Why India Works

A good read !!!

*Why **India** Works -
written by internationally acclaimed film director Shekhar Kapoor.***


A greater ‘hole in the wall’ you cannot imagine. A small fading sign on the top saying “Cellphoon reapars” barely visible through the street vendors crowding the Juhu Market in Mumbai. On my way to buy a new Blackberry, my innate sense of adventure made me stop my car and investigate. A shop not more than 6 feet by 6 feet. Grimy and uncleaned.
‘Can you fix a Blackberry ?”
‘Of course, show me”
”How old are you” ‘Sixteen’
Bullshit. He was no more than 10.
Not handing my precious blackberry to a 10 year old in unwashed and torn T-shirt and pyjamas! At least if I buy a new one, they would extract the data for me. Something I have been meaning to do for a year now.
‘What’s wrong with it?”
‘Well, the roller track ball does not respond. It’s kind of stuck and I cannot operate it”
He grabs it from my hand and looks at it
“You should wash your hands.
Many customers have same problem.
Roller ball get greasy and dirty, then no working’
Look who was telling me to wash my hands. He probably has not bathed for 10days, I leaned out to snatch my useless blackberry back..
” You come back in one hour and I fix it’.
I am not leaving all my precious data in this unwashed kid’s hands for an hour. No way.
“Who will fix it?”
‘Big brother’
‘How big is ‘big brother?’
‘big …. Umm ..thirty’
Then suddenly big brother walks in. 30 ??? He is no more than 19.
‘What problem?’ He says grabbing the phone from my greasy hand into his greasier hand. Obviously not trained in etiquette by an upmarket retail store manager.
‘Normal blackberry problem. I replace with original part now. You must wash your hand before you use this’. What is this about me washing my hands suddenly??
19 year old big brother rummages through a dubious drawer full of junk and fishes out a spare roller ball packed in cheap cellophane wrapper.
Originalpart? I doubt it. But by now I am in the lap of the real India and there is no escape as he fishes out a couple of screwdrivers and sets about opening my Blackberry.
“How long will this take?”
”Six minutes”
This I have to see. After spending the whole morning trying to find a Blackberry service centre and getting vague answers about sending the phone in for an assessment that might take a week, I settle down next to his
grubby cramped work space. At least I am going to be able to watch all my stored data vanish into virtual space. People crowd around to see what’s happening. I am not breathing easy anyway. I tell myself this is an
adventure and literallyhave to stop myself grabbing my precious Blackberry back and making a quickescape. But in exactly six minutes this kid handed my Blackberry back. He had changed the part and cleaned and serviced the whole phone. Taken it apart, and put it together. As I turned the phone on there was a horrific 2 minutes where the phone would not come on. I looked at him with such hostility that he stepped back.
‘you have more than thousand phone numbers ?”
‘yes’.
‘backed up?’
‘no’
‘Must back up. I do it for you. Never open phone before backing up’
‘You tell me that now?’
But then the phone came on and my data was still there. Everyone watching laughed and clapped. This was becoming a show. A six minute show. I asked him how much.
‘500 rupees’ He ventured uncertainly. People around watched in glee expecting a negotiation.
That’s $10 dollars as against the Rs 30,000 ($ 600) I was about to spend on new Blackberry or a couple of weeks without my phone. I looked suitably shocked at his ‘high price’ but calmly paid him. Much to the disappointment of the expectant crowd
‘do you have an I-Phone ? Even the new ‘4D one ?
‘no, why”
‘I break the code for you and load any ‘app’ or film you want. I give you 10 film on your memory stick on this one, and change every week for small fee’
I went home having discovered the true entrepreneurship that lies at what we call the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. Some may call it piracy, which of course it is, but what can you say about two uneducated and untrained brothers aged 10 and 19 that set up a ‘hole in the wall’ shop and can fix any technology that the greatest technologists in the world can throw at them. I smiled at the future of our country. If only we could learn to harness this potential.
‘Please wash your hands before use’ were his last words to me. Now I am feeling seriously unclean.


vandy

I wouldn't let a kid near my PC, even if they showed me a certificate. On the other hand, if people ask me about phones (knowledge of computers means one is supposed to understand phones? I don't!) I always say, ask the nearest teenager! But I would back up my phone data, even if I was taking it to an official Nokia Service Centre.

I used to go to a stall in East Ham (London). They had a list of charges prominently displayed, which went something like:

Diagnosis:

... free.

If you want to watch: £5.
If you want us to explain: £20.
If you want to argue: £50.

I was seriously tempted to put up a similar sign over my desk at work

I'm sure you got ripped off, probably by a few hundred Rs --- but you got the job done, and done well, and an official outlet might even have charged more!

Nice story

What a great story! That two minutes must have felt like an eternity for the phone owner and for the phone fixer. So glad it all turned well. Now, I must go wash my hands before I use my keyboard any more.

All in a days work for the fixer. I am impressed that the six minutes actually was six minutes, though. Our laptop is at the repairers. They always promise a diagnosis/quote in 24 hours: it's been a week.
More germs on a keyboard than on a public toilet seat!

LOL. 100% truth is never at a premium in or around an Indian shop/service. I mean why let the real factoids get in the way of securing that contract/deal?

