One of the greatest lessons I learnt in development — it was also a profound experience that revitalised my Hindu roots after my communist background had nearly scythed them — was from an ordinary woman stone-breaker. We were expecting the birth of our child and I had gone with my wife to Sangli, in southern Maharashtra, to be with her parents for the blessed day. On a morning walk along a pot-holed road which was being re-laid, I saw a group of labourers who were about to begin their day’s work. It was obvious that they belonged to a migrant clan of stonebreakers, engaged by the construction contractor. It was also obvious that they were poor, very poor. Tented huts on the roadside, open-air kitchen with the barest of utensils, a baby cradled in a cloth-sling — it’s a common sight at construction sites in India. What struck me was that before the team began the day’s work, a woman performed a small puja on the stone, smeared it with the auspicious yellow and red powder, broke it with a ceremonial strike and then everybody went about their respective tasks. I asked the woman why she did it. In her own earthy Marathi, she replied, ‘‘This is not a mere stone for us. There is divinity in it. This stone feeds us. It also makes your cars run smoothly on the road.’’ She and her colleagues might as well have done their work in a routine manner, alienated from both the tools of work and its social purpose, and motivated only by the wage it brings. This is indeed what we see in almost every workplace — in government offices, in schools and colleges, in factories, in research laboratories. But work meant something more than wages for those illiterate but wise women and men. Why have so many of us lost touch with the divinity and with the larger social good in whatever work we do in our respective professions? Whatever the shortcomings in our culture and traditions, and there are many, they had certain values that imparted a larger meaning to work, gave a fulfilling expanse to life. Sadly, we are getting alienated from our own culture in the onrush of fake modernity. We have cultivated false notions of work with high-value and low-value, where value is equated solely with money and where most work, high-paying or low-paying, leaves people with a feeling of emptiness at the end — and often in the middle — of their working lives. How do we beat this problem? I wish to share two gems of wisdom with readers of this column. The first is from Swami Ranganathananda, one of the greatest sages of modern India. Ironically, most Indians heard about him during the recent controversy surrounding L K Advani’s comments on Jinnah. But his voluminous writings on diverse issues are a must-read for anybody who wishes to work for a better India. Take this piece from a lecture on citizenship. ‘‘No work is big or small, our attitude makes it so. If you do a clerk’s work with a clerk’s mind, both the work and the worker remain small. But if you do the same work with the mindset of a citizen, both become great. Similarly, a teacher working in a remote corner of India, thinking of himself as a low-paid employee, reduces himself to an inconsequential individual. But if he develops the attitude of a citizen, he uplifts himself to the status of a nation-builder and invests his work with great significance and meaning. You are free to make your work and yourself small; you are also free to make both big. It all depends on your attitude, on your philosophy of work. We have to achieve an intrinsic bigness in ourselves, and impart that bigness to all the functions that we perform.’’ The second is from Bipin Chandra Pal, one of the least recognised among the leaders of our freedom struggle. His book Nationality and Empire: A Running Study of Some Current Indian Problems, though published in 1916, is highly contemporaneous. Pointing to certain weaknesses in the nationalist movement, he wrote, ‘‘Most of us are nationalists more in the European sense of the term than after our own true social philosophy. Jagad hitaya, Shri Krishnaya — for the good of the world and dedicated to the Lord — this has been the consecration of all our works, sacramental and social. This is how the rich among us always consecrate every public work they construct, be it a temple or a tank; and it shows the universal reference of all our social duty. Our modern nationalist ideal has not yet reached this lofty spiritual level. The idealism of the Indian nationalism rarely rises above the lower European plane of it, where it concerns itself almost uniformly with the carnal conflicts of political and economic competitions.’’ Write to sudheenkulkarni@expressindia.com
