Opinion | Arbeit Macht Machine: Re-Imagineering Work Weeks

In India today, we face a tremendous crisis in lack of employment opportunities but more formidable is the lack of skilled manpower to handle the jobs that exist. A large number of unqualified people can, in principle, be deployed to do numbing, back-breaking tasks. In this sense, time again loses its value. In a country of uneducated people, time has little relevance and mindless work is all that one can do, if one wants to work at all. The story does not end here—in this era of AI, there is a real danger that even this uneducated workforce will be made redundant. The whole package is scary.

Subrahmanyan’s comment that the Chinese work 90 hours a week and therefore they are doing better, is neither here nor there. It is simplistic in the extreme. Time can never substitute for high-quality, meaningful work. The Americans and Europeans have shown the world that a productive society can be propelled forward with a 40 or even 35-hour work week. It is a question of how one manages one’s time. These people take their weekends very seriously but they really put their minds to achieving a quality work week, where not a minute is wasted. There are no tea breaks or free lunches. Time is more valuable than anything else to them, and they use this most valuable commodity to get the maximum amount of productive work that amplifies into disproportionate returns in terms of money earned. The time that one gains in this way can and should go into the family and lifestyle weighing pan. This is how one achieves this elusive work-life balance.

There is a serious flaw in the argument (leaving aside issues of mental health and family life) that the more hours one puts in, the greater the output. This is mostly true for repetitive manual work or production line manufacture but it has little relevance to the sorts of employees, whom Subrahmanyan and Narayana Murthy have in mind. What they are suggesting, and what I have spun into grim hyperbole as the title of this essay, is to make men into machines, and substandard ones at that, because the machine is best at being a machine, as this new era of AI is painfully telling us.

Work actually has a proper scientific definition. In textbooks of physical chemistry, it is defined as energy transferred when a force moves an object. It’s the energy needed to move something against a force. Work always implies the expenditure of energy, and this has to come from somewhere. Taking a poetic licence, work is the use of physical or mental energy to achieve some particular aim, wherein there are some obstacles in attaining the said aim. Both Narendra Modi and Rishi Sunak are very hard-working men but beyond a point, they just might have missed an elusive element in the work-life balance that resulted in both of them failing to get the electoral mandate at the level that they wished for in the recent general elections in India and the UK. Let us assume that these two political leaders had no limitation in the amount of energy available to them. Their problems then arose in how they expended this energy, and also where and how.

To use corporate jargon, Modi would be deemed to have performed slightly below expectations and Sunak below expectations. Both of them surely worked very hard, they were devoted to their tasks, and yet hard work and dedication alone seemed not to have sufficed for the task at hand. This brings me to the point of this essay—why is hard work alone not enough for success even for ordinary mortals, where the goals are of a moderate type, forget prime ministers who are into the business of winning general elections.

Bernard Montgomery (Monty), the legendary commander of the British Armed Forces in World War II, was asked what he looked for in a soldier, and if what was at stake, was an operation that could affect the course of the entire war. Monty’s reply was razor-edged. He classified soldiers as hard-working or lazy, and independently, as intelligent or stupid. He constructed a quadrant. The hard-working intelligent soldier is the backbone of any army he said, but this wasn’t his choice for a do-or-die mission. The stupid lazy soldier is a no-brainer. One just puts up with him. Monty selected the lazy intelligent man for a critical clinching assignment; being intelligent he knew how to do the job and being lazy he would have secured his intelligence for when he really needed it. This is good time management. But I save the best for last—when Monty was asked about the hard-working stupid soldier, he became scathing and said that such a man could destroy a whole enterprise. So hard work without the accompanying intelligence is of little value, and in fact, it can become destructive.

Hard work alone does not translate into success.

Work, time, distance, money and a final elusive X factor are important in achieving success. It is not bull work alone. The Americans say that one should drill where the wood is thinnest. Nothing could be more expressive and important than this aphorism, in any country in any situation, because humans’ supply of energy to do assigned work is limited. Work is essential for success. It is, however, a necessary and not a sufficient condition. Work is worship, they say, but all work and no play also makes Jack a dull boy. The Gita emphasises the importance of work for a karmayogi but this is qualified as the more sophisticated concept dharma, of which work is merely a component.

This brings me to the final point, namely the kind of conditions that must be created in India in order that focused work leads to disproportionate outcomes. AI itself is the result of decades of research. It didn’t show up out of the blue. The research was the reason it happened, specifically an extensive, well-funded, long-term, targeted study. Without research, one ends up scraping the bottom of the barrel pretty quickly.

All that entrepreneurs can do is use the available research to create goods that are viable. Unless India’s research needs are addressed, we will be condemned to a never-ending loop of flimsy consumer goods—a sub-standard China, and all talk of 90-hour work weeks will sound like King Canute talking to the waves.

Swami Vivekananda, the Sankara of modern times, has emphasised the importance of balancing work with all other facets of human life. One of his famous quotes highlights the importance of dedication to work while also allowing time for play and relaxation. The fearlessness that he talks about is the essential X-factor that complements all temporal factors referred to above.

“Be not afraid of anything. You will do marvellous work. The moment you fear, you are nobody. It is fear that is the great cause of misery in the world. It is fear that is the greatest of all superstitions. It is fear that is the cause of our woes, and it is fearlessness that brings heaven even in a moment. Therefore, arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached. Play as much as you like, but the moment you have done playing, get up and do not stop till you have reached the goal."

The author is an Emeritus Professor in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and Distinguished Visiting Professor in UPES, Dehradun. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.