Monday, February 19, 2007
Monday, February 05, 2007
Frugality is India’s Tradition. Modernity sees India’s frugality as Poverty
Well saw this picture in the forest office at Dandeli – Just got moved by this one really. What really is frugality – Many mistake it to be miserliness or poverty. Frugality, on the other hand, is a tendency to possess less and what is absolutely necessary. It is this intelligence to understand what is really essential for us – is lacking and this is what makes us co-relate frugality and poverty. Well common sense is really uncommon. Mahatma Gandhi was an apt example for this trait. He always remarked that a khadi dhoti was enough for him to cover his body and in remarking so wore only dhoti for nearly half of his life, after his return from South Africa. Yet many of us very casually remark “Majboori ka naam – Mahatma Gandhi”. He is the same father figure, who is admired all over the world for his principles and values and yet many of my comrades don’t give him his deserved share of respect.
When I read this quote and started thinking over it, I remembered this particular anecdote (Can’t guarantee the authenticity though) from the Cold War era. NASA (USA) spent a decade and millions of dollars developing the high-tech Astronaut Pen, to solve the problem of writing in zero-gravity in a space ship. The Soviets solved the problem another way: They used a pencil. Were the Soviets poor in opting for pencil – a better solution than the hi-tech pen? Theres another example – when Motorola or GE came up with the Six Sigma concept, people started finding examples of Six Sigma processes. Only a handful of processes qualified like the airplane safety / reliability may be. But the most effective of them all had its roots in India – Yes the Mumbai Dabawallahs had achieved a six sigma level even before the quality concept was known to the world. Well, the dabawallahs are now world famous and feature in most of the case studies, but their secret in achieving those quality levels lied in 2 color dots and 5/6 digit code. I bet any consulting company in the world can come up with a better solution to this problem of supplying home made food to the appropriate people in their respective offices. I thought may be – I can have a go at it, so I closed my eyes and started visualizing the process and the intricacies of it and the first thing I saw was barcodes, bar code readers and an RDBMS to support these.
The great Indian elections of 2004 – brought 2 surprises; well the results were a big surprise but this is not a topic of our concern today, but the other surprise was more meaningful. The world’s largest democracy had surprised the entire world by announcing the results in a mere 4 hrs span (Poor Pranoy Roy did not have the time to digest the figures and present the analysis – He normally would it for 72 hours at a stretch). How many of you knew this fact – that India was the first of all the countries to use the fully electronic voting machines. Well there were a few attempts made by USA to start using electronic voting machines, but even the Americans were not able to deploy this across the country. USA had used touch screens, encryption techniques, backup servers, voice-guidance systems, modems, storage cards and a Windows based operating systems to come up with a state of the art of the technology voting machine which were networked to the central server. God knows, how much amount of coding would have gone into it. The Indians on the other hand, came up with a electronic machine – which looked like a Casio music synthesizer may be. The scientists at work never had any fancy expectations from it apart from its basic function of adding those votes efficiently and accurately. These machines were not even programmed about the candidates and only small slips of candidates and their symbols were just clipped besides the buttons. The electronic voting machines were never wired off together and were kept stand alone – This apart from keeping the system simple and cost effective, helped in avoiding problems if any one of those EVMs were captured. It was only one EVM that was vulnerable in case of booth capturing and the rest were unaffected. Now many of my Indian friends would already have a question in their minds – Its true they worked, what was their failure rate. Of the 1 million EVMs deployed, about 1800 of them malfunctioned for whatever reasons – this is an acceptable quality figure, considering that there were spare EVMs available in the booths and in the entire elections, hardly a few of the precious votes were lost in the process. In fact, the same philosophy is being prophesized in the Japanese Kaizen principles – Come up with simple solutions and continuously improve.
There is another example – that I would like to pick up straight from my home town – Belgaum. When we were studying our Engineering, the Belgaum traffic police came up with a novel concept of solar traffic lights – they deployed this across all the major circles in Belgaum. After 2 months, they had to discontinue with the traffic lights in the most centrally located circle in the city – the traffic lights just did not serve the purpose because it would not be programmed in accordance with the complex traffic situation there and brought in new problems of traffic congestion and starvation at the same time. Then, we had thought this to be a backward step, to move away from the traffic lights. In fact we had thought this to be a project for our final year engineering to help the traffic police to get over the problem. Now we realize the wisdom that went behind that decision of going back from those traffic lights. The circle, after 5 more years, still doesnot have a traffic signal.
India has traditionally been a rich country and that’s the reason for all those sieges right from Mohammad of Gazni to the Lord Mountbattens of the East India Company. But our forefathers were wise enough to have never been behind those technologies. This is evident in all our Indian dishes – an Indian woman would never want a mayonnaise sauce or vinegar to spice up her yummy dishes. The Indian home remedies for all sorts of medicinal problems justify this again. Try this yourself, the next time you cut your finger / bruise your leg, apply turmeric – the blood stops more instantly than when you apply Dettol. I am now convinced that the high priced glitzy solutions are no more efficient than their easily found, common counterparts. Friends, after having written so much, let me confess that I am not against technology. I am as big a technology buff as many of you are, but we got to be simple in our problem solving approach, we got to apply that wisdom to justify the use of technology. We Indians have a rich tradition and culture that we got to pass over to our successors – Lets pass this as it is as we have inherited it, if not add any value to it.
