Live to work?

The other day, it so happened, we were comfortably ensconced (strictly by invitation to a wedding!) in a 5-star hotel in Goa. It was morning and we were at breakfast in the hotel's coffee shop. All of a sudden a bit of someone else's conversation hit my ears and the piece of egg-on-toast-with-bacon halted in mid-air en route my eagerly expectant mouth. What the person in question quipped was that the whole ambience of that moment, including the ritual of breakfast, fondly reminded him of his working days.

It was quite an innocuous staement by itself. However, to me it seemed absurd that the sylvan surroundings, coupled with the company of friends and merry makers, should remind one of work days of the past. Of course I realised what the person had meant. In his corporate days he used to travel around the country and would put up at 5-star hotels. He was obviously reminded of that. Still, this bit of an offering set me thinking and reinforced my theory that this friend of mine (he shall remain un-named), like so many others in his position had perhaps, sacrificed a lot in life at the altar of career promotion. I used to travel a lot also. I definitely enjoyed the stays in some beautiful hotels. But I cannot say that I enjoyed the good things in life because they reminded me of my working days!

Perhaps, this is what plagues a lot of us in the corporate world. Trite as it may sound, a dangerously large number of people are more and more "living to work rather than working to live." What I mean is that people are increasingly considering their work and its appendages to be their badges of identity. We brand people ( just as much as we brand ourselves) according to their calling and station instead of discovering their intrinsic worth as human beings; as persons. We describe people as "doing well" if he can present an impressive corporate identity - does not matter how he has acquired it! Woebetide a person who is unfortunate enough to be a proficient musician, sportsperson, a performing artiste, an academic, a literateur, unless of course he is in the rarefied atmosphere of the Rehmans, Tendulkars, SRKs, Sens and Seths.

So, when corporate grandeur is the lodestar of one's life, it is but natural that everything outside the environs of the office assumes secondary importance. People often think work, live work, dream work and even socialise only for work. And let me tell you, the majority of these people would point a finger at me and ridicule me for airing my "typically" irreverent view of work culture. The question is - why does this happen? Is it peer pressure? Is it the unimaginable importance of the job? Is it over work? Is it sheer incompetence? Is it a fashion statement to appear very busy at all times? Is it living up to the dubious "ideals" set by the media through that brainless yet overused expression - "work hard, party hard"? Or is it that typically human (read Indian!) habit of sycophancy? The answer, perhaps, lies in a combination of these factors for I have actually encountered, on a regular basis, all of them in the course of my corporate years.

This obssession with work, at times, is bizarre and ridiculous. As a junior manager in the Accounts Department, fresh from completing my 120 weeks of management training, I was in the company of the departmental manager and his two assistants from the middle management cadre. (In fact, one of them was the topic of one of my earlier posts about Canada and Czechoslovakia - remember?) The work-day used to begin at 7.00am and end officially at 5.30pm. To me this was long enough a period to complete the day's allocated work, although one will be hard-pressed to find a more tedious and boring job than Accounts! Anyway, I could leave office latest by 5.45pm. the extra 15 mins being an allowance to enable the stampede of homeward-bound workmen to finish as I had no desire to be caught running out with them!

My senior colleagues saw things differently. My practice of leaving by 5.45pm was viewed as a sign of a callous attitude towards work and, apparently, it reflected a total absence of seriousness on my part. However, that is not the story in this post. It is a story of the three venerable colleagues who displayed their "habit of hard work", their "commitment to the job", their "loyalty to the organization", blah blah, blah blah, by leaving for the canteen (not home!) at 5.45pm and refreshing themselves with tea/coffee and snacks for half an hour or so.. They would then head back to their desks and call it a day earliest by 10.00pm! This routine would be folowed de riguour every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, which were holidays! However, they would relent a bit on Sundays and go home by 2.00pm, at times! Also, they would permit themselves the luxury of relaxing a bit over the weekends by going to office at 8.00am instead of 7.00am! Yes, reader, this is absolutely true.

"The 3 _ _ _ _ _ s" did this year after year. They had no family life and, of course, no social life.So much so, many like me never got to meet their wives or children, although we all lived in the company's estate for managers. I often wondered as to what were they trying to achieve in life. In fact, one of them, most tragically, died the day after his retirement. He had no time for the family during his working life and he certainly did not have it post-retirement. His world, like those of his other two cohorts, comprised the office, the company, the reconciliation of bank statements, totting up the company's credits & debits, maintenance of various inventories, etc., etc., etc.

Years later, when I was in the company's Marketing Division, I had the misfortune to work with several bosses who would warm their office seats till around 10.00pm every day, including Saturdays! In fact, Saturdays became party time for this select band of sycophants. There was absolutely no work. The time was spent in partying, fraternising and politicking! The cascading effect of this "show of importance" was typical. Everybody, barring me, also stayed back late not because each one of them was perpetually inundated with work, but because their action would look good to the big boss and they would be classified as "hard-working". Needless to say, their shameless sycophancy took away every meningful thing from their family lives. One fallout of this was that a sizeable number of them would start affairs in office or with associates. In this instance too, the office and all it represented, became the raison d'etre of these "busy" corporate creatures.

In fact, I had researched deeply and come out with some astounding stats about the cost of needlessly keeping the office operational on Saturdays. After considering the expenses on electricity (generation and use), lunch and evening snacks, the morning and evening runs of the two pick-up vehicles, security, overtime payments, etc etc., the amount we spent worked out to lakhs of rupees per year which could easily be saved. I put all this in a report and placed it for implementation. I only managed to draw ridicule and accusation of corrupting the serious work culture of the office!

