It’s a weekday morning, you have just reached work dressed in formals and are waiting for the lift on the ground floor with a bunch of others. Nobody talks, minds weighed down by the coming work day. As per Google Maps, you have reached; but the map doesn’t factor in this painful vertical journey to the work desk.

Suddenly, a hotshot executive walks straight to the already glowing lift button and presses it 2-3 times again, and stands back — people waiting don’t know the button needs to be pressed to summon the lift is, perhaps, the assumption? Or is it that, by pressing it, they have magically ensured that their floor is prioritised over the others? Everybody loves to press a button, and hence how we use lifts is a good window into the Indian psyche.

Lifts have been there throughout history. Unless those late-night TV conspiracists are right about aliens building the Pyramids (perhaps under an 80:20 subvention scheme?), those stones must have been lifted to the top using some pulley mechanism. Even Archimedes tried it in 236 BC. But only in 1852, Elisha Otis and his sons came up with an elevator design that employed a safety device. If the ropes........

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