Dignity is in work, not in the nature of the work. Part II

Why are certain kinds of work considered dignified and others not? Cerebral, dignified. Manual, not as much. I see this in India and in the US as well. Is this ingrained in the nature of work or in our need to stratify? The industrial age, post-industrial age and free market, dominant metaphors that define work. They say work stratification is necessary for optimal efficiency. Is it? More importantly, is the process value neutral? Doesn't an inevitable value judgment accompany work stratification? Hence the age-old hierarchy that disdains certain work more than others. In all types of work, similar process at play. Take science, for instance. Typically, project leads design the research while technical staff do the hands-on work. Paid and rewarded less, and recognized not at all, unmistakably hands-on science work is deemed grunge work. To the detriment of the scientific enterprise, scientists and science itself. With essential meaning lost in the process, we end up building bodies of knowledge that are mere chimera.

When work is stratified in hierarchical silos that prioritize efficiency, it leaches essential meaning out of it. How much meaning is lost to that soulless tyrant, efficiency? Can't be quantified and therein lies more absurdity. Efficiency reigns in a world where the quantifiable is synonymous with meaningful. That which can't be quantified? Rendered unimportant, even meaningless. A more grotesque disconnect my mind cannot conceive.

The essential we lose pertain to unquantifiable elements such as bonds of purpose and meaning with others at work, and with the work itself. Bonds not reducible to simple quantification. What ensues? An abundance of terms that reveal an absurdly unnatural relationship to work. The daily grind, the rat race, TGIF (Thank God It's Friday), Work-Life Balance.

Work-Life Balance. How that phrase grabs me by the throat and suffocates. It scares me. My work gives essential meaning to my life. Instead I'm supposed to regard it as a necessary evil that makes the rest of my life possible? A glib corporatist phrase, implicit in it the idea that meaning comes from life, not from work. After all, meaning comes from intimate relationships, and our intimates inhabit our life, not our work, it decrees. Only in a world where work equals a pay cheque does Work-Life Balance make sense. Is work only a pay cheque though? Should it be?

How about Nature? What is Work-Life Balance to Nature? If I could commune with a bird or a bee, would they speak of the need for Work-Life Balance in their lives? Rather isn't the phrase Work-Life Balance itself the clearest evidence of a debasing process that makes our work lives less meaningful? Where the irrepressible joy of discovery, of purpose in work?

Should we expect irrepressible joy and purpose from work? Let's flip that proposition. Isn't there much tedium in non-work life as well? So many chores are part of daily life. Our bodies. Brushing teeth, bathing, personal grooming, shitting. Our lives. Cooking, cleaning, running errands, raising children. Yet we don't begrudge their daily presence in our lives the way we are prodded to do about work, especially in the US. No Work-Life Balance equivalent there. Why? Simple. Such daily chores are still a holistic part of our life while we have organized work, that which we get paid for, in such a way that it isn't. Our mandatory daily life chores don't befuddle us the way much of the work we get paid for do. We don't seek an explanation for their presence in our lives but we have created work lives which need explaining, even to ourselves. And therein lies the rub.

We spend more and more of our life at work even as the cultural and economic powers-that-be exhort us that it's a means for doing other, presumably more important and/or meaningful things. Do contradiction of terms get any bigger than this? Shouldn't work be more than a means, even an end in itself? Isn't work, any and every work, entitled to its own dignity?

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/Dignity-is-in-work-not-in-the-nature-of-the-work

Dignity is in work, not in the nature of work. Part I.

With the nature and value of work in harmony, dignity in work no longer an ignominy.

 

See the bee buzzing among the flowers
Never found among Nature's disavowers

'Work is life, life is work', says the bee
'Meaningful work is the only way to be'

With fruits of earnest labor a soul merrily basks
'Yet what's a fair wage for such work?', one asks

Ah, therein lies the human's existential rub!
For our work value outweighs our pay stub

Such a fatal fissure between human work and life
'Work-life balance' embodies our ensuing strife

Yet 'Meaningful work is play, the play of life',
Asserts Nature's gleam, with mischief rife 

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/With-the-nature-and-value-of-work-in-harmony-dignity-in-work-no-longer-an-ignominy 

Power without accountability creates a desert where disdain blooms at the expense of humanism and dignity

What to say about an old routine traffic stop that was anything but routine? How lucky it wasn't worse, much worse.