Well saw this picture in the forest office at Dandeli – Just got moved by this one really. What really is frugality – Many mistake it to be miserliness or poverty. Frugality, on the other hand, is a tendency to possess less and what is absolutely necessary. It is this intelligence to understand what is really essential for us – is lacking and this is what makes us co-relate frugality and poverty. Well common sense is really uncommon. Mahatma Gandhi was an apt example for this trait. He always remarked that a khadi dhoti was enough for him to cover his body and in remarking so wore only dhoti for nearly half of his life, after his return from South Africa. Yet many of us very casually remark “Majboori ka naam – Mahatma Gandhi”. He is the same father figure, who is admired all over the world for his principles and values and yet many of my comrades don’t give him his deserved share of respect.
When I read this quote and started thinking over it, I remembered this particular anecdote (Can’t guarantee the authenticity though) from the Cold War era. NASA (USA) spent a decade and millions of dollars developing the high-tech Astronaut Pen, to solve the problem of writing in zero-gravity in a space ship. The Soviets solved the problem another way: They used a pencil. Were the Soviets poor in opting for pencil – a better solution than the hi-tech pen? Theres another example – when Motorola or GE came up with the Six Sigma concept, people started finding examples of Six Sigma processes. Only a handful of processes qualified like the airplane safety / reliability may be. But the most effective of them all had its roots in India – Yes the Mumbai Dabawallahs had achieved a six sigma level even before the quality concept was known to the world. Well, the dabawallahs are now world famous and feature in most of the case studies, but their secret in achieving those quality levels lied in 2 color dots and 5/6 digit code. I bet any consulting company in the world can come up with a better solution to this problem of supplying home made food to the appropriate people in their respective offices. I thought may be – I can have a go at it, so I closed my eyes and started visualizing the process and the intricacies of it and the first thing I saw was barcodes, bar code readers and an RDBMS to support these.
The great Indian elections of 2004 – brought 2 surprises; well the results were a big surprise but this is not a topic of our concern today, but the other surprise was more meaningful. The world’s largest democracy had surprised the entire world by announcing the results in a mere 4 hrs span (Poor Pranoy Roy did not have the time to digest the figures and present the analysis – He normally would it for 72 hours at a stretch). How many of you knew this fact – that India was the first of all the countries to use the fully electronic voting machines. Well there were a few attempts made by USA to start using electronic voting machines, but even the Americans were not able to deploy this across the country. USA had used touch screens, encryption techniques, backup servers, voice-guidance systems, modems, storage cards and a Windows based operating systems to come up with a state of the art of the technology voting machine which were networked to the central server. God knows, how much amount of coding would have gone into it. The Indians on the other hand, came up with a electronic machine – which looked like a Casio music synthesizer may be. The scientists at work never had any fancy expectations from it apart from its basic function of adding those votes efficiently and accurately. These machines were not even programmed about the candidates and only small slips of candidates and their symbols were just clipped besides the buttons. The electronic voting machines were never wired off together and were kept stand alone – This apart from keeping the system simple and cost effective, helped in avoiding problems if any one of those EVMs were captured. It was only one EVM that was vulnerable in case of booth capturing and the rest were unaffected. Now many of my Indian friends would already have a question in their minds – Its true they worked, what was their failure rate. Of the 1 million EVMs deployed, about 1800 of them malfunctioned for whatever reasons – this is an acceptable quality figure, considering that there were spare EVMs available in the booths and in the entire elections, hardly a few of the precious votes were lost in the process. In fact, the same philosophy is being prophesized in the Japanese Kaizen principles – Come up with simple solutions and continuously improve.
There is another example – that I would like to pick up straight from my home town – Belgaum. When we were studying our Engineering, the Belgaum traffic police came up with a novel concept of solar traffic lights – they deployed this across all the major circles in Belgaum. After 2 months, they had to discontinue with the traffic lights in the most centrally located circle in the city – the traffic lights just did not serve the purpose because it would not be programmed in accordance with the complex traffic situation there and brought in new problems of traffic congestion and starvation at the same time. Then, we had thought this to be a backward step, to move away from the traffic lights. In fact we had thought this to be a project for our final year engineering to help the traffic police to get over the problem. Now we realize the wisdom that went behind that decision of going back from those traffic lights. The circle, after 5 more years, still doesnot have a traffic signal.
India has traditionally been a rich country and that’s the reason for all those sieges right from Mohammad of Gazni to the Lord Mountbattens of the East India Company. But our forefathers were wise enough to have never been behind those technologies. This is evident in all our Indian dishes – an Indian woman would never want a mayonnaise sauce or vinegar to spice up her yummy dishes. The Indian home remedies for all sorts of medicinal problems justify this again. Try this yourself, the next time you cut your finger / bruise your leg, apply turmeric – the blood stops more instantly than when you apply Dettol. I am now convinced that the high priced glitzy solutions are no more efficient than their easily found, common counterparts. Friends, after having written so much, let me confess that I am not against technology. I am as big a technology buff as many of you are, but we got to be simple in our problem solving approach, we got to apply that wisdom to justify the use of technology. We Indians have a rich tradition and culture that we got to pass over to our successors – Lets pass this as it is as we have inherited it, if not add any value to it.
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