The world today moves at a truly mind boggling pace. Gone are the days when 8 hours of work earned us a peaceful rest with our families. Our lives, as we know it, are governed by our irrepressible urge to please and please further. It is in this quest that we have given up the freedom of doubting, the willingness to forgive a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting and most of all the choice of saying NO to any authority --literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.
This apparently mighty word is getting rarer by the day. NO, the word in its true essence is now an embarrassment to most of us. It does not matter how much we are pushed around, we never say NO. The reason for that is very simple – our education and tutorials.
We are taught to say NO to strangers, NO to objects that don’t belong to you, NO to drugs and NO to premarital sex among other things. Excellent…but nobody taught us to say NO to being pushed around, NO to doing work that is not ours. No…when it comes to work, never say NO. Work is Worship…Other’s work is also worshipped. Come to think of it, even we would not like anyone to say NO to sharing our work! There is but a thin line between enthused work and coercive labour. That line, I suspect is often been crossed all around the world.
Picture this for a start – Zach is a dude in the toilet paper industry. Neck deep in scheduled work, Zach goes all out to do a job that was not his own but was expected from him. He, along with 5 teammates had to bail out their unit and their proprietor from public shame and dire consequences. 7 days on the job that was menial to say the least, (large amounts of lousy data entries) they are finally asked to take it upon themselves to provide the finishing touches to the assignment. Behold their agony when they have to work very late into the night to complete it to save their unit’s behind. They do the work, albeit screaming like madmen (nobody else was around to listen to madmen…except toilet paper)…even miss their dinner for the sake of the job and deliver it on time. You know what they get for all this team spirit, effort, passion and pain – That’s a five letter word that I would not say in public.
Yeah you heard me right…nobody cared once the objective was achieved. The time, the effort…everything was forgotten in a second. What remained behind was a backlog of toilet paper suppliers, tired sinews and an implosive anger. They were rubbed the wrong way…with zero degree sandpaper.
Whom would you blame for what happened and the after effects?
After a lot of thought, my take would be that it was the fault of the guys who agreed to doing work that was not theirs. This dude Zach, he just never learned to say NO. I’m not talking about an aggressive NO…nothing like our Bollywood stars vigourously shaking their heads, snapping their fingers and saying, “na thakur na!” I am talking about an assertive NO. Something like, “No, I’m afraid I can’t sit late tonight and complete this task. I need to catch up on some important mails.” Instead Zach’s reply to the coercion was, “Definitely, it will be ready by tomorrow morning.”
Learn from a 2-year-old. Ask him to do things that he ‘thinks’ is not worth his while and you will get a sharp NO. You can do all you want but he would not take the hint. If the kid can do it, why then are there billions of adults who can’t? The reason is very simple – We, the educated adults have learnt the pinch of a long word ‘consequence’. It teaches us that we have the duty to be right and also snatches away the freedom of being wrong. This realization puts us in chains and liquidates everything our forefathers shed their blood for.
Apparently Zach is the product of the system and a hopeless case…nothing different can be expected from him. However, you, who are reading this can change and right the wrongs. You can stand up and use the 2 lettered word that was once the power of an enslaved nation. Remember that no one can make you accept anything without your consent. As the great Galileo once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
