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walking in those chappals and about the need for steel sole shoes. He immediately shrugged me off as his conscience did not bother him about the harm and himsa to these fivesensed human beings. His total concentration was on onesensed himsa (by being a vegetarian) and maximizing his profits at the cost of his own workers who bring him the
profits with their sweat and blood. 0 About twenty years ago, I was visiting a factory that makes
various kinds of metal wires. After drawing the wire to the size, many bundles/rolls of wire are then loaded into an electric furnace for heat treatment to make the wire soft. In this case, the furnace was a big hole in the concrete floor having a diameter of four feet and a depth of about fifteen feet. All along the furnace wall (in the hole) were electric resistance wires that when hot provide heat (maybe up to 500 Celsius or more). The top rim of the furnace hole was flush with the concrete floor. The whole area in the factory was also poorly lit. I saw the workers loading many bundles of wire into the furnace by using a manually operated crane. They all were standing very close to the top rim of the furnace which was still hot. Seeing this, I immediately realized that if any worker had a slight slip of foot, distraction (due to the telephone, noise, or talk, for example), dizziness, or heart attack, he would fall straight into the furnace and would never come out alive. I explained all this to the owner, a devout Jain. His first response was to point out to me that nothing like had happened so far. I told him not to wait for that accident. God forbid if it does ever happen, he will never be able to sleep for the rest of his life, not to speak of the legal repercussions. I also suggested a simple solution for this and asked him to make a wall of bricks about six inches high along the rim of the furnace, which he said he would do. I returned again two years later but nothing had changed. Again, the life of a five-sensed human being was not registering in his conscience.
An Ahimsa Crisis: You Decide
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