Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  She had the look of a person in transit. Her pale-blue outfit was powdered with dust. Squatting on the cement wall of the median, she was clearly waiting for someone, and her face spoke of anticipation and excitement that even her son, young as he was, seemed to share. His posture was stunning: naked but for a string around his waist, he sat straight upright, attentive, patient—a two-year-old with the manner of a Buckingham Palace guard. They were so striking that I thought about them the whole morning. What was she waiting for—a bus? a rickshaw? her taxi-driving son, making it big in the big city?—and how long would she be waiting? I imagined what it would be like to wait at a prearranged corner on a prearranged date, far from home, with no magazine to kill the time, with no way to know if my ride would be late, with nowhere to go if my ride didn’t show up. What was life like before mobile phones? I realized I’d forgotten.

  Seven hours later, she was still there.

  I was returning from a late meal with Murali and Dipankar. It had been a celebratory lunch, and our bellies were full of what had been their first taste of sushi. (Despite our distance from the ocean, a sushi place had opened up on M.G. Road, and I had been ranting for weeks about the incomparable joys of uncooked fish.) On our way back to the office, we passed through the same intersection, and the woman and the child were still sitting there.

  As we passed by, I saw her face.

  It was the face of a person who’d been squatting in dust and exhaust for seven straight hours. She looked defeated. Her son drooped next to her, like leaves on a plant that hadn’t been watered. In the preceding seven hours, I don’t think they’d moved. How could they have? If they’d moved, she’d always wonder: had her ride come while she was gone?

  I didn’t pass by her corner when I left that night. But the next morning, my heart tore: the woman and her son remained. Had they eaten? Did they have any water? Did they sleep right there? Did they sleep at all?

  The morning after that, they were gone.

  Once the traffic police granted my car permission to enter Udyog Vihar, it was just a short drive past the Trident Hotel to the office, an uninspiring three-story building with a generator as tall as a bus parked in our driveway to facilitate our uninterrupted computing and air-conditioning needs. Jagdish would turn the generator on when the first employee arrived at the office, flipping a switch and shattering the morning’s calm. Unlike our Okhla office, in which the power only failed periodically and our backup needs were less complex, generators were obligatory in Gurgaon to supplement its wholly unreliable municipal supply. (One day back in Okhla, I’d asked Deep, the office IT guy—who, incidentally, was the exact opposite of American IT guys in that he was always the best-dressed person in the office—to show me where our backup power came from. He opened a door to reveal a few dozen car batteries wired together in a closet.)

  Our Udyog Vihar office boasted four full floors dedicated to making our client happy. In the basement was the canteen and social area, where lunchtime found all the employees but me sharing meals, playing carrom on a board that was a pale reminder of the frictionless masterpiece the old office got to keep, and cheering each other as they played a modified indoor version of cricket. Every other time of the day, the basement was used primarily for catnaps on the padded benches. The ground floor had one large conference room and four small ones that had been intended as ad hoc meeting rooms; but because this was the only quiet spot in the building, a few senior staff members commandeered them as semi-permanent offices. The creative teams sat on the second floor, and the account servicing and finance teams sat on the third.

  When Paul commissioned the office’s remodeling, he’d given the architects a bold vision of an office filled with “fun” and “mystery.” He imagined an office so comfortable and so vibrant that our clients would gladly descend from their glass tower and catered lunches to hang out in our cubicles, jam with office musicians, paint office murals, and discuss philosophy over late night tea and hookah. But the budget for “fun” and “mystery” only extended so far as to install circular windows in the conference room. Which is too bad, because Paul actually had the right idea: if we were going to succeed, we had to get the client to love us.

  This wasn’t supposed to be necessary. At the global level, we were this client’s Direct Marketing Agency of Record. But that was only on paper. While the corporate honchos in New York shared cigars and handshakes over lobster dinners they expensed to the company, their broad vision didn’t map to the reality of New Delhi’s advertising industry, in which ad agencies are seen as vendors to be squeezed.

  The competitive environment was as fierce for Delhi’s ad industry as it was for laptop repairmen in Nehru Place. There were hordes of agencies promising to do the same work we did twice as fast and half as expensive, and our client knew it. So while our relationship was officially a long-term partnership focused on long-term results, our client in India was feeling the pressures of the global recession, and short-term budget pains are hard to ignore especially when there was a queue of competing yes-men elbowing each other aside with promises of cut-rate work at breakneck speed. Making matters worse, our branch of the company existed only to serve this single client. They couldn’t officially fire us, but they could certainly stop giving us work. If they weren’t happy, we were all out of luck.

  Which is why it’s commendable that Paul took a big risk with our office. He had to do something to secure our relationship and our jobs. So to appreciate Paul’s effort to save our company from the circling vultures, I tried to overlook the office’s physical failures—of which there were many. We had no microwave, no refrigerator, and nowhere more appropriate to wash our dishes than the spigot in the driveway. Worst of all, the improperly installed urinals emptied into the same line that drained the floor, which essentially created a stagnant open-air sewer that filled the stairwell with the stench of urine.

  Nasal comfort, sanitary adequacy, visual appeal: we had none, but we made do. We made it work with what we had.

