In praise of routine, repetitive work

 Deadlines to be met, reports to be submitted, meetings to be attended, presentations made, the team must be hustled, targets met - yes, corporate life is full of pressure. Other fields too, have their own compulsions.

Then how about?

1. cooking
2. drawing and painting
3. exercising
4. deep breathing
5. meditating
6. writing a diary
7. keeping a journal
8. embroidery
9. knitting
10. sewing
11. wiping and putting away utensils in their place
12. folding and ironing clothes
13. dusting furniture
14. hanging washed clothes for drying
15. changing curtains and bedspreads

I could go on. This is non-glamorous but essential work which actually keeps our surroundings and our mind clear. Only the clear mind can ruminate, connect the dots and offer new insights, new ideas. Otherwise it quickly becomes jaded and falls into a rut. It works but is devoid of joy and satisfaction.

So never underestimate routine work. It is good.

Ironical

 There was a recent news item which stated that Amitabh Bachchan had handed over one of his many properties in Mumbai, named Prateeksha to his daughter Shweta Nanda. The news went on to say that the name of the house was taken from the following lines from Harivanshrai Bachchan’s poem:

Swagat sabke liye yahan par

Nahin kisike liye prateeksha.

The simple lines are powerful. They indicate the autonomy and own rhythm of a house.

I thought a little more. Given their meaning, Swagat would have been an appropriate name for the house. Choosing Prateeksha and quoting the 2 lines don’t go together.

What do you say?

P.S. Swagat = Welcome 

Prateeksha =Waiting 

The above two lines mean: Everybody is welcome here but the house does not wait for anyone.

The reading list

I had posted an entry with the same title a year ago. (October 5, 2022, label: Learning) It was about an old lady who painstakingly went through all the books in a reading list of 150 books her school teacher had handed over to all the students who were passing out of school. The teacher knew that most of them would not be able to pursue higher studies. However, she wanted them to keep in touch with learning and books and so the list.

I had vowed to prepare a list myself, a modest one of 25 books. One year has elapsed and the list is pretty ordinary. However, I have gone through all of them and can vouch for them.

Because Google search has made access easy, I have not given complete bibliographical references, particularly in Fiction, for what may be called classics. I guess it will not be difficult to get the books.

Most of my readers are mature and I do know they occasionally want to escape our dreary world. We also long to understand our world better. I hope the reading list will help in both these cases.

Instead of lamenting about the death of the reading culture, giving specific suggestions is helpful.

So, do give the list a once over.

The reading list

Non-fiction

1.    The complete Indian housekeeper and cook, Flora A. Steel, Grace Gardiner, 1888, 1904

2.    Social action and the labouring poor: an experience, Primila Lewis, 1991

3.    Women’s work, the first 20,000 years, women, cloth and society in early times, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, 1994

4.    Give us credit, Alex M. Counts, 1996

5.    Social research methods, qualitative and quantitative approaches, W. Lawrence Newman, 2000

6.    Truth, love and a little malice, an autobiography, Khushwant Singh, 2001

7.    The laws of lifetime growth, Dan Sullivan, 2007, 2016

8.     Outliers, the story of success, Malcolm Gladwell, 2008

9.     Deep work, Cal Newport, 2016

10.  Failing to succeed, the story of India’s first e-commerce company,   K. Vaitheeswaran, 2017,2019

 

 

 

Fiction

1.    The ladies’ delight (Au bonheur des dames), Emile Zola, 1883, 2001

2.    Keep the aspidistra flying, George Orwell, 1936, 2000

3.    These old shades, Georgette Heyer, 1926, 2004

4.    A town like Alice, Nevil Shute, 1950

5.    The Priestley companion, extracts from the writings of J.B. Priestley selected by himself, 1951

6.    True grit, Charles Portis, 1968

7.    Changing places, David Lodge, 2011

8.    Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

9.    Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte

10. Complete short stories, Anton Chekhov

11. Room, Emma Donoghue, 2010

12. The glass palace, Amitav Ghosh, 2000

13. Gone with the wind, Margaret Mitchell

14. All creatures great and small, James Herriot

15. China court, Rumer Godden, 2013

 

 

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Truth is stranger than fiction

 In the year 2002, Mr. P. K. Roy, a resident of Kolkata, requested a diamond merchant to find a valuer for a big diamond in his possession. It was a 32-carat Golkonda diamond, no less!, set in a gold ring. The broker turned up with a valuer at his house. The way they conducted themselves and handled the stone made Mr. Roy suspicious and he asked for the stone back. The broker swiftly took out a pistol, pinned Roy to the ground and asked his accomplice to run away with the stone. He too, legged it successfully.

