Care for one's work makes or breaks a country

A domino effect that doesn't seem to end

A country that doesn’t want to do good work will end up being a hell’s kitchen.

Gordon Ramsay, world’s most renowned chef, amazing entertainer, maker of “idiot sandwiches” and master-chefs. What was your first thought when you read his name? Guy who loves to yell and throw food on walls?

I find no difference with my everyday life from this kitchen. We all are busy yelling and asking each other to do our respective work while slogging out our own. If only we had more care into what we do. Maybe the chaos would only be on the tv show and not on the streets.

“Chalta hai” with no compromise

Cities no longer have a home, it’s a 4 walled dingy apartment with a namesake window that barely gets any fresh air. All designed like “it works so it’s enough”. Some builders I have met never cared for parking spaces, “avundu hanebhara” was thrown at it; a classic Kannada dialogue which loosely translates to “his fate”. That fate could have been better if the house was designed to allow for more light and air but now they have deal with extra in-door lighting and air fresheners causing more power consumption and extravagant bills. Oh and no parking for his / her own vehicle so go catch a bus and sit in those torn / half maintained seats and a so-called suspension.

A friend of mine who works in the entertainment industry says how they have long shoots and extra hours of after-work which sometimes results in about 30+ hours of continuous field work. Imagine this person going back to that prison of a house. Nobody likes to struggle forever so what do we do next? we buy an extra large car which takes up half the road. Who cares about parking cause the road is ours and if anyone complaints then “adjust madkoli saar” (roughly translates to make do with it). It’s a narcissistic world where it is “chalta hai” for us when we are held accountable but “no compromise” for others.

What if everyone did a decent job?

The reels / tiktoks from real companies pumping out “when manager is at the office VS when they are not” are funny until the CEO of a big conglomerate asks us to work for 70 hours a week. Both arguments are from different contexts, so without taking sides, I want to point you to this video -

The “beverage inventor” part is my favorite, the restaurant she works at collaborates with a local store to add seasonal drinks to their menu. And guess who started the initiative and manages the whole thing? “Waitress” is just a blanket term for all the responsibilities this person has on their shoulders. She is not just a part of the business, she kind of runs it. And we need more of such companies / managers / businesses that allow for such environment.

A 1:1 comparison to this person’s life with a service worker in our restrictive society is unfair, but the key take-away needs to be the “entrepreneurial-sh” / why don’t we do this? state of mind. Everything else is relative to your context.

Nobody is asking you to be a hard core passionate worker

Working at a job you don’t like is definitely hard, one way to deal with this is to having an open mind and accepting the work as is and let it teach you cool things. We often hear founders / business builders talk about how sales is not a glorious job and quite looked down upon in our country (thanks to all the spam, scams and the uncomfortable nature of the job) BUT has taught them a lot on building a business. They had an open mind about it and went with the flow.

The care-free attitude as a collective has had a choke-hold on us and has drained out clean breathable air throughout our country. The laundry list of fixes is long and among the first things we need to do is by focusing on doing good work, maybe it gets better from there on?