Like Evolution, Disasters Happen Slowly and Gradually
Or, why growth at all costs can have dire consequences
đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
Itâs a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and lifeâs big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
Bangalore, the city where I currently live, popularly known as The Silicon Valley of India, came to a standstill two weeks back because of a flood. In the most crowded parts of Bangalore, there was water everywhere.
The more I read about the reasons behind the flood and the history of the city, a pattern began to emerge. I noticed a costly lesson that applies equally to city planning, business, and personal decisions: The downside of chasing growth, productivity, development, efficiency, profit, etc. at all costs.
On to this weekâs essay! Itâs about 1,500 words.
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Q: Are there downsides of a âgrowth at all costsâ mindset?
In the 1500s, Kempe Gowda â a chieftain under the Vijayanagara Empire of South India, who ruled over most parts of Karnataka for the better part of the 16th century â constructed a fort, built several temples and lakes, and transformed Bangalore from a sleepy village to a culture centre.
Three centuries later, in the 1800s, the Britishers built their cantonment in Bangalore, allocating areas separately for barracks, officersâ dwellings, public services and parks. Its planned character ensured an environment of peacefulness and companionship in the city.
Fast-forward one hundred years. Itâs the 1990s, and urban growth is transforming the city â faster than it could sustain.
This sudden change was triggered by the IT boom, which turned Bangalore into a world city. This attracted job seekers in the tens of thousands from all over India.
But no part of the city told the story of this fundamental shift in conditions more starkly than Whitefield.
What began in the 1800s as a quiet settlement for the Eurasians and Anglo Indians was a wide open precinct till the 1980s. It was an open country. Farms on both sides of a rustic road were dispersed with thatched-roof houses serving light food and tender coconuts. There were open spaces and fields of flowers dancing in the breeze. One could go there for a dayâs outing.
In about ten years the old familiar features were all gone. In 1994, an India-Singapore consortium built the 69-acre International Tech Park in Whitefield. It was a ten-building behemoth that included sports arenas and a hotel, all of international standard. It became the preferred campus of every multinational giant with an eye on India. Other gigantic towers followed suit.
The techie population crowded there. This heavy influx of people slowly began to choke Whitefield. But the government refused to notice that something bad was happening. Soon, Whitefield became a monster.
There were only two main roads, both perpetually congested. Drivers, who were constantly overtaking one another, either blocked the traffic when they were lucky or caused death and injury when they were not.
Thanks to the presence of international companies and a bulging population with money to spare, modern urban facilities were constantly coming up despite the problems. Malls, hotels, multiplexes, speciality hospitals and schools merged into the congested and overflowing anarchy of the area.
What overwhelmed Whitefield were only the high points of what plagued Bangalore as a whole. A cosy town turned international melting pot, Bangaloreâs face slowly turned ugly.
Whitefieldâs story is the story of Bangalore now.
Today, letâs talk about growth. More precisely, letâs talk about the hidden price we have to pay when we pursue relentless growth, and the very visible consequences we have to face unless we ask one simple question: At what expense?
Everything has a hidden cost. Things that look clear on the surface often have fault lines that come back to bite you later.
Burning fuel would help you run industries and take you from one place to another but give it a couple of decades and it would heat up the earth and kill a lot of plants, animals, and even humans. So would cutting down trees, overfishing, consumerism, drilling, and using plastic.
The problem is that in your quest for unlimited growth, you are often taking a big debt you have to repay in the future, and the interest is steep.
Often itâs not the main perpetrators who take the brunt of it. Instead, others have to pay the most for their mistakes. For example, the common man suffers the most when a city is flooded because of the policy makersâ stupidity. The employee suffers the most when a business goes bust because of the leadersâ bad decisions.
This is the âhidden costâ that you refuse to see when you are blinded by the lure of growth, development, and prosperity.
It is only when you refuse to meditate deeply on the real expense youâd eventually have to bear, you get carried away by easy-to-measure and surface-level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as revenue, growth, income, development; pay only lipservice to second-order effects such as CO2 emission, traffic conditions, air quality; and blatantly ignore what cannot be measured easily, such as peace of mind, serenity, quaintness. In other words, this is exactly you create a recipe for disaster that is Bangalore.