May 6-7, 1998. Past mid-night, ~12:20AM. Heading home from work in my second-hand, beat-up Honda hatchback, the only car I could afford back then. I'd been working on my scientific presentation for the next morning. An immunology lab at the NIH, the PIs' work the stuff of text-books. New to the lab and to the US, my mind's still running through my data slides, slides I'd toiled over till late that night.

Preoccupied, I cross the Montrose Road and East Jefferson intersection. Become dimly aware of flashing lights behind me. Instinctively assume an ambulance and swerve to the right to give space but the lights follow. Confused, swerve to the left, again to give space but the lights still follow. Only then do I suddenly realize it's a police car not an ambulance, and immediately stop.

Cop car drives ahead, swerves to block my car and stops, cop lunges out of his car, yells to get out of the car and to keep my hands out of my pockets. No one else in sight or on the road, no person nor car. Totally shell-shocked, I get out with my hands up, left hand in a splint. A lab mishap the previous month had meant emergency tendon repair surgery in my left hand.

Moved to the curb. Proceed with exercises. So clueless, I realize only later they're tests for ascertaining alcohol-induced driving impairment. Pass those tests? Of course. After all, I hadn't consumed alcohol, ever. Cop's still haranguing me. Says I'm not on alcohol but he's sure I'm on something. What is it? Point to my ID badge, explain to the cop that I worked at NIH, that I'd initially mistaken his car lights for an ambulance, that my mind was on my next morning's presentation. Patent innocence and naivete of someone habituated to speaking truthfully and used to being believed.

Response? To cuff me. Threatens to take me into custody. With my left arm in a splint, struggles to put the cuffs with my arms in the back, finally cuffs in front. Pitiful and thus fittingly absurd.

Second cop car with two cops pulls up. Shine a light into my face. First cop says I was clean for drink. Explain my story to them, ask why the first cop's treating me so badly. Shrug, say they can't do anything about it, it's his call. Drive off.

Cop tells me I'm not fit to drive my car home. Not alcohol but I'm on something, he doesn't know what or so he insists. Calls for a tow truck. We wait for it. My apartment is less than 500 yards away. After it arrives, asks if I have the $75 to pay for it, uncuffs me, tells me to get out and go home with the tow truck. Drives off, never explaining why he cuffed and uncuffed me.

Get home around 2AM. Pay off the tow truck driver. Do I sleep that night? Don't remember. Next morning, get dressed, go to Bagel City bagels, get bagels and cream cheese for the presentation, go to NIH and present my data at 10:30 as usual.

After the presentation, tell my PI (Principal Investigator) about my mishap. She advises to not pay the tickets and to instead appeal in traffic court. Also to write everything down while it's still fresh in my mind.

I write down everything as I remember it and send it to the First Secretary, Consul, Embassy of India in Washington D.C.. Also send a copy to Bob Levey, a Washington Post reporter then covering disproportionate use of force by local cops. He thanks me for sending him my report but he's moved on from covering this story. Meet the vice-consul at the Indian Consulate in Washington, D.C.. Unsurprisingly, a dead end there too.

September 14, 1998. My day in traffic court. Cop lies, says I was on alcohol that night. My threadbare protection? That his own recording of the facts don't support his lie. After all, when it's my turn to speak, I freeze. Never been in court. Judge decides quickly. Just fines to be paid after all. Pay at the counter with a personal check. Now history, the entire event meticulously documented, labeled and filed away in my ever-burgeoning file cabinet of a life.

Other things take longer to put away. For years, while driving, whenever I heard the sound of sirens, be they cops or ambulances, one of my legs would start trembling uncontrollably.

I'd made a traffic error for sure. Past midnight, traffic signs stop working. If they blink orange, slow and go. If they turn red, stop and go. At the Montrose intersection, they'd blinked red. I should have stopped before going. Instead my error was to slow and go. A new driver, I'd only learnt car driving after coming to the US. My mind was also too much on my presentation.

