Work-Life Balance: Remembering Charlie Chaplin

Classics are for ever. On every re-visit one would get a new perspective. Remember Charlie Chaplins 'Modern Times'. The speed of the assembly line is increased to make the poor worker more productive. The chap comes out as a nervous wreck! Pan the camera to our modern day corporate work pressures. Are we going to end up like the protagonist of Chaplin's classic ? This is more relevant in the context of 'developing countries' like India, where the workers and managers alike have to face the ever increasing speed of the assembly line. They say that the younger generation loves to work 26 hours a day! Older fools like this writer cannot simply comprehend what is happening! We are dead wood. Fancy the so called productive generation coming up when the parents had no time to mend and guide them! There would not have been this generation at all but for the leisure (work-life balance) the older workers were allowed. Is this idea of modern times part of a grand design? Should we re-visit another of chaplin's classics: The Great Dictator ?

This binary world

You are my friend or foe. You are with me or not. I(WE) or YOU. Black or White. The world has,of late, become mere binary. Politics, Religion, Social relations........ every thing on earth, it seems, is confined to this limited geography of imagination. Can origin of this bondage be traced to the origin of computers? or the e-world in general ? Computers, we know, are machines and can 'understand' only electrical 'OFF' and 'ON' positions. Thus we reach the limits of counting '0' and '1'. (Human dexterity of counting up to 10 ie '0' to '9' is lost and along with it the innumerable possibilities of human imagination too!) Do I sound cynical? and my ideas regressive? Pardon me. I love technology and especially computers. But the confinement into which this binary limit has put our human mind is being reflected in this world. Don't you think so? Confining oneself to this binary world is horrible! is it not? When can we redeem the warm shades between black and white? Or are we doomed? If one is closetting herself(again a politically correct binaryism) with a PC or laptop and think that the entire world is with me, or I am part of this COSMOS (Thathwamasi), sorry! I do not share this naive optimism. Nevertheless, I know for certain that human mind is far more broader.Its boundaries continuously get enlarged with love. Love for music,books, poetry, art, children,the afterglow reflected on wet (Edavapaathiyil Nananja) trees..... Love! unconditional love.If we cann't reclaim our loving minds, we are going to end up as bits... lifeless, loveless.