Human touch: Three Monks

INTRODUCTION

The film is based on the Chinese proverb "One monk will shoulder two buckets of water, two will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water."
Is a Chinese animated story released in 1980 and directed by A Da. The story is about three monks coming to a monastery and learning to co-exist just like a real world corporate scenario where people from different backgrounds come to a common forum and have to co-exist.

The movie :

The Plot:

The story starts with a monk reaching the monastery and has the whole place to himself he seems to be a pure soul and as expected does well to keep the place warm. He knows all the work has to be done by him and he does as required, goes and fills in water (which seems to be quite a task) and preaches for the rest of the day, this has striking similarities to our day to day lives, when we do not depend on others all our work get done on time, the problem arises when we have to get things done by others and the skill set required are different from each other.Being alone is never a great idea the challenge comes when we have to perform as a team.

Then to complicate things another monks enters the picture, he too is a pure soul which can be observed from the way he treats the butterfly, also the way he handle it proves he is an intelligent individual.

All is well when he steps in, he is assigned the job of filling water and he does it till he is new to the place, but just like in real world he refuses to do all the work alone. Now there are two ways to handle this problem, first both can go in turns and fill water which sounds fair in terms of load shared, or they could both do it together by carrying the load up and down together. Although the first option might look more apt for the scenario the resultant productivity in the second option is better, in order to extract work from his employees a manager has to make sure that the work load is shared in such a way that highest productivity can be reached.

As seen with the first two the third one also has clean consciences and as soon as he reaches the other two quickly team up against the third. A while later three fight against each other. This shows us that if the resources are not managed properly it could result in a lot of problems. Like when the three monks were choked , there was no water in the house and stay put that way because the problem was rather too small, but when a bigger issue like fire came up they had to team up to fight against it. Probably the better solution was this when compared to the earlier ones discussed. This way they learned to work as a team and this helped them come up with a more modernised pulley system, hence we learn how important it is to work as a team and better solutions can be thought of if we work as a team.