For want of a nail

My right hand has been in a viciously expensive wrist brace for two out of three weeks now. I would love to say that I was rescuing a baby from a burning building, but the truth is entirely prosaic. The top of my shoe, which had come loose weeks before, was protruding; it caught the lip of the stair going up to my front door and tripped me, and I dislocated my thumb breaking the fall.

Besides refreshing my appreciation of the seminal importance of opposable thumbs, this event has refreshed my appreciation, not for the first time, for the unsung art of maintenance.

Shoes, like everything else, wear out. I'd been tripping over the protrusion even on flat ground for weeks. There was no good excuse not to fix it - I'm in the local market multiple times a week and it would have cost me five seriously devalued bucks to have the cobbler fix it. Now I can't pick up so much as a pen, and my incarcerated arm smells, thanks to Delhi weather, like wet dog rolled in cat vomit. Benjamin Franklin put it thus: "sometimes a little neglect may breed great mischief".

Maintenance pays off. Sort and file your bills every week, and tax month looks a lot less upsetting. Tighten the loose button on your shirt and maybe it won't fall open in the middle of the office. Stop ignoring the twinge in your jaw and maybe you avoid having three teeth pulled. Do without your vehicle for a day while the mechanic takes care of the weird noise, and maybe you'll get routine commutes instead of hospital bills. You get the idea.

It's the sort of un-sexy work the success of which lies largely in the things that do not happen.

Clean the drains in time, so that the city doesn't sit through six-hour traffic jams. Get someone to look at the crack in the concrete pillars right away, and, hey presto, the metro doesn't come crashing down on a peaceful Sunday morning. Check that all electrical arrangements are properly insulated, and you don't have to go to the funeral of a young filmmaker who happened to be holding his car door open when it brushed against a metal gate festooned with live wiring. You get my drift.

It is also about policy implementation.

Notice that school textbooks are being saffronised, and perhaps you won't get generations of intolerant jingoistic loony tunes. Don't pander to religious interest groups of any description, and watch how they eventually stop throwing tantrums. Keep checking that your protocol to clean the utensils, counters, and ingredients with which midday meals are made in schools all over the country, and to test the food first, is being followed, and maybe you don't get classrooms full of dead kids. Insist that the gender sensitisation programmes you put in place to help policemen and other men be more respectful of women be followed and funded, and see how that affects violence against women.

It is also about politics.

If you're a political organisation, find a way to make sure that your grass-roots workers, MLAs, MPs and ministers understand your core ideology and maintain their commitment to it (without, of course, being dismissive of debate). Keep your eye on the mission statement, because wear and tear and entropy and regeneration are natural laws of the universe, and the things born of dying stars are not always pretty. Keep your finger on two pulses: what the people want, and what the nation needs. They're not always the same thing. Keeping it together is very hard, but without regular fresh applications of glue, you're going to lose the plot to something that might look a lot like a black hole.

The security personnel in my college lived by the following slogan, pasted all over campus: "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link." We made fun of it because the most visible security officer was incredibly weedy, but they really are words to live by.

My private nightmare is that we build ginormous nuclear installations, and they end up reducing hundreds of surrounding kilometres to smoking ruins for centuries because of a chain of cascading failures stemming from a rusted lock, or one little sign faded into illegibility.

The familiar rhyme says it best: "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost/For want of a shoe, the horse was lost/For want of a horse, the rider was lost/For want of a rider, a message was lost/For want of a message, the battle was lost/For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost/And all for the want of a horseshoe nail."