  And this is the single most important concept we learned during our time in India: jugaad.

  Making do.

  The nearest English equivalent to “jugaad” is “juryrigging,” but that translation doesn’t do jugaad justice. Artist Sanjeev Shankar describes it as “attaining any objective with the available resources at hand.” My colleague Anurag translates it as “a duct-tape arrangement.” Either way, jugaad is about making do. Improvising a solution. Creating options where there are none.

  Many of our friends said that the concept of jugaad was best illustrated by a common rural vehicle that people actually call a ‘jugaad’: a homemade truck made by cobbling together a wooden cart with a diesel irrigation pump. After being fitted with makeshift steering and braking mechanisms, the pump becomes an engine that enables the vehicle to transport people from one village to another, with dozens of riders crammed onto the back as tightly as the bundles of sugarcane it can also transport. More significantly, this setup enables the pump to actually move itself to the next field in which it’s needed for irrigation duties. No two jugaads are the same, because each one is an improvised solution using unlikely parts. But they’re all pure representations of this spirit of ingenuity.

  Indians swell with pride at their capacity for jugaad. “We are like that only,” Murali would tell me when describing solutions to situations that would have made most goras thankful they had the embassy on speed dial. The variety of solutions they’d create for seemingly intractable problems proved this pride was well founded: the way motorcycles were chopped in half and welded to carts to create centaur goods haulers; the way mother, father and three kids could fit themselves onto a single scooter; the repurposing of used water bottles as cooking oil containers; rope spun from discarded foil packets; and cricket wickets made from balanced stacks of rocks.

  Humble Indian villagers are idealized by Delhiites much in the same way that small-town America is idealized in American politics. And what makes the villagers so nob
le are their MacGyveresque abilities to adapt available materials to solve problems that would confound sophisticated city dwellers. As one blogger put it when describing those water pump trucks, “These vehicles reflect the true spirit of innovation in rural India.”2

  But we think that the spirit of jugaad is actually broader than clever mechanics. Jugaad is the philosophical outlook necessary to make it work, regardless of what “it” is. It’s about solving problems with what you have, not what you wish you had. Jugaad is the human Tetris that fits nine people into a car built for five. And it’s also the patience that total strangers require to sit on each other’s laps and breathe each other’s sweat for a ninety-minute sauna down M.G. Road. Jugaad is the ability to endure thirty-two hours on the train from Mumbai to Amritsar, when the mere three-hour stretch of that route that Jenny and I rode from Bharatpur to Delhi left us exhausted and claustrophobic. Jugaad is the hope for the future that lets a woman and her son spend two days waiting on a median for someone to pick them up.

  Jugaad is how everyone gets by.

  Jenny and I come from a tool-addicted culture. Before we came to Delhi, we couldn’t function without a certain baseline of modern conveniences: we needed adequate light, temperate air, comfortable chairs, personal space and no meaty smells rolling up from the basement. And if any of those aren’t in place, we’re unable to do our jobs. But the jugaad philosophy suggests a different approach: that while modern tools and technology should be appreciated when they’re there, they are not cardinal requirements. Technology is a comfort, but not a necessity. And a lack of technology doesn’t change the fact that the job’s got to get done.

  Under the jugaad philosophy, only we Americans whine that the air conditioning has gone out. Everyone else reflects in the good fortune of having had air conditioning at all, and gets their work done anyway.

  One reason jugaad might be so idealized is because so many elements of the culture seem to emphasize the exact opposite. The government adheres to stifling bureaucracy, the schools fixate on memorization, and the chain stores that represent India’s growing organized retail sector direct their employees to follow rigid processes and forbid any deviation.

  We’re thinking of Barista and Café Coffee Day specifically. For example: we didn’t like Barista’s iced coffee because it came from a powdered mix that was too sweet for our tastes. But numerous waiters and waitresses at numerous branches all refused to indulge any requests for brewed coffee on the rocks, or for a small-sized coffee served in a glass large enough to add ice cubes, or for any other deviation from the menu. Our only solution was to request a cup of ice without mentioning our intention to mix it with the coffee, and then make sure the waiter was far away when we’d combine the two.

  Similarly, when my parents ordered toast at the Café Coffee Day lounge in Hauz Khas market, they were told it wasn’t on the menu. After fruitless debate, they finally resorted to ordering a toasted corn-and-spinach sandwich with crumbled paneer—hold the corn, hold the spinach, hold the paneer.

  The management of these chains seemed to prize process over everything else. This must create a problem for employees who hope to advance: if they’re forbidden from showing creativity or initiative, how do they distinguish themselves? How does an employee impress management when management doesn’t want its employees to stand out?

  This may explain why employees were always so enthusiastic for us to fill out comment cards. They’d press them into our hands long before our food had arrived at our table. At one Domino’s pizza counter, we were given the comment card not only before we’d eaten our pizza, not only before we’d received our pizza, but before we’d even been handed our change. Employees would hover over our table with hopeful looks, pouncing the moment we’d put down our pen and then dashing behind the counter to read the card with the other employees reading over their shoulder. It was their best and only hope, we realized, of proving their worth to their employers.

