New brooms sweep clean, but old ones?

It is both good and bad that so many Indians still persist with the traditional type of broom instead of going in for the more modern versions. After all, continued patronage of the broom keeps a lot of people in business — not only those who gather the best stalks of grass to make the body but also those who bind it into efficient implements to do the job that the people who buy them expect done: sweep clean. But inconsistency is also endemic to this industry and implement.

The danger is that if unreliability reaches a critical point people may just switch to other cleaning implements even if it means letting go of a worthy cause.

Moreover, unless they are given time to be properly broken in, new brooms have a tendency to shed chaff and create a mess rather than sweep it away. And unless the binding is of top quality too, the chances of brooms disintegrating due to the pressure of heavy-duty jobs are also high. There is also nothing more disconcerting than stray stalks slipping out of the bundle and weakening the efficacy of the tool.

The challenge is to keep the broom together, losing neither mass nor momentum when the jobs at hand get tougher. But as the very nature of their constitution necessitates frequent replacements, it would appear to be unwise to get too attached to brooms or consider them permanent.