Rambaran used to fix ceiling fans and short-circuited wiring for half our block. That was his whole business for almost fifteen years, going door to door with a screwdriver and a roll of black tape, charging fifty or a hundred rupees depending on how bad the wiring was.
Then, one season, a government solar pump scheme arrived in a neighbouring village before it reached ours. Rambaran did not wait for it to become his problem. He borrowed a cousin's motorcycle, rode two hours to the town where contractors were installing the first batch of solar water pumps, and stood there for three full days just watching them work.
Nobody asked him to. Nobody paid him for those three days. He came back home and told his wife he thought this was coming to our village next, and when it did, he wanted to be the person who already knew what to do, not the person still learning on someone's field with the pump broken and the season slipping away.
Six months later, the scheme reached us. A dozen households in the village had shiny new solar panels installed to run their irrigation pumps, subsidised, celebrated, photographed for a local paper. And exactly one person in the area knew what to do when the wiring inside the control box started acting up in the humidity, or when a panel needed realigning after the monsoon winds knocked it off angle.
That person was Rambaran.
He had not become a solar engineer overnight. He still could not tell you the physics behind how a panel converts sunlight into current. But he knew wiring, he knew what heat and moisture do to a junction box over a season, and those three days of watching strangers install pumps had taught him just enough of the difference to not embarrass himself the first time someone called him with a problem.
Word got around fast in a small place. Within a year, farmers from two other villages were calling him instead of waiting for the scheme's own technician, who took two weeks to respond and charged for travel on top of the repair.
What I keep coming back to about Rambaran's story is timing. He did not learn solar repair because a customer walked up and demanded it. He went and stood in a field, uninvited, because he had a hunch that the world he had built his living around was about to shift under his feet, and he would rather be a step ahead of that shift than chasing it.
Most people in his position would have waited. It is the more comfortable thing to do. Wait until the first solar panel actually breaks in your own village, wait until someone asks you directly, wait until there is money on the table before you spend a single unpaid hour learning something new. Waiting feels safer because you are never wrong about wasting your time.
But waiting also means you learn on the customer's dime, fumbling through the first two or three jobs while people watch you figure it out, and in a village that reputation sticks. Rambaran skipped that entire phase by spending three days being useless and curious before he had any reason to be.
I think about this a lot in my own work now, in rooms full of people talking about how a market is about to change, an industry is about to shift, some new technology is coming for the way we've always done things. Most of us nod along and go back to what we were already doing, telling ourselves we will adapt once it actually arrives. Very few of us go stand in the field early, just to watch, with nothing guaranteed in return.
Rambaran never called it strategy. He called it common sense, the same common sense that told him fifteen years ago that fixing fans and wiring would eventually not be enough to feed his family forever. He was simply willing to be a beginner again in public, ahead of the crowd, instead of being forced into it later alongside everyone else.
His shop still has the old sign painted on the wall, the one that just says electrical work in Hindi. He never bothered repainting it to say solar. He does not need to. Everyone within twenty kilometres already knows what he can fix, because he made sure he knew before anyone else thought to ask.
~Vazhi
P.S. If you have ever picked up a skill nobody was paying you to learn yet, purely on a hunch about where things were headed, you already understand exactly what kept Rambaran's shop full while every other electrician in the area was still catching up.