jugaad
n.— «New Delhi-based IT entrepreneur Karan Vir Singh, managing director of Voxtron Dezign Lab, called it the “jugaad” factor—the improvised quick fix. “It’s like putting two spoons of turmeric powder into your radiator if you spring a small leak,” he said. “It works, it will seal the leak. In Punjab, I have seen villagers buying an agricultural water pump at government subsidised rates, cannibalising some other parts from here and there, and turning it into a vehicle.”» —“What’s culture got to do with IT?” Straits Times (Singapore) Sept. 29, 2002. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
In Japanese, the word san (さん) means “three” and kyuu (きゅう) means “nine.” Said together, the words sound like English “thank you,” so back in the 1990s, when pagers were all the rage among Japanese teens, typing 999 was a quick way to punningly...