Tuesday, March 28, 2006

What is the problem?

I happened to see one of those wonderful-looking Volvo buses on the road today – The ones with a half-glass body, seats at 2 levels, automatic doors, electronic board with the destination and route details and a driver’s-cabin. Couldn’t help admiring it….especially on comparing it with the regular buses that were plying nearby. Why did we not build such attractive, effective (seating, information, driver control) buses in the first place? (Our regular buses come from Ashok Leyland, Tata and the like I guess.) Was it because of one of these reasons or perhaps a combination of some of these reasons? Something to think about, if you ask me…because the reason can never be that we don’t have what it takes to build such buses.

 

1.       Did we focus so much on just selling the buses and making money that we cared nothing about how the buses looked, how strong they were and how much of information they provided to the users?

2.       Did the government want to spend as less as possible on the buses and keep the rest of the money for “other” things?

3.       Did we not go to other countries and learn from them and decide to scale up our transport system?

4.       Did we not bother to go collect requirements from the users and simply decided to build buses the way we thought was the easiest for us (the bus builders)?

5.       If we had all the ideas, did we not bother to define our bus-building process well-enough to ensure that the final delivery was as good as the ideas that went into it in the beginning stages?    

 

This may look like paralysis through analysis but I really think this is food for thought, for we probably have the same problems crippling/killing us across all public systems in the country! If we acknowledge that we have a problem, identify the root cause(s) and tackle them, India may be one of the best countries to live in. We have the rest….culture, spirituality, intelligence, enterprise,…..etc. (I am hoping that these things remain with us even as I say it….especially, our culture!)

2 comments:

M Taher said...

Hi Nimmy
You are a geneius. Here you raise the question about why India missed the Bus (viz., state-of-the-art technology); and in the previous day you shared the spiritual knowledge, i.e., one-pointedness, and left us to ponder [In short, I now get the meaning of your Title: Aa-ha! Thinking Inside The Blog!].

That is to say, a KM mind goes out to enquire about the state-of-affairs on the street; and another KM mind is still busy trying to synchronize with the oneness.

The moral of all the above is mindfulness (or concentration) thro' which we are sure to get the answers to all our issues.

Stay in touch: I am a Mysorean now in Toronto.

Nimmy said...

thanks for the comments dr taher and ranju....

dr taher, i am really glad that i am putting some sense into my blog and stimulating people's thoughts....hope to get better at it with time.... :)

ranju, i've left a comment on your blog! :)