Problems, solution and the procrastination

Perhaps I might be forgiven, being in the age group I am, for making a mountain of a molehill and then considering the same as insurmountable. Imagine, therefore, my surprise, a sense of magical exhilaration when the other day I decided and was actually able to solve a simple household problem with a reasonable effort, an action I held up for months.

While in the above case the problem posed could be resolved to one’s satisfaction, I am not sure that all kinds of small problems we face both in our day to day lives and the ‘larger’ problems of life in the realms of technology, environment, health as well as in the broader social, political, economic and cultural contexts (subsuming some of our daily problems as particular instantiations of the bigger issues) can always, in a general way, be shown to possess happy or fair solutions. These may often be justifiably considered intractable.

 

Health problems of an individual

It is a common experience that some of the problems we face as individuals apparently resolve themselves given sufficient time. There is a certain degree of reversibility associated with some changes with respect to a particular position or the condition of a given system (which our life has to deal with), for instance, our body at any given instant. Changes do occur in our body or in its behaviour. Sometimes one is barely conscious of these changes or almost disregards these. On other occasions, however, these changes may be more significant and it is possible that one perceives the changes as persistent and feels uncertain about the consequences. That is when a problem with our body might come to acquire a definition. But as experienced by many of us, quite a few such apparent changes disappear on their own after a period, or if they remain, are not quite noticeable and seemingly do not interfere with our daily life. This does not mean that the problem has been resolved, but rather the body has come to terms with the apparent changes in it and taken them in its stride. It can be said to have graduated into a new steady state, may be termed better or worse than the previous state. That is a matter of perception, a subjective decision, but usually not calling for any action, a problem-solving intervention.

There are occasions, however, when the changes in one’s body may not be diagnosed as benign. There may be a threat perception about an immediate breakdown of our life or damage to its quality. The problem definition in such a case becomes more urgent with greater specialised and professional inputs. Specific solutions, mandating medically consistent actions and treatments might follow. But it is not guaranteed in all cases that the solutions would be fully satisfactory or would entirely or even partially resolve the problem(s) originally posed.

The main difference between the two cases above (pertaining to health problems of an individual) is the apparent decisiveness and wherewithal to act with the available medical means (scientific knowledge and technology) upon resolving a problem in the latter case whereas in the former hope or faith in the self-healing capacity of the body is in evidence leading to apparent inaction. The outcome in either case may not conform to a uniquely definable ‘solution’, but would be measured in terms of our expectation of what a solution in a given case should look like.

Problems – scaling from individual to community levels

In the household context, people continuously need to solve problems arising with regard to selection, procurement of various gadgets and attending to a myriad maintenance issues related to a number of appliances and procedures of routine use for convenient, smooth and trouble-free conduct of daily chores. By the same token, a cooperative housing society, a larger colony of residents with a more or less homogeneous background, and finally a much larger and a more diverse community living within the precincts of a municipality (municipal corporation) might be required to solve qualitatively similar problems, though not just with wider variability due to heterogeneity of the populace and their requirements, but with a significantly higher scale that may sometimes call for altogether different strategies and skills.

Guaranteed equitable distribution of drinking water to all residents in a large housing complex or a larger community and uninterrupted collection and environmentally safe disposal of accumulated municipal solid waste are examples of two common and pressing problems most cities in India face today, with no immediate and reliable solution on the horizon. There are many more similar problems, such as, public health, sanitation, air/water pollution, roads and efficient drainage (especially for storm water), etc.

Water supply

 While the water distribution problem is generally a large-scale citywide one, management of water supply in a smooth and equitable manner even within a much smaller residential complex may present problems to those responsible and entrusted with the job that may not be just technical (removing blockages, repair or replacement of machine parts or some related civil works) or technological (choosing a more modern and advanced technology than used in the existing installation, deciding about water conservation and rain water harvesting). On the other hand, managing city’s growing water need, with growing population, will entail not just planning and construction of new storage facilities ahead of the growing demand, but taking principled position about sanctioning new planned residential/commercial building constructions that source their water from the city’s available water storage facilities, strictly monitoring and controlling unlawful extraction of the groundwater for the same purpose. 

 

Solid waste disposal

A different set of issues become pertinent in the context of solid waste disposal problem. In this case the magnitude of the problem may grow too big and its resolution may become quite intractable with the scale due to the indecisiveness and procrastination (lack of urgency) on the part of the people responsible for its management. Simple issues like segregation of waste into dry and compostable wet garbage or separation of recyclable (such as plastic, metallics) and electronic wastes, which are relatively easy to enforce and implement at the level of individual household units within a residential society, become many times more difficult, hazardous and expensive (if not nearly impossible) to carry out if such a combined (unsegregated) mass of solid waste from a large number of housing complexes are allowed to accumulate at a municipal ward level. Choices among common treatment processes such as composting, incineration, landfill and capping etc, can become orders of magnitude difficult and ineffective, what with poor match between the feed specification of some of these machines and the actual load, poor designs or the inefficiency of the commercially available machines to be selected within municipal funds restrictions. Thus the problem here is not just techno-economic but also about planning and management.

