India's recently launched Bollywood success, 3 Idiots, celebrates grassroots innovation – often encompassing the notion of repurpose.

From Livemint:

If you’ve seen 3 Idiots, a frothy film about an impoverished, smart-alecky student-inventor who lives by his wits, you can’t miss the scooter-powered flour mill, a cycle-powered horse shaver and an exercycle-cum-washing machine... prompting producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra to quietly announce a fund for the three real-life brains—a Kerala teen, a Uttar Pradesh barber and a Maharashtra painter—powering the fertile imagination of wannabe engineer “Rancho”, or Ranchoddass Shyamaldas Chanchad, Aamir Khan’s character.

The inventions were sourced from the National Innovation Foundation (NIF), set up nine years ago by the Indian government with inspiration and support from a 16-year-old proponent of grass-roots invention, the Honey Bee Network. Both NIF and Honey Bee (the name is a metaphor for the cross-pollination of ideas) figure in the credits of 3 Idiots...

The stories of the inventors whose machines feature in Chopra’s film mirror the adversity-derived chutzpah that has so endeared “Rancho” to India...

• Remya Jose (20), a student from Kerala’s Malappuram district, created the exercycle-cum-washing-machine when her mother was ill and father had cancer. The Discovery Channel shot a video of her invention, now a YouTube hit.

• Mohammed Idris (32), a class V dropout and a barber from western Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut district, invented a cycle-powered horse clipper that pares equine hair in half the time that it takes hard-to-find electric shavers...

• Jehangir Painter (49), a painter from north Maharashtra’s Jalgaon town, put together a scooter-powered flour mill to relieve his wife from the tedium of blackout-induced three-hour waits for wheat to be ground...

The Indian ability to innovate is not new and is exemplified by the word jugaad. It has no direct English translation, but refers to the ability to engineer a solution—mechanical or otherwise—to a problem. Jugaad has now entered mainstream lexicon as the get-it-done ability of Indian companies. It has also found its way into some business school courses...

3 Idiots was a “great effort to link the small ideas with the big picture” and should hopefully now symbolize the national storehouse of inventors. “They (the movie makers) have ignited the fire, now we have to channel it,” said Gupta. “It’s a great opportunity to create mass awareness.”