One man's meat

I stared at the hostess on my flight back home . Noopor , her name badge read . She had a simple smile , the kind that looks stuck on her . As she cleared the dinner plates into her service trolley , I wondered what was it that motivated her to do such stuff . The sixty – seventy passengers whose plates she clears in each flight gives her the satisfaction of a job well done or is it the glamour of flying around or is it the sense of service that’s pervading in them to give themselves to such a task ? Or is it just the good life ? Jeanine , our brilliant radio jockey , has become an airhostess with Virgin Atlantic airlines , flies to London for two days every week and has the week to herself whether she’s in London or in Pune . So , is it the good life ? One must agree that she is the service type , someone who doesn’t mind putting others needs first
And Danny ? That’s the other guy as a part of the service team on this flight .What motivates him ? Why would he , a smart looking ,handsome young man seek a more interesting vocation rather than this servile and drudging task .
I had walked up the escalator since this part of the airport has an aerobridge entry to the aircraft . There’s a cop at the exit gate . What’s his motivation ? Checking each boarding pass to see if it has been stamped could be duty . But isn’t the guy controlling traffic or the guy chasing goons across city lanes enjoying a more thrilling and rewarding career ? Compared to checking boarding passes ? Is his job rotated – from airport checks to traffic to crime or is it superspecialization ?
What motivates a conducter in a bus to spend his life checking tickets ? The driver has all the thrill , maneovring through rush hour traffic , controlling his environment every minute , every day . The conductor checks cash daily for each trip . Hands out change and manages money . Is he doing it because it’s his job or is there some thrill or has he decided that’s his life ? What motivates a girl in housekeeping at the Taj to check my laundry needs everyday , clean my bedsheets and re-arrange the flowers ?
What motivates a vegetable vendor to stand behind his vegetable stand everyday making a couple of hundred ? Just plain occupation , the need to survive or the joy of feeding many a family by providing access to farm fresh produce ?
Why does someone working in IT spend his life staring at a computer screen ,a prisoner of a two-by-two cubicle ? Is the satisfaction of having cracked a code that can save a warehouse eight billion dollars in annual savings good enough to keep going ? Or is it this urge to rake brain cells solving complex problems or is it a personality disorder not seeking to understand the world outside ?
The newspaper vendor whom one never gets to see delivers a paper everyday , making a penny for each paper . Why does he keep going ?
The girl at the billing counter at shoppers stop in In-Orbit , malad . What motivates har to do exactly the same thing everyday ? What motivates the young dude behind the McDonald’s outlet on Linking road ? The freedom that money gives him to date , dine and detox every weekend or the sheer pleasure of a swelling bank account ?
What motivates the petrol bunk attendant attached to the country owned outlet on Cadell road and who is going to be there for his entire work lifetime of forty years to keep filling ambitious cars with fuel so they can meet their dreams ?
What motivated those bunch of musicians on the Titanic to keep playing even as hope perished around them ?
What motivates a teacher to teach the same subject from the same textbook every year to a different class in the same classroom ? The same questions , the same answers and the same exercises . Mrs. Chitnis taught us Chemistry and she was exceptionally finicky about the way we learnt it. We needed to carry four different coloured pens , each of which would be for a different chemical reaction . She referred to five notebooks of notes which were very neatly preserved for years . Did the thrill of getting someone to understand AgCl + NaNO3 = NaCl + AgNO3 enough for her to be motivated for life , creating multi-coloured reactions separated by equations ? In her case , it had to be more . There’s no deeper relevance of things like valencies and periodic tables in ordinary life. She taught us to make soap from carbolic acid , though I haven’t made soap ever after . Her passion with the subject helped us learn it fast enough . What really ignited her passions to deliver batches of students who preferred physics and biology rather than lifeless chemical equations ?
What motivates a child to wave at a passing train ? Who does he smile at ? Why does it give someone happiness in waving at a bunch of strangers passing through on their journey ?
The soldier knows fully well that he stands half a chance of returning alive and half a chance of returning dead . Yet , their sense of duty is amazing . There’s not to make reply . There’s not to reason why . There’s but to do and die . Imagine being posted to Iraq , fighting someone else’s war someplace else . What’s in it for them ?
What motivates a sales guy ? The achievement of having motivated someone to part with his money for things that he has managed to sell or the gamble of meeting revenue numbers month on month or the capacity to influence people to change their minds ?
Moolah motivates . Everyone working , I imagine , to the best of his ability seeks a life of respect . Money buys respect . It doesn’t buy peace or happiness . it buys respect . Work brings in the moolah . And goals are objectives that form the basis of the need to work . Goals and opportunities are pretty straightjacketed in our lives here . One kind of job for a lifetime . In the west , there’s study , compulsory conscription and diverse , exciting work options . The Palestinian army major who was co-habiting with me in the Panjim Inn in Goa was in India to study nuclear warfare . The Srilankan damsel was studying marine biology . Dinner table conversations were stimulating and experiential . My tenant in one of my houses in Pune is the chief engineer of the Holiday Inn project building a hotel in Kalyaninagar . He’s just back from a similar project in Dubai . That’s some job . Aamir Khan does a movie every four years and has promised to improve his record . That’s some job . Dr. Dharmarakshak has the best cardiothoracic surgical record in the Nizam’s institute of Medical Studies . He operates on severe arthero-sclerosis and cardiac arrest cases and the precision with which he grants people their lives dependent on their abused hearts is remarkable . No wonder , the corridors of the hospital section where he consults reverberate with hope . His sign outside his room could as well read ‘God is in ’.That’s some job . And some responsibility .
What would I like to do ?
Buy a nice cottage on a beach in Goa , fill one of the rooms with thousands of books and the state-of-the-art home theatre with a great DVD collection of the best movies ever made . Find a muse , Padmalaxmi , for instance . Hit the dirt road once a year for a two-three month long journey through Indian hinterland or travel extensively through one different country every year for a couple of months .
Eat . Read .Write .Converse .Swim .Storytell .Observe .
Live .