Mr. Roy filed a police complaint. The police traced the whereabouts of both the merchant and his accomplice but could not locate the stone. They thoroughly searched the house of the accomplice several times. Mr. Roy approached the court. The case ended recently after the stone was recovered and handed over to Roy. It is currently valued at Rs. 15 crore.

The accomplice lived on the first floor and below the staircase there was a switch-board. All these years, the diamond was tucked away, neatly wrapped in paper, in one corner of the cavity of the board. The police passed it several times when they conducted their searches. Suddenly, a few months ago, one policeman, just felt like it and looked at the cavity on a whim. The board was outside the accomplice's home and so no one had looked for it there.

The judge invoked a Feluda story (Feluda was a fictional detective created by Satyajit Ray) where a thief hides a precious stone in the mouth of a stone lion, the  carrier of goddess Durga.

(The Times of India, 14 August 2023)

Third space

 

After private and public spaces? Before the fourth room in the house to be claimed by women? (The drawing room, kitchen and bedroom are the usual spaces at home, with women mostly found in the latter two. Feminists, starting from Virginia Wolfe have urged women to find their own space at home and it is called the fourth room. In this room, armed with 500 pounds a year as their private income, women could begin by killing the angel in the house, said Wolfe.)

Not quite. Third space denotes the large grey area that lies in between binary options. Society compels us to choose either/or, yes/no in many situations but to assert our free will, it is important to take recourse to the third space. This space is for refuseniks who are tired of conventions and want something different. The least they can do is to show that binaries are inadequate.

Ralph Waldo Thoreau, Herman Melville’s Bartleby and Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher who lived in 4^th century BC in Athens and Corinth are all heirs to a strand in Greek thought that prized the capacity for individual reason over the hypocrisy of traditions and customs. They consistently did the opposite of what people expected.

Ordinary people gave up on them, even called them mad but they all are important figures and their message lures many till date. It of course, takes courage to act on one’s convictions and to ignore the ridicule which is the stock response of common people to the unexpected. We need them to realize that there are alternatives and there are cracks in the crushing weight of habit, custom and tradition. Refuseniks tell us that it is important to refuse and they show how to refuse. We assert our individuality and free will by refusing. Thoreau shunned society and stayed by himself amidst nature but Diogenes was a part of his society. He neither assimilated nor exited society; he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal.

I have parsed the above from Jenny Odell’s How to do nothing, resisting the attention economy, Melville House Publishing, NY, 2019.

I found this analysis very illuminating as it helped me understand my late father’s personality. He ridiculed all conventions and stereotypes and refused most binaries. He loved to do the unexpected. For example, he wanted to listen only to Pandit Bhimsen Joshi who sang last in the 3-day long Sawai Gandharva music festival. He calculated that with the usual delays, Bhimsen would start in the early hours of the fourth day and so he paid a visit on the fourth morning. Unfortunately, the concert was over then and everybody filing out of the shamiana, looked askance at this fresh, smiling figure!

He always thought about things on his own and thought about many facets of a given thing and he approached it from different perspectives. I have inherited his resistance and refusal but, in my case, it is always an instinctive response and I am a very poor thinker as compared to my father.

Progress

 The sweeper in our society did not turn up for two days. Garbage piled up. There had been complaints about his shoddy work and he was pulled up. I thought, he had resigned and no replacement could be found. So anxiety ensued.

However, he turned up yesterday at 4 p.m. He was grinning from ear to ear. He was just back from a trip in a hired car to Ganapati Pule in Konkan. His family and his wife's family had gone there together to take advantage of the long weekend. He was very pleased. The temple at Ganapati Pule is very nice and it is located right on the sea shore.

The sweeper is a pious man. However, the temple did not appeal so much to him as did the shore. He saw an ocean for the first time and was very impressed.

