meethapani

Celebrating Jugaar The basti kids in front of my mother’s house have become avid snooker players, except the table is a cloth placed over a bit of wood with sides made of stretched tape wrapped around nails. With 6 pockets, the cues are simple sticks and the balls are marbles.  The whole fragile contraption is placed on a couple of plastic boxes well below waist level even for a child. But each player has focused concentration for the next shot and a silent audience surrounds the table. Every so often photographs of innovative low cost solutions do the social media rounds: the missing numbers of a broken clock written on the wall, a shower made of a pierced empty plastic coke bottle. These are what we would call jugaar. A jugaar is an innovative low cost fix or solution in response to a need. Almost every culture has an equivalent: gambiarra in Brazil, zizhu chuangxin in China, jua kali in Kenya, system D in France, trick 17 in Switzerland, chindogu in Japan.  ...

Choosing to Study Art and Design Another academic year is about to begin. The number of young people wanting to study art and design is growing. Young people in Pakistan seem to know something that parents and policy makers do not. Subjects that will materialize into successful jobs are usually identified as medicine, IT, business studies, and engineering. School and college curricula channel young people in these directions. For the last five decades, education has been serving economic development, and public policies reflect this. The term “human capital” developed by economists Gary Becker and Jacob Mincer in the 60s, is overused as an aim to produce labour capable of increasing economic  growth. But as we know youth has its own recalcitrance, and as society’s elders are less and less able to guarantee pathways to success, there is a growing urge in young people to plan life journeys on their own terms. Along with business school, computer sciences and pharmac...