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Doing Your Own Thing

I see two faces of India every day. The desperate face of joblessness, on one hand. On the other, countless organisations equally desperately looking for good people to work for them. Somehow the two never seem to match. The numbers of the jobless keep growing while it is becoming more and more difficult to recruit good, talented people for any kind of job. Whatever the salary. Whatever the opportunities.

Start at any level. Whether you want a clever, creative, intensely driven CEO or a humble, hardworking, reliable driver who comes to work on time, it is not easy to find such a person. There are companies who are ready to compromise by picking up a reasonably capable person at a slightly lower level and training him or her into the top job. But even that is not easy any more. So the same bunch of people get wooed by different organisations and even before they can show results on one job, they move on to another. At a higher level. At a better salary. This game of musical chairs goes on till suddenly the music stops and someone drops out.

The same more or less applies to low level jobs. Whether your driver or your cook is any good or not, there are enough people in your neighbourhood ready to pick them up with a slight raise simply because there are not enough skilled people around to do home jobs. Everyone wants to be a peon or a clerk or a stenographer in some office.

Every day I meet hundreds of young men wanting to do any small timepass jobs in banks and public undertakings. Most of them, if they learnt a specific skill, could have easily become rich and successful doing their own thing. But, no, they want a job.

And, what is even more peculiar, they want a job where they have to show no talent, no enterprise, no ability. They are not even looking for good money. They are not even looking for a job where they can acquire skills or showcase their particular talent or expertise. All they want is what they describe to me as a secure job with fixed working hours and with a certain number of holidays in a year. The more, the better.

When I ask them why they need fixed working hours and what they will do with so many holidays, their usual answer is that they want to study more and develop themselves. Study what more? Most of them have no idea. They mumble something or the other about a part time law course or some similar timepass stuff. In other words, they want a time pass job so that they can study more of the timepass stuff (with which they got this timepass job) so that they can get an even better timepass job with more timepass opportunities in the future.

Why not look for entrepreneurial opportunities instead? Why not start at the very base, with a job that gives you a chance to use your skill whatever it may be? A driver at home earns much more than a peon at office. So does a plumber, a mechanic, a carpenter, a nurse, a cook, a repairman. Yet fewer and fewer people are ready to learn these basic skills which can make them independents. Where they do not have to hang around looking for jobs but can become self employed professionals. The reason, I suspect, is this business of izzat.

Somehow, in middle class India, we do not respect independents. We have more time for an itinerant Eureka Forbes salesman than a self employed plumber even though the latter may be a far more skilled professional and earning more. That is why you will find in many lower income homes the wife who works as a bai and goes from flat to flat washing dishes and helping out with the cooking ends up earning much more than the husband who works as a peon at office and dreams of retiring with a princely salary of Rs 5,000.

At the highest levels, this is doubly true. Everyone is clamouring for the middle management jobs where the salary is mediocre, the expectations are low and there are no entrepreneurial tensions. Everyone wants to be a general manager or a vice-president in charge of something or the other. No one wants to take charge of the full picture. That is why most owners in India end up managing their own businesses and training family members to take over.

The dividing line is too strong between the entrepreneur and the worker, the owner and the manager, the independent and the professional. In fact, most people still look askew at the person who opts out of the system to do his or her own thing. Whether it is an Ashok Wadhwa or an Ashok Soota or a Jerry Rao.

We have still not reconciled ourselves to the simple fact that one Subhash Chandra has redefined the entire media and entertainment business today and, in less than a decade, emerged infinitely larger than all the established media houses put together. He started from zilch but used his entrepreneurial instincts to build an empire that has challenged every preconceived notion we had about what media and entertainment is all about. He took the right risks at the right time and refused to buy all those old, traditional verities that have kept our old, traditional business houses in chains. Enterprise was his first priority. Management came later. The Ernst & Young Award for Entrepreneurship that Chandra got last week recognises this simple truth.

In fact, that is why all our old and traditional business houses, however renowned they may be, are losing steam. They are destroying wealth, not creating it any more. Their sense of enterprise has died out. What remains is just the pretence of great management expertise. They are no longer creators of wealth. Flab in the brain, lack of risk taking skills, the pursuit of an easy and comfortable lifestyle has made boxwallahs out of them. They can no longer take hard business decisions. They are too busy exercising soft management options.

Clubbing and playing golf is no longer business. Business is hardball. Only the tough and the talented can survive in the new environment where new companies are seizing all the initiatives and creating wealth much faster than the older ones, despite the huge advantages that still vest in size, experience, political networking. Technology also assists the brave. The internet is increasingly driving everyone towards a level playing field.

That is why if joblessness in India is to be fought, as it must be, we must fight it with more opportunities for independent enterprise. Not just jobs that mean nothing. We do not need, we do not want India to be a nation of frustrated peons, clerks, typists, stenographers and telephone operators.

We need to encourage more self employed professionals however humble their skills may be. If it is cooking so be it. If it is carpentry or plumbing or driving or smart home keeping or even running the neighbourhood electric store, so be it. Enterprise creates wealth. Wealth takes the nation ahead. And when the nation surges ahead, more and more people take pride in doing their own thing instead of clinging on to their stupid, deadend jobs to pass their time.

Pritish Nandy

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