It is mango season now, and I remembered an old tale from Hindu mythology that a lot of Indians are familiar with. Narada, Hindu myth’s mischief-monger-in-chief, goes to Mount Kailasha with some sort of a special one-of-a-kind mango that apparently cannot be shared. Both Ganesha and Kartikeya want the mango. Shiva resolves the dispute by saying that whichever of the two kids circles the world sooner, thrice over, will get the mango. Kartikeya hops onto his turbocharged peacock immediately and gets on with the circumnavigations. Ganesha instead goes around his parents, Shiva and Parvati, three times, and gets the mango for himself, much to the chagrin of Kartikeya.
While the purpose of the story may have been to moralise about how kids should consider parents the totality of their universe, most kids remember this story for how clever Ganesha was; how he subverted the rules of the game for personal gain. And poor Kartikeya who played by the rules gets little or no love. The jugaadu Ganesha is the hero of this story.
Our mythology is filled with such stories. Pretty much always with popular gods as the heroes. It would be rather silly if I draw a straight line from these old stories to our current culture of celebrating jugaad. It is just that the popularity of these stories reinforces how much we admire people who break rules and conventions, to come out on top. And in the world of business at large, and among startups in particular, some of these rule-breakers are looked at as gods themselves.
But is such jugaad a good thing or a bad thing? I use a fairly simple heuristic to judge this. If the jugaad was necessary, you did the right thing. If with the resources that you had, or rather because you lacked resources, the jugaadu way out was the only possibility, then it was absolutely the right thing to have done. Harking back to the story of Ganesha, Kartikeya, and the mango — Kartikeya had the resource of a fast peacock. And so he was right in trying to use it to get the mango. Ganesha’s only option was a slow mouse. There was no way he could win the race with it. And so he did what he did to get the mango.
Most startups are Ganeshas when they begin. They have limited recourse to manpower, money, connections — none of the peacocks of the world of business. That they repeatedly take recourse to jugaad in the early days is thus just borne out of necessity. But in due course of time, they accumulate those resources. And that is when it is time to try and shake off those old habits, because if you still try to be jugaadu at that stage, it is almost always a recipe for trouble — or at the very least, derision.
It is one thing to try and dive into narrow bylanes in search of a shortcut when all you have is a two-wheeler. But when you are driving a bus, it really makes much more sense to stick to the main roads.
In this weekly column, we discuss the startup workplace. Thejaswi Udupa heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace
