The virtues of decriminalising mediocrity

Upon arriving in Japan, we first had to visit the railway pass counter to procure our rail pass. The lady at the counter also advised us to procure a local suica card for using public transport and this costed me a further sum of 2,000 yen per pass. As bad as I am at math, I could immediately arrive at the conclusion that for my wife and I, put together, a sum of 4,000 yen was payable. However, the sales representative used a calculator for the very same computation.

As I stepped out of the airport, I was greeted by a taxi driver dressed impeccably well in a suit. There wasn’t a smudge on his shoes and his cab was spotless. The gentleman didn’t speak a word more than what was necessary and didn’t express an ounce of frustration when he had trouble locating our hotel. As we settled into the hotel and took a walk around, everything that Japan is famous for, the courtesy, the politeness and the cleanliness became evident. But with Japan’s growth having stagnated, how does it succeed as well in maintaining the sanctity of its public spaces, while India, with all its growth story can’t solve the garbage crisis in its cities?

I guess the answer lies in the taxi driver, the sales representative at the railway pass counter and the gentleman who received us at the airport to help us with the reservations. They were all employed to perform a job that Indian society would consider mediocre. Yet, these individuals took immense pride in their jobs and were keen on doing it well. Merely because the sales representative needed a calculator to add 2 and 2, it didn’t invite her colleagues to judge adversely, her intellectual capabilities.

Far from it, the people there had tremendous respect for one another. From the way they dressed for work, to the way they executed the simple obligations cast on them, it was instrumental in the efficiency with which they delivered results. It appears to me that the secret of Japanese ideals lies in the fact that they appreciate hard work and perfection, regardless of whether it yields billions of dollars or impacts billions of lives. One doesn’t have to be an inventor or a billionaire entrepreneur to be respected in Japanese society. But one is required to be committed to one’s craft, no matter what that craft is.

Indian society on the other hand has assumed a level of unhealthy competition and has a serious issue with dignity of labour. One can be a scientist but still be mocked and condemned for not going into the industry to make billions. A school teacher is looked down upon as a product of rejections elsewhere in the economy. Someone who cleans the streets is practically treated as an untouchable, perhaps a byproduct of the caste discrimination that is pervasive and rampant. IIT graduates feel that the humanities professionals are lesser human beings. We don’t value the effort inherent to every job.

We instead value more superficial aspects of accomplishments, success stories of raising investments, making money and changing the world. I wonder if this explains our propensity for corruption. If I perceive my job, as say, a peon in a university as something that holds little or no value, the only thing I can hope to gain out of it is money in the form of bribes. It begs the question, if the peon enjoyed the respect of our society the way an engineer in an IT firm does, would he still be as keen on taking bribes? I am sure there are larger problems that can be attributed for the peon’s propensity for corruption, but the lack of pride and honour he feels in his job, I am certain, is at least one of them. I am convinced however that in our obsession with fame and money, our jobs do not provide to us, the spiritual satisfaction, the sense of honour and pride that a vocation is to provide.

The secret to cleaner cities, more sustainable development, better scruples in society and generally making our communities more courteous, liveable and sustainable, is to celebrate the importance of the so called “mediocre” jobs. The country doesn’t run only from the handful of billionaires, who are no doubt valuable, but it is kept going by the toil of several workers whose efforts, at best, we take for granted and at worst, we hold in contempt and disgust. But what is important is that we learn to value that sustainable human societies, which enable and nurture billionaires, are built on the bedrock of people performing simple jobs well and with a sense of purpose and pride. By referring to such simple jobs as mediocre, we have sowed the seeds for the disruption that we face in our everyday life in India.

To end, I remember an anecdote from Sant Kabir’s life. When his followers, questioned his decision to continue to be a waver when, in fact, his devotees were happy to take care of him, Kabir replied stating that in weaving, he discovers the divine. In every task, menial or otherwise, there is the divine. This is a shift in attitude India must make, if it is to achieve a quality of life that compliments its economic growth. We must come to recognise that the lady at the ticketing counter at a railway station, senses the divine every time she cuts a ticket for a customer. If, however, she doesn’t feel that way, it is for us to assure her a quality of life, that enables her to perceive in her job, a sense of purpose that is needed?