Bablu's Phuchka Model: Global supply chain, local love story
With my fondness for Nirvana, German Expressionism, and Guinness, it may come as a surprise that I'm a vocalist for local. There's a certain kind of happiness I feel when I buy chicken, go out to have phuchka, get a haircut, or buy medicine from my neighbourhood. Of course, the chicken is probably of distant (read: non-neighbourhood) provenance. The barber uses tools, creams, and lotions made in different parts of India (the fan in his saloon is China-made). Barring the potatoes and chillies in Bablu's perfect phuchka cocktail being locally sourced (our area is urban-agricultural), the atta, tamarind and everything else are most likely from 'outside'. And my stash of Met XL50 that I get from the local med store is manufactured in Guwahati by a company headquartered in Kandivili West. So, each contribution of dosh to my immediate 'desh' - my locals for whom I harbour a disproportionate amount of material and metaphysical loyalty - is part of a larger, great chain of economic being. Of course, it would have been grand if my neighbourhood manufactured printers, made EV batteries, had bookstores that I would gladly have visited... But I'm not a postcolonial nutter who thinks manufacturing GPUs is one hop away from spinning khadi. Truth be told, my Swadeshi Lite is firmly based on availability, ease of procuring, and quality, with the hope to see my neighbourhood grow more prosperous by the day. The main difference - heck, the only difference - between Trump's call for a swadeshi andolan and Modi's shout-out to Make India Great Again is in their nuance. The former, French farmers' union style, doesn't want anything that is consumed by the American people to be produced outside America. The latter, Bapu-style, doesn't want the Indian people to consume anything that is produced outside India. It's a subtle difference, but a telling one. In both versions - 'make what you consume' vs 'consume (only) what you make' - the real intention is to see that the Country-That-Must-Not-Be-Named is denied two of its biggest markets. If all goes well, the Country-That-Must-Not-Be-Named will shrivel to the size of an economic shih tzu, while America returns to its rightful place in the comity of nations that it had in the 1950s-1960s, and India goes back to its own hallowed position from which it was displaced before the very moment Babur crossed the Chenab in 1519.
Being a self-sustaining economy should not be a problem for a country that makes everything it uses. For a country that doesn't have much use for jet skis, like, say, landlocked Vatican City, not having a homegrown jet ski-manufacturing industry isn't a problem. Unless, for some sentimental reason, the new pope decides to start exporting jet skis to Peru and/or America. The problem is that the Country-That-Must-Not-Be-Named has, over the years, infiltrated their merchandise everywhere in almost everything. And we're not just talking about Ganesh idols that Kiren Rijiju may have bought online by mistake. We're talking about also infiltrating things that go into making things that make things.
In all this gung-ho hungama about 'Make in India', everyone is thinking only quantitatively. This may be understandable for a country that takes (perverse) pride in having more people than any other country - 'Kya hai tumhare paas? 'Mere paas demographic dividend hai!' But quality has a quantity of its own that goes beyond shifting units Soviet Union ball bearing-style.
There's a reason why after the swadeshi movement did what it had set out to do, we didn't quite become a nation of charkha spinners. Tagore was bang on in his 1925 essay, 'The Cult of the Charkha': 'I am afraid of a blind faith on a very large scale in the charkha in the country, which is so liable to succumb to the lure of short-cuts when pointed out by a personality about whose moral earnestness they can have no doubt.' Instead, we invested in the tech descendants of the spinning jenny, despite its Lancashire 'satanic mills' origins. If we do get seriously vocal for local - and I think it's a splendid idea - we mustn't fall for any cult. Instead, invest monetarily and imaginatively in making things that will make us want to buy them. Frankly, if Bablu's phuchkas were Chinese, you think people wouldn't have lined up to gobble them? They're just 'world-class', you see. Elevate your knowledge and leadership skills at a cost cheaper than your daily tea. What's slowing Indian IT's AI deals? The answer is hidden in just two words.
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