Turn-around time, experience, price (especially if not negotiated up front) & authenticity of replacement parts are all on a sliding & movable scale based on your physical appearance, desperation & the intensity/concern of your initial screening questions (or lack there of).

Same same throughout the world really ..... but the deregulation thing in India makes it just that much more of a daily 'game'.

Wowie... i paid the same amount in an authorized service center to get the exact same part replaced on my lowly blackberry wannabe Micromax Q5.

And i was feeling ripped off, even though i get a bill for it.

this supposed potential would not turn kinetic very well if some one tried to harness it. A blackberry owner may get ripped off for the trackball but its these hole in the wall shops that enable the hundreds of millions that cant afford the prices in a showroom to use technology.

PS: 700 million and counting was the no of cell phone subscribers in india the last time i noticed a statistic.

My father in law teaches/used to teach basic science part time to a group of very very poor children, most of whom were not interested in learning.

Skip forward five years, now of his students has set up a business selling and repairing computers, has a staff of twenty, and recently opened a branch office in Dubai.

The funny thing is this "student" is still very friendly and has no airs and graces despite doing so well.

It just goes to show that some people are basically nice.

One of my most memorable experiences allowed me to witness "India Working" first hand ...

It was almost dark in Varanasi; the evening air filled with a mixture of fog, dust, and smoke. I was headed to the Ganga with a small group of students. We drove our bus to a parking area several miles from the ghats and then boarded cycle rickshaws to make our way closer to the river before we would begin walking. The streets were crushingly crowded - people doing their evening shopping, eating, rushing here and there. It was wall-to-wall cars and rickshaws and cows and people and motorcycles - literally a river of humanity. My rickshaw was at the rear of our group so that I could keep an eye (or so I intended) on the rickshaws carrying my students ahead of me.

A young fellow not more than 15 years old and thin as a rail undertook the job of peddling me (BIG Texan) through the crowd. Almost immediately, it became obvious that something was seriously wrong with his bicycle. It was making a strange metallic, scraping and slipping sound. My "driver" kept looking back and down at the gears. Every few minutes, he would hop off his seat and study the workings of the bicycle. Needless to say, my students were long gone and out of sight.

I suggested several times that perhaps I should hire a different rickshaw? However, the young guy was not about to let this "rich" American slip out of his grasp, so we kept struggling along. Finally, he stopped in the middle of the streaming traffic and told me to wait ... "need part". As he started to walk away, he looked over his shoulder, leaned in close to me, and whispered ... "Be very careful ... Many Musselmen here!" Leaving Yankee-Doodle me sitting in the rickshaw towering over the crowd, he hurried to a tiny wooden stall on the roadside filled with plastic jars containing screws, bolts, and nuts and began discussing our plight with the shopkeeper. He and the shopkeeper would shoulder their way through the crowd to the rickshaw, try a bolt, discuss the finer points of the mechanical problem, struggle back to the closet-like shop, search for another bolt, push back to the rickshaw, repeat, and repeat. Each time, the young rickshawalla whispered his ominous warning ... "Many Musselmen here"!

So, here I am ... All 6'4" of me ... Sitting in a broken down rickshaw in the near dark in a crush of "Musslemen" ... While a child attempts to find a screw to patch his bicycle together. All I could do was laugh .. Drawing more attention to my fool self. At long last, my young driver found the bolt that would do the job!

Now you're probably thinking that at this point we were off and running again aren't you? Oh no ... Now the boy and the "screw-walla" began bargaining over the price of the bolt. After 10 minutes of intensely expert haggling, they agreed on the grand sum of 3 Rs - then looked up at me to pay it!

My young students waited 45 minutes for me to reappear - riding high in my newly repaired rickshaw. Their eyes were as big as saucers as I rounded the bend and all of us left Varanasi with great tales of India Working!

This is exactly my feeling & experience about 3 years ago when my brand new and expensive Nokia phone fell in the raging Ganges river at Rishikesh. I took it to the local nokia service centre and after examining it for 30 minutes, they wanted 2days time and 6000 rupees to fix it but there was no guarantee whether it'll work or not. I took back the phone and showed it to a friend in my hometown. The next day, he took me to a local 'unorganized' mobile phone market where they buy ,sell and repair mobile phones. After walking through the market for about 20 minutes, we reached a small kiosk with dim lighting and full of used phones, nuts & bolts of mobile phones.The guy examined phone for 10 minutes and advised, "I can't give you the original equipment but i can make the phone work and hopefully, you'll have all your data & contacts intact". I asked "how much?", he said "700 rupees"

After thinking for 5 minutes, i decided to take a chance. The guy opened up the phone, switched on the light bulb and worked on it for the next 20 minutes. The phone screen lit up the first time he switched it on and then went off. This continued for the next 5 minutes. He opened the phone again, did something, switched it on and handed it over to me. All the contacts and data were intact. My friend examined it, switched it on and off several times and it was working fine. I used the phone for next 2 years without any troubles.

So...India does work..in its own unique ways!

That reminds me, I need to get my boy to fix my phone.

The one repair job aside from luggage that I had done in India was on my camera. I could see from his face that the repairman was overcharging me. Still, I thought about the minimum examination fee in the US of 80 USD just to start the process and that this man was asking 30 Rupees..