Word: Jugaad

FEATUREs:

• Originally from Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, and Urdu
• Definition in the Oxford English Dictionary: “a flexible approach to problem-solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way”
• Definition in Harvard Business Review: “the gutsy art of overcoming harsh constraints by improvising an effective solution using limited resources”

Jugaad is a hack, a hustle, a fix. It’s a lot from a little, the best with what you’ve got—which is likely not much, if you need jugaad. A “very DU word,” a Delhi University grad once explained to me, and I thought about how college students as a rule and around the world turn nothing into something (e.g., instant noodles).

I first learned the Hindi word in the summer of 2008, which I spent as an intern at a Delhi magazine called Money. A friend in another Indian city—an interloper in the old country, like me—revealed it on a call. She and I loved words. Back in Texas, we had devoured the words of Indian novelists, used them to build an alternate world, a fantasy India, as if our parents had never left (the voluble writers came in handy: Salman Rushdie, with his refracting tales; Vikram Seth, whose A Suitable Boy dropped with a life-changing thud). Jugaad explained a quality we knew about before we had the means to name it. For instance, when our parents took idlis on road trips because they valued fermentation as a preservation method long before Williamsburg shopkeepers taught the world to do the same. They liked hacks before hacks were the fashion: keyboards, not pianos, to service the lessons that were obligatory; accent-modification audio tapes they could listen to as they drove or as they shaved their way into new identities, so as to sound like the locals from whom they aimed to take space—Texans with centrally located homes, and hearts also centrally located, inside the place they were from. The efficient assimilationist knows where to cut corners to get from the aisles to the center.

At my office in Delhi, jugaad functioned as company policy of an informal sort. Corporations, not readers, kept us in business. Liquor magnates, airlines, and clothiers paid for ads, and we repaid them with glowing press, when they might have been targets of critique. Back in a rented apartment, I told a young Texan man who’d come to India with me about this connection between the word my friend had learned and the dissonance at my workplace. The friend eventually married the man who’d taught her the word, a boyish Bangalore native. I married the young American man I’d taught the word to, whose...