There’s a certain charm in staying unchanged in a fast-changing world

It was a narrow corridor, right between the restaurant’s kitchen and the dining hall where crisp golden-hued, ghee-laden masala dosas and chutney has been served to generations of Bengalureans. In that corridor where barely two people could stand side by side, stood this old man clad in a white panche folded at his knees, bent over a large wet grinder that roared non-stop with the white dosa batter. His left hand held the wall as if to balance himself – and then, there was me, holding the sound recorder, next to him.

I used to host a radio show back in those days, and my producer and I were there as part of a massive ‘Bangalore’s best dosa’ hunt that the radio station had launched to unravel more of this national favourite breakfast. This gentleman’s duty in the hotel for 19 years had been to soak rice and dals in some secret proportion for the dosa batter and grind them to the same consistency that would turn out the same golden-hued dosa with the same texture day after day. Soak, grind, supervise, repeat -- was all the man had done for 19 years, every morning 4.30 onwards, bent over in that same corridor.

Back on my show, I spoke about him to my listeners, many of whom were software engineers and IT professionals on whom their HR departments spent a bomb to ‘motivate’ them to do better each day — costly holidays and incentives in the hope that they would not quit the organisation for higher pay or better perks in another.

What is the secret to keeping at something for years? How do you bring dedication into the daily grind? Where ‘innovation’ is worshipped, is there merit in staying unchanged? I, for one, feel that we as a generation do not realise the greatness of ‘sameness’. Nor do we understand or practise ‘devotion’ to a craft, the kind that we read of the iconic actor Dilip Kumar, who actually walked around in iron shackles practising to play the wronged prince in Mughal-e-Azam, or worked on his Bhojpuri to perfect it for his role as a village simpleton in another.

My father joined, worked at, and retired from the same PSU, a job that took us all over India as kids; I changed three jobs within a decade, three more within the next. A popular homeopath in Bengaluru’s Malleswaram had the same small one-room clinic in white paint and his brown table, sitting at which he used to see dozens of patients who would sit on a brown bench outside, day after day for 40 years, until he passed on.

Close your eyes and imagine your mother – in the same attire, same hairstyle for years, only greyer. Or your physics teacher, with the same loose flared pants, checks shirt for class after class. Our food stayed the same; festivals brought in ‘specials’, but even those were predictable. When we grew up, earned more and travelled the world, we were proud of the food we could now taste. But the more pizza and pasta you ate at parties and airport lounges, the more you suddenly craved to run back home to roti-dal or anna-sambhar. Ultimately, the more the variety you can buy, the deeper the longing for same-old-ness.

But sameness is not the same as dullness. It is a value in its own right. It takes effort, to maintain the same quality of work for which it was sought for in the first place. There is no slacking off; every day you wake up, get ready, do the same that you did yesterday, with the same devotion. And then again. It is this persistence at sameness that perfects your hands, your skills, sometimes to a six-sigma level of precision, like the world-famous dabbawalas of Mumbai. There is excellence to be had, just by doing more and more of the same.

A few years ago, when my grandmother Padmini, then 93, came home, I told my son about all the work I used to watch her do when I was a kid. From making food on firewood to churning huge cauldrons of butter by hand, to serving meals to a minimum of 20 people daily; this, for at least 75 years of her life, daily, without a holiday. The boy’s eyes popped. He vanished into his room momentarily, only to reappear with a sheet of paper. “Ma, I calculated, Padmini paati has made at least 8 lakh 24 thousand chapatis in her life!” His great grandma smiled, taking the fellow into the warm folds of her saree, “What a child…is that such a big thing to talk about?”