A Fair Company

I had been working late nights on Dhee (that story is in my last piece), so this morning I was half awake and heavy. And my daughter didn't want to go to school. The teacher yells, one of them said. She had already complained about this, not to me, to Subhash bhai. And he had promised her he would come to school with her. So he came. We dropped her off together, and on the walk back, the two of us got talking about samriddhi.

Not as philosophy. As a real question for two people trying to figure out what this all means: what would samriddhi, swadhan, swavlamban actually look like for us? Is working for money the right call at all? Do we want to work for money?

Idealism always treated money as a vice. You had to leave everything, because everything is moh maya. Madhyasth Darshan doesn't do this. Here money is for nirvaah, for samaajikta. For family, for society, for prayojaneeyata. The texts even call shram, labour, the real capital. Value comes into the world when a human works skill into material. Money is just a token of that. The vice was never earning. The vice is the token detaching from the work and getting hoarded, and hoarding, the texts note, has no "enough" point. You can never have enough of a symbol.

Fine. Earning settled. And we know what we can produce: an AI services company, building things companies actually need. That's our forte.

Then the discussion moved to the kind of company. Not employer and employees. Partners. Everyone takes a responsibility and ensures it is taken care of.

So how is remuneration decided? For that, we'd need each person's shram moolya, their labour value.

Subhash bhai proposed a formula. Take a person's requirements, divide by the hours they'll give. That's their shram moolya.

I thought a bit. Something felt not right. Wait..

I could say my requirement is ₹10 lakh a month, and offer two hours a day. Someone else needs ₹1 lakh and works seven hours a day. That's not fair.

And skill? I've spent twenty years honing something the market pays well for. Where does that go?

It's like we all bake a cake together, and then someone takes a large piece while I get a small one. Mujhe kisi ka shoshan nahi karna, par mera bhi to shoshan nahi hona chahiye!

Subhash bhai didn't defend the formula. He asked, "Bhai, kaun maang raha hai? Aisa ho raha hai kya reality mein? Imagination mein hum ye sab karte hain. Par real kya hai?"

That one landed. I'm a developer. Hunting edge cases is my job. What can go wrong in this design, where will this code break. But this company won't be built in my imagination. It will be built in reality, with real people. So look at reality.

Then, as he usually does, he changed the dimension.

The company is a family. All partners are family members. If a family member is working less, do I file a grievance, or do I go and ask what's going on with him? Why is his requirement so large? Agar aavshyakta nishchit nahi hui hai, to samajh ki kami hai. His fairness is being violated too. His jagruti is stuck. If I have understood something, is it not my role to help him understand it? Tabhi to family hai.

I had not been seeing the company as a family. Ten families living together would have samriddhi, because their bonds are not for money. The bonds come first. The working together follows.

And I should have seen it sooner. The man saying all this had just walked my daughter into school, because she'd complained to him about her teacher. No agreement required it. No clause covered it. The company I was trying to design on paper was already running, that very morning.

· · ·

The ground shifted. But shifted ground makes a developer want to inspect the foundation. So I got of bed after wife and kids slept (Ok, I love staying awake at nights) and I went to the texts Fable 5 with the Madhyasth Darshan MCP Server (the precursor to Dhee, the little experiment that first made me see its power, but I digress. (Ohh, I love to digress, see? A digression in a digression. Ok.. Back to the story now.))

I wasn't checking whether Subhash bhai was right. He sees sharp. He may not have the words of the darshan, but he has the view, and a higher view than mine. I have been making it a point to write down our conversations, and that is why I came to the system: to write this one down, and to find the darshan's words for what he had seen that morning.

The words were there. And they went further than the our conversation had gone.

I went looking for the correct fair formula, the one we should have used. There isn't one. The paribhasha of shram moolya doesn't mention hours. It doesn't mention requirements either. It values the thing produced, the usefulness and kala established in it. And the definition of shram itself has nipunata and kushalta sitting inside it, skill and proficiency.

And my edge case, the ₹10 lakh man? Manav Karm Darshan says we escape the accumulation trap only when it becomes proven that every family's need is limited, and the capacity to meet it is greater than the need. A requirement that never settles at any number is not a design input. It's a symptom. The man gaming the formula isn't cheating the company. He's the one being cheated, of his own jagruti. Subhash bhai's point, with page numbers.

Still. Formulas can be gamed, na? Someone has to be the safeguard. The texts put the safeguard somewhere very interesting: nowhere in the rules, and everywhere in the room. A family is close-knit. Everyone's situation, effort, and need are visible to everyone, all the time, and evaluation happens continuously without ever being an audit. My edge case cannot survive in that room. I wanted to make the formula game proof. A family is game transparent.

Even the cake comes back, inverted. In my picture, everyone fights over slices. In the texts' (Ok, not using the strikethrough here, because you already know, right?) picture, the family that has eaten enough starts baking for the neighbourhood.

· · ·

Kaam to samajh par karna hai. A company based on nyaya would be families bonded for completeness, not individuals negotiating slices.

We are still discussing this, and the questions are getting better, not smaller. How does a stranger become family? Do partners join a company like this, or grow into it? When a client pays in money and a partner draws by need, who sits down and evaluates the shram moolya of a code review? And what happens the first time that full visibility feels like surveillance instead of care?

I don't know yet. We are still working on it. But that's for another day, possibly tomorrow. Good night!