There's gotta be a better way!

From my very first days in the US many, many monsoons ago, I began hearing a uniquely- in my experience- American phrase: "There's gotta be a better way!". In many ways, it epitomizes the spirit of American inventiveness and problem-solving. When Americans find something cumbersome, or dissatisfying in result or output, it's an automatic thought. I was reminded about this today, when I opened my windows to take advantage of a brief cooling in the aftermath of a thunderstorm. I unlocked and pushed out the windows, and then had to wiggle my rather large hands through the metal grille to latch the window open. Later, when the humidity level proved too oppressive, I decided to close the windows and run the air-conditioning for a while. Hand through the grille again to unlatch the window, and then I had a really difficult time closing the window because it required that I push my hand way out to grab the frame of the window and swing it back in again. Looking at the welts on my hand and wrist, I said to myself, "There's got to be a better way!".

 And that got me thinking both about the problem and about how ordinary day-to-day problems and hassles simply don't impinge on the Indian mindset. We just go on, putting in the extra effort, tolerating the unnecessary inconveniences, and barely even notice them, simply dismissing them as facts of life. It's little wonder, then, that we don't have a track record of inventiveness. Philosophy, yes, we're up there with anything anyone else has. But philosophy is not a sport, it doesn't require movement, it doesn't even matter if you don't have a formal education. Look at the records which Indians hold in the Guinness Book of World Records: they are mostly for lack of grooming, lack of activity and, if I may say so, for sheer laziness! The longest hair, the longest fingernails, the longest toenails, the longest time spent sitting/standing in one place, the longest time spent standing on one foot on a rock in the middle of a river pointing at the sun, the most people gathered in one place sitting in the lotus pose or something, and so on. Lately there have been some efforts at creating records involving slightly more activity: most people simultaneously playing a musical instrument, or most people simultaneously chanting shlokas or something similar. You don't see Indians in the GBWR for running the fastest mile, or building the longest suspension bridge or anything that might require strenuous activity. It's not that we aren't- with a little prodding and some proper nutrition- capable of at least attempting some real records. What holds us back is a cultural stew of negativity, of saying "It's good enough" when it's not, or "That's coolie work" to deprecate working with your hands, or simply "What for?", expressed in that ubiquitous Hindi phrase "Chalta hai!", or the Kannada "Yaako, sumne bidi!"(What for, just leave it alone!).

 And so we use the inventiveness of other peoples, and claim them as our own because, hey, "We gave the concept of Zero to the world", or "We were living in sophisticated cities when the white man was swinging on trees in Europe" , or "We invented algebra and trigonometry and astronomy and plastic surgery and....". But heaven forbid you say anything to the effect of what matters is where we are at now, and that it's not where we should be. The response to that, predictably, is "We were looted for the last 1000 years by the Arabs and the Europeans!". Well, that's just victimhood. Plenty of people have been looted. The Europeans used to loot each other, and were looted by peoples from across the Urals. And they weren't living on trees when cities were being built in India, they were building their own cities and ships and foundries and canals and castles and irrigation systems. It's a typically defensive Indian reaction to place all our woes on someone else's head. I was looking today at some pictures of the city of Cotonou in Benin(yes, that city infamous for its internet scammers). Benin is a poor country, with a per capita income lower than India. It used to be the "Slave Coast" of Africa, and was for almost two decades until 1990 a Marxist country. Yet, for all that, the city of Cotonou, the most populous in Benin, is remarkably clean when compared to any Indian city. And I mean any Indian city. It's downtown area has clean, well-laid sidewalks and kerbs, and well-maintained buildings. Why is that? It's not that they have more money, or more resources. Compare it to Bangalore's "upscale" downtown of the Commercial Street-Trinity Circle-Richmond Circle triangle, which is a stinking, decrepit, pot-holed eyesore, despite the new steel-and-glass buildings, despite the fact that businesses throughout the entire area make fortunes. There's no excuse for that, save the pervasive apathy of the Indian mindset.

 During my childhood in India, it was common to have two varieties of the same product: the regular one and the "export quality". By definition, "export quality" was destined for markets which had an inexplicably higher standard than Indians, who- one presumes - could, should and would be happy with anything which doesn't fall apart or stop working in under a week. I dealt with this mindset in another post. When I was in my teens, I saw that there was a problem with shampoos and hair oils in glass bottles, which had a tendency to slip and shatter on the floor, often causing injury. Even vitamins came in glass bottles. I attempted to have major manufacturers replace their glass bottles with the by-then ubiquitous(in other countries) food-grade plastics, but ultimately failed because they would lose their coveted ISI stamp(remember that? I think I only see it on helmets now) if they used non-ISI-approved packaging. I visited a major plastics manufacturer who claimed to be making food grade plastics. They told me they had previously applied for ISI-certification, but had not been able to get it. I visited ISI, and they told me that while the plastic might very well meet their own published standard for food-grade plastic(simply a metric copy of US standards), they were unwilling to certify in case some problem arose in the future as a result. More than likely, they had the standard on the books, but no means of certifying compliance to it. After running around for months, I finally gave up on it. Now, of course, the MNCs operating in India have made food-grade plastic the de facto standard of food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical packaging. But did it have to take foreigners to come and do it for us? Was it that Indians were so apathetic to each other that they would live with the potential for injury without demurring? That we place more value on views and opinions which come from a westerner rather than an Indian? Could our own manufacturers not see that glass breakage was a serious hazard and that "there's gotta be a better way"?

Not a day goes by without my encountering some new instance of inconvenience, poor design, procedural inefficiency, or other irritant which could not be either eliminated or substantially abated with just a modicum of commonsense application. Whether it is the commonsense that is lacking, or the will to apply commonsense, I am still at a loss to discern. As an Indian myself, I hope the problem is the latter, but am not convinced that it couldn't be the former. Seriously, if Indians don't incorporate problem-solving into their everyday thinking and embrace it as a good thing, it's not going to be a better tomorrow, at least for those of us unfortunate enough to live outside of the western-inspired insular communities popping up all over suburbia.