We are today in an era of specialization and super specialization. To that an extant we have divided man, science including health science and even God. Where are we up to?

Not one will dispute the benefits to be obtained from a division of labour which makes for specialization and efficiency, especially for profit centered industries. At the same time this has done irreparable damages to mankind, visibly and invisibly.

In India such specialization through divisions has held sway since time immemorial and it has even gone to seed, having become hereditary and caste bound. This made easier for the invaders of the land including the Colonial Masters in their skill of “divide and rule”. After independence present day politicians too mastered and excelled in the art of “divide and rule” – both vertical and horizontal. Naturally humanbeings suffer and all livingbeings suffer, slowly drifting towards the dead-end of universal destruction.

The Supreme Creator God gave all livingbeings limbs and senses for proper and regular use and they are not for abuse or non-use. Limbs and senses primarily help one’s search for food as well as escape from dangers sensing one’s own enemy and possible dangers to life. To live healthy and urge to escape death is the true nature of all living beings.

Unlike other livingbeings humanbeings are provided a “higher faculty” by the creator, which continue to get abused. The result is the divisions. The division of the matter down to “atom” has done irreparable damages to not only mankind but all livingbeings and the universe as a whole.

Perhaps no other livingbeings do too much harm to one’s own fellow-beings as humanbeings do. This is against the law of true nature and the nature of all livingbeings.

It is now time for man to understand the life and the nature. Life when it is allowed to run its natural course is resourceful enough to provide for itself all it needs without any further conscious effort of our part. As Mahatma Gandhi rightly put it “Mother earth provides enough for everyone’s basic needs. But the greed of the few has deprived the majority of their basic needs.”

Such then is work and its function in life. It makes it possible for man to use his faculties and develop himself during his own life-time and leave behind him his personality indelibly stamped on the product of his work that which is the best part of him.

One has to work and perspire to get inspiration. There is no short-way to inspiration without perspiration.

Leisure is an integral part of work just as rest is an essential component of a musical note. The two cannot be taken apart. Leisure is not a complete cessation of all activities. That will be death. Neither is leisure idle time. Idleness leads to deterioration. Beneficial leisure provides rest to one faculty, which other parts of our personality are being exercised. A mental worker at his desk needs an active hobby like gardening to form a complement to the nervous strain caused by desk work. Any work to fulfill proper function as ordained by nature, and not mutilated by man, must contain these complementary parts in itself.

There are innumerable examples of faithful work well done in this manner. There is a steel pillar near the Kutub Minar at Delhi bearing an ancient inscription. This pillar has stood in the open exposed to sun and rain, heat and cold for centuries on end, yet, there is not a speck of rust on it. The composition of this alloy has confounded the best of modern metallurgists. The iron smiths of old who cast this wonderful pillar did not seek any shortcuts to produce this effect. They did not shirk the routine labour and discipline involved in manufacturing such metal. They took work as nature meant it to be. Hence we have this monument declaring that fact to us even today.

Before the work of a picture is launched hours of hard work for the skilful mixing of paints and blending of colours is absolutely necessary. The colours used at the Ajanta Caves must have taken decades to evolve to have attained such perfection as to have lasted all these many centuries. The artists of those times did not grudge the labour on it; and posterity pays its obeisance to them for their peerless gift. Those artists did not devise ways and means of obtaining the effect without the labour involved. Nature is a hard-task master. It never rewards permanence to grudgingly rendered work. Nature refused to be browbeater or cheated.

Similarly, a beautiful embed of devoted labour has been bequeathed to generations yet unborn by those creators who hewed out of living rock the whole edifice of a temple at Ellora. That sense of proportion and symmetry are not the result of an attempt to shirk work nor the outcome of seeking shortcuts so as to avoid labour. It is the product of an opportunity squarely faced. Labour properly directed blesses those who work and also the products of their labour.

Man’s constitution is not an inanimate machine. His system calls for a balance of operations which will exercise all his faculties. This condition can only be ensured by a wide enough unit of work.