A few years ago, when he joined, he wore torn clothes, did not have footwear and was afraid of society rules. He did other cleaning jobs at offices in the 'Mega center', a nearby office complex. He ran around cycling from the society to these offices. He settled down as he is a sincere worker. However, during the lockdown, all the offices were closed and our society work was his only means of sustenance.

Now the offices are open and in full swing. It is difficult to get cleaners who make decent money as compared to the past. Their stamina and time are the only constraints. So the sweeper looked around and decided to have a family vacation. Progress indeed.

Our gardener has 2 daughters and 2 sons. The daughters are clever, sons less so. However, due to reservation policy, all of them have jobs and are doing well.

One of the maids in the society has 4 daughters and 2 sons. The daughters are educated and have jobs in Amazon! One son is a driver for Amazon. All are doing well. So much so that they have rented a 2-bedroom flat in our building in addition to their flat in a multistorey slum rehabilitation building nearby. The daughters wear capris, trousers and T-shirts and ride 2-wheelers.

So with progressive government policies, with the spread of digital technology and with demonstration effect of television and social media, the bottom is coming up.

This is progress and not Ambani's/ Adani's joining the club of the world's richest persons.

What women go through!

 I refer to 'Kunastav kunitari...' an autobiography (Marathi) of Yashoda Padgaonkar, wife of the famous Marathi poet, Mangesh Padgaonkar. (Rajhans Prakashan, Pune 2000)

Autobiographies of wives of several important men are available in Marathi and without an exception, they are a treasure, an important feature of Marathi literature. All are written straight from the heart, in simple language and they describe the domestic, everyday life of these women, their husbands and families. Most of them do not say anything about the contributions of their husbands and still, they provide an important insight into personal histories in a certain time period.

Years ago, when Marathi annual literature festivals were important occasions, one in Konkan held a seminar in which wives of famous men of letters spoke. It was reported that all the husbands were present in the front row to listen to what was being said about them. That was hilarious and it also showed the independence these women enjoyed. To me, it marked an important characteristic of Marathi middle-class milieu.

One shortcoming of these autobiographies is the disproportionate importance they give to the husbands and the early days before and after marriage. Both are understandable given the man-centric nature of middle-class families of the last century. I hope it has changed now. (Alas! Not many towering literary figures are left in Maharashtra for their wives to take up writing but women have stopped depending on their husbands so much.) Some of the women, defied social conventions to marry their partners and a large part of their writing is devoted to those days of courtship and the hardships. Yashoda Padgaonkar and Vidya Madgulkar give far too much importance to those days. The reader realizes that they are reliving the past with relish but the reader is bored.

Yashoda Padgaonkar was Yashoda Ujagare before marriage and she was born in a Marathi Christian poor family. She lost her father early and her mother worked as a school superintendent. Padgaonkars are Saraswat and the poet was born in a fairly well-to-do family. So Yashoda had to make a lot of adjustments. I will not go in those details. They must be understood from first-hand reading. (BTW, I have a small collection of these autobiographies and I am proud of it. I dip into them any time and get drawn in immediately.)

I will elaborate on only one aspect of this adjustment after marriage which Yashodabai had to make.

Christians are very clean and particular about personal hygiene and appearance. After marriage, Yashoda encountered the scarce and dirty common toilets in the chawls of Mumbai. She found them unbearable and soon she developed a fixation about human waste disposal. She developed piles and suffered. She had surgeries and her health suffered. She describes her travails in great detail. Her fixation did not go away, nor did her health problems. One is not likely to encounter this aspect in other writings. It is nonetheless important.

Yashoda had completed her graduation in Marathi at the time of her marriage. Mangesh Padgaonkar had not. They became acquainted in college. Mangesh Padgaonkar earned nothing, save some occasional translation work, even after his marriage. But Yashoda could not work, her husband was not in favour of the idea! She is bitter about the waste of her education.

She has written about her husband with detachment and has provided a very fair assessment of him.

Going through the book once again yesterday brought the above point home in a striking fashion.

Drift

 An organizational malady.

A beginning is made with a bang and there is a lot of enthusiasm and spirit to do something well. Time passes and drift sets in. In case of business organizations, the market is supposed to take care of drift.

