Key Highlights
- Subrahmanyan (who advocated even Sunday work) and the Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, was met with severe criticism and soul-searching on the issue of work-life and exploitation. Yet exactly 100 years ago, in 1924—while still a young revolutionary fresh from prison and resignation from the ICS—Subhash Chandra Bose articulated a radically different vision in his article 'Amra Ki Chai?' translated from bengali “What Do We Want?” (published in Subhash Chandra Bose’s Complete Works, Volume 1, p.
- 310). In it, he declared:Snippet of the article where he mentions the topic in Bengali.“"No human being requires to work more than 4 hours - at most 6 hours a day, in order to stay alive.
- Because not only in their body, in their thoughts, ideologies, pursuits, beauty, love and creations, they need to remain alive- alive every moment till the end of their life.
- They need to be stay alive in their soul, and so they need to pursue the 'amrit'.
- Because they are born of "Amrit, the son of "Amrit" and the immortal desire for that "Amrit" within them has been constantly hammering them with "Yenāhaṃ nāmṛta syāṃ kiṃ ahaṃ tena kuryām!" We want all to have the right to that "Amrit"."The Sanskrit verse Bose invokes—“Yenāhaṃ nāmṛta syāṃ kiṃ ahaṃ tena kuryām?” (“What shall I do with that by which I shall not become immortal?”)—comes from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a profound dialogue between sage Yajnavalkya and his wife Maitreyi.