No matter whether it is a problem faced by an individual or by a collective, difficulties in problem solving (making it an open-ended process) are often associated with an inadequate or incomplete problem definition that may happen sometime, in a typical real life scenario, due to lack of input information required and the uncertainty in the data. The indecisiveness to act in a way so as to move towards a solution may also occur when one has to make choices among multiple solution strategies resulting in outcomes which, even though include a good technically consistent solution to the original problem but makes the solution less worthy either because of incurring too much expense or for generating a new problem (like disposal of a byproduct).

Social and political over-determinants of problem-solving choices

An important difference that pertains to this class of problems vis-à-vis the problems faced by an individual household is the collaborative nature of the problem solving in the sense that the decision making in this regard can not be done individually. This might (usually, though not necessarily always) bring into play the social and or even political determinants quite apart from purely technical or technological considerations that would have decided the course of action in an individual based problem-solving scenario.   

However, it can be stated with some certainty that delaying decisive actions, even at the risk of failures or sub-optimal solutions, do not help in the long run and may actually compound the problem. This has been amply demonstrated in the case of community wide problem-solving by way of huge cost overruns and/or coming up with an outdated solution designed for a certain assumed scale that may have seen an increase by an order of magnitude during the pendency of the problem solving process.

The tree

When I happened to step into the balcony of my flat in the morning after a night of torrential rain accompanied as it was with a vicious gale, the first thing I noticed was a bit of a void in the direction of my line of sight which normally did not intersect with a part of the balcony and a good part of the terrace of the two-story house in the neighbouring bungalow society right outside the boundary wall enclosing ours. By then I realised that a stout and big branch at the upper flights on the right side of the Krishnachura (‘Royal Poinciana’) tree I am used to seeing from my balcony was no more, being substantially broken down from the main stem and was precariously dangling above and across the boundary wall with a medley of sub-branches, leaves and flowers further threatening to go where gravity would pull them to. And that meant on top of a lot of spanking cars parked on either side of that wall.    

Three things bothered me, in no particular order. Both my neighbours in the opposite two-story house and I would forego a part of the privacy (without having to pay any premium for this privilege) naturally provided by the leafy branches of the tree. The latter, which had a symmetrical expanse as it diverged upwards, well nigh lost it, much like a human shorn of an arm from the shoulder. A cuckoo that used to station itself on some branches and from the leafy incognito issued its unrelenting calls since early morning fell silent, probably confused by the mayhem had gone to a safer abode.

By mid morning there was a flurry of activities on both sides of the wall involving responsible men and a few concerned women, watchmen, safaiwallahs and later one or two babus in grey safari suits from the corporation in-charge of the garden department. They paced up and down the sidewalk, looked up the tree and estimated its broken segments, furiously argued among themselves. An hour later, a thin agile young man armed with a chopper climbed up the tree and bracing himself at a convenient junction on the stem, methodically chipped at the sides of the broken branch before chopping it off close to the corresponding Y-joint, the huge panoply of branches and leaves and flowers being caught hold of and drawn safely down by two more workers from the department standing below. Some further pruning later those workers pulled the remains of the tree, much like an animal carcass, across and out of the colony on to the main road en route to its designated transit area of the municipal ward awaiting further denudation and decapitation towards an appropriate utilitarian end.   

Presently, the reasonable and the practical men and women from our colonies, having successfully resolved the fall out of an act of god went their ways. Safaiwallahs got busy with their daily chores. Babus sped away on their two wheelers. Then the tree was left alone to reflect on its bruises and cuts. The places where the chopper had amputated the branches were looking white in the rising sun, bright and raw.

In time the injured stem will be washed by rain of any memory of a presence and tanned by sun, collect grime and look like the others. If its fecundity serves it well the tree might shoot out new arms thereabouts or elsewhere and grow leaves on them and again aspire for the sky, no less, and fill the void in the direction of my line of vision. When the air will rise, the tree will slowly allow its bruised hope to flow up and down the sinews of the branches for them to be swayed, with leaves aflutter and flowers aflame. In time the pint-sized birds will think nothing of their busy flitting across the branches and resume their preferential perch on the lightest among these dangerously tempting gravity. And the cuckoo will be back to pull me out of my slumber with amazing persistence.

Perhaps there was no need to be despondent about this act of god and its human follow up. The tree will survive. And so will all those that animate the nature.