What about non-market organizations?

Right in front of my house stands the large campus of an army school which imparts training to soldiers and officers. A commandant looks after its affairs. The trainees are generally kept very busy. Their day begins at 5 a.m. and ends at 6.15 p.m. with a breakfast and lunch break in between. The trainees are divided into groups of about 30 persons and 1 master, wearing red socks is in charge of  1 group. When the school is full, at least 5 or 6 groups can be seen exercising, playing and doing acrobatics of different types at any time during the day. According to my nephew who was in the air force, these masters are very good people.

For the last fortnight, I have noticed only 2 masters around. They just stand there and leave their charges free. The trainees do not know what to do with themselves. Instead of the normal super active selves, they cut a very sorry figure just standing around. Some of them start exercising, others join or do not. It looks very pathetic.

What could have happened?  Is the current commandant  not competent? Have some masters been transferred and only 2 left back? Have they been assigned office duty?

I will never know. But I am saddened by this drift.

It was the same in the college in which I taught. Because exams were pretty easy and because teaching was not very stirring, students stopped attending. Then teachers stopped teaching. Instead of taking both to task, the administrators were busy plotting their own career moves. Result: empty classrooms and a dismal ambience.

Of course, it is dangerous to leave 16 to 19 year- old's, boys and girls, together like this. All types of mischief was rife on the campus but teachers and administrators turned a blind eye and things drifted more.

In the army school, I hope the drift will be temporary. In the college, drift was permanent, I am afraid. The college stands but it makes no contribution to anything.

It is the duty of organizational leaders to ensure that drift does not set in.

'Lekin' versus 'Teesri Kasam'

 Old, acclaimed Hindi films both. I do not mean to write about them but about their songs and accompanying dances.

Zuthe naina bole is a very fetching song from Lekin. Hridaynath Mangeshkar has set it in raga Bilaskhani Todi, one of the most melodious ragas, and has got Pandit Satyshil Deshpande to sing it with Asha Bhonsale. The song and its video are available on You Tube. The accompanying dance sequence by Hema Malini is however, very disappointing. Her actions are wooden and stilted. She must be a dancer with little imagination for she confines herself to a few repetitive, set actions and facial expressions.

Go back to these 3 famous song and dance sequences in Teesri Kasam:

Pan khayo sainya hamaro,

Hai gajab kahin tara tuta and

Raat dhalne lagi.

Shankar Jaikishan and Asha Bhonsale have excelled themselves here. And Waheeda Rehman! So natural, so graceful, with a spontaneous smile on her face and the rhythm playing through her whole body! Typical actions and gestures but she gives them a magical touch. Simply mesmerizing.

Surely old is gold.

Whither cantonments?

 Cantonments, scattered all over India, are reminders of the British Raj and I have fond memories of them.

Nagpur's Sudder Bazar area was spacious with well laid- out roads. The main city areas of Mahal and Itwari on the other hand, were very congested.

Pune has not one but three cantonments - Pune, Kirkee and Dehu road - attached to it. A lot of history is attached to the east (Pune cantonment) and west (Pune city and Deccan Gymkhana) divide in Pune. Without knowing it, we landed in the eastern part of Pune fifty years ago and we have absorbed the camp - that is how Pune cantonment is known - culture.

The ethos of camp is best captured in Farrokh Dhondi's 'Poona Company'. Gambling, betting, taking pot shots at the nationalistically minded denizens of the city, making money in trading and small business, sticking to the knitting of one's close community - Parsees, Irani's, Jews, Anglo-Indians and Goanese Christians, Muslims including Moghuls, Sindhis, Gujrati's and Jains - were the features of this ethos. St. Vincent's School and its Jesuit priests, Gulati hall with its few cultural programmes and later Nehru Memorial Hall defined the (little) intellectual core of this culture. Sports were more important than studies.

Parsees, Christians and Muslims looked down upon Jains and Marwari's as spineless, sissy people and Marathi people were all 'Ghatis'. This narrow culture flowered against the backdrop of posh areas like Main Street, East Street, Cahun road, race course, Empress Garden and Koregaon Park. Camp culture gave importance to money-making rather than intellectual and cultural pursuits. However, it is cosmopolitan and at the level of everyday activities, this culture is helpful and welcoming.

