As old men or "olding" people of Indian origin tend to do, my father-in-law and I were discussing the many problems that India faces that seem to be insurmountable, once you peel off the gloss of the urban elite and the expatriates, and the IT and call center moguls, the bankers and the multi-national corporations, and the well-heeled.
Everyone seems to be looking for a messiah – a magical person who rides in from the blue, takes things in hand, organizes people into orderly rebellions that will ultimately change the status quo and everyone is happy as he/she rides off into the dust, mission accomplished. But reality always intrudes into this dream – people have jobs, mouths to feed, rents to pay, and who has time to organize people to create quiet revolutions that change the status quo? As my father-in-law puts it, everyone knows what the solution is but no one wants to step forward to lead the charge.
I look back to the India of 1979 when I left that country, only to return as a tourist and visitor year after year. The roads were not congested, nor were the vegetable and fruit markets crowded. The city sprawl was well contained and most distances were covered on bicycle. There was also a sense of optimism and civic sense and decorum among public officials and citizens’ alike and egregious behavior was the exception rather than the norm.
It seems that when you take a country with a population of 500 million and blow it up to 1.2 billion, all the problems that were solvable have become insurmountable. The very crushing weight of all those people, their aspirations, their scrabble for the spoils of life seems to almost tilt the very earth. The room to maneuver is gone (all margins) and continued urbanization in the absence of any town planning seems to stretch resources beyond any manageable level of fairness or equity.
In engineering and physics we studied the concept of entropy – as a measure of the amount of disorder. In India, as populations and urbanization increase, entropy seems to have increased beyond any sustainable levels where human beings can survive without the cushion of disproportionate wages and dollar incomes.
Enterprises face increasing entropy from the time they are formed. Since I personally have been involved in the genesis of three small enterprises and was part of the evolution of a fourth, this statement comes from experience. I will say it again: Enterprises face increasing entropy from the time they are formed. This increase in entropy manifests itself each time a new person comes on board, each time a new process is put in place, each time a new customer is signed on, each time a new piece of equipment comes into the enterprise, each time the enterprise moves locations, each time the enterprise merges into another, or spins off a piece of itself, or …
As we have seen with the Indian situation, increase in enterprise entropy means increased difficulty of implementing solutions – even to the point of impossibility. And when solutions appear impossible, the average employee accepts the fait accompli. No one dare take on the 800 pound gorilla, least of all the burgeoning middle class. Everyone is waiting for that messiah!
Everyone seems to be looking for a messiah – a magical person who rides in from the blue, takes things in hand, organizes people into orderly rebellions that will ultimately change the status quo and everyone is happy as he/she rides off into the dust, mission accomplished. But reality always intrudes into this dream – people have jobs, mouths to feed, rents to pay, and who has time to organize people to create quiet revolutions that change the status quo? As my father-in-law puts it, everyone knows what the solution is but no one wants to step forward to lead the charge.
I look back to the India of 1979 when I left that country, only to return as a tourist and visitor year after year. The roads were not congested, nor were the vegetable and fruit markets crowded. The city sprawl was well contained and most distances were covered on bicycle. There was also a sense of optimism and civic sense and decorum among public officials and citizens’ alike and egregious behavior was the exception rather than the norm.
It seems that when you take a country with a population of 500 million and blow it up to 1.2 billion, all the problems that were solvable have become insurmountable. The very crushing weight of all those people, their aspirations, their scrabble for the spoils of life seems to almost tilt the very earth. The room to maneuver is gone (all margins) and continued urbanization in the absence of any town planning seems to stretch resources beyond any manageable level of fairness or equity.
In engineering and physics we studied the concept of entropy – as a measure of the amount of disorder. In India, as populations and urbanization increase, entropy seems to have increased beyond any sustainable levels where human beings can survive without the cushion of disproportionate wages and dollar incomes.
Enterprises face increasing entropy from the time they are formed. Since I personally have been involved in the genesis of three small enterprises and was part of the evolution of a fourth, this statement comes from experience. I will say it again: Enterprises face increasing entropy from the time they are formed. This increase in entropy manifests itself each time a new person comes on board, each time a new process is put in place, each time a new customer is signed on, each time a new piece of equipment comes into the enterprise, each time the enterprise moves locations, each time the enterprise merges into another, or spins off a piece of itself, or …
As we have seen with the Indian situation, increase in enterprise entropy means increased difficulty of implementing solutions – even to the point of impossibility. And when solutions appear impossible, the average employee accepts the fait accompli. No one dare take on the 800 pound gorilla, least of all the burgeoning middle class. Everyone is waiting for that messiah!
Reduction of entropy automatically occurs with reduction of size and complexity. As someone who forsook the perks of corporate life more than twenty years ago to travel the road with smaller lanes, I can attest to the attraction of small business and its smaller entropy footprint. American corporations are hardwired to growth and committed to increasing entropy by the urge of investors and Wall Street. Reduction of entropy occurs when you have no investors and all growth is determined by your own needs and appetite.
And how do messiahs come about? That’s a blog for another day.
And how do messiahs come about? That’s a blog for another day.
2 comments:
Love your prose. Thoughtful and well articulated.
Are you slipping a bit into nostalgia as 'olding' people do?
'I look back to the India of 1979 .... There was also a sense of optimism and civic sense and decorum among public officials and citizens’ alike and egregious behavior was the exception rather than the norm'
Wasn't public office nothing but the old boys club those days and was a citadel of bureaucracy and model of inefficiency. For example, you were treated like a irritable mosquito when you went to a bank (state-run) to take your own money out. For every 'service' minded person who said 'will do it', there were a dozen who added with a grin, 'eventually'.
Still, your point about looking for Messiah is accurate; or more accurately, 'waiting for a messiah'.
The beauty of "olding" is that you start missing the slow pace of life and the built in inefficiencies and the tremendously large blank spots on the tape of life without feeling guilty that you are withdrawing from the rat race.
Hurtling madly at ever increasing pace for some unknown reason towards some unseen destination never appealed to me :). The journey has to be as appealing as the destination!
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