Wow, can there really be only 4 weeks to go? My time in Delhi is starting to get short and already we are about to say goodbye to some good friends who are heading back to the states. Things have really kicked up a gear in the last couple of weeks here. I've been running here and there having meetings with a wide variety of organizations operating in the healthcare and BoP spaces in India trying to understand what they do, what challenges they face and how the organization I'm working for can help them overcome these challenges. This has involved experiencing a wide range of Indian 'office' spaces, which are mostly apartments with the trappings of corporate life transplanted into them...a video conferencing system is a common fixture in most offices of international NGOs for example. But this is something you come to expect from India and from Indians...there is a way of making do here, of getting things done despite a lack of resources, infrastructure or political support. A way of reusing what is around you, of repurposing it to fit your needs. Indians refer to it as 'Jugar', the practitioners of which are the ‘Jugari’. If we have a word in English to describe the unique combination of resourcefulness, creativity and willingness to operate outside the rules that constitutes the Indian way, it would probably be MacGyver (used as a verb). Of course, it isn’t just a lack of resources that encourages this approach. Indian bureaucracy and regulations are legendary, with a dizzying array of rules, laws, policies, institutions, ministries and layers of administration. So much so that daily life in India seems to revolve around figuring out how to get things done…not so much working the system, as working around the system.
Now, time to MacGyver myself up some coffee in this chai-obsessed country.
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