There is this story of a guy resting under a tree along a motorway. A businessman, going by that way, stops his car – just to take a short break and look at the countryside – and approaches the lazy guy. He asks: “why don’t you do something productive and profitable?”
The lazy guy says: “What will happen if I indulge in industry, tirelessly, like you? The rich man tells him that he can earn a lot of money. “What happens then? says the lazy guy. The rich man says: “You can save a lot of money, and build a house, etc.” The lazy guy quips: “Then what?” The rich man is upset, but chooses to proceed with the conversation, because it is intriguing to him that someone doesn’t understand the meaning of earning and saving, which is all he thought of so far. He says: “Well, you can rest for the rest of your life and enjoy the leisure…”
“That is what I was doing over there before you came and started this whole pointless conversation…” said the lazy man. Humans are known for delayed pleasure, and working their heads off to get there. No longer. We want happiness now. And happiness happens in the head.
Man, machine and the dog
Some sociologist (or futurologist), one of my students at the world school would know – that there will be only two employees in future industries: a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to see to it that the man does not go anywhere near the equipment. That was in essence what the author of “The Age of Entertainment” wrote about. We are not anywhere near that scene right now, but it looks like robots and other technologies will lead to such an eventuality.
Then what would we do, as humans, with all our leisure? My mother has the answer: she gets up at 9, has coffee, looks at the paper. [So in the age of entertainment, we should have newspapers and new channels] Then she goes for a wash, does a bit of puja, and has breakfast. Then begins her tryst with day-television. [Forget about night, or even evening, day-television is going to be big in the age of entertainment.] She goes on watching, actually listening to, the sounds of her favourite language – in fact the only language she knows (Telugu).
She is not very sure what is the difference between the box out there now (a television set) and the box in the olden times (a radio receiver). This goes on until 9 in the night, with lunch, evening coffee, and a dinner happening with the idiot box on all of the time. She briefly exercises her limbs around 6 p.m. for a few minutes and she really lives the life of a person belonging to the ‘leisure’ class.
I would like a life style like hers, with a minor variation: she writes the name of Srirama in a book, maybe fills a half page per day; I would write an occasional article about what the young people wear today. [Like the ‘piece’ Bertie Wooster wrote for his aunt’s magazine, Milady’s Boudoir.] My style is grunge, but I see guys spending an arm and a leg literally to get the grunge tag! I wish to ‘disambiguate’ that scenario.
We have bigger houses and smaller families
Germaine Greer visited India twenty years ago, and wrote about the great Indian joint family – which is like an MNC operating in multiple locations. I belong to a big family: one of my brothers is in my home town, I am in Hyderabad, another brother of mine too is in the same street. Two brothers are peripatetic. When my sister visits Hyderabad, she parks herself at my place but spends a lot of time at my brothers. We are almost a joint family – without living under one roof. I consult my brother in Mumbai about a television set I need to buy for mom. My bank statement goes to my brother’s flat down the street. I am not married, and all my siblings take decisions on my behalf.
I don’t know what intrigued Germaine Greer about the great Indian family. It intrigues me, too, what Julia Roberts found intriguing about Hinduism. Is it that the bigger-houses, smaller-families thingie triggers this passion for India?
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