Now, Iâm not saying that the idea of Bangalore as the Silicon Valley of India is bad. What Iâm trying to point toward is that Californiaâs Bay Area did not lose its charm when Silicon Valley became a land of miracles. Neither did Boston. So, why did modernity and enterprise make Bangalore unbearable?
Itâs because of sheer stupidity when Bangaloreâs elected leaders, administrators and builders decided to ignore a KPI Kempe Gowdaâs mother had set for him from the get-go.
When the fabled founder of Bangalore set out to build his dream capital, his mother gave him two strict instructions: âBuild lakes. Plant trees.â Along with modernising the city, Gowda made a hundred lakes and lined the pathways with wide, leafy trees. Bangalore isnât called (rather, used to be called) the âGarden Cityâ without reason.
Unfortunately, politicians and land dealers of modern times were born to different kinds of mothers. They are hellbent on destroying all the gardens. In about three decades they filled up 2,000 hectares of lakes, and, in the late 2000s alone, felled 50,000 trees.
Under their earth movers and power saws, the urban sprawl expanded until the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) became the largest municipal corporation in the country. The population density rose to 12,000 persons per square kilometre.
Gone are the days when one would enjoy sitting at a bench and watch the cars and busses pass by. They are only stories from a distant past you hear from elders. The city is now an endless cacophony of noise from traffic jams.
Nature herself has started protesting in ways that are impossible to ignore. Bangaloreâs largest waterbody, the 700-acre Bellandur Lake turned into a menacing expanse of white foam and then caught fire in mid-2015. The stagnation of accumulated sewage had produced methane gas that became inflammable.
A few weeks back, a dayâs rain flooded the whole city and brought the Silicon Valley of India to a stand still. The primary reason however was not nature. It was man. During the investigation, BBMP found that encroachments and illegal constructions have been blocking upto 700 stormwater drains in the capital for the last ten years, leading to the large-scale waterlogging that happened eventually.
So much for development.
I am not anti-growth. Rather, I am opposed to the idea of growth at all costs. When you think in absolutes like âat all costsâ or âno matter whatâ or âitâs now or neverâ without fully understanding the extent of those sentiments, only disaster ensues.
It is the rat race for a better future that makes you ignore your family and focus on your career, ignore customer satisfaction and focus on business revenue, engage in greedy decision making while ignoring the hidden cost of small actions. In other words, this is what makes you stupid.
We often assume we would know before disaster arrives, and would take counter measures before anything serious happens. We are the smartest creatures on the planet after all, arenât we? When the time arrives, weâll surely figure something out. Better deal with it later, we say, when it becomes a real problem. Right now, itâs just an imaginary speculation. Letâs not be so paranoid about everything!
But the funny thing is that disasters donât announce before striking. There will be no knocking at the door. There wonât be any blinking red neon sign saying: DISASTER AHEAD! Disasters happen gradually, due to the compounding effect of small individual actions that we take when we dunno their hidden cost.
Take the 2000 dotcom crash, the 2008 financial crash, the 2020 California wildfires, the 2022 heat wave in India and Pakistan â all built up gradually year after year due to tiny actions, until they blowed up.
C. S. Lewis summed it all up in one line: The safest road to Hell is the gradual one â the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
Like evolution, disasters happen slowly and gradually. They look dramatic only in retrospect.
A couple of years back, a former additional chief secretary of Karnataka said that water scarcity and contamination may force the government to evacuate half of Bangaloreâs population in 2023. âBangalore is growing rapidly,â he said, âwithout realising that itâs actually dying slowly.â
This is the hidden cost of chasing growth at all costs.
Timeless Insight
Warren Buffettâs first rule of investment is: Never lose money. The second rule is: Never forget Rule 1.
Eliminating weaknesses by reducing downsides is in itself a good winning strategy. For example, removing a bad hire is far more effective than adding good hires. Similarly, not doing what we know is wrong is far more effective than doing what we think is right.
As Charlie Munger says: It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
What Iâm Reading
Once we understand that obesity is a hormonal imbalance, we can begin to treat it. If we believe that excess calories cause obesity, then the treatment is to reduce calories. But this method has been a complete failure. However, if too much insulin causes obesity, then it becomes clear we need to lower insulin levels.
â Jason Fung, The Obesity Code
Tiny Thought
The main purpose of religion is not to affirm that there is a God, but to prevent humans from thinking they are Gods.
Before You GoâŚ
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek đ