This unholy trend has its deleterious fallout not just on the morals of people but their mental make-ups as well. The foremost casualty is our disinclination for work. Most people who are thinking of big money without being in any lucrative or successful business or industry, are those who want the creature comforts and luxuries that big money brings without wanting to work. The decline in the capacity for work and unwillingness to work is all too evident both in offices and homes. The traditional Bihu delicacies that used to be prepared at home are largely bought from shops in urban societies. What we see of the activity of preparing delicacies for Bihu or of weaving gamosas on television is confined to the rural areas. In the upper middle class families, grown-ups who ought to know better, tend to dissuade their children from any work involving physical activity and to get even routine day-to-day tasks done by their domestic help. As a result, a lot of children are unable to perform simple tasks that used to be done by children 40 or 50 years ago. Obviously, their parents are not preparing them for the problems they will have to face when they grow up. There will be fewer domestic workers and those who are available for domestic work will have to be paid unaffordably high salaries. So they will have to continue with the corrupt practice that has been legitimized by our government officers—of using office staff for doing domestic chores. What seems rather likely is that the progeny of a large number of our government officers will have to devise more innovative forms of corruption to deal with the far shrewder and much more demanding office staff of tomorrow. Considering that senior officers who ought to have known better have persisted in projecting the view that physical work is something to be ashamed of, the satisfaction that people once derived from a job well done now belongs to the realm of fairy tales. People with skills have become so rare in the Northeast that we have to indent workers from outside for all skilled work and pay them much higher wages than are paid in other Indian States for the same work. When I was a schoolboy in the 1940s, there were skilled masons and carpenters just outside Jorhat. We never had to think of indenting any mason or carpenter from outside the State.