The crucial term in question is ‘enjoy’. The great English writer Thomas Carlyle coined his famous expression ‘Work is Worship’ that is now enshrined in a phrase. But work is not only worship, it is a pleasure too. In the dim past workers were associated with their tools. Goldsmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters or tailors, book-binders and others were nearly equated with their tools. They could not live without them. Their professions or vocations, eventually became their titles. They loved and enjoyed their work.
But today the scene is far changed. Men do not live in closed communities. Human skill is transformed into mechanized skill and what was done by hands is done by machines. Naturally the pleasure of creation is not subjective. To put in other words, it does not reward the creator. It is objective; one admires the machine for any creative skill.
This kind of work culture has progressed by leaps and bounds. Slowly but surely this mechanization has overpowered the human soul. Once a news-reporter quipped (= critically commented) when he saw Gandhiji writing literally with the butt-end of a lead pencil that was worn thin. He asked. “Bapu, why don’t you have a new one, it’s so small to work with?” Bapu meaningfully smiled and said, “I am honouring and paying regards to the labour of the artisan that made it.” We may say, this is an instance of Marx’s labour theory of value’. But can we say this today when thousands are turned out in an hour?
Work and Enjoyment are divorced. And now ours is an age of computers and internets. It is true, if there were no satisfaction, men would not have been induced (= prompted) to accept them. But this is a different kind of satisfaction; it relates not to the medium but to the result or achievement. The satisfaction is transferred from the tool, the instrument or the medium to what it helps to achieve. The computer or the website is the launching pad to achieve the objective. It is a transferred pleasure. The enjoyment of working with the tool; the joy of manufacturing new designs or new techniques has become a matter of the past. That attachment is foreign to workers today. It is an age of ‘readymade’ commodities, of shared product and joint ventures. This too, is ‘satisfying’ but not the satisfaction derived from participating in the process of creation.
The work-culture is riddled with a serious drawback. It causes boredom, mental stress and a kind of psychological setback. It was never so when workers participated in the process of creation. Books that are of topical interest are got-up things- a sleight (= skill) of hand that dresses inputs to advantage, create sensations and turns in coins by millions. Original writings are few and far between, though not nil. If genuine creations like this are so divorced from the passion or enjoyment of creations like this, what to talk of other kind of works.
But it cannot be helped!
