By Hook Or By Crook

SYSTEMS AND RULES MAY BLOCK ELEPHANTS — BUT THERE ARE ALWAYS GAPS WIDE ENOUGH TO LET A RAT THROUGH

 

ACCORDING TO Brahmavaivarta Puran, Kuber, the king of Yakshas, had a gardener called Hema, whose duty it was to gather fresh fragrant flowers every morning with which Kuber performed his daily worship of Shiva. One morning, smitten by desire for his beautiful wife, Hema failed to leave his bed and go to the garden. As a result Kuber did not get the flowers he needed for his worship. Enraged, Kuber cursed Hema that he would be struck with an incurable skin disease and would be separated from his wife forever. The curse took effect and Kuber's gardener found himself alone and diseased in a faraway land. For years he suffered the curse, feeling there was no way out until one day, he told his story to a sage. Feeling sorry for Hema, the sage advised him to perform a vrat, an observance that involved fasting and praying all day on a particularly auspicious day. "If you observe this vrat with pure devotion, you will be liberated from this curse. Your health will be restored and you will be reunited with your wife." 

   Religious books are full of vrats, ways by which one can work around any distressing and apparently insurmountable fate. The same thought exists behind the notion of upaay that is popular amongst astrologers. Astrology is supposed to reveal, through the position of stars and planets, the fate of man. If the revealed fate is not favourable, then the astrologer immediately offers a work around — a gemstone, a mantra, a pilgrimage, a prayer or a ritual by which the negative effects of a planet can be overcome. 

   For centuries, Indians have been exposed to vrats and upaays. Hence, at a deep cultural core, most Indians believe there is nothing rigid about life. Everything is manageable, solvable, everything has a work around. This powerful cultural construct has its most popular manifestation in the North Indian word jugaad. It is the ability to get things done when the law and the rules do not favour us. You want to fly down to Delhi today, but all tickets are booked — what do you do? Do a jugaad. You have been shifted to a new city and you want admission for your daughter in the best school in the neighbourhood, but admission time is over. All you have to do is get the man who can get jugaad done and find a way out. A jugaadu is a highly networked person who can weave his way through any system and get things done when the

straight and narrow path is blocked. 

   In the typical Indian way of accommodating everything, we surrender to fate for the big things in life but for the small things, we subscribe to jugaad and vrat and upaay. We believing in bending fate, but do not believe we can break it. That is one reason why Indians are such short-term thinkers, finding it difficult to plan for the distant future (airports for 2020) while finding it easy to find jugaad for the immediate problems (land domestic flights in international airports to handle the air traffic crisis). 

   For many the existence of jugaad is a testimony that to the fact that systems are inefficient and corrupt. It indicates that Indians have no qualms about bypassing the system to get their way. Put in another way, systems in India may block elephants but there are always narrow gaps to let a rat through. For people who are linear thinkers, this behaviour can be rather disconcerting. 

   For others jugaad is proof of ingenuity and creativeness — a demonstration that Indians are not willing to accept fate and are willing to scurry a solution out of any problem. Nothing is insurmountable. If one has the will, there is always a way. 

   So this leads us to the question, does the system construct jugaad or does jugaad construct the system? Are we creative thinkers and therefore refuse to create linear logical systems? Or is it that we find linear systems tedious, demanding too much discipline and uprightness, hence turn to jugaad? The answer perhaps lies in the emotional nature of Indians that is responsible for both the inefficiency of the system as well as for the effective workarounds. 

   If you travel across India, you cannot rely on a postal address to find a person's house in a city. Postal addresses are logical — name of the city, the area, the road, the colony, the building, the flat. But Indian cities are not logical. You have to step down from your car and ask the paan-wala for directions. This is also jugaad, albeit a minor form, that allows you to overcome a situation that is not favoured by logic. If you are in the USA, this may not be possible or even needed. Everything is so well organised with road maps and street signs that there is little need to ask anyone. Today, there are street signs and road maps in India too. But people still prefer asking those around them for directions. This indicates the Indian comfort with people rather than with processes, with private emotions rather than with impersonal logic. 

   Indians do not split professional and personal behaviour very easily; professional friends over time become personal friends, making it possible to ask for favours and do jugaad. There seems nothing wrong with taking advantage of his role and position. Most of jugaad is not just done through bribing or such financial transactions; it is done through relationships, networks, favours or emotional blackmail. It cannot be reduced to a process. 

   Comfort with jugaad is the reason why we tolerate and even contribute to inefficiency. Deep down, we don't believe systems work hence don't invest time and resources to building systems. It is perhaps the reason why the service sector is discovering that Indians are not very demanding of customer service. We don't expect things to work through processes — we find innovative personal ways to get things done. Rather than call up the telephone agency's complaint department which will give standard promises of seven-day solutions, we have greater trust in giving bakshish to the local lineman who will solve the problem in three days. We have become such compulsive out-of-the-box thinkers that, as we connect with the world at large, we need to train ourselves to be more in-the-box, become more aligned to processes and respect the rigidity of the system.