Savyasaachi

“2 mice fell into a bucket of cream; 1 mouse struggled, soon gave up and drowned, but the 2nd mouse, he struggled so hard that he whipped that cream into butter and finally crawled out.”

This is a situation which I see day after day in India, the only thing being that there’s so much cream being poured into the bucket that even people like our 2nd mouse finally drown.

Let me explain.

Once I was on my way from Mysore to Bangalore, in the general compartment of a train. At one of the stops, a man (let us call him “Ram”) entered the train and suddenly started distributing peanuts (3 each) among everyone sitting in that coach.

“What the hell is this for?” we all wondered, all of us looking at each other confused (personally, I was waiting for someone else to start eating peanuts, just in case something was wrong with them.)

Slowly, all of us ate our peanuts which were, in fact, pretty good.

In five minutes, Ram was back and this time with a bag full of peanuts. Almost every single person on that train bought the peanuts.

What might have earned him 40 Rupees in profits on a normal day earned him 150 that day. A 400 percent increase in profits.

Now, isn’t this man a true entrepreneur? Does he not display all the qualities of a true businessman?

Five minutes later, I had a small chat with Mr. Ram. I asked him where he was from and what his level of education was; “Harohalli” (a small village in Mandya district) and “6th standard” were his replies. He also told me he would like to own a shop in the city one day.

And then I thought to myself, would this man also realise his dreams one day? Or was he doomed to a life of selling peanuts in trains, while his dream of setting up a shop drowned in all the bureaucratic paperwork he would have to face? Why, in this country, people like us never had the courage to believe in people like Mr Ram?

In a country like India, where most businesses, big or small, are family-owned and most other parents push their sons or daughters into professional courses, while at the other end of society people are too poor to hope for anything at all, where is the room for people like him to succeed?

If we look at the history of any of the developed countries, we find that all of them owe their success to the spirit of entrepreneurship.

The motor, the telephone, the radio, telegraph (to name a few) are innovations that have changed our lives forever. And all of this due to a few men who held onto that idea, governments and people who saw potential in that idea invested in it, nurtured it, and finally a society that was not afraid to accept change.

We all hear that this century belongs to India, more generally to the developing world - why then are uneducated people who innovate often looked down upon or are told that what they are doing is not important?

I seek not to be negative, but only to create a sense of urgency, because if we change our ways, clear up our bureaucracy and wholeheartedly accept and support our innovations and innovators, then this country will develop at a pace never seen before.

As I said, it is not that there are not enough mice who struggle, it is just that there is too much cream.