Long time back, I had read ‘New Brave World’ a novel by Aldus Huxley which depicted a possible future with mass production of conditioned people designed for specific tasks. Just as one acclimatizes bacteria, little children are forced to cultivate specific habits, capabilities, liking and disliking. The horror of such new brave world showed the evils of human greed and neglect of humanitarian values by capitalist forces. The novel 1984 by George Orwel on the other hand showed similar fate to individual freedom when socialist forces gain power and control over society.
Both these authors have cautioned the world against cruel overpowering of individual’s freedom by big organizations. Still, it seems to me that the world is moving steadily along the same route of disregard of human freedom and humanitarian values, which may lead the society from group of creative, free and happy individuals to bandwagons of slaves of some cadre controlled by some powers and fighting with each other.
Due to globalization, the western corporate culture in coming in big way to India and has shaken the traditional roots of stability in social and business life. The overzealous welcome to foreign big corporate industries with lucrative offerings of agricultural land through special SEZ system seems to have assumed indispensable need for development. Financial poverty has opened new avenues for big organizations to grab development projects in cities and interiors through BOT where small competitors are automatically eliminated. Nobody looks into the economics and profitability of these projects as capital funding is not required. The big industries also raise the capital through people for such projects, they grow in size and strength and do irreparable damage to local small industries and organizations.
The corporate sector converts its personnel into polished, greasy parts of their gigantic machine. These parts play a role assigned to them, but do not have independent functional ability. They are totally dependent on the employer. The propaganda machinery of corporate creates client base from mass media which is mesmerized by the wealth, infrastructure and lofty advertisements. The effectiveness and capacity of the personnel in large corporate isd mainly due to support of large well proven branded systems and protocols. They are least affected by outside environment and economical factors.
If the corporate is in loss, it is concealed so smartly that people, shareholders, employees and consumers remain completely ignorant about the real status. Collapse of such corporate suddenly creates great impact on economy, employment and social prestige as it happened in case of Lehman Brothers.
Small businesses on the other hand are constantly exposed to demand – supply variations, price fluctuation, taxes and customer choices. The personnel employed in small business have to be alert and active to counter the difficulty, compete the competitor and pursue the customer. But people do not support small businesses as they can’t stand in competition with corporate business as regards quality, wages, infrastructure, prestige and advertisement warfare.
Still these same small businesses are tough and flexible enough to survive in adverse economical environment. They retain the human vigor, freedom, provide local employment and are in tune with the local social fabric and economic level. They do no harm to agricultural lands and nature so aggresively and do widely dispersed and distributed development. Hence to my mind, instead of moving towards new brave world, India should concentrate on growth and stability of small businesses. It should give protection to small industry’s survival, encourage cooperation and collective progress keeping their own identities rather than attempting to replace them with big corporate industry.
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