Main Street had shops like Regal Stores and Marz-o-Rin. At one end of the street was the charming West End theatre and then Dorabjee's - the first departmental stores - (It is actually a superstore.) in Pune, a stone's throw away. After the departure of the British, the Indian army, steeped in the British discipline, dominated the camp as the head quarters of the Southern Command. So there was discipline and cleanliness. English was widely spoken and understood.

Some parts of Camp and Kirkee are simply beautiful. They instantaneously evoke the past. Sudhir Patwardhan has immortalized parts of Kirkee in his paintings.

Residents of Pune Camp were very proud of their heritage.

Alas! Time has not been kind to the cantonments.

Pune has grown by leaps and bounds while the boundaries of cantonments have remained fixed. Cantonment boards sustain themselves on grants from the central government and on their own, they have a measly Entry tax on vehicles and property tax for revenue. The central government has reduced the grants after GST became operational and there are frequent delays in getting the money. PMC, on the other hand, makes good money through property tax because its boundaries are expanding and there is new construction everywhere. New construction is restricted in cantonments.

Thus Pune camp is today a shadow of its past. The Shivaji market which was gutted has not been fully restored. All roads are full of ditches. Shops on Main Street are closing down. There is double way parking everywhere. Residents have fanned out to Fatima Nagar, Wanowrie, Kondhwa, Hadapsar and Yerawada. Footpaths have been encroached upon and cantonment board people ignore complaints of residents.

Toxic work culture

 

Toxic work culture

Literature on people/ human resource management is full of platitudes. It is also very upbeat and positive, overly so. My own experience about people management is that it is very demanding work and one has to be truthful and honest while dealing with others, no matter what the short run compulsions are. I also found that it is better to restrict one’s interactions to a small group.

On the backdrop of a lot of motivational goodness in the literature, a recent article about toxicity at the workplace caught my eye. (The Times of India, Pune, 1 Feb 23: ‘Productivity got boost from WFH, but toxicity grew too’ by Sujaya Banerjee)

The article states that toxic work cultures are disrespectful, abusive, unethical, non-inclusive and very competitive. Their features are:

·       Lack of freedom to speak up, to experiment

·       Poor communication in the organization

·       Micromanagement by seniors

·       Lack of trust and

·       Poor experience at the workplace.

It was a short article but it caught my eye. It resonated with my experience absolutely.

My own work experience is pretty limited. I began my career in a large, professional manufacturing organization when I was singularly ill equipped to work. Instead of acting on this realization and quitting quickly, I hung on for three and a half years. Then I was in a semi-government organization for donkey’s years. It is the latter that I am talking about.

I taught in a college, funded by the state government but run by a private trust whose life members constituted the management. The college had a nice, compact campus at a very good location and its staff and students were cosmopolitan. A number of institutions ran their show in the campus and my college was the newest member.

I had to spend a lot of time to get tenure in the college. By then drift had set in. Students stopped taking the examinations seriously and they also stopped attending lectures which were pretty boring. The subjects of Commerce were also very boring and were taught mechanically, without any explanation of their background and forward, sideways linkages.

Students’ absence was something nobody talked about. Instead, ostrich-like, the faculty looked inward and concentrated on backbiting and watching each other’s moves for career progression. Progress was never defined in academic terms. It was only administrative i.e., taking over office work, examination work and finally becoming Principal.

Due to government regulations and reservation rules, the faculty got divided into 2 groups, a handful of tenured teachers, surrounded by a large group of temporary teachers, part-timers, leave vacancy teachers etc. The latter were made to slog in the hope of getting tenure but just a few could manage to. Because there was no accountability to students, permanent faculty had plenty of time on hand and it resorted to groupism. Reserved versus general category teachers was the basic divide to which were added more angles of subjects, departments, facility with languages, general outlook etc. etc.

The salary scale was meagre but it was periodically revised as per successive pay commission rules and the positions were pensionable. So there was plenty going for these tenured jobs. There were few separations. People dug their heels in and tried to sabotage working from within. As the first principal of the college retired, there was dilution in the effective power in the hands of subsequent principals.

