Resilience
Creaking fans, once-pitch-black-now-grey black boards, a sleepy weekday afternoon and 50 odd kids trying not to sleep off lest they get caught by their “madam” propagating the system that everyone loves to hate today. These are the scenes under which l learnt most of the concepts that define me today.
“…and this chaff and waste which is thrown away in other countries feeds our huge cattle population…” . Since resilience was too big a word for me at that time, this is the line,(image rather, of a bovine feast) I attached to concept most akin to resilience that my young mind could conjure up . And with it, it also gave an important pillar in the value system of my social identification of being an Indian. It was these very forgotten brain synapses that were tingled when I recently stopped at a traffic light and this saw this image.
In these times of great uncertainty, this is one picture that gives great solace to my heart. Why? For to me, it is an epitome of what differentiates us the rest of the world. And to stretch the limits (Literally) it would also be the best picture to answer the question “What will happen to our economy and our people in face of this slowdown?”
For the uninitiated this is the picture of a tyre of one of the typical monsters that ply the road in India. This one is of a yellow variant which reminds me more of Adthoma from spadikam but that’s probably besides the main point here. Now I am no dendrochronologist but I am sure that there are many a stories behind each of that crack and rings which is the result of the wonderful phenomenon called “re-treading”. And this is where we score!
Today people talk about cost cutting, but I think as a nation we took a PhD in it long back. This resilience and cost effectiveness in the Indian culture is not something that has been consciously nurtured up by us, but something that has grown out of brutal necessity. It’s no simple joke when you have to provide for nearly 18% of the worlds population on 2% of its land! And this is something we have learnt to do beautifully.
They say when people are agitated, like by being woken up in the middle of their sleep, they generally start abusing in their mother tongue. Only time will tell that if that in this hour of need, the class of Indians (including me) tainted by western education, who are in a place where they can rewrite the history and redefine world power equations, will be able to fall back onto our core Indian values to see the storms through.
But its these pictures that I see every day in life- from the raddiwalla (scrap-collector) who goes thru hazardous garbage – a work that would ensure a litigation in any other country (legacy code reuse?) , to the truck driver who tries to make that extra buck by offering his empty company truck space on his empty return journey (Reverse-supply-chain ?) that make me believe that if anyone is going to weather out this storm, its gotta be an Indian first.
So my request to Indians trying to cope with the slowdown – Please look around and be inspired!
