“The working men have no country.” – Marx
Whenever I hear someone making noise about outside people coming and taking jobs, how life of people in the city has got impacted due to many immigrants from outside, it seems to be so ridiculous. In every aspect of my life, I have interacted with people from different states and with all the initial differences in our lifestyle and language, over a period of time, these differences have easily been overcome. Throughout my schooling, graduation and now my working life, I have had loads of people around me from different states. So much so that, I am much more comfortable talking in Hindi than talking in Konkani(my mother tongue) and Kannada(language of the state to which I belong to, state of domicile). As a working professional, this interaction has been extended now to workers from different countries.
This is very typical for any worker in IT industry also. Most of the time, he/she will be staying in a city far away from the state to which he belongs to. If he/she is without a family, there is a high probability of living in a PG or flat where he/she shares it with someone from a different state. Even if he/she stays with a family, there is a good chance that the neighbour is from a different state. Definitely he/she will be working in a team which will have good proportion of the people from other states.
Now what is so common amongst all the workers from various states in various industries. Workers do not have choice of a state, they go where their work takes them. They can have the notion of choosing the city but if work requires it, then they have to go to any state/country and live there.
Workers don’t have the luxury of choosing the lifestyle and environment they want to live in. It all depends on the place where you work. Again getting to choose your locality is just a notion which is by far very artificial and constrained with many restrictions making it virtually useless.
Workers also do not have the luxury of choosing with whom they will work with. “My team is not very good” is a statement which you often hear from workers in the IT industry and most often it can only be attributed to be because the worker is not comfortable working with people from different background and states.
A worker gets into terms with these realities as he/she has no other option. Again most of these decisions are not taken to make profit or to enjoy a luxury life. These decisions are forced on workers to simply make a living.
