Clever Deshi Inventions

For a while now I’ve been keeping my eyes out looking for cool Bangladeshi inventions/better ways of doing things that we could learn from or implement at home. Alas, after four months of observation the list is pretty short. So far it contains two items:

1. The wood block doorstop




















2. The dishwashing liquid refill pouch


(Lest I be accused of wandering around with my eyes shut, I should point out that I have noticed an immense collection of different tools/practices/ways-of-doing-things here that I had never seen before and to my eyes constitute Deshi inventions - the bodi knife, cooking on the floor, tandori ovens, rickshaws, ruti rolling sets, etc. However, none of these seems to me an improvement over the old stand-byes that we use at home. So I've left them off the list.)

Surely there exist many more useful innovations from this part of the world (local readers please offer your own observations in comments on this post), but perhaps many of them have already circled the globe, and so go unnoticed by me by virtue of already being familiar. (Actually, I have no idea were the two items on this list were actually invented. I first saw them here. So, as far as I’m concerned, here’s where they were invented.)

That said, I am impressed by the two that made the list. The wood block doorstop caught my eye when we first moved into our apartment here. Nearly every room has a door to a little balcony outside. During the day we usually leave a few of these doors open for better airflow. The doors themselves are solid wood and fairly heavy. When the wind gusts and blows them shut they make a bang that shakes the house. That’s where the wood block doorstop comes in. On each doorjamb there is a little wedge of wood attached to a hinge. When you open the door, you can swing the wedge between the door and the jamb and it will hold the door open and keep it from slamming shut. The real genius of the tool is its simplicity. At home we have those fancy hydraulic-arm things on our screen doors, but they’re almost always broken or at best semi-functional. But the little wood block is sturdy, simple to use, and does the job. The catch is, you need a sturdy door. When the wind blows there’s a lot of leverage on the little block and it can generate quite a bit of force on the door. I imagine if we tried the block method with our flimsy aluminum screen doors they’d buckle where the block meets the door in a moderate wind.

The other item on the list, the dishwashing liquid refill pouch, is also straightforward and perhaps already exists in the states though I’ve yet to see it. It’s just a good way to reduce packaging. Instead of buying a whole new sturdy plastic bottle with the spout at the top, you just buy a little plastic pouch of dishwashing liquid and reuse your perfectly serviceable old plastic bottle. You are still creating some waste in the form of the plastic pouch, but it’s less than the amount of plastic in the dispensing bottle.