My dad's first car was a Nissan Datsun bought in 1987, it was a great car, with a powerful engine, sturdy body, great pick-up and automatic windows that I loved to play with. He loved that car too and called it his son. Over the years, the car met with a few accident but it was built to take the blow & was built to be fixed quickly without much trouble. It was with us for 13 years before its started falling apart. The engine though was still in top notch condition.
After giving away his first son - Nissan, reluctantly though, my dad bought a Toyota Corolla and unfortunately he met with an accident few months after buying the car. The car crumbled like a biscuit. "They don't make things the way they used to anymore", he said shaking his head slowly with sadness, looking at the carnage.
Today, I see what he had seen then.... For gone are the days where things were made to last, the days when time was taken to fix things rather than throw them away. We now live in the upgrade era where you can upgrade anything from your mobile to your wife.
The age of just getting by than working hard. Because hard work is for the retards of the world. Working smart (What does that even mean?) is the new catch phrase till an even more emptier phrase takes its place. Working hard is no longer a virtue I am being told with conviction, it is a relic of a bygone era, a passée notion we should not concern ourselves with. Hard work and its cousin excellence is dead... Long live the dead!
Even at work we are pressurised to deliver faster and all deadlines are EoD (I wanna kill the guy who coined this!). Quality of work has taken it's beating in the never ending onslaught of intense pressure from deadlines that have inadvertently eaten into the quality of work like a virus that progress slowly and steadily. Your turn around time is more important than the quality of ideas you bring to the table.
It is now acceptable & rewarding even, to create sub-standard work, just as long as you wear your flashy suit & confuse your boss & client with snazzy presentations and convoluted expressions like "Our core competence is unparalleled in disambiguating the disintermediate agenda". Even products are excused for their lousy life time, cause "Hey, we were gonna upgrade it in 2 years anyway!".
Products or our work are sold by how they look & how well they can be talked up rather than hard performance facts. Cause saleable is the new standard to achieve not quality and never excellence. Products are created & sold just as long as it is saleable & passable.
We now live in a world where talent is scantily praised and inability is showered with hype, brilliance is ridiculed and the idiots praised. The wardrobe malfunction of a celebrity makes more waves than a cabinet reshuffle. Welcome to the 21st century where hard work and excellence are passée and the barely passable drives the world.
5 comments:
Well keyed...we have really moved out from that era where we believed in quality and where we thought we could repair anything damaged..let it be a relationship..we are now into an era where we have a easy and affordable replacement for every damn thing...
anyways...keep typing..:)
beautiful
@VJ, don't worry, there are still a few of us who hold the "old" value system. So as long as we are alive, we will practice what we preach! :)
@Naveen - Thanks man!
Ah!! I can read b/w the lines..thanks anyways!! :)
It could well be that, with the passing of generations, the newer generation is expected to be able to think faster than the old one. Hence, even with tighter deadlines, the quality of work should not suffer, because everyone is keyed into delivering better performance and geared for it. Just a thought. :-)
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