I only concentrated on teaching and I was attracted to research. It did not take long for the established group to keep me at an arm’s length because my motives were not understood. Each of the features of toxicity mentioned above was experienced by me. I felt suffocated, alienated in the college. I found the culture non-inclusive, closed and discriminatory.

My part-time post-doctoral research fellowship was the last straw for the in-group and because of it, I was made to feel like a pariah. I retaliated by totally ignoring the group. I got isolated but I did not mind. I concentrated on my own work. There was another, younger teacher who excelled in teaching. He too, quit in sheer disgust.

In the college, I could work on my own. In corporate jobs, people cannot and they cannot afford to be shunted. So, they take to copying their seniors and that makes the workplace even more toxic.

Given the highly competitive nature of corporate workplaces and given human psychology (highly educated, experienced persons can also be very mean!), inclusion of these negative but crucial aspects of working, will make human resource management literature more realistic.

Adverse sex ratio

 So what is to be done to solve this problem? (Continuation of post of 2 January 2023)

• Create more jobs. Demographic dividend is going waste as young people do not have jobs and cannot contribute to society.
• Empowerment of women so that we do not go backward and get rid of female foetuses.

After reading yesterday about the agitation of men who cannot get brides, I have been thinking continuously about this situation. I have become aware of the myriad ramifications of the issue.

So I read with interest this news item in today’s newspaper:

A newly married man recorded the phone conversation of his bride and came to know that she was planning with her relatives to decamp with valuables from the marital home. The man had paid a large amount as bride price already. He complained to the police and the lady, raised as an orphan, was caught.

There have been quite a few cases of newly married women running away with their jewellery.

When an imbalance or disequilibrium exists, touts will first step in to exploit the situation.

Progress throws up difficult problems!

Maharashtra Times, 1 January 2023 featured a disturbing article. It is published with a photo of bridegrooms in Solapur who took out a public march to draw attention to their plight of not getting  brides. The marching men were in the age group of 28 to 40 and all hailed from rural areas. They have been trying but unable to get married for a long time. The article claims that almost every village in Maharashtra has young men who are unable to get married. Sadanand Deshmukh had mentioned this problem in his Sahitya Academy prize-winning novel Baromas.

Most of these men do not have jobs. However, they are economically active. Many are engaged in farming, in agro-based industries, in small businesses or are followers of political leaders. Just a handful are dependent on their parents but feel that with marriage, their prospects would improve.

I remember times when getting their daughters married off in time and avoiding social approbation was the biggest priority of parents. How did this complete about turn happen?

There are many reasons.

• Girls are better educated and want husbands who have equivalent or higher education. Girls have made good use of educational opportunities open to them and they are striving to be economically independent. Boys have lagged behind in rural areas. Many have just matriculated or done graduation in Arts. These courses have no job prospects. Girls shun these boys.
• Girls do not want to live in villages and small places. Urban life is hectic and crowded but it is considered open to new ideas and liberating in many ways.
• Girls prefer husbands with steady jobs. They frown on farming because of its risks and uncertainties. There are cases of young men taking up indifferent jobs in towns just to get married. After marriage, they leave the jobs and return to farming. Then the girls approach courts to dissolve the marriage! There are cases of young men who are prosperous farmers and earn handsome income from farming but they too, find it difficult to get married.
• Female infanticide was practised on a large scale in rural and semi-urban areas in Maharashtra a decade and two ago. There was rampant misuse of amniocentesis tests till women's organizations agitated against the practice. So the sex ratio is adverse in all the districts, advanced and backward, in Maharashtra. Therefore there is a real shortage of girls. Because of this shortage, looks and financial background of girls do not matter any more. In fact, older, separated and divorced women are also acceptable in marriage. Issues of caste, religion and region are also not important!

The article makes a plea that this has become a pressing social problem and it must be redressed satisfactorily. It does not outline how it is to be done.

A few years ago, I read reports of Jat farmers in Haryana facing a similar problem. In a few cases, Keralite women travelled to Haryana for marriage and in spite of linguistic, cultural barriers, the marriages were successful.

There was also a movie starring Tulip Joshi who had to become a modern day Draupadi after she marries into a family of five unwed, grown up brothers. The image of Tulip Joshi, all pale and confined to her bed is seared in my memory.