Kalgoorlie Miner: (4) River of Knowledge

During a five week trip around India earlier this year, my mate Tim and I made it our aim to leave the country with at least a workable understanding of how Indian society functions despite the apparent randomness encountered at every turn. Broadly speaking we failed, but there were small gains made.

The central pillar of Indian craziness, the monumental cliff face from which all other madness is shed, is chronic inefficiency - pointless rubber stamping, elaborate systems of back scratching, and unnecessarily laborious work practices are commonplace.

Examples include women who are employed to hammer rockmelon-sized pieces of rock into marble-sized pieces of rock for use as road base in the Indian Himalayas, men employed to check your ticket to tourist attractions literally two metres from where you bought it, and the failure of anyone to collect rainwater in Darjeeling, where there is a water shortage despite the fact that it drizzles all day.

Of course it is a given that there will be inefficiency and seemingly menial work in a country of over one billion people, most of whom are poor, but the examples above are government-related, which led Tim and I to suspect that there was beauracratic method behind the madness.

In the end we formulated a theory that, mathematically speaking, if 'x' is the population and 'y' is the work available, then everyone simply does 'y/x' work each day. Using this (questionable) theory, if the population increases then each person does less work or, more commonly I suspect, unnecessary new jobs are created in order to keep individual work levels constant - hello zero unemployment and crippling inefficiency!

Another fascinating aspect of the Indian labour force that Tim and I noticed was the single task expertise of the street-level workers: zip-repairers, shoe-polishers, chai-makers etc. I was most impressed by the mobile phone repair men set up on many street corners with nothing but a school desk and a soldering iron - they put our woeful "send it to the east coast" electronics repair systems to shame.

This notion of a single expertise reminded of a passage from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", where Robert Pirsig says (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the river of human knowledge, which used to be deep and narrow, is now shallow and broad - only in this example we are talking about across cultures, rather than through time. Basically, through improved transport and communication technology, we in the first world have become jacks of all trades and masters of none, and therefore rarely get the satisfaction and wellbeing that comes from having a complete understanding of a particular subject or two.

The deepest part of my river is probably my work as an exploration geologist. I love the challenge of trying to gain a perfect understanding of the rocks in my area - my colleagues and I joke that to fully understand a rock, you must become the rock (an impossibly sad and unfunny joke for non-geologists I know).

So for me it's rocks, for another it's zips or brewing tea, and for others it's fast cars, stamp collecting, or miniaturised poodles. The only people I can't relate to are those without a passion - a deep river is a good river!