Undercover Economists

By Jay Dubashi | Feb 5, 2011

Who said this? Oscar Wild, who used to go about dropping such pearls and wound up in a prison? No, it was actually an economist himself looking for a plumber, who, he said, was harder to find than a dinosaur.

It's a topsy-turvy world. There is more gold than ever, but you would be lucky to find a plumber when you want him, or even when you don't want him, as the species seems to have just vanished from our good earth. Why plumbers? You can't get even an electrician or a dhobi for love or money, or for that matter, a good car mechanic to fix your ignition. The bazaars are full of shops selling diamonds, kanjivaram sarees, laptops and jazzy cars, but try to get hold of a plumber, and you would draw a total blank.


I have tried everything to fix our leaking pipe - except give an ad in the local paper and spent a fortune on pliers, wrenches and other exotic paraphernalia plumbers carry or used to carry, in their cases. You can get computer experts, nuclear physicists, space engineers, even management pundits from Harvard, but try to get a plumber, and you would be hitting a wall.

In America, I am told, you have to make an appointment for a plumber, or an electrician, or even a good car mechanic, just as you do for a doctor, and you would be lucky to get one when you want him. Jobs are very scarce in the U.S. right now but so apparently are professionals like electricians or plumbers. They are being imported in large numbers but they have so much work in their home countries they refuse to budge.

It is a funny kind of economics. The richer a country becomes, the scarcer are the kind of people you need. Have you been a good dhobi lately, or even a bad one? There were times when he went about on his bicycle with a huge bundle of dirty clothes in the back seat. Now the bikes have disappeared along with the dhobi. He now goes about on a scooter and I have seen one or two with vans of their own. It is no more a profession; it is a business, and apparently it can do without customers.

The richer your economy gets, the more you have to do things yourself. But this is precisely how we lived as farmers. We used to do everything ourselves, from hacking down trees for fuel to taking coconuts to the nearest ghani to press for oil. The poor bullocks would go round and round and you collected the oil in kerosene tins and came home triumphantly with dozens of tins brimming over with pure coconut oil. We grew our own rice, and since there was a pond on the property, we grew our own fish. We outdid Gandhi in self-reliance, and we never required a plumber or an electrician, because we drew our water from our own well and, of course, there was no electricity.

We did need a dhobi from time to time, particularly in the wedding season, when we had to make ourselves presentable, but the dhobi was our own man, and he went about on foot collecting clothes, until his son went to Dubai and made so much money he forbade his father to wash other people's clothes and the dhobi slowly lost his mind and took to drink. Incidentally, the toddy too was home-made but we were under strict orders to stay away from it.

Now that you need all these people, for our own economy is now said to be emerging it not actually "emerged", they have gone to Dubai and Bahrain, and some as far afield as the UK and U.S., running petrol pumps and taxis and making fifty times as much money as you and me. So, if you want a clean shirt, you clean it yourself or ask your wife to do it. But she is either working in a bank or has become a software expert and is not as handy with the washing machine as she used to be. So we have become expert dhobis, plumbers and electricians as we could be, though we graduated from Harvard or Cambridge and can teach you how to put an atomic power station, if not how to clean a shirt.

This is not economics as we were taught in London and Cambridge, so I have put my Samuelson and Hayek and Keynes aside and bought some how-to books - how to wash your shirt, how to fix your pipe and how to change your fuse. This is what Gandhiji would have wanted us to do, and just when the economy is about to take off, we have become Gandhian.

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