Diwali for Visiting Americans: How India and Malaysia Actually Run a Meeting

🇮🇳 India · 🇲🇾 Malaysia

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

One Indian tech worker described the office mood whenever an American colleague visits in person in three words: "it's like Diwali." An American expat running a Malaysian office, meanwhile, described his own evenings rather less festively: a full day in Kuala Lumpur followed by calls stretching from 8pm to midnight with his US counterparts. Both offices are performing the same ritual — rearranging their entire day around someone else's time zone — and both have quietly normalised it as just how meetings work now.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇳 India

🇲🇾 Malaysia

India

India's meeting culture resists easy generalisation, and the people who study it for a living say so themselves: workplace norms here vary "considerably by company, industry, city, seniority" and by whether the employer is a local business or a multinational. What holds reasonably constant is the broad shape of hierarchy — "decisions tend to flow from the top down, and employees agree with their superiors" in more traditional organisations, with deep, genuine respect for seniority built into how a room behaves, even as the same research notes a visibly more casual style has taken hold inside startups specifically.

Where this gets interesting — and where a foreign manager most often trips — is the gap between visible agreement in a meeting and actual alignment afterward, which is exactly why management guidance recommends sending written agendas and explicitly naming who owns each next step, rather than assuming a quiet room means consensus. Layered on top of this is a specific, widely discussed modern ritual: offices that work with US teams increasingly schedule calls at 11pm or midnight specifically to protect the American side's "precious hours," a pattern one widely shared account described as becoming self-perpetuating, "passed on from seniors to freshers until it gets normalized." Hofstede's research scores India at 77 on power distance, a notably high reading that tracks precisely with both the top-down decision flow and the apparent willingness to absorb significant personal cost — in this case, sleep — to accommodate a counterpart perceived as senior in the global hierarchy, whatever their actual rank.

Malaysia

Malaysia's meeting culture carries its own, related form of indirectness, this one running up the chain rather than across time zones. Guidance for newcomers describes colleagues "second guessing" what a supervisor wants to hear and answering accordingly, rather than offering a direct assessment — a pattern genuinely disorienting for anyone used to blunter feedback cultures, since the disagreement is real, it's simply never voiced in the room. What makes Malaysia distinct from many neighbours is just how much this varies by employer type: multinational corporations are explicitly described as running "very westernised" internally, while other organisations carry "a distinctly Malaysian flavour" in the same city, sometimes the same industry.

The time-zone ritual shows up here too, just with the roles slightly shifted: an American expat managing a Malaysian office described settling into local hours — in around 9 or 10am, out around 6pm — only to then run calls with his US-based employer from 8pm to midnight most nights, a stacking of a full local day on top of a full US-hours evening that he contrasted directly with the "normal 8am to 5pm shift" he'd been used to at home. Hofstede's Malaysia score sits at 100 on power distance, among the highest recorded anywhere and matching or exceeding India's own high reading, which fits a workplace where open disagreement with a superior is genuinely rare, and where "what you think you want to hear" becomes the actual content of a meeting rather than a cynical aside about one.

The Reckoning

The real symmetry here isn't hierarchy itself — most workplace cultures have some — it's that both countries have built the same specific coping mechanism around a foreign (usually American) counterpart's time zone, and both have fully normalised the personal cost of doing so. India's version runs the risk inward, through a cultural willingness to agree visibly while disagreement stays private; Malaysia's version runs structurally similar, through "telling supervisors what they think you want to hear" as the default mode rather than the exception.

The genuinely sharp irony: both patterns are routinely invisible to the foreign manager benefiting from them. A visiting American reads a smoothly run, agreeable meeting as evidence the team is aligned and happy; what's actually happened, in both countries, is that misalignment and midnight calls alike have simply been moved somewhere the visitor doesn't see them.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

BusinessToday.in — A software engineer's viral post captured the late-night-meeting ritual exactly: "You have to schedule meetings even later — till 11pm or 12am — just to make sure they don't sacrifice their precious hours," adding that the practice "gets passed on from seniors to freshers until it gets normalized."

BusinessToday.in — Commenters responding to the same post offered a sharper diagnosis than the original complaint: "It's our own desi brethren who act more goras than the goras," arguing that Indian managers, not the American counterparts themselves, are usually the ones imposing the harshest accommodation.

ExpatArrivals (interview with Michael) — An American expat managing a Malaysian office described the unglamorous reality behind the time-zone ritual bluntly: a full local workday from around 9am to 6pm, followed by "calls anywhere from 8pm to midnight each night" with his US-based employer.

BusinessToday.in — The same thread captured the performative side of the ritual with a line that doubles as its own punchline: "When someone comes from abroad, it's like Diwali in the office," one commenter wrote, noting staff are sometimes called back into a workplace they'd normally work from home, purely to be visibly present for a visiting American colleague.

Conclusion

If you're choosing between these two placements, the honest framing is that both will eventually hand you a very similar schedule: a full local day, followed by an evening shaped by someone else's business hours on another continent. The real cultural skill either country will ask of you isn't running the meeting itself — it's reading what isn't being said in it, whether that's a Malaysian colleague telling you what they think you want to hear, or an Indian team quietly absorbing a midnight call schedule nobody will admit out loud is unsustainable.

Ask the blunt question neither culture will volunteer: "is this actually working for you, or are we just being polite about it?" You likely won't get a straight answer in the room — but asking at all tends to be noticed, in both places, as a good sign.