Benevolent Innovation

Disclaimer - This story is a work of fiction. Any similarity with real life events is purely coincidental and unintentional. 

Praful just completed his demonstration of the ceiling fan to the group of market observers. He and his brother Jatin had teamed up together to build an accessory to the quintessential ceiling fan. Both brothers, Praful and Jatin had completed their engineering in mechanical and electrical streams, respectively and joined their father in their family business of manufacturing accessories for ceiling fans. Praful was more emotional than Jatin, while Jatin the more practical. In the final year of the engineering course when the company placements had started, an unfortunate incident had deeply shaken Praful. Due to being ignored by a big corporate in offering placement a friend of Praful had ended his life. His friend had committed suicide by hanging from a ceiling fan in his hostel room. Praful was very close to this friend of his and this rash act of this friend had a severe mental impact on Praful. This event almost changed the traction of his life. Praful blamed himself for not getting a feel of his friends mind before the accident. Praful however had been placed with a handsome pay package. This even more pricked his mind with guilt. Constantly, his mind was working on how he could stop such incidents from happening in the first place. Jatin completed his electrical engineering and joined his father in the family business. 

Praful then gathered the reasons of the numerous suicides committed in the country. He found that due to overbearing mental stress, the youth mainly undertook this extreme step. He also found that these accidents mainly happened in the hostels of engineering, medical and management studies. Interestingly, Praful found that the majority of the death was with the help of a simple ceiling fan. 

After deep thought, an idea did strike Praful's mind. He discussed the idea with his brother Jatin. Then both together worked with various proto types in their factory floor. After repeated failures and some successes, they both came up with a design. They developed a spring like device embedded in the rod from which the fan is suspended from the ceiling. After numerous trials and errors, finally their design was ready. The embedded spring in the rod of the fan would abort the suicidal attempt of a mentally weak person. As soon as the person ties the knot around the neck and hangs from the ceiling fan, the embedded spring rod elongates and the incumbent touches the floor with the feet aborting the suicide. The instrument looked just fine as far it's functioning. 

Then they applied for it's patent. Meanwhile, Praful had decided to work full time as an entrepreneur so he resigned from his new job. They even got their invention registered with the government department for MSME, to get any helpful incentives.

Initially, they displayed their products as advertisements in the media. The market reaction was mixed. Some dealers in the market showed interest but they demanded incentives to shore up sales. This required infusion of lot of capital. The two brothers then approached various financial institutions with their patents and design and projections of revenues. But the institutional finance was shy of taking risks. They couldn't give the importance of the cost of human life which was being regularly lost and considered it to be an innocuous reason to drive a profitable business.

A few months after it's launch, the product, however, refused to take off. The number of suicides due to hanging from the ceiling fan continued it's upward count.

Praful was very upset. He felt tremendously disturbed. Then in the heat of the moment one afternoon when he was alone he tied a nooose around his neck and tied the other end of the cloth to the ceiling fan in his office room. He was alone. As he released the tool from under his feet, Praful hung from the fan dangling and his feet touched the floor. His suicide attempt had ended in a failure. He had forgotten that the fan in his office room had also been installed with the anti suicide device. Ironically and unknown to him his close circuit cameras had recorded his incident very minutely. Jatin sitting in another room had observed this footage on his PC and immediately rushed to his brother's room. Jatin found Praful safe but thoroughly shaken. Then scolding him profoundly with profane abuses, Jatin brought a glass of warm milk to help rejuvinate Praful.

Then in a couple of days, a show stopper industrial exhibition invited both the brothers to display their innovation. To a big audience, the video showing Praful's shameful act was displayed on a large screen. There were many big distributors in the audience. Spell bound the audience witnessed the macabre happening ending in a stupid display of folly and comedy.

To Jatin and Praful's utmost amazement, the brothers clocked a big order for supply of the spring anti suicide fan rods. Next day, the media was agog with the news. As a result, the two brothers were flooded with orders for many months and they received huge funding from private equity partners. It was the benevolent innovation which had the blessing of the market.