
The week gone by saw a tumultuous debate on work-life balance in India. Hardworking India has suddenly seized the subject for an intense to-and-fro on social media platforms. The catalyst this time—on an issue that keeps hitting the fan in our country from time to time—was the chairman of multinational Indian conglomerate L&T, Sekharipuram Narayanan Subrahmanyan. In an internal video communication, Subrahmanyan could be seen exhorting folks to toil longer, even suggesting a 90-hour work week with Sundays included. The zing in the video was a remark with a veiled sense of caustic humour, “How long can you stare at your wife?”
And then all hell broke loose. A meme-fest followed on social media. Television debates raged on. Some women’s organisations even attributed a gender-skewed attitude to the comment. Others said he should have used the word “look” rather than “stare”. The inane took over the serious, as normally happens with such debates on media—every Tom, Dick and Harish (I included) had a view on the subject. The sublime became the ridiculous.
Now that a whole 10 days have passed and the noise has subsided, I think it is time to look beneath the skin of the issue that brewed and boiled a whole nation to debate. Time to sit back, relax and see why Subrahmanyan’s seemingly innocuous and jocular remark hit the spot it did with Indians. There sure are lessons to take out from the whole episode.
The big learning for corporate India is the fact that nothing is ‘internal’ anymore. All communication—whether labelled internal or not—should be considered external once it leaves your tongue, hand or head. In the day and age of social media, anything can be recorded and, once shared, can go viral. Watch out for that. Say what you must, but say it with purpose and curated caution. Watch every word, watch every point of humour, and watch literally every pause. Every breath you take, and every step you take is public. Your internal space ends at the tip of your nose and external space begins therefrom.
Gender is a big issue in the country today. It is emerging to be a bigger one in the future. All those in public life and a public space must adhere to the basic norms of this new society. All genders must be respected, must be spoken of equally and must not be disparaged. The new society will not tolerate it at all and is waiting to bite on a misstep.
Today, we have three generations of people at work. One is the senior generation of thinkers and doers. These are the ones in their sixties today. These are folks who have grown up in a different India. They have seen shortages and strife of a different order than what anyone else has. This is a generation that has believed in the diktat that ‘work is worship’.
This generation of leaders and workers alike have believed in the ethos of hard work, which has been typified by either hard work in the field or in the battlefield—as seen in some hit movies of yesteryears with actor Manoj Kumar exhorting hard work and singing paeans to farmers and soldiers. The true-blue hard workers were typified by the “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” slogans of yore.
The second generation of leaders and thinkers in India come in the age group of 40-59 years. This is a cusp generation between the deprived and the enabled ones at the top and the bottom of the age profiles we are referring to. This generation of folks are the sons and daughters of those in their sixties and seventies and fathers and mothers of the generation below them in the 20-39 age group.
Everyone in this category is a bit confused. They are sitting on the fence of decision-making and are not too sure, which is the right approach to life. At one end you have the “work is worship” and “work alone satisfies” mindset of their parents, and at another, there is the “there is more to life than work” mindset of their children. This segment is therefore challenged.
The third generation of leaders and thinkers are in the 20-39 group. These are folks new to work, or even feel harassed by work. Their bosses are typically in the confused lot of people sitting on the fence and their CEOs could be either from this segment or from the first generation of hard workers.
Subrahmanyan is clearly categorised to be in the top segment, going by his comments and what followed in the press note issued by L&T that spoke of the company’s broader vision for progress, India’s current opportunity for growth, a push for the country’s development and the yen to “achieve the shared vision of being a developed nation”.
And then there is a fallacy segment out here as well. There is a generation of young people in the age group of 20-39 who work for bosses and owners who belong to their very own age group. At times even younger. Many of these are from the startup ecosystem, with a very different and even irreverent take on hard work and the number of hours put in.
Many of them believe in the WFH (work from home) and WFA (work from anywhere) culture, and are essentially concerned with the output rather than the input of number of hours of work. Even out here, all is not well. There is angst. And this angst is that of the toxic workplace, where other toxicities apart from number of work hours seem to dominate their lives. But let that be a subject for another day.
The moot point then is that the current outbreak of angst on the 90-hour week is far more complex than it seems. India is divided across two sets of polarised views—one at the top of the age bracket and the other at the bottom. One lives to work and the other works to live.
In between sits a confused India, being pulled at one end by a dad or mom, and at the other by the son or daughter. Mind you, all live in the same home, the same glass house. This tug of war shall continue. To each their own.
Harish Bijoor
Brand guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults
(Views are personal)
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)