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!
Initial reaction was “where is this going”, but once you got to your theme you made some nice points.
Comment by Nikhil — November 11, 2008 @ 9:53 pm
the “where is this going” feeling is now my trademark isnt it?
I just hope that i can establish my patent on the ending twists too!
Comment by cafm — November 12, 2008 @ 1:50 am
aliyaa my thoughts for two paise that it is worth….
[shamshi beikku]… anyway nice reads…
India always had high return on investment because of the “typical” indian kanchoosness
India always had high “demand market”
But the credit crunch is affecting the “capital market” and hence we still might take a hit — as in where n amount was available now n/10 is available to do what you want to do…. [i am way out in the deep water here]…. sorry aliyaa oru MBA kaarannodu ithu thallaan
Comment by deepak — November 14, 2008 @ 8:47 am
A very refreshing blog I must say…!
And this is one of the few good posts I have read on the much written about meltdown. And the most hatke of all!
I’ll have to invest some more time to go through your posts…am looking forward to it…
I’m glad you came across my blog, more so because I discovered yours in the process…
Comment by Parul — November 14, 2008 @ 9:47 pm
@ deepak..true da..now mostly the capital inflows (which was funding a lot of our growth)is going to dry up from west…but China(yes! source Economic Survey for 2007-2008), our biggest trade partner, is relatively less exposed to the crisis and our domestic market is also quite strong so though we might take a hit, it might not be as strong as the doomsday’ers are predicting.
In this post I was thinking more in terms of the cost cutting and efficiency measures that the world will have to accept as part of the recovery…and how we are already good at it and also how there is a chance more work will come to us as a measure of cost cutting, now that the “India” model is proved to work
@ praul thx for the compliments!
my head just hit the roof! 
Comment by cafm — November 15, 2008 @ 11:34 am
@ cafm : is there a point of diminishing returns in the cost cutting proces?
Comment by deepak — November 15, 2008 @ 1:05 pm
Basic economic funda na…you keep on producing as long as your marginal revenues per unit of production is more than your magical costs…beyond that you dont. (In a profit maximizing theory which obviously applies here)
Associated with each cost cutting measure there will be some “cost” incurred for that…and the cost advantage will start reducing once the obvious cuts are made….so at some point the marginal benefit of the cost cut will equal the marginal cost of the cost cut where you stop taking further measures.
Comment by cafm — November 15, 2008 @ 2:35 pm