Did my traffic error justify this cop cuffing me and threatening to take me into custody? Certainly not. Diligent researcher, not involved in anything even remotely anti-social or criminal. Ours the only cars on that road while this entire incident transpired. Safe neighborhood, not a drug- and/or crime-infested one. Yet so lucky it didn't end another way.

Smart phone cameras. One brutal incident after another uncovering a critical slice of American culture that stayed largely hidden or unspoken in polite society, a culture of police impunity, especially against non-whites. Beggars the imagination that an immigrant scientist could have a harrowing personal experience about cops and yet I do, that too years old. My bad luck? Maybe. Certainly arbitrary and capricious. An anomaly? Certainly not, too many tragic videos attest to a culture of law enforcers habitually violating the rule of law.

Power exercised arbitrarily, with bias. Inevitable when complacence, willful ignorance and apathy drive a Faustian bargain prioritizing so-called safety and security at the expense of accountability. A basic tenet for an equitable society, selective or non-existent accountability desiccates human relations. What withers first? Humanism. Is it even possible to prosper and feel good about ourselves without it? Rather, isn't denying others basic dignity by opportunistically abusing power the very manifestation of privation of human decency? After all, what's civility but to treat each other with a modicum of dignity, and to not dehumanize? Easy to say, 'let's reverse course'. Not so in practice. Once given away, arbitrarily bestowed power isn't easily wrested back, nor its pernicious corrosion of human values easily reversed.

What's behavior worthy of emulation? One where individual dignity prevails. Going to traffic court, lodging my complaint with the Indian Embassy in writing and in person, writing to the Washington Post's Bob Levey, all to reclaim my dignity because I choose to live a life where it's sacrosanct. It behooves each and every one of us to choose to make this the norm in our lives but are we equally up to the task? Not in the least, else why this ruinous state of affairs where bigotry and inequity of one kind or the other prevail the world over? Not simply because bigots and other agents of inequity exist but because cultures tolerate and even accommodate them. And so, driven by cravenness, humanity's caravan of the absurd lumbers on in perpetuity, a Sisyphean quest seeking to create nobler versions of ourselves.

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/Power-without-accountability-creates-a-desert-where-disdain-blooms-at-the-expense-of-humanism-and-dignity

October 31, 1984: The night of my brother's right stuff.

Moments of shared history. For Indians, especially Sikhs, October 31, 1984 is such a day. Seared in my memory, a date of ignominy with only a tinge of fraternal quick-wittedness tempering some of its horror.

A day of rumors. Something had happened to Indira Gandhi. Rushed to AIIMS or Safdarjung, she was sick or wounded or dead. All day long, rumors swirled, thickening, thinning, like flocks of birds. Then it came, the moment of truth. Wasn't it 6PM when All India Radio officially announced? Indira Gandhi was dead, shot and killed by her own Sikh body guards.

Didn't the riots begin almost instantaneously? Living so close to AIIMS and Safdarjung, rush upstairs to the roof, climb atop the water tanks. Against the setting sun, a memory of smoke rising from among the many high-end fashion stores in the distance. Isn't that Perfection Silk and Saree House, the smoke a sign of its demise? Isn't it owned by a Sikh?  Chilling portent of the coming evil hours. Soon, not one but several smoke stacks rise up into the sky. People mill around in the street, talking. Then the distant non-stop strum. Takes a while to understand it's the sound of rioting humans.

Maybe speak briefly with Jyoti, our Sikh landlord's grandson and his mom, Manoranjana? That day, they had visitors from Punjab, the heartland of Sikhs. Also seared in my memory? The first P on their visitors' Ambassador car's license plate.

How did my brother do it? The front gate, flanked by two posts with glass encased bulbs that lit up at night, one displaying the address, the other, the names including our landlord's, unmistakably Sikh. Suddenly, as the rioters grew ever louder, nearer, he picks up a paving brick from the garden and smashes the glass and bulb. Dark. Name display gone. Next, another inspired act. From the thelawala's ironing stand out on the street, takes a piece of coal and, in the thickening darkness, quickly changes the tell-tale P in the visitor car's license plate to B. Back then, with Mumbai still Bombay, it could be a Bombay car in the driveway. Wouldn't pass muster in light but at night? Fingers crossed.

