Bad Company : With a touch of Indian history

Those who do not read the history tend to repeat it. 

Ever heard the above quote ?  

In school we had a story of a bad company and a friend of mine, Sanjay said jokingly 'all company is bad company'. Don't go into grammatical errors of it since we were Hindi medium students and more importantly kids. I think both of us now working for some corporate would agree to this with some extent but I am sure that Sanjay had not said this keeping corporate in mind because we were in middle school and we did not know where would we go. 

Possible comparison he must have done is East India Company to Bad company of friends, bad friends can do enough damage to you in similar ways that East India Company did to India. Though, this reasoning can now be linked to corporate as well. Choice is personal and reasoning as well, but the thought can not be discarded altogether at once. I do have my reasons but let's get into history and see if we have something in common between East India Company's British Era and Modern Era, the time we are living now. 

Looks like I was looking for a reason to lash out at someone and decided to write this blog. Having a habit of linking everything to past or possible events of history made me think of what is common in history which would justify my reason that few things have not changed and we would be slaves for longer period than we think. It might need a strong reform but may be we will need something like Revolt of 1857. 

Revolt of 1857 transferred the power from Company to Crown. Poor Indian people who had never heard of the company, it did not matter to them. But now when we backtrack things and try to see the changes it brought, we understand why it was a big event and why India glorify this revolt but on the other hand Britishers just called it sepoy mutiny. 

Before 1857, East India Company aka Company was ruling the country. Every decision was executed according to company policy and by the company officials. Whenever Indian's tried to reach out for a change they were reverted back with a response that it is company policy or company will decide this. But people did not know who is company ? Yes, for them Company was 'Who', not 'What'. It was something they had never dealt with. 

Honesty is the best policy.

I'm sure whoever said above knew about the company policy. If you think carefully, you will realize that the term 'Company' was brought in use to get rid of accountability. Though, this could not be initial thought because no idea starts with a cunning thought, we just come up with later during the process when we want to exploit things out of that. Initial idea behind the term could be just to identify themselves as a group which did not have any individual identity. If good happens its the company who did it not the individual, and if something bad happens again its company, saving the individual taking the accountability and blame from public.

Later they must have come with a hierarchy which would pass on the responsibility to upper hierarchy thus again shifting the accountability and no one has to take it. There is not individual in this hierarchy but there is a name, such as 'Management', which exist to get rid of accountability for the sake of saving those who should be responsible and accountable. Just like a crowd does not have a name and a face and crowd can murder someone, a company or its management can do the same and no one will be accountable for it except crowd or company and its management which does not have a face.

How do you deal with something that doesn't have a face ? First, is it a ghost ? Yes, It could be if they exist. Ghost, I am not sure if they exist, but companies do. So how do you deal with something like that ? To be honest, neither the people of India before 1857 knew not the people of India after 1947 know. So what can be done ? This is where revolt of 1857 is important. 

Revolt of 1857 transferred the power from Company (East India Company) to British Crown. Now since the crown is handling the things, it will have a representative who people can go to directly with their concerns and they will get an answer from the crown's representative, and the most important thing is it will have face. Thus you are not dealing with a ghost. Outcome might not be favourable to you but you know who took the decision, there is an accountability for the decision and representative can be brought into question for taking the decision. This is called democracy, though companies like to associate themselves with the democracy because they had to hide their real face (Oh I forgot they don't have one in real). 

If Revolt of 1857 would not have happened then rule would never have gone in Crown's hand and Indians would have done such a revolt later to get rid of British rule. Crown gave them a voice and now Indian's knew who to talk to. You can not talk to crowd, you talk to Individual person and once you can talk to someone, you can negotiate.

Just like every humanities subject tries to prove itself as science, companies also calls themselves democratic if not companies at least management does and that too for obvious reasons. There another quote those are on top of my head right now,

One death is a tragedy and one million deaths are statistics. 

Above quote is supposedly said by Joseph Stalin. For a company your death is just increasing their statistics, because they don't have the ethics to stop after one. Anyways ghosts have a bad reputation for a reason, right ? So do companies or their management. So do Joseph Stalin and that too not without a reason.