This brings to my mind William Shakespeare’s words: “In nature there is no blemish but the mind; none can be called deformed but the unkind.”

It is no wonder that in most industrialized countries more and more people suffer from nervous disorders, mental diseases and most dreadful degenerative diseases like cancer. I remember having read somewhere decades back that in the United States of America one student out of every 16 at school will spend part of his/her life in an insane asylum. If one is of 15 years of age the chances are that 1 out of 20 will be confined in an institution for the mentally ill for 7 years of life. Mental diseases increase multifold and it may not be surprising if one day half the entire population will be in the insane asylums and the other half will be outside trying to support them by taxes. What a sign of progress/development for the so called developing nations to emulate!

World Health Organization (WHO) has recently declared that the disease cancer will overtake congenital heart diseases.

Indian sages and seers have given to mankind invaluable knowledges such as “Ayurveda” i.e. Life Science. It is unfortunate that has been reduced to medical sciences like “allopathy”, “homeopathy”, etc. and tries to complete with the rest of pharmaceutical and hospital industries. What a shame! What a crime!!

It is worth noting here what Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 1908 in his very famous book “HIND SWARAJ or INDIAN HOME RULE”:

“Doctors have almost unhinged us. Sometime I think that quacks are better than highly qualified doctors. Let us consider: the business of a doctor is to take care of the body, or, properly speaking, not even that. Their business is really to rid the body of diseases that may afflict it. How do these diseases arise? Surely by our negligence or indulgence. I overeat, I have indigestion. I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine. I am cured. I overeat again. I take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself. My body thereby certainly felt more at ease; but my mind because weakened. A continuance of a course of medicine must, therefore, result in loss of control over the mind.

I have indulged in vice, I contract a disease, a doctor cures me; the odds are that I shall repeat the vice. Had the doctor not intervened, nature would have done its work, and I would have acquired mastery over myself, would have been freed from vice and would have become happy.”

As Mahatma Gandhi’s contemporary and economist J. C. Kumarappa wrote decades back before Indian independence:

“We have to restore work to its pristine glory as the molder of character and the developer of the best in human faculties. This can be done only by releasing work from its fetters and allowing it free scope to function naturally.

Man needs the fire of work to let him glow with the radiance of life. Proper work will radiate warmth, not only to the actual worker, but to all those around. When a devoted mother works hard for her children not only does she find her own happiness in it but the whole household comes under effect of her love and devotion. The children are well-looked after in body and in mind and they will grow up to be sturdy citizens. A nurse or a house-keeper, however efficient, cannot replace a mother in the home.”

Division and sub-division of labour in the pretext of specialization and super-specialization do divide and sub-divide the benefits derived into profits, salaries, wages, rent, interest etc. which effectively deprive the worker of the bulk of the fruits of his labour. The exploiter steps in and carries away a large slice of the benefits like the wax-moth in a honey-comb beating away the products of the activity of the bee.

Self-interest is the only incentive in nature for creatures to extend their cooperation to any activity. All efforts to nibble away such benefits lead to violence sooner or later. That is what continues to happen everywhere in this world.

Socialists/Communists, who aim at equitable distribution but plan on collecting the profits together first and then set about distributing, are going counter to their bountiful nature, which rewards directly. This sort of socialist/communist method also will spell violence in the long run.

It is necessary to fully understand the life and nature of this universe and plan products and production lives centered with a certain amount of attention paid to living wages than labour saving profit centered production of goods ignoring Life and Nature.

Even in the 21^st century India continue to live through its thousands of villages. Villages and villagers live true to Nature and the village is life is inseparably one with the Nature. It continues to help remain elevated spiritually. Naturally the tendency of the Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being while the material centered, division of labour oriented, profit motive Western industrial civilization continue to propagate immorality. Indian urban places are also getting afflicted by this disease. As Mahatma Gandhi said in 1908: “The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God. So understanding and so beliving, it behoves every lover of India to cling to the old Indian civilization even as a child clings to the mother’s breast”.