On the culture of Unnees Bees
This is an extension to
’s post on the topic. In that write-up , Mohit quotes a line from a news item about an Indian factory that manufactures casings for Foxconn, an assembly partner of Apple . The news item mentions that about 50% of the products coming off the assembly line from that factory are discarded for defects . Mohit writes that such huge inefficiency is a reflection of the mediocrity that sets in as a result of 19/20 (Unees-Bees) attitude we Indians have towards our work . He explains:“The term (unnees-bees) is typically used to convey that the difference was not really worth fretting about, and if you insisted on precision, you were being unreasonable.”
Mohit writes from personal experience that once normalised in society, this attitude seeps into everything and leads to tragic consequences in matters of road safety , fire hazards etc. He argues that the same attitude leads to several disasters in the country where precious lives are lost .
I am going to pen down some thoughts with three examples of the same phenomenon I across below .
Exhibit 1 : Google I/O
In July this year , I had a chance to attend a conference called Google I/O held in Bangalore on behalf of my employer . The yearly fixture is organised by Google to interact with its developer community in the country and introduce the company’s new products and offerings in various fields that the community can leverage. Google’s webpage for the event tells me the full day event had a total of 1800 attendees from all over the country . There were multiple sessions from several Google engineers from all over the world with a central focus on new AI products the company had tailored. It was held at Karnataka Trade Promotion Organisation Convention Center in Whitefield area of Bangalore.
There was a gorgeous selection of food and snacks available for free all through the day . The sessions had a highly advanced setup with attendees provided with audio devices to listen to particular speakers with several sessions running in parallel side by side.
It was just a top notch event and Google clearly couldn’t be more gracious in the way it arranged and splurged on it for such a large crowd . But there was one crucial aspect that stood as an eyesore to me - the washrooms in the huge main auditorium were reminiscent of the ones you would expect from a busy railway platform in the country . I did not click a picture but you can imagine something a degree worse than following photo I pulled from this tweet:
Dingy and leaking would be the words I would use to best describe them . I won’t have complained if this was not such an outstanding event in every other sense as we Indians routinely come across public facilities much worse than what was available there . But I kept thinking about how the sheer contrast between toilet facilities and facilities in the rest of the event would have looked to the eyes of 100’s of Google employees from several tech and management teams who had descended from their respective headquarters in US and Europe .
Google had no choice in the matter . For a successful event of this scale, they must have first needed a place within the city limits where around 2000 people could congregate. This is the best venue they could get with those constraints . If only the government (who apparently owns the venue) allowed them to tear down the washrooms and build them anew , I don’t think the 2 trillion dollar behemoth would have thought twice about that.
This is what the state with one of the highest per capita incomes in the country in its political and financial capital has to offer to the best companies in the world . I dread to think what an event of this scale would look like if a company held it in Benares instead of Bangalore .
This stood out as an example of Unnees Bees attitude to me because while the govt built a great venue where such an event could be held, the blinders of Unnees Bees attitude that we have on our eyes as a society ensured the venue lacked in this crucial yet disregarded aspect.
Exhibit 2 : Hyderabad Test match , England Tour of India
There is an interesting clip on Youtube about the debate of allowing switch hits in the game of cricket that took place between Harsha Bhogle and Kevin Peterson . The discussion took place in Hyderabad in January this year during the first test match of the series between India and England . You can watch the entire video here but my point is beside the banter between the two commentators .
Notice the ragtag plastic chairs Harsha and Kevin are sitting on.
This is not a T20 match that would conclude in 3 hours. It is the longest format of the sport that would conclude after 7 hours x 5 days of game time.
BCCI, the Indian Cricket body , had a revenue in excess of ₹18,760 crore (US$2.2 billion) in FY 23-24. The top comment on the video summarises the ‘Unness-Bees’ phenomenon at play here well :
Keeping the matter of sitting comfort aside, this was being beamed live to millions of TVs across the world . This visual of a commentary box passing the muster of the production team is nothing but a result of Unnees Bees attitude.
Exhibit 3 : Hindustan Aeronautics Limited
Few days ago , the Twitter handle of HAL , country’s premier agency in Aerospace division tweeted these images .
According to its website HAL does ‘cutting edge’ work in “designing and manufacturing of fighter jets, helicopters, jet engine and marine gas turbine engine, avionics” .
The office-bearers of this decaying institution thought their ‘beautiful’ and ‘durable’ (or unusable?) recycled products behoved tweeting to the world and tagging various senior politicians of Defence Ministry(who are equally mired in their own Unnees Bees). Another prime example of “Unnes-Bees” culture of the country at our disposal.
Some Good News
In the post I mention at the beginning of the essay , Mohit quotes
of Takshila Institution :Japan and China did a few years of ‘Unees-Bees’ before becoming manufacturing powerhouses. Linkages to exports were key perhaps. Their prosperous consumers were more demanding.Professor Pranay is spot on . Further reading on the topic made me realise this “Unnees-Bees” phenomenon is a malaise of the developing world . I was astonished to read this 2016 essay on the Chinese version of Unness-Bees . They call it Chabuduo. The whole article reads like someone wrote observations about India and just replaced the country name with China later.
I think the mediocrity that Unees-Bees or Chabuduo entails is only half the problem . The bigger problem is the whole society revelling in the systemic decline the same mediocrity entails . As the writer ,
, concludes in the article :In the end, what perpetuates China’s carelessness most might be sheer ubiquity. Craft inspires. A writer can be stirred to the page by hearing a song or watching a car being repaired, a carpenter revved up by a poem or a motorbike. But the opposite also holds true; when you’re surrounded by the cheaply done, the half-assed and the ugly, when failure is unpunished and dedication unrewarded all around, it’s hard not to think that close enough is good enough. Chabuduo.