Stepping into the Dark

Stepping into the dark

When he sat under the apple tree he must have been dead bored, in all probability idling time, lost in the process of reconciliation with the past or the future. Whichever way, he was quite oblivious to the present, or so it seems, since it took a falling apple to wake him up from his stupor and start the churn in the mind.

Like Sir Isaac Newton, most of us are always in stupor lost in the past or mired in the future, but without having the power to change course on both accounts. It takes a Eureka moment for a new thought to flash across in the mind and give birth to new innovations much in the mold of Sir Isaac Newton. However for flashes of brilliance you must be living in the present. To live in the present we have to be thinking animals of today and not get lost in the maze of yesterday or the inconceivable of tomorrow.

Flashes of brilliance or ideas that flash across the mind are mostly considered stupid enough to be bottled up inside the person for fear of being ridiculed by others more so by experts who carry on the everyday rants. The majority of people are happy churning out the same recipe for everyday life. The thought process and the motions are mundane and boring but done in a flurry of everyday activity that we are quite accustomed to.

To suggest something contrary to acclaimed and accepted views and something that has not crossed the expert minds would be akin to teaching a fish to swim. However innovations and improvements have only happened when you break the trend, when you force yourself to be strong enough to air your views. Sooner or later the brave one will find a supporter, and then their numbers swell to form a caravan, this is how innovation takes place. The only effort required is perseverance that is unfortunately hard to come by and missing in a lot of adventurous people.

While working in the garment Export industry I found that many of the daily routines were undertaken and taken over by the so called experts whose expertise spanned a lifetime of monotonous routine. They in turn dished out the wares to newcomers. Since most of the new comers in production lines and on the floors came from a non-too enlightened background, they lapped up the dishes irrespective of the sweetness or the staleness. In later life they would swear by them and challenge new thought entrants since it did not sync with the ideas they were introduced to or grown up with. The supervisors and Managers manning these lines and floors rarely do a peep into the staleness of prevailing systems or experimenting with newer ideas.

The result being that for time unending they tend to carry on with the daily chores unmindful of workers satisfaction, or freshness in commitment or routine. Over a period of time, daily routine has turned out to be more mechanical than conscious driven, simply because it lacks freshness of ideas and innovations. Two examples of debates being stilled in the conceptualization stages are explained.

The finishing section has workers who are segregated on the basis of skills like; thread cutters, initial checkers, measurement checkers, final checkers, folders and taggers etc. Realistically speaking all these are skills that do not need specialized training. A routine training to teach each individual worker the method, would suffice and this segregation can be erased making them unified finishing workers for all activity mentioned above thereby increasing their satisfaction and raising motivational levels along with productivity, bringing down the cost of production.

However people experienced in the activity refuse to toe this line because it disturbs their equilibrium and forces them to realign anew. So engrossed and programmed are they with the routine that even peeping out of their comfort zones, gives them the shivers, as a result an Eureka moment is lost and forever melts into uncertainty.

A second thought - Finishing workers are all across the industry forced to stand continuously on their feet for an entire working shift of 8 to 10 hours with a lunch break of about 30 minutes. Does anyone realize the damage it does to their morale and enthusiasm not to say about physical strain they undergo to be part of this daily routine. Can’t they be provided with stools where they can be seated and do their work. Ask the supervisor and the manager and they will come out with familiar stories of how a seated worker loses the will to work and how seating turns them into lazy folks, thereby reducing their efficiency and productivity.

Not thinking, in terms of improvement is losing out on moments of flashes of brilliance. The learned in the modern world are turning more and more to startups than traditional forms of work, because they have an advantage of being their own masters. An idea that is born in the mind and when implemented that bears fruit is like giving birth to a baby and see it growing, an individual that does not characterize the known, a being that thinks and acts independently, more so when it is given the freedom to fly sky high.

Robin Varghese- robin_vargh@yahoo.com

21^st November 2015