Worker Bees

Worker Bees

They say, statistics never lie; so, I have decided to fall back on them.

As per a random website that I landed on with the help of Google, 77,000 jobs were created in India in 2016. Yet, we are still struggling with low employment rate, the sword of lay-offs over our head, and the fear of losing the rat-race (since everyone calls it that, although even I am part of it and nowhere close to winning it).

Another side of the coin is that India saw the rise of start-ups with immense acceleration in 2016. It has been reported that in 2016, there were 19000 start-ups in India. The number of active investors in India has doubled. The growth was so astounding that the government had to acknowledge it and create a separate entity called ‘Startup India’.

It may seem that the general paradigm in India is shifting from looking for jobs to creating them; but, we are still creating jobs with the start-ups and people are happy with start-ups more because of this factor, than because of the rise in GDP.

The other day, I was talking to a colleague who is having a hard time juggling between work and personal responsibilities. Owing to the travel time she has had to face post marriage (since her new home is a little far from work), she is not getting sufficient time to pamper herself or spend time with her little one. One thing led to another and we started discussing that outsourcing the house chores would be a good option to steal some time from the day. Upon discussing various outsourcing options, we hit a dead-end everywhere. She can’t hire a cook because that leads to too much effort of monitoring and cleaning; she can’t hire someone to do her laundry because that leads to too much cost of buying new clothes, since the laundry lady seems to not good at her task; she tried hiring a day-care help for her child but the lady was not responsible towards the child. All in all, our discussion ended with the conclusion that she must get used to things the way they are and work a little more. The conversation then ended and we turned towards our desks and continued work.

Another incident that prompted me was when a friend of mine was loaded with work from her boss. We could see her hunching into the desk, not because she could not sit straight, but because she was physically and mentally tired. She tried to reason a little with her boss but eventually succumbed. We urged her to discuss it with her boss and not take this over-burdening sitting down, but the reply shocked us, “This is how it has been and will be. There is work and I must do it. There is nothing I can do about it.”

It’s strange that in an era when people are cherishing the idea of being their own bosses and working under no-one, we have accepted the nature of being workers in various walks of our lives. Somehow, the rebel in us has died and we have started to work like conditioned animals who don’t even know why we are doing what we are doing. Empowerment has taken a backseat in our lives, and we have resorted to the concept of agreeing to whatever the Queen-bee says. May be this is around me, may be this is real, but I feel -

Somehow, we have become the worker bees of the biosphere and are very comfortable with it.

If you can find the will, don’t succumb to everything, rise-up once in a while and see the sun.