Chalta hai

"Oh! The financial model fails if you assume Interest rates outside a range."

You can fool some people all the time and I had managed to fool my organization into thinking that I was an expert on financial modeling. Now that I had quit, they had retained me as consultant, and here I was checking on the validity of a financial model by one of the people in the Projects department.

By the way, in case you are wondering whether a financial model is a size zero woman, sashaying down the ramp clad in currency notes, let me disabuse you of the notion. There are spreadsheets and then there are spreadsheets. The latter are the ones which you develop to project the financial position of a proposed project to assess whether it was worth investing in. When banks get into the act, these spreadsheets get elevated from the general population of mango spreadsheets and enter the exalted realm of financial models.

"Fails?" I asked her.

"Yes! It breaks down with those assumptions."

She might have been talking of a pet poodle and wondering why I could not just accept the fact that poodles WILL lift their legs near lamp-posts and water them. After all, it was in the nature of poodles to do it and, to her, it seemed that it was in the nature of financial models to break down every now and then.

"You made this model, right?"

"Yes"

She looked puzzled. She had no clue - or so it seemed to me - that I could be so stupid as to assume that, just because she had made the model, she was responsible for any breakdowns it suffered OR for rectifying them.

When I was doing this modeling, if someone had pointed out an error in the model, I would go crimson all over my body, rectify it, and periodically kick myself in the butt for the next month for having made the error. One of the various immaturities in my mental make-up that prevent me from being an adult Indian. The idea of merely assuming that  'Work WOULD have errors, so what?' never occurred to me and still does not.

(By the way, it just so happened that the other person was a woman. It could well have been a man.)

The next interview was with the head of the Projects department.

"I think the model needs rectification. It fails when certain assumptions are made."

The man looked at me in astonishment. As though I were a fireman, who had been called to put out a serious fire in an apartment block, and was refusing to take the vehicle out because the axle was noisy and I insisted on greasing it before I took the it out. I, on the other hand, could see no emergency and was not mature enough to understand that, when there was no fire, there was no need to grease the axles and keep the vehicle ready.

"Chalta hai (It's Ok), yaar! We can manage with this one." he said. Then, seeing me still unconvinced, he provided me with the blood-brother of 'Chalta hai'. "Kya farak padtha hai (What difference does it make)? We will just keep the assumptions within limits."

Ye Gods! I do not belong in the Indian corporate world. I still have the senseless assumption that the shirt should be cut to fit the body, when everyone knew that the body can be cut to fit the shirt. In other words, the model need not be made to adopt any necessary assumptions, we could just tailor the assumptions to fit the model.

THAT, to me, is the major cause of most of what ails India. What if you cannot maintain service standards - chalta hai, you cannot be good all the time. What if your roads are littered - chalta hai, you cannot be clean all the time. What if your products break down - chalta hai, you cannot maintain quality all the time.

The problem is not that I expect 100% quality every time. The idea that nothing less is acceptable is what ensures replacements, penalties for deficient service etc. In other words, when 100% quality is guaranteed to the recipient, then quality standards improve and, even where there are inevitable failures, the recipient is guaranteed a replacement/compensation.

If, however, you start accepting lack of quality as the norm - the 'chalta hai' attitude - then everything goes down the drain. The moment you start thinking of yourself as a rat in a sewer, you only think of becoming a bigger rat, not a lion. For example, I see Indian companies touting 'German technology' or 'Japanese Technology' in their products as a selling proposition, and there is no vestige of shame in either the seller or the buyer that the implicit message is that imported technology is bound to be better than indigenous technology. I cringe when I see those advertisements and when I accept the inherent truth of the message - with a 'chalta hai' attitude, you are never going to get 'Indian technology' to mean something to take pride in.

I prefer not to exert myself at all but, when I take on a job, I can never do less than my best and can never digest an error in my work as being natural. There is a certain pride in doing a great job and becoming the best at what you do - a pride that entirely obviates the need to have the esteem of other people to bolster your own self-esteem. The fact that other people have become only a source of pleasure and not points of stress is entirely due to the fact that I do not need them in order to have a sense of self-worth. So, yes, abandoning the 'chalta hai' attitude and striving for personal excellence is a great help personally, as well, in addition to the difference it makes to Society.

But then, I am the immature maverick Indian. Who knows how the mature Indian will feel and react. For all I know, the reaction will be the other sibling of 'Chalta Hai' - "Sab log aise hi hain (Everyone is like this)". Leaves me with no option but to say, "Kya farak padtha hai. These people will be like this. Chalta hai."

I suppose we may as well resign ourselves to talking about our glorious history, instead of making history.