Marauding rioters run past. Shouting gleefully, arms filled with goods from freshly looted stores. No reason to stop. No Sikh in sight. No sign this is even a Sikh house. Some even graciously share their loot, throwing designer shoes and sarees onto the lawns as they run past. A macabre vista of the end of days? Surely it would be something like this.

All night, our landlords hide upstairs in/ behind the roof-top water tanks. Next morning, I hear friends drove up in the dark of night, around 2:30 or 3. Stealing out, crouching below the car seats, spirited away to a safe house.

As the smoke cleared over the next few days, it also became clear we'd lived through a genocide. The Sikh genocide. Thousands of Sikhs were mercilessly slaughtered that day and the days that followed, certainly thousands in Delhi alone. Beaten up and burned alive as they made their innocent way home from work.

2009. Jyoti's working in Chennai and he, Manoranjana aunty and Jyoti's wife drop by the evening I'm flying back to the US. Now Jyoti has two kids of his own. A boy and a girl. A future materialized, a future that hung in the balance the day Indira Gandhi died. My brother recalls smashing the glass but surprisingly, he forgot changing the license plate but Manoranjana aunty hasn't. She reminds him.

My brother's quick thinking likely saved lives that night. The lives of our Sikh landlords. How did he do it? Still can't answer. The world suddenly topsy-turvy. Lives in the balance. Can't be sure what to do, let alone do right. A moment of reckoning. Instinctual, visceral? Maybe, but what my brother did on the night of October 31, 1984 was the right stuff, then and forever. The right stuff that precariously separates the civilized from the bestial.

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/October-31-1984-The-night-of-my-brothers-right-stuff

Peerless hospitality: My childhood experience taught me it can be none other than Sikh hospitality

I've never forgotten that first whiff of 'milagu rasam' (Mulligatawny) that wafted through the doors of our new home as I stepped out of the taxi from the railway station. A divine smell that immediately transported me back to the only home I'd known thus far. I was 7 years old and I'd just left behind everything familiar. We'd moved to Delhi following my father's transfer there.

I'm South Indian and 'milagu rasam' is a staple South Indian dish. Delhi, the capital of India, on the other hand, is far in the North. Different language, different cuisine to name just two stark differences.

The house. Our landlords, a Sikh family, lived downstairs. We'd be living upstairs. That entirely unexpected 'milagu rasam' smell? The doing of our landlady. People in the neighborhood called her 'Mataji' meaning respected mother. Deserve that affectionate nickname? I learned soon enough that she embodied it.

She'd be meeting us for the first time that day. That was no obstacle to her vast, innate generosity. Knowing we'd have traveled a long distance and likely would be tired and hungry, she'd taken it upon herself to call on a South Indian neighbor and learn from her how to prepare a typical South Indian (Tamil) meal. A delicious surprise indeed!

We step into the house and there's the freshly cooked, aromatic South Indian meal ready and waiting for us. Soft white rice cooked to perfection, Dal (yellow lentils), Sambar (dish) (lentil stew) and of course steam rising from the 'milagu rasam'. Not just these but all the traditional South Indian accompaniments. Papadum, yogurt, mango pickle, the works. One of the most memorable meals I've ever eaten. Such a gracious welcome, I still tear up whenever I think about it. Ever since, for me peerless hospitality means Sikh hospitality.

Long gone but evergreen in my memory, Mataji, the very embodiment of an enveloping warmth like none other. Language, mannerisms, cuisine, religion, apparel. All different yet all rendered inconsequential by this simple gesture of boundless hospitality. Stitched with indelible warmth and generosity, it's deservedly a memory to last a lifetime.

It's June 2015, the 40th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's extraordinary decision to declare Emergency and many in the Indian media are reminiscing about their experience of that inflection point in India's modern history. Among all those, the one that resonates perfectly with my experience is this piece, not about the Emergency but about another Indira Gandhi-triggered inflection point in 1984, and yet it's also about peerless Sikh hospitality, peerless even in the most arduous of circumstances.
The Story I Did Not Report In ’84

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/Peerless-hospitality-My-childhood-experience-taught-me-it-can-be-none-other-than-Sikh-hospitality