Mr. Narayana Murthy has once again graced the nation with his sermon on the sacred 9-6-6 grind—nine hours, six days a week, for six decades, perhaps—because apparently greatness is just one long shift away. And as always, an establishment hungry for moral high ground nods in synchronized approval, as though the only thing standing between India and superpowerdom is "the laziness of its citizens".
To be fair to NM, the nation has been largely rendered "lazy" by liberal doses of freebies, cutting across states and political parties. And that calls for a whole new discussion, and I will get to that separately.
But, let’s be very clear: hard work is not the villain here. Hard work built Japan’s resilience, Korea’s competence, China’s manufacturing muscle, Taiwan’s precision, Singapore’s discipline, and Vietnam’s momentum. These nations did not simply ask their people to work hard—they created conditions where hard work meant something. They built world-class infrastructure before lecturing about world-class productivity. They ensured that a citizen breaking his back for the nation did not also break his spirit trying to access clean water, safe streets, decent hospitals, functioning sewage systems, or even uninterrupted electricity.
Their social contract was simple:
“You give us your best years of effort, and we’ll give you the basic foundations that make those years worthwhile - for you and by deduction, for the nation.”
Contrast that with the Indian version, which often sounds like a cruel parody. Here, we tell people to run a prosperity marathon, then quietly tie their legs with bureaucracy, corruption, crumbling infrastructure, broken public systems, and a thousand indignities that take more energy than their actual jobs. We ask them to work harder, faster, longer—while they spend hours navigating potholes, pollution, power cuts, paperwork, collapsing public services, and an education system that is an obstacle course rather than a springboard.
It is one thing to inspire people to push harder. It is another—and ridiculous —to force citizens to fight for the most basic elements of a civilized life and still demand peak performance. That is not national progress; that is gaslighting on a national scale.
This calls bring in front, the scenes in MGR's "Aayiraththil Oruvan" where the slaves get flogged, egging them on produce harder, under sub-human conditions!!
" அடிமை நாய்களே!"
Telling Indians to work harder without fixing these fundamentals is like asking a man to climb Everest while handing him a broken oxygen cylinder and telling him to “think positive.” It is the moral grandstanding of an elite that loves the optics of toughness but refuses the responsibility of fairness. It is a system that has perfected the art of blaming citizens for problems created by decades of policy apathy, infrastructural neglect, and administrative decay.
If the establishment truly wants to emulate Singapore or Japan, then let it first provide Japanese roads, Korean public systems, Taiwanese educational standards, Chinese infrastructure speed, Singapore’s civic discipline, and Vietnam’s administrative clarity. Only then will the call for harder work sound like a national mission—and not a tone-deaf lecture from those who never wait in government hospital queues, who don’t worry about water contamination, and who glide above the very chaos that suffocates the average worker every single day.
Until that day arrives, the sermon on “work harder” remains a mocking echo—because you cannot demand world-class output from citizens forced to endure sub-standard basics. You cannot build a great nation by exhausting its people before empowering them. You cannot unlock productivity by multiplying suffering.
As our own, now-ostracised, poet Subramania Bharathi says,
“துன்பம் நம்மிலே தோன்றிட, உலகம் துன்பம் தந்ததோ?
தீமை நம்மிலே பெருகிட, பிறர் தீமை செய்ததோ?”
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