Writing Feedback /
Machine Learning versus Learning by Humans [51]
I apologize for allowing my baby_mind to take over earlier. Here is the other response, maybe the kind I should have given in the first place.I was twenty-two. For many years I had been resisting the direction I was finally taking. Life should be fun, and challenging as well, but never so bleak that you lose control altogether, have no choice but to fall into despair. That was the reason I had resisted this direction.
I am not going to say what made me change. Or why I now felt ready to face my fate. But I had taken the steps which brought me to the door where my future would unravel.
I arrived, the month and year I can still remember, on april of '78 at my parent's home, in a state of mind that may have surprised them too, though they wouldn't show it. They knew better than I did that there was a certain inexhorableness in the march of these events, and I was where I had to be.
Five years earlier, my dad had taken an early retirement from his previous employment, and put his money in starting a small engineering workshop in an industrial town close to Delhi. He was a patient of asthma and sometimes his asthma attacks were so severe that he would sit up in bed, shoulders humped, and breathe with a painful and laboured sound, sometimes for hours. I had come to dread that sound, for it was in the night that he'd have these attacks. There is a lot of emotion tied with that, but I will be able to gradually bring them up I hope.
It was easy enough to set up the workshop, buying and erecting a couple of power-presses, a few lathes, some necessary instruments. Then he hired a local as his foreman and some three or four workers. The idea was to take orders from a motorcycle manufacturer, which too had recently come up in this town. This motorcycle factory outsourced almost ninety percent of their work to small manufacturing units like our own workshop. For every component there were at least three manufacturers and the factory could drive their prices and control the supplies as per their requirements. The inspector of the incoming supplies could turn the stringency of his checking up by just a notch, and the lot would be returned.
All this was specially true for the lowest rung of the suppliers, those who had joined this business recently. They often found themselves scrabbling just to pay their workers, becoming obligated to their own suppliers as well, as they would have bought materials on credit from them. It was for these reasons that a workshop owner's life became very stressful.
His not being an engineering oriented person, made my dad vulnerable to those around him who were. After a few foremen were ejected, the one who settled in had sense and tact to wield his skill knowledgebly enough, that he was never thought so much in the wrong to be fired, and yet appeared by virtue of a little technical knowledge he possesed of some value. He hid his own personal designs behind this veneer, something which surfaced much later. Such a person is even more deadly to have close to you and begin to rely upon, as he slowly sucks your confidence in doing even the things that you could do well. But then, this is what reality is !
The first six months were unreal in more ways than one. That I was doing this, was itself a surprise of a sort to me every time I thought about it. I had put my hand on the till where catastrophe was a certainity, and with it I felt, much of what made up my life until then. I imagined myself being gradually sucked into this maw of machines and metal, workshops and traders, all clamoring for money we did not have. The people at the manufacturer's started to appear almost like deities with the power they wielded over us, to delay our payments, or reject our supplies, or to even give us enough orders that we have enough to work with, and make some money from manufacturing to carry on.
I started literally at the bottom. I was not even the person who operated the machines directly, instead, I was the person turning the wheel of the hand press while the operator fed the metal blanks and removed them after each stroke. Ofcourse the workers were initially a little stirred by this, expecting that I would only last a few hours then move to the office and sit at the table, with papers or something of the sort.
But I had a sense of abandon, I wished something big to happen, or nothing. Because no small event or change was going to turn this ship around, as it sometimes appeared to be. And not knowing what I could do specifically, I just put my head down, caught up in that small process of my immediate operation, and let myself go into it.
This isn't much of a life, and there wasn't much to speak about after sitting at the press for eight hours. I'd walk home as it was only a few miles, and I felt the life that I had known until then slowly recede and dissolve into some oblivion. Only one thing I can remember feeling sure about, and that was that somehow, this is all I can do, and so this is all I am doing.
Six months later my dad left the management of the buisness altogether. I had somewhat of a footing, and the workers regarded me as the one incharge. And so did those outside the buisness, the ones who had payments to collect from us, and those who needed a point man to put pressure on to deliver, threatening to cancel the existing orders.
With someone who has experienced something similar, this might resonate well. It is a little like drowning and fighting for your life. Life preservation in these circumstances is an instinctive act, the actions of flailing your limbs to free yourself and give some upward buoyancy come naturally.
But imagine yourself in that situation and not even knowing which direction to pull towards. At such a time there is a notion which may arise within you. I remember it seeming like a choice almost, and as if it was of no great significance. You felt you had the choice of not surrendering despite the overwhelming odds. You clasped on to this idea, recognizing some other features of it as well, just as you might for a species of a plant growing in the wild.
Without such a support from within, it would have been impossible to keep my sanity. In that quiet hour as I walked home after work, I saw the various events arranging themselves, projecting for me what I should do next. And that is how it seemed to carry on for a long time, for nearly two years, as I struggled to break out of the vicious circle. To find something complex that we could manufacture, and with a margin of profit sufficient to turn around our downwards trend.
When you have a rope to grasp, which to begin with, only seemed like a rope, but turns into a lifeline for you. Your uncertainity melts away, and your focus only strengthens its existence. What an exhilarating feeling that is! As I happened that day to walk across the table of a design officer who I only somewhat knew, something on his table caught my eyes, and I asked him what it was. They were looking for suppliers to make this component for them, but it might perhaps be a little beyond our capability. It was a significant moment as he looked at me, seeing the eagerness, the mixture of intensity and despair, whatever it was, he was a kindly man and said to me, "Sure. Go ahead, give it a try."
