On Work!

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” The words sound enchanting and very liberating. But doesn’t it look too glamorous, too idyllic to be true. If everyone worked on what they were passionate about how would the world work in sync? I mean someone has to guard the traffic signal the whole day, someone has to sweep the streets and unchoke the drains, someone has to nurse the sick and sullied patients, someone has to tar the roads in seething heat. If all of these people moved out of their regular jobs and pursued something else, what would become of the world we live in.

Till very recently, I used to crib about my field of work. I used to deck up my facebook updates with quotes like, “"Chase your passion, not your pension.”. My work always was monotonous for me. It lacked variety. I had this false concept of work that led me to hate my job in hand and I often dreamt about a job that would be blissful, a job that would bring me that promised joy; when work would never feel like work again. Trust me, next time you hear someone lecturing you on the same, sue him; because it would cost you some precious years chasing a chimera

Wisdom dawned onto me, when I hit onto a certain chapter from the book, “The Professional”, Subroto Bagchi. I paused and reflected for atleast a few minutes after eyeing its first sentence. The chapter starts with an on the face statement: “Jobs are not meant to satisfy us”. A sobering thought that made me shuffle and shift across my chair and prodded me to focus on the chapter with renewed anticipation. “Jobs are not animate things that have knowledge of who we are, what we are seeking and what our special needs could be”, the writer went on.

Many like me argue that it is not work that bothers, but the routine of the work that is boring. For all those people who think their job as mundane and monotonous, they need to learn from Nature. The earth revolves around the sun with clock work regularity. It goes round because of its capacity to be predictable. The bees and insects pollinate the fields so that we get our food with ‘monotonous’ regularity. And what is not routine about a cardiac surgeon who operates on people every day? Or for the pilot who flies airplanes? At Narayan Hrudalaya, new born babies who are a few months old are operated for heart ailments. They must remain for days in the ICU where every baby has a dedicated nurse round the clock. She just cannot take her eyes off the infant—not because of the doctors who operate and leave, but because of the nurses whose routine job is to attend to babies after the operation.

Some people dislike the work, some like me like the salary but not the work, some dislike their boss and yet others dislike their colleagues. In some cases, people dislike the idea of work itself. Subroto Bagchi in the book says, “a professional realizes that work is a blessing and, most of the time, it is therapeutic. We are lucky that we have work to do. Every day, increasing number of people in this world feel left out, unlucky, because they have woken up to a morning without any work. Go to villages and you will realize what unemoloyment means and how scored of people will be grateful if they can even manage seasonal employment.”

Being a CBSE student in school I have grown up looking at the emblem donning our book covers every year that read, “Work is Worship”. I am sure as kids many of us never gave a thought to its essence. After all these years, it seems I am beginning to get it. The key is to love what you do if it is not possible to do what you love.