The Dignity of Labour
Recently I was waiting for a few
minutes at a traffic signal when I happened to notice an old woman selling
bangles and assorted fancy items wheeling her hand cart away from the busy
junction on the orders of the officious police force who didn’t want people to
clog traffic right at the intersection. On a hot summer day, especially here in
madras when the temperatures touch 40 degree centigrade even in the shade to
see these old women push heavy hand carts laden with merchandise trying to sell
them in the scorching noon sun somehow trying to make a living honestly instead
of begging or stealing or praying to god for a handout made me reflect on life
in general and the value we assign to dignity of labour.
And immediately, unbidden I recalled
my colleagues, highly educated office workers seated in air-conditioned rooms
who at the stroke of ten am or ten patients whichever is earlier close down their
pens for the day saying “I have worked enough for the pittance they are paying
me” regardless of the throngs waiting outside for a consultation. And these people, the ones who work only for
my salary amount kind are even lauded for their work because compared to
others- the ones who sit reading the bible or divinity texts all day in the
hospital and prefer to teach only bible gospels/classes to any student who approaches
them with a doubt, at least the ten am workers see at least a few patients a
day while the born again Christians spend all day communing with Jesus for
which the government pays them a salary and
gives them an airconditioned office and a captive audience of eager young students-
eager to pass somehow/anyhow. And that
this is all overlooked or justified by the higher authorities who are frankly
afraid of being labelled anti-minority in the vein of excessive secularism and
being politically correct towards religious minorities by allowing them to proselytize
young college going kids in the classroom.
Anyway, leaving that aside, the very
fact that eighty plus elder citizens are still working in the summer heat
teaches us two lessons. The first is the most obvious, that there is no social
security in India and you either work or you starve, even if you are a
centenarian. Which means that either you work hard in your youth and middle age
and save the money to tide over your old age or you try and get multiple
children at least one of whom will take care of you in your old age, which
explains the population problem.
The second lesson to be noted is that
people in India, leave alone the officialdom, I am talking of even the common
populace, look down on people who work with their hands/feet etc. There is no
dignity in labour if you are not working in an airconditioned office sitting
down in front of a computer. Even the most productive of manual workers,
factory or industry workers or self-employed persons don’t command the respect
of a say a 22-year-old software techie who just passed his arrears exams
borderline or the bureaucrat who sits on his backside all day and only comes
alive to demand baksheesh to scrawl his signature across a file. These are the
kind of people who are most respected in India as seen by the ubiquitous engineering
colleges and civil service training institutes.
I don’t have any solutions to offer, I
don’t even know if I can achieve something with this rant of mine. But as a writer
it behoves me to chronicle the times we live in for posterity and as a result I
am recording this to the world wide web in the hope that someday someone in the
far future will want to research why such an ancient civilization like India collapsed
so suddenly and they might be interested to learn that it was because we valued
shirking work more than honest labour and rewarded those who worked the least
and punished those who didn’t.
