“Necessity is the mother of all inventions”-Plato.
We all move forward…at least that’s what we wish to…try to. However, with advancement, often comes the burden of sabotage, in some form or other. Recently, I happened to watch a couple of films, which addressed this issue, though in very different ways.
“Xagoroloi bohu duur”(It’s a long way to the sea”) one of the most critically successful works of Assamese movie-giant Jahnu Barua, tells the story of an old boatman , entrusted with the indispensable job of carrying inhabitants of a remote village across a river to the city-life on the other side, & how his life gets shattered when a bridge gets constructed on the river. The film portrays how in course of making a convenient way of crossing the river for the villagers, the livelihood of the poor boatman gets snatched away. Collateral damage, as people say! Small sacrifices for a larger cause. Ironic indeed!
I watched the newly colorized version of ”Naya Daur”, B.R.Chopra’s vintage saga on the theme ‘Man vs Machine’ & was amazed to see, how within the ambit of making a mainstream song-&-dance hindi-flick, the director has put forward a strong message, that of endorsing/patronizing the peaceful as well as useful co-existence of manual labor & machine-driven efficiency.
Even in our daily lives in a country like India, we witness a similar scenario with Rickshaw-pullers & Auto-drivers operating along the same route. Passengers opt for the former if the latter is not available. So what do the poor labourers do? Remain as men at the mercy of machines?
Even, in the organized industrial landscape, automation has led to umpteen job-cuts, resulting in organizational-development, but at the cost of creating unemployment. Being an erstwhile IT-professional, I get disturbed at the lame manual modus-operandi followed in the PSU, I presently work for. However, a potential ERP-implementation , though held up owing to the severe digital-divide prevalent in the half-old workforce, would invariably put the relevance of the staff working in the file receive-despatch section at stake….& had it not been a PSU, probably they would have been handed pink-slips. So, how do we solve the bottle-neck? The way-out is pretty linear. Man only has created machines….hence, it shouldn’t be the practice that machine destroys men & their lives. If we need machines, we also need work-force to operate them. Therefore, let there be mandatory development, but it must not throw people out of jobs, rather, bring more of them in!
We all move forward…at least that’s what we wish to…try to. However, with advancement, often comes the burden of sabotage, in some form or other. Recently, I happened to watch a couple of films, which addressed this issue, though in very different ways.
“Xagoroloi bohu duur”(It’s a long way to the sea”) one of the most critically successful works of Assamese movie-giant Jahnu Barua, tells the story of an old boatman , entrusted with the indispensable job of carrying inhabitants of a remote village across a river to the city-life on the other side, & how his life gets shattered when a bridge gets constructed on the river. The film portrays how in course of making a convenient way of crossing the river for the villagers, the livelihood of the poor boatman gets snatched away. Collateral damage, as people say! Small sacrifices for a larger cause. Ironic indeed!
I watched the newly colorized version of ”Naya Daur”, B.R.Chopra’s vintage saga on the theme ‘Man vs Machine’ & was amazed to see, how within the ambit of making a mainstream song-&-dance hindi-flick, the director has put forward a strong message, that of endorsing/patronizing the peaceful as well as useful co-existence of manual labor & machine-driven efficiency.
Even in our daily lives in a country like India, we witness a similar scenario with Rickshaw-pullers & Auto-drivers operating along the same route. Passengers opt for the former if the latter is not available. So what do the poor labourers do? Remain as men at the mercy of machines?
Even, in the organized industrial landscape, automation has led to umpteen job-cuts, resulting in organizational-development, but at the cost of creating unemployment. Being an erstwhile IT-professional, I get disturbed at the lame manual modus-operandi followed in the PSU, I presently work for. However, a potential ERP-implementation , though held up owing to the severe digital-divide prevalent in the half-old workforce, would invariably put the relevance of the staff working in the file receive-despatch section at stake….& had it not been a PSU, probably they would have been handed pink-slips. So, how do we solve the bottle-neck? The way-out is pretty linear. Man only has created machines….hence, it shouldn’t be the practice that machine destroys men & their lives. If we need machines, we also need work-force to operate them. Therefore, let there be mandatory development, but it must not throw people out of jobs, rather, bring more of them in!
