Subir Roy: Throw out obsolescence

The microwave oven was a little more than just that. It was elegantly designed and was given to us years ago by my late brother-in-law when he used to stay in Singapore. OK, I am being sentimental, but a bit of him was there permanently in one corner of our kitchen, although his genial self was no longer around to cheer us up.

Then, one day, the oven gave up. We called the mechanic. He charged Rs 200 for the visit and declared that the "card" of the microprocessor-based appliance had burnt out and Panasonic neither produced the model nor marketed its components in India any more. You could import the card, but it would cost a pile and come without a warranty. "Sensible to buy a new one," he declared with cryptic insensitivity and left. How can you throw away a thing like that, I thought, which is so elegantly designed and still looks so smart.

Then, a few days ago, our Sony music system, which had changed our lives for a decade, gave up. Another mechanic came, took one look and declared the entire disc-changing mechanism had to be changed. The damages? Around Rs 6,000. "Difficult to come by these components, as the company doesn't make these systems any more," he explained. Then, as he tuned on the FM radio, which still worked fine, the room filled with quality sound. If the speakers (lungs and vocal cord, if you like) were still so good, then why throw away the whole thing, I wondered.

The last straw was our Tata Indigo car. I asked a friend who is a car buff to suggest a good garage where I could get the alternator repaired. His reply was precise: since your car is over five years old, get rid of it and go in for a new one.

The advice to throw away things after they have done some years, I thought ruefully, was like asking me to call it a day when all I may need is a pacemaker - something that is neither insignificant nor inexpensive, but can and should be implanted when the rest of the system still has a good bit of life left in it.

The problem is not with technology or workmanship - the two keep making tremendous progress - but with the way consumer durables are marketed. Ever since post-War prosperity took hold and ordinary families began to own TVs, washing machines and cars, appliance manufacturers hit upon a unique strategy. Stop overdesigning things that you can proudly claim will last a lifetime. Design so that as soon as the clock strikes midnight to mark the completion of five years or so, the appliance conks out. Galloping technology, powered by the microprocessor, will be ready with a new model with more features to keep you engaged for the next five years - until it is time to go in for a replacement. And what is junked will keep adding to the world's junkyards.

Soon there was a term for it - planned obsolescence - and it came to be symbolised by the Intel-Microsoft duo. Keep designing more complex operating systems that need more powerful processors so that every so often there is a new operating system and a chip to go with it, making the previous incarnation passe, obsolete and impossible to upgrade. Now that the latest incarnation has arrived, glasses that can compute, I am waiting for the computer that will be able to see. Then a pair of correction lenses will be as cheap as a tablet, not the one you pop into your mouth but the one that helps you junk your laptop.

Life would have gone on nicely but for the fact that the world soon woke up to an entirely new problem: a lot of the planet's resources were non-renewable. Since there was a threat of running out of such resources, commodity prices zoomed, thereby putting paid to the business model that depended for survival on the insatiable appetite of the consumer and the fickleness of his attention span.

When concerns over resources and what to do with our junk first surfaced, I had a great conversation in Delhi with a diplomat from the European Union. I said I so liked the Volvo car, which looked like a tank but gave you such a sturdy ride and lasted for as long as you wanted to use it. He couldn't agree more and extolled the virtues of the Ambassador, which could merrily do 300,000 kilometres with its engine being redone not once but twice. What had derailed the world, we both agreed, were the Japanese who made us junk perfectly good devices every few years. The time had come for modular designs that allowed upgrades endlessly.

subirkroy@gmail.com