This is pretty interesting. I am from India & you can observe something similar in India with a lot of people not all. We are not the most anal about being on time & most meetings never start on time. Parties or group dinners will never ever start on time. There is this thing called "Indian Stretchable Time", a funny variation on IST. I always wonder how much of this has to do with our cultural concept of time. As per Indian mythology, time is not linear but circular, there is a cycle of birth & death till you attain moksh (salvation). The other thing I notice vs. west is that people in Indian offices chat with coworkers a lot more.