My office in Gurgaon didn’t exactly provide the most ideal working conditions. The municipal power was completely unreliable, so we had a shipping container-sized generator running almost full-time in our driveway, spewing diesel fumes into our office when the wind was right. We had no microwave, no refrigerator, and nowhere appropriate to wash our dishes. Worst of all, the improperly-installed urinals emptied into the same drain-line used to drain the floor, essentially creating an open-air sewer that filled the office with the stench of urine. But we made do.
And this is the most important concept we learned during our time in India: jugaad. Making do.
The nearest English equivalent is “jury-rigging”, but that translation doesn’t do jugaad justice. My coworker Anurag translated it as “a duct-tape arrangement.” Artist Sanjeev Shankar describes it as “attaining any objective with the available resources at hand”.
Jugaad is about improvising a solution. It’s about ingenuity in the face of adversity.
0 Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
