Few days back, a friend of mine and me were travelling in  his expensive sports bike, manufactured in India, and after a stoppage, his electronic start would not work. The electronics had a short circuit. He then used his kick start to make the bike work. And Suddenly it Dawned on me  that's the beauty of India, if  electronics fail we always have a Manual Override in any form and any circle of the country. 
I was watching Die Hard 4.0 , and was thinking in India  such an incident  would have  been a huge failure, as most times the traffic signals do not work here, and its the cops  who clear the jam. Even today stock  brokers along with huge electronic support have the back up paper work ready. While boarding the flight even if the systems are down the list is out  where your name just needs to be ticked, and may be uploaded later. One of my colleague was travelling in a reputed European air carrier  few days back, and could not check in early,  as the system was not ready to check him in. In India, you just  have the manual Over Ride.
Today while coming to office , i was caught in this horrifying traffic congestion due to a bottleneck situation.
 Suddenly 2 police personnel non-traffic though, came from no where, and cleared the traffic  in 2 mins.
Even Indian Army  today one of the strongest in the world in their conventional weapons prefer mechanic over electronics.
The whole question is why?
The whole manual over ride comes from 2 things, Indians have this  great Human skills. For example when driving we always know, whats the other guy  going to do. A guy is honking loud from  behind and suddenly i realise its no point moving to left  to give  him space, rather move right ( India is right hand drive  mind you), and there you go he overtakes from the wrong side. If  there was a system in place that would not allow me  to  move to the right and him to overtake  from the left, this could have been a an accident. We though have the traffic rules in place, but  out here they more like guidelines, as long there is a smooth traffic, and accident free, to make both  the travellers life easy  you can manually relax the rules.
Secondly India has the human power, abundance of labour, and that to cheap. The broking firms can employ  people who will manually   type out entire data, and take a print of it and file  it in the racks. If the comp is down out comes the type writer. If printers  is down  comes the stylo machine.
 Thirdly and very importantly, the rate of technical change is very slow in India, and that to an extent is good as it gives us the  flexibility. Its not that  new Technology is not available in India, it is  but the adoption is very slow, and while it is being adopted, it is being Indianised, for the welfare of the masses. The options are laid out to Indians .. which one you want  . if you are tech savvy  go ahead use the electronic option, or if you are scientifically challenged like me.. use  the manual option.
Its like a a car, where u have an auto transmission ,EPS and  ABS.. if they all fail the hydraulic takes over. For an entire country to do that in one go if very difficult. But India is a country which  works with Hydraulic Power Steering and  auto transmission.  So when they fail  the changes is not much and hence people are already adapted to it . So  in a diverse country like India, Manual Over Ride is  essential and will always remain.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
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1 comment:
yes!!..pretty true in the context of this country!!!
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