  So we always left glowing comments, even when service wasn’t out of the ordinary. If we had any complaints about service, the worst we’d do is refuse to fill out a comment card.

  The Delhiites around us, on the other hand, never hesitated to make it clear when they didn’t get their money’s worth. They’d say exactly what they meant—on comment cards and in any other instance when an opinion was offered. We’d exalt in watching an incompetent co-worker get a dressing-down from the client. We’d revel in time saved when the boss cut off a bad idea with a dismissive bark. We’d laugh in surprise when club patrons would shout at the DJ to change a song they didn’t like. We’d gasp at our neighbor Mr. M.’s unadulterated opinions on politics, his countrymen, or us (“You look very sick—your eye has all those red veins!”). We’d be shocked when politicians would speak of vast swaths of Indians as “backward castes”—such a term would be politically explosive if applied to underdeveloped parts of the US.

  But of all the unadulterated honesty we saw in Delhi, we were most shocked by how bluntly people discussed each other’s weight. On that day when I was on the company terrace watching the cross-dressed hijras torment the company across the street, with their security guard vainly trying to push them out while Jagdish double-checked the lock on our gate, my co-worker Tapan gave me a sidelong glance.

  “Dave,” he said, “you’re looking fatter and fatter every day.”

  My jaw dropped so far that a hijra picked it up and demanded payment for its return.

  In America, few subjects are more sensitive than someone’s weight. Had I made a comment like Tapan’s to a coworker in New York, I’d have become the office pariah when word got around about what I’d said. But in Delhi, my weight was open for comment. And so was everyone else’s. Even a woman’s weight—and if weight is a sensitive issue in America, a woman’s weight is doubly so. If the subject of a woman’s weight had come up in the New York office, the only acceptable response on any man’s part would have been positive reassurance (“No . . . you look great!”) followed by a rapid change in subject.

  But not here. I remember one co-worker, a twentysomething guy, telling another co-worker, a twentysomething girl, “You need to lose weight.” There were six of us chatting in my hip beanbag corner of the office: five guys and that girl. When the pronouncement was made, I gasped and got ready for her to smack him; but instead, as all the other guys looked at her midsection and nodded in agreement, so did she. I couldn’t believe what I’d just witnessed. But I was the only one who’d thought it was extraordinary.

  After Tapan shattered my self-confidence, I wandered through the office to find someone who could commiserate. Coming across Sonia in the conference room that she’d commandeered as her office, I told her what Tapan had said. “Oh,” she laughed, “he’s only saying that because I told him a few days ago that his belly had gotten huge.”

  Such are the hardships I faced in India: worrying that my belly looked too big in a country where, if someone was thin, it wasn’t because they spent their days at the gym.

  From that perspective, Jenny’s employment at Pardada Pardadi was good for me, too: it helped emancipate me from my American-style ennui as much as it helped her accomplish something more meaningful than impressing clients with the color of her hair.

  Pardada Pardadi was founded by Sam Singh, an Uttar Pradesh native who returned to his home village after decades climbing the corporate ladder at DuPont. Sam has dedicated his life and his fortune to eradicating poverty in the villages around his childhood home, and his organization is transforming traditionally oppressive gender roles to help girls lift their families out of poverty. The school he founded, which now has well over 1,000 students, educates its girls in both academic and vocational matters. It also deposits ten rupees into their account for every day they attend, payable upon graduation. Taken together, this means that a fresh graduate is one of the richest and most educated women in her region. She has the power and means to make revolutionary decisions for herself and her family, and the education to
pursue a future beyond the farm.

  Across a handful of rural villages surrounding Anupshahr, a small city four hours east of Delhi, Sam’s students are learning to reject the patriarchy and shift themselves from third-class citizens (girls there are valued less than sons and less than the family water buffalo, in that order; when parents are asked how many children they have, they only count the boys) into community leaders who can derail the poverty cycle. As the Wall Street Journal affiliate Live Mint put it in their profile of Sam, Pardada Pardadi is building “a generation of women that won’t silently acquiesce to being nameless entries in countless family trees.”3

  Because Jenny worked for the school’s administrative office in Delhi, we were able to visit the school and see for ourselves the striking difference it made in its students’ lives. Sam took us to a tiny farming village, where two girls, both students at the school, led us on a tour. They showed us their small brick homes, their immaculate pounded dirt yards, and their family goats, talking to us with poise and confidence despite the fact that we were both foreign and I am male. As we were walking around, we realized we were being followed: behind us were two girls who weren’t students at the school, wearing dirty clothes and peeking at us from around corners. Whenever we turned towards them, they ducked their heads and hid. It was clear to us which of the girls in this village would have the selfconfidence to convince their parents that a marriage at age fourteen was a bad idea, that a girl should be seen as more than a crippling dowry waiting to be paid, and that the best thing any family could do is educate both male and female children.

  Soon after we left the village, Sam abruptly asked his driver to slow the car. He pointed to a family walking down the road: the man was sauntering casually along the roadside, his hands clasped behind his back and a carefree look on his face. His wife was a dozen paces behind him, leading a tired child with one hand and balancing a great bale of cattle fodder on her head with the other.