that truck on the wrong side of the highway? Madam, please look up from your phone” and “This is Delhi, even Lord Ram wouldn’t bother with the traffic rules, but I am not like that”), the third went one step further and offered me a quid pro quo. “Let me be straight with you, madam. If you give me a five star, I’ll also give you one.” Shocked by the fact that there is a reverse rating in play and wondering if my Uber customer rating is one that would embarrass my parents, I quickly pressed all five stars.
I am not sure if Uber is offering some kind of incentives to five-star rated drivers (Yes, I am a committed journalist and I did ask them, but perhaps because they did not want to seem shallow seekers of high rating, none of the three confirmed the existence of such a scheme), but this obsession with rating is all around us and increasingly becoming the axis around which most interactions rotate. Gone are the days when the only ratings you cared to check was when you were booking a hotel online. Today, there are very few transactions that aren’t followed by a form demanding that every aspect of the deal be rated on a scale of one to five. As with most things, ever since feedback forms have gone unreservedly viral, it has lost all meaning. I went to the dentist last month and, even before I’d reached home, there was an SMS and an email asking me how many stars I’d give him. Anyone who would rate their dentist anything less than five stars is either a masochist or the kind of person who has abandoned all notions of oral health and hygiene. And how exactly does this rating exercise help? Would you choose a dentist purely on the basis of their star rating? Is a 4.5-rated dentist necessarily better at his work than his contemporary who is rated 4.3? How did we find a dentist, plumber or seller of Ray Ban frames before this ratings epidemic?
While I was trying to find the answers to the real implication of what is now an endless tyranny of feedback forms, I stumbled onto the discovery that the last bastion of rating will soon be breached. Launching in November is an app called Peeple, which lets you rate… people. Users of peeple will be able to rate people who are in their contacts list on three different levels — personal, professional and dating. The makers of the app say it helps users “really see how you show up in this world, as seen through the eyes of your network.” It will also allow users to find and meet people nearby with high ratings. “Now you can surround yourself with the best of the best and make new friends, business connections, and trusted people to help make your life easier!” (exclamation theirs). I don’t know about you but, so far, I hadn’t spent a minute contemplating how the lack of a rating system for people rendered my life unwieldy. How much longer do we have before we walk into a room and know that everyone there is thinking, “Meh, she is only a 3.1”?
Yet, while my first instinct is to dismiss this as yet another way in which people, by which I mean users and makers of the Internet, haven’t really progressed beyond their teens, experience has taught me that my instincts about these things are usually wrong. A few months ago, a friend added me to a group called Gurgaon Foodies. I watched the interactions in this group as some kind of sociological experiment. The first thing I figured out is that the group name itself was a bit of a loose definition, not everyone on it lived in Gurgaon and most users are foodies in the limited sense that they do eat food. Initially, the queries were rather rudimentary. “Where can I buy freshly-made waffles and maple syrup?” (Answer: The kirana store next to you; this is Gurgaon, for heaven’s sake) or “Does anyone have a good recipe for pumpkin soup?” (Answer: Everyone does; they are all disgusting). I would see these questions and the scores of comments and wonder why these people wouldn’t just look at a store shelf, or ask their Mum, or simply google it. I was certain the group would be inactive and dead in no time. On the contrary, the reliance of Gurgaon foodies on their network has gotten only increasingly critical. Last week someone posted, “I am at this restaurant, please tell me what to order. Quick, foodies, please this is urgent, the waiter is on his way over. WHAT SHOULD I ORDER?!” This was real panic, and I will admit that for the first two minutes when there were no comments on the post, I was genuinely anxious about the prospect that this person might have to actually look at the menu and order something that someone somewhere did not rate highly enough. For this is where we have come to, dear reader. This is the definitive problem of our times.
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Veena Venugopalis editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law