What is that one thing India is not terrible at?
Everyone knows the well-worn joke about the Japanese politician and his Bihari counterpart. The joke goes something like this: the Japanese tells the Indian, “Give us Bihar for a month. We will turn it into Japan.” The Indian replies, “Give us Japan for a month, and we will turn it into India.” This clichéd joke underlines the point that we Indians are terrible at making things, but we are world champions at unmaking.
As we approach the 68th year of Independence, I thought it might be worth examining what are the things we are good at making and the ones we aren’t. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi exhorts the world to “Make in India", the fact remains that we have always been terrible at manufacturing.
Complexity
Let us unravel this slogan in all its marvellous complexity. Let’s begin with stuff we simply cannot do. Jo hamare bas ke baahar hai. First up, the nail clipper. We were and remain incompetent at manufacturing nail clippers. Back in the 1980s, the nail clipper was an exotic thing, like Bailey’s liqueur. One had to ask an uncle returning from a foreign trip to get one. I grew up in Allahabad. Most of my friends used scissors. School monitors would diligently do "nail checks" in the morning assembly, but the exercise struck me as being patently unfair.
How can the nation’s future be expected to have clean and shapely nails when the very instrument required for the job is not manufactured by the nation? This gap in the market was filled by the South Koreans, who flooded the market with substandard, oversized nail clippers, with colourful ornate designs. You could keep pressing the blunt jaws of the clipper as hard as you might, but it simply would not clip. On the positive side, at least the Koreans introduced us to the clipper. We didn’t have a word for it so we settled on "nail cutter". "Toothless grinner" might have been a more appropriate name.
We were awful at stationery too. The ubiquitous Sandoz eraser, blue in colour, wasn’t much good at erasing. Instead of rubbing out an error, it would peel layers off the notebook paper until there was gaping hole in the page.
Fountain pens leaked like, well, fountains. The ink spilled onto the page, stained one’s fingers and left blotches in schoolbags. Once again, an Asian neighbour came to our rescue. The Chinese fountain pen conquered the market. The pens were so good that as schoolboys we gave them to each other as birthday gifts. A Chinese fountain pen was the thing to own and flaunt, much like a Mercedes car.
Which brings us to the pencil sharpener. You could keep turning the Camlin Flora pencil (with its pretty pink flowers) till the flowers withered, but obtaining the ideal sharp point was an elusive exercise. You see, we have never been too good with the cutting edge. Finding the sharpener utterly useless, most kids switched to a half shaving blade. No Chinese or Korean came to our rescue. We made do with Topaz.
The Chinese came to our rescue again when it came to the cigarette lighter. We send satellites up in space but we cannot make lighters. So Mr Baide, a Chinese businessman, flooded the market with an impeccably third-grade lighter, which disintegrates the moment you accidentally drop it. It anyway stops working after a few clicks. There is gas but no flame, a right royal design disaster.
Expertise
At the height of the Cold War, Gore Vidal once joked about the Soviets that the Americans didn’t need to fear a nuclear attack from them. The argument was that while they were excellent at making vodka, they were a disaster when it came to making bottle screw caps. How could a country that couldn’t manufacture a bottle cap put nuclear warheads on their missiles and send them over the oceans all the way to New York? We too made excellent rum, Old Monk, and went nuclear with a vengeance. But do you remember the Old Monk cap? It turns and turns like the proverbial pencil sharpener but refuses to shut. The moon around the Earth. If you’ve opened a bottle, might as well finish it. Just don’t put in your bag. But hold on. There are some things we’ve also been very good at making in India, where we have a headstart and unparalleled expertise.
Isabgol
We make excellent long-lasting bushy jhadoos; we are champions when it comes to manufacturing hair oil, from coconut to amla and every fruit and nut in between.
We are brilliant at fans. The regulator might burn out with wear and tear, but rest assured, your Polar fan will rotate eternally. Let us also not forget Telephone brand Isabgol, manufactured at a consistent quality, decade after decade. The fine grained rice husk has kept the nations’s digestion intact for 65 of the 68 years that we have been a free country.
Finally, let’s pay tribute to our plastic mug-making skills. When I first arrived in Oxford, I searched desperately for the mug in the loo but it was nowhere to be found. Not anywhere in England. I needed water to complete my morning ablutions; toilet paper left me with a lingering sense of incompleteness. The unfinished business. When I came back to India for my vacations, I made sure that I packed a green plastic mug in my suitcase. You can take a man out of India but you can’t take India out of the man. That’s just how we are made.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)