Suppose you and me together have to do two tasks A and B. We need to decide who does what (let’s assume that we need to pick one task each). Now I’m a stud and you are a chutiya so I’m better than you at both A and B. So how do we split? It all comes down to the degree to which I’m better than you in each of these tasks. Suppose I’m marginally better than you at A, but significantly better than you at B. Theory of comparative advantage (commonly used to describe international trade) says that I should do B and you should do A – this way, total productivity is maximized. I suppose this makes intuitive sense.
You have a number of people cribbing about what is popularly knonw as “chutiya kaam” – approximately translates to bullshit work. Work that is uninspiring for them, but which they need to do because it needs to be done. Sometimes you have otherwise fairly intelligent and efficient people assigned to chutiya kaam – with the explanation that there is no one else who is well-enough equipped to do it. And these people find that less intelligent nad less efficient people are being given better work.
The reason the more intelligent and efficient person might get the chutiya kaam is that he is better at that than his colleagues, even if he is better than his colleagues in the more intelligent stuff. So I suppose if you want to avoid chutiya kaam altogether, one of the ways of doing it is to prove yourself to be a chutiya at that. To be inefficient and incapable of doing that, and in the hope that it will then get palmed off to someone else who is perceived to be better.
But then this is a double edged sword. There are people who believe that all kinds of “chutiya kaam” are inferior to all non-chutiya kaam. And that if you are not good at chutiya kaam you cannot be good at everything else. I’m reminded of this guy in my class who was captaining the class team for a day and who refused to let me open the bowling because I’d dropped a catch. “You can’t even catch properly, and how can you expect to bowl?” he had asked.
The unfortunate thing is that a large number of people are like this. They refuse to accept that chutiya and non-chutiya kaam are not comparable, and require different skill sets, and that they will neeed to apply trade theory to figure out who does what. They look at your skills in one and use that to judge you in another. And allocate resources suboptimally. And when faced with this kind of people, the strategy of trying to be chutiya at chutiya kaam may not work.
So I suppose the key is to figure out what kind of person your boss is. Whether he appreciates that different jobs can take different skills, and no one job “dominates” another. And whether he applies trade theory when it comes to work allocation. If the former, you can’t really do anything. If the latter, you can try being chutiya at chutiya kaam.
Postscripts
“chutiiya kaam” is not a homogeneous term. Some jobs are chutiya for some people but non-chutiya for others. It varies from person to person.
I have grouped all “chutiya kaam” together just for the sake of convenience. There are differnet kidns of chutiya kaams and all of them require different skill sets.
Each non-chutiya kaam also requires its own skill set. I’ve again grouped them together for the sake of convenience of argument
I firmly believe that principles of economics that can be useful in real life (such as demand and supply, trade theory, game theory, etc.) should be part of the 10th standard economics syllabus, rather than teaching kids to mug up GDP growth rates for different states for different decades
I have resisted the temptation to bring in the studs and fighters theory into this analysis