The desi jugaad

“Let the clown and con-man wear Their many-coloured coats;
Let the fool and charlatan speak From a dictionary of quotes...”
From The Quotations of Bachchoo

The Duke of Edinburgh, notorious for stirring up hornets’ nests, putting his foot in it and being something of a bull in a China shop, all at once, was on an occasion inspecting a new building somewhere in Britain. He and his hosts, who were showing him around, were confronted by an unfinished corner of the edifice through which a tangle of electrical wires hung out like that proverbial hornets’ nest.
“Th

at looks like it’s been installed by Indians”, said the Duke.
The accompanying journalists promptly recorded and reported the remark. It made the headlines in the guise of “Prince Philip in Racial Slur” et cetera. Certain members of the Indian community, who generously assume the role of spokespersons, expressed, on our behalf, their outrage. How dare he? Racism! Colonial exploitation! Burra sahib talk! And that from grubby little Third World UK to the Emerging Power!... and so on.
The truth is, as anyone with eyes to see knows, that one of the great and distinctive features of our Indian streets and even of our best, newest and “17 star” installations, is the bush of wires protruding from the ceiling or from a corner or cornice; the overflowing tangle of wires which leap out of one of those metal boxes on the pavement which seem to lie open for no reason or indeed the criss-cross of what looks like a demented weave over the crossroads of small towns and crowded localities of large cities, hanging from precariously standing poles. The matted nature of our electrical enterprise would throw Edison and even Maxwell into a panic. It should be a matter of pride that these encumbrances are intelligible only to our super electricians.
The other explanation for the Duke’s remarks, one which I proffered at the time to alleviate the anger of my fellow Indians, was that Prince Phillip didn’t mean us subcontinental Indians at all! The middle classes of Britain refer to bad workmen, people who leave things half done, especially in the building and electrical-installation trades, as “cowboys”. Phillip was attempting to recall this description and hit on the wrong word from the pairing of “Cowboys and Indians”. He was, blunderingly, being somewhat unfamiliar with bourgeois idiom, referring to native Americans.
I did extend this explanation at the time but it wasn’t taken seriously. The cry of “racism” didn’t die down.
How times have changed. Recently the news in England, on BBC radio and TV bulletins, was headed by the disgrace heaped upon India’s preparations or non-preparedness for the Commonwealth Games scheduled to start on the 3rd of October. Spokesmen for the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian teams voiced their deep disapproval of the accommodation their athletes would be required to live in. They said it was filthy, unhygienic and dysfunctional. It was also alleged that when the rains came some of the bedrooms got flooded. And for good measure they said malaria and dengue fever were rife in the city.
The spokesman thrust forward by the relevant authorities, a brave individual called Lalit Bhanot, fearlessly faced the international press. He said it would be all right on the night. He didn’t say, as he might have, that the rains abate by October so there may be no flooding.
Mr Bhanot emerged from the interview as something of a relativist philosopher. He said, in his own way, that one man’s spic-and-span is another man’s squalor. He said a lot of the clean-up had already taken place. The reports didn’t exactly say what shape or form the filth and unhygienic conditions actually took. From the severe way in which the New Zealand official expressed himself, one knew that it was more than tangles of wires hanging out of the corners of ceilings. But what was it? Rats running about? Cockroaches crawling out of kitchen crevices as they do in the best of Indian houses and hotels? Was it just muck and mud from the workmen’s feet which hadn’t been swept? Were the toilet bowls filthy and did the toilet seats, being screwed on too far back, prove incapable of being lifted for a gentleman’s use? Were the flush handles inoperative? Did the showers spew out muddy water on a hapless bather’s head? Did the water supply collapse and the electricity dunk out at odd intervals in the day? Did the bathrooms of one floor leak into the rooms of the floor below?
Of course, Mr Bhanot is right. Standards do differ. Sometimes sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. It doesn’t take an Einstein to note that all the complaining countries were white and neither Malaysia nor Kenya had any opinion on the cleanliness or suitability of the accommodation in the Games complex. Or perhaps they did and their standards were as flexible as some Indian ones. Britain hasn’t pronounced on the facilities yet, but that’s probably out of diplomatic decency.
Yes, standards differ. I remember when I was first preparing to come to England as an undergraduate, an old uncle Behram Bumshowerwalla (a second cousin several times removed — sometimes by the police!) warned me against going too close to Englishmen, saying that the cold climate caused them to not bathe regularly. Arriving in England, I found this not to be quite true and I put it down to a bit of Parsi racist prattle.
However, the other thing that “Behramji mama” said had, I discovered, a bit more truth to it. Claiming as he did to be the inventor of the bum shower, he inevitably and at great length bored people with the statistics of his trade. He would tell all and sundry at breakfast, lunch and dinner, at weddings, navjotes or on any occasion where he could coerce some hapless person into lending him an ear, how slow the European trade in bum showers was. The Europeans regularly returned the concessional packages he offered on a sale-or-return basis. Few sales, lots of returns. He attributed this slackness of trade to there being a differential in the hygienic standards of Europeans and Indians, the grubby details of which he forced on his listeners but which I will spare the gentle reader.
I wish he were alive. He would have enjoyed meeting Mr Bhanot and providing him with a real and national example of Bhanot’s First Law in operation.