Hustles could yet trip up Indian startups if we don’t take due care
gig economy; or to start up a new business. In a not-so-positive (okay, negative) sense, it also means being sharp, pushy, unscrupulous, fake or downright scamming people. In an age when the meanings of words can be subjective— depending on the identity of the person using them and the specific context of their usage—it can be pretty difficult for a third person to understand what a ‘hustle’ is.
Having long associated hustling with pulling a fast one (or, in Indian parlance, putting a topi or cap on someone’s head) I am not comfortable with the word being used to describe entrepreneurship in our country. We have a long history of associating entrepreneurship (and business in general) with dubious practices, and it is only recently—perhaps just in the past couple of decades—that it has gained respectability. As Majrooh Sultanpuri’s lyrics for the 1956 Hindi film C.I.D.
go, “khud kaate gale sab ke, kahe iss ko business" (you cut throats and call it business). The problem with ‘hustling’ in popular usage is that it can legitimize an amoral approach to business, investors, employees and customers. I decided to track down how ‘hustle’ came to acquire its contemporary meaning.
It turns out that for most of the past century, the word described what African-American people in the United States had to do to make a living in a world that was stacked against them. By the early 1990s, hip-hop artists in the US were using the term to describe their lifestyles that combined cultural and business entrepreneurship. From there, it travelled to the American tech industry, where it initially came to mean a hardworking, hard-selling approach to business.
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