Sadgati, Ravibabu Manchala, 62. Been with Skills, as ED-DDU-GKY, based at NIRD&PR.
The Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar was found, killed in Rafah, Southern Gaza. This ‘elimination’ is considered the biggest potential game-changer in the Israeli landscape. Hamas resolves to retaliate.
Everyone living has a portfolio of livelihoods, ways and means of living. Some of them may be decent and some may not be. Decent livelihoods would be ways of life, living. Intricately interconnected in social, cultural, psychological, and economic dimensions. There is some localness in them linked to land, water, nature, and geography. There are livelihoods without life within, lifeless livelihoods – maybe uncreative; assembly lines; slavery. Some may say these are ‘deadlihoods’. Mechanical, soul-killing, alienating, boring, and exhausting ‘9-5 jobs’, shift jobs, wage work et al. Only the people with no ‘escape’ should be doing these, isn’t it? Or the ones who get very high wages for these?
Are these livelihoods okay for us? Exploitative, extractive, and dehumanizing. By capital, by power, and by knowledge. Don’t we need livelihoods that meet our basic needs – air, water, food, nutrition, health, entertainment, and education? Resilient? Do we approve differences in wages, maybe 1: 10^7 times, or returns of capital several 100 times running interest rate(s)? at the cost of suffering coexisters, the future, or the NextGen? Continued mining? Land, water, and fuel use? Killing ecosystems, commons?
Is this one-way movement – hunting-gathering – farming, manufacturing, services, digital and so on – development? Who will, can, should tell? Thoughts, processes, spaces, and mindsets? What are ‘desirable’ livelihoods, careers, professions, then? Essential crunch livelihoods, are they not aspirational? Take us through first, second waves, and maybe, third wave. Are not third, fourth, and fifth causing our ‘end’, civilizational end? The saviour livelihoods are diminishing, becoming invisible, day-by-day. The killer livelihoods are becoming centre-stage. Something amiss. How can the ‘killers’ get counted, rewarded? In GDPs. Extractive male livelihoods, as usual, become productive ‘work’. Nurturing female livelihoods is ‘service’. How come? Is mainstreaming anti-nurturing?
A wave takes over promising ‘workers’ of the previous waves. Others do not get to the next fully, and are not comfortable to persist in the previous. Result: we are sliding out of self-employment to unemployment, underemployment, and toxicity. With no alternative jobs. Uncertain small, nondescript assignments in place of high-skilled works. The market rejects them, making the skilled unskilled. Lifeless livelihoods take them in temporarily. Existing resources become non-resources. Long-term perennial happiness, joys, and health are casualties with uncertainties, tensions, and stresses coming in.
Is it possible to have more fulfilling, satisfying, and useful livelihoods portfolios for all of us? Can the drudgery go? Can the inequities come down? Can the hybrid engendered livelihoods work? Can there be only regenerating livelihoods? Can curriculums change, nayi taleem, media, communications, culture, equitable pays, and wages in sync? Can we have agency on our bodies, plates, families, farms, knowledge-skills-tools, resources, groups, villages, markets, and governments? Can we move to being ‘self-sufficient, reliant largely’, communities – mutual help-care, rather than monetary transactions? Can we move away from ‘convenience all the time’? To Social, hybrid PVM collectives? Can we?
Yes, we can. If we coexist, keep flowing with ‘collective will’. In N? amrtajeevikayoga for 7L.
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