Coming to terms with aversions

WITH EYES WIDE OPEN

D. N. Bezboruah

M ost of us living in Assam have a few pet aversions that no one really wants to talk about. Now that I have chosen to do so, I can guarantee for myself a fairly high level of unpopularity in the coming weeks. However, one can also be assured that there will be some soul-searching that will make most of my readers realize that I have not been too far off the mark and that a great deal of collective course correction is called for in the coming days. The strongest among these aversions is the aversion to any kind of work. Close on its heels come the aversion to honouring commitments and keeping time.

What is perhaps most interesting about our aversion to work is that the people of Assam are very fond of the fruits of work. They like good food, well-kept houses, beautiful gardens, melodious songs and everything that is the end product of a lot of carefully planned work that is also well executed. However, what is very important is that the work has to be done by someone else. These lovers of all things well done and beautiful are very firm about one principle: someone else has to do all the hard work so that the end products may be enjoyed by the lovers of good things. Here it is important not to miss out a vital fact of life. This aversion to any kind of work relates mainly to the men and not so much to the women. The women have a major role in producing the delicious food that is put on the table, in ensuring that the house is clean and well kept and that the garden is well looked after. It is not as though the men are incapable of any kind of work, but the aversion to work is very strong among the men as also among most middle-aged women. Most well-to-do men in Assam tend to look down on friends who do much of their day-to-day work themselves. One can only feel sorry for the kind of example they are setting for their progeny who will discover, in a few years, that getting someone else to do one’s work is a frightfully expensive proposition. They will also rue the fact that they grew up without learning to do any work to have their quotidian needs fulfilled. I have not come across many young men who are capable of ironing their clothes or fixing their own breakfasts on days when their better halves are away. I have met a whole lot of young men who get even their shirts washed at the dry cleaners. Considering the costs involved, one would have expected more people to acquire washing machines and to iron their clothes themselves. One can cite countless examples of the all-pervasive aversion to any kind of manual work that one sees among young people. What is much more saddening, however, is that the aversion to work should be so strong even within the establishment.

Now that the present State government has competed a year in office, a lot of people keep asking me about what I think of its performance. When one talks of performance, one obviously relates it to work done. What is very visible about the present State government is that there is far more attention paid to festivals and celebrations, to felicitations and presentations than to any productive work. It is noteworthy that in a whole year of governce there has been very little effort to do anything about promoting industrial development in a State that is woefully deficient in such development. In the year that flew by so quickly, there was a surfeit of book releases, felicitations, launching of hitherto unlisted and unimportant days in the calendar and the effortless metamorphosis of a college into a university. For instance, Ambubachi, a four-day period on the calendar, never observed by any government in the past, was observed by the administration this year. A lot of people were amazed that something totally rooted in superstition should merit observance by the administration and that the invitation letters should go in the me of the Chief Minister of the State. 

Today, the most favourite occupation of senior bureaucrats of Assam is to hold semirs and meetings to talk about skill development. As far as real skill development is concerned nothing has happened in the State. In fact, people are even suggesting that the industrial training institutes (ITIs) of the State should be wound up because they have maged to achieve so little by way of skill development even though the cost of maintaining these ITIs is a major burden on the State’s exchequer. A suggestion I have repeatedly made to the ITIs that each one of them should have an annual fair at which products made by the ITI trainees should be on display and on sale. This situation has fallen on deaf ears obviously because there is actually very little real skill development taking place in these ITIs, and the authorities are keen to prevent the public from knowing what actually takes place in the ITIs by way of skill development. 

The development of the required skills for the needs of the 21st century among the youths of the State is a matter actually confined to paperwork. No one in the corridors of power is even remotely concerned about actual skill development. We have had to cope with total neglect of skill development in Assam for several decades largely because there was the more interesting activity of siphoning public money from Central grants into private coffers. This activity gained tremendous momentum during the 15-year rule of the Tarun Gogoi government. During this period, bureaucrats were helped to forget that people existed in the State and that the government was supposed to be functioning for them and not for the employees of the government alone. We have now probably reached a stage where those in charge of so-called skill development may not be able to recognize what skills are needed to be developed and how the government is supposed to be going about this task. The kind of total callousness about the crying needs of the people that has become the hallmark of the political executives and the bureaucrats of Assam are unique to this State.

Apart from the aversion to work (especially work that involves physical activity) one other major aversion is to the need to honour commitments. Since most commitments relate to some work that has to be done (not necessarily manual work) for someone else, there is an aversion also to keeping one’s promises. A lot of people tend to make promises and commitments that they are uble to honour and sometimes have no intentions of honouring. Many of these promises relate to payments that are due. A lot of people tend to forget that the goods and services supplied by others are their means of making a living. And when people fail to keep their promises on payments due, they create great difficulties for people who turally make commitments to others based on payments due to them and promised on a certain date. Such failures to honour commitments and promises projects the most unflattering image of people living in this State. 

One other aversion closely related to the earlier one is related to keeping time. For most people there is ‘my time’ and ‘his time’. Most of them are keenly aware of their own time. I have met a lot of people who arrive about half-an-hour before a programme is due to start. I do not regard this as being punctual. I see this as someone having a lot of time on his hands with very little to do. The busy person who has several engagements during the day, will arrive just four or five minutes before the programme begins. I regard this as being punctual. Unfortutely, most people can think only of their time. They often fail to realize that when they have given time to someone else and made that person wait, they do him a lot of harm if they make him miss his commitments made to others by landing up one hour later than promised. Such people have no consideration for other people’s time or the disservice done to others by making them fail to honour their commitments to others. In urban societies it is important to ask the person one is about to meet whether he or she has lined up something important soon after the time agreed on. This elimites the risk of doing unintended harm to someone by making him miss another important engagement. In Assam, a lot of people are very fortute in having a lot of spare time. But there are others who must budget the allotted 24 hours of the day far more carefully because they are busy and have no spare time.