Let’s operate in the unused toilet

We have turned jugaad, our famous make-do solutions for everything, into a national badge of honour

Jugaad is not the correct way to do things; it is the way we do things.

I was in class at the Social Communications Media department of the Sophia Polytechnic when the rains came down and thunder rumbled.

“ Haathi nu pag (the footsteps of the elephant),” I told my students, a Gujarati phrase I have picked up from Parsi friends, which describes the departure of the monsoon. After that I set out for the station and found that there was an odd feeling in the air at Grant Road Station, something of the atmosphere you get outside a home where a death has taken place.

No resident of this city is without

raadaa-radar . (

Raadaa , a Bambaiyya word for fights, disturbances to the peace, and even riots.) I heard someone ask, “

Kiti off

zhaale ?” in the signature Marathi-English code-switching that constitutes our city’s communication patterns. That translates as: ‘How many died?’ though ‘off’ is from English and from the world of switches and currents. You’re no longer plugged in.

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I heard that question and my heart skipped a beat. I asked what happened and was told about the stampede on the bridge and how people were killed in that mad rush on a narrow bridge, built to serve a population one-tenth the size of what it is now.

And my mind turned to another word,

jugaad , a word we have turned into a national badge of honour.

Jugaad means a make-do solution. It is not the correct way to do things; it is the way we do things. We are so proud of it that when we do things the wrong way but we get the result we want, we boast about the

jugaad endlessly.

Sample this

What is jugaad ? Here it is. Your mother needs a cataract operation. You and she turn up in the hospital at the appointed time and the surgeon does a double-take.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. You show him the email telling you when you’re supposed to turn up and there it is, in black-and-white, incontrovertible proof that your mother is to have the cataract in her left eye removed.

“Oh dear, there isn’t an operation theatre available,” he says. “But I tell you what. We have an unused toilet. Well, it hasn’t been used for a while. I’ll get my staff to clean it up so that it’s completely sterile and we’ll set up a table there and do your mother’s eye and she’ll be home for tea. How does that sound?”

Now, if you are a votary of jugaad , you will agree and your mother will indeed be home for tea.

If you like things done the proper way, you will take your mother home and have a cup of calming tea (or coffee or kaadhaa or rasam or kahwa or whatever is your tipple of choice for difficult moments) and make another appointment, perhaps with another doctor, perhaps in another hospital.

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For all those who have done some jugaad and sent work off to the client and then felt vindicated or even triumphant when it was accepted, how would you like to have someone patch something together, throw some old stuff in, top it and tail it with some new clichés, do a rush job, and send it to you? You know you haven’t been given your money’s worth.

What do you do? Open a bottle of champagne and raise a toast to jugaad and sign a cheque and send it off happily? You should, because that’s what you might do if your jugaad worked.

Jugaad is a failure of empathy. Our nation lives in a failure of empathy. There was a flyover built in my city which was completed and was closed. Why was it closed? A political problem. Can you imagine not opening a flyover that would ease the traffic in a city close to terminal arteriosclerosis because the political partners in government are bickering?

There was a proposal to build a new bridge. That proposal was wending its way through the bureaucracy. Almost the entire bureaucracy is a failure of empathy. How would you feel if your pension were delayed by two years and you end up one of the hundreds of senior citizens who come to the bank and ask pathetically whether there has been any news? How would you feel if you had to walk down a bridge that was close to collapse? How would you feel if someone you loved died in a stampede?

Road rage

But before you shake your head and blame the bureaucracy, blame the government, think of the last time you were driving on the highway.

In front of you a truck, another car and a truck. “Damned truck,” you mutter to yourself. “Just supplying food and clothes and petrol to the nation and driving along so slowly. I suppose I’ll have to cut in front of it.” So out you go on to the wrong side of the road to cut in front of the truck. But the guy in the other car is also thinking the same thing and he’s moved out into the wrong side of the highway too. “Who does he think he is to cut out in front of me with his dinky little car? Doesn’t he know I have an Indian-Made-Foreign-Label car under my rear with a gazillion more horsepower than he does? I have to show him his place.”

Now you’re trying to overtake the guy who is trying to overtake the truck and this means you are now on the second lane in the opposite direction. I am in the car which is headed in the opposite direction. You manage to merge back in behind the truck but not before you see my face, cold and terrified as we miss death.

You laugh.

***

Of course, there are some advantages to jugaad . For instance, the language of my city, a language that draws contempt for its Marathi from Pune, contempt for its Hindi from Delhi, contempt for its English from anyone who ever wrote a column about desi English, still communicates.

And the bravehearts who worked at Parel and Elphinstone Road still rode the trains home. (Of course, some of the bravehearts were also caught trying to strip dead bodies of their gold.) We manage. It is jugaad .

All I am saying is that we should not make it the badge of our tribe. We should be aiming at the correct way to do things. And that perhaps is when we will turn our engineers into problem identifiers rather than code writers.

Jerry Pinto tries to think and write and translate in the cacophony of Mumbai.