Yak Shaving

There are ideas that shout. Yak Shaving is not one of them. It waits quietly until the day you need it.

It is worth keeping in your pocket not because it is always right, but because it is always available. A tool you carry beats a perfect tool you left at home.

What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.

Consider the chit fund in a small town. It survives not on contracts but on the shame of defaulting before neighbours. Reputation is the oldest collateral in India.

Money is a good clerk and a terrible master; the arrangement is entirely up to us. The name is new; the wisdom stood at bus stops long before either of us.