I have seen senior managers so caught up in the office rat race that they would regularly shun parties thrown by their friends in order to honour invitations from motley work associates whom the spouses had never even met! In single-mindedly promoting their own career these people lose the support of their family and friends and become lonely in the later years. They spend a lot of time with people who they would never come across again or who matter little in their lives but have no time for near and dear ones. For them they are always very busy, martyrs to the cause of self-grandeur and self importance. Pay-back is never far off. People have long memories and they wean themselves away from such self proclaimed CIPs sooner or later.

What I mean to say is that I wonder what is it that makes people so work-oriented or corporate-glory oriented that they miss out on the joys that life has to offer everyday? Is it because they are Johnny-come-lately people who get mesmerised by the razzmatazz of corporate lives? Or is it that they have no home lives worth the mention and ,therefore, immerse themselves in the murky waters of office life? Or is it purely and simply to impress the boss? Just look at the alarmingly large number of people who do not take their annual leave in order not to displease the boss!

Have you ever noticed that some folks are chronic late comers to parties? These people would consider it a compromise of their corporate importance if they arrived at any time before say 10.00pm! These unfortunate souls fear that early arrival would take away sustantially from their image of hot corporate honchos and would be a come-down in the eyes of their friends. To them it is prudent to be always "fashionably" late at such get-togethers. I know of people who deliberately come home late from office in order to protect their trumped up images of indispensable and hard-pressed hot-shot executives.

Whatever be the reason for letting one's office consume the quality hours, days, weeks, months and years of one's short life, it turns out quite counter-productive, in the end. As I had mentioned earlier we should work to live; work diligently to earn money in order to have a good life with our families and friends. Once we convert our search for money into our reason for living, we are in deep waters. After all, we must have the time and the occasion to spend the money we have earned so single-mindedly. Remember the stories of Mahmud of Ghazni?

I have never felt the need for extended working hours during the course of my career in the corporate world. And no one can say, not even "The 3 _ _ _ _ _s" that my work remained pending or behind hand for 38 years!! Of course, there were special occasions or emergencies when I have had to stay overnight in office. But those were emergencies, not routine days.

At the end of the day, people should be able to relax and treat the job as exactly what it is....a job. We all know and teach our children the adage "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". If that is so, then why the hell do we turn ourselves into "dull boys?" Who are we impressing or pleasing? How much happiness are we dispensing?

Finally, I cannot help but end as a lotos-eater and recall the immortal words of Lord Tennyson "......if death is the end of all, why should life all labour be?"

From Al's Diary....Is Canada In Europe?

Of late, for some reason or the other Canada has been central in our discussions at home.What we have been discussing is not relevant to this post. However, what they did is to bring Canada back to sharp focus in my mind, for all the wrong reasons!!

Long years ago (do I sound like Nehru?), Canada had featured in a piece of conversation between a fellow manager in our company and I. I realise that, after reading about it, you will refuse to believe what I have written and dismiss me as an old gas bag! Please be assured that this anecdote is just another gem from my collection of many hilarious experiences gathered in the course of my 31 years of association with Bata India Limited. By the way, I solemnly affirm the authenticity of the story.

It was a rainy day in 1975. The car park in front of the factory leading on to the reception area, was already under ankle-deep water. My concern was that the time was a few minutes short of 12 noon, at which hour the siren would sound and we would have to leave for lunch by wading through the water. The top-management team was also worried, although for different reasons. At any moment His Excellency, the Canadian High Commissioner to India, would arrive. In fact, because of the widespread rain, his mini-motorcade had already got hopelessly delayed. To add to the woes the factory had got completely inundated. A VVIP visit in those conditions was not the easiest thing to manage!

At about 5mins to noon, there was a warning call from the Gate Office to say that the High Commissioner's car was about to enter the factory. In those days I used to work in the Accounts Department of the company which was lodged in the Administrative Block occupying the entire frontage of the building. As the VVIP entered the premises, we, quite naturally, jostled for vantage positions near the windows to satisfy our zoological interest in him. Our Pay-roll Manager was next to me as we all tried to catch a glimpse of the Diplomat. It was this lucky configuration of peering individuals that gave rise to this gem of an experience I want to share with you.

The Pay-roll Manager was one of the veterans of the organization. He had worked himself up the ladder from the employee ranks and had finished up in the managerial grade through sheer hard work. Although he had mastered the art of pay-roll preparation, he, like his many other colleagues, was not the possessor of formal college degrees. As a result of this he and his ilk grudgingly considered us - the management trainee types - to be a little better informed than them, which was not very far from the truth, in any case.

And so it happened that on this rainy mid-day in Faridabad Mr. Pay-roll quietly asked me in Hindi as to which country this visiting " minister" belonged to. With an effort at maintaining a straight face I informed him that the visiting gentleman was not a minister but was in fact the High Commissioner for Canada to India. At this he wondered what could possibly be the latter's interest in a shoe factory. I commented that perhaps due to the fact that ours was a Canadian company he may have evinced some interest in seeing our operations and familiarising himself with Canadian business interests in India, especially since Mr. Thomas J. Bata, Chairman of the Board of the global Bata Shoe Organization, himself was the Chairman of the Canada India Business Convention also.

Mr. Pay-roll was puzzled. He had learnt from his predecessors that the founding father of our organization Mr. Thomas Bata had started operations in Zlin in Czechoslovakia back in 1894. He also knew that many of the original expatriate managers of Bata India had been Czechs. Besides this, he was also familiar with certain Czech words that are used till this day in the official company jargon. However, during his extended tenure with the company one fact that seemed to have by-passed him was that Mr. Thomas J. Bata had shifted operations of the global organization to Toronto at the onset of the Second World War after severing all ties with nations behind the "iron curtain", and that, as a result, ours was very much a Canadian organization!

To a simple mind, unnecessary complications are highly unwelcome. Mr. Pay-roll had grown with the organization knowing that it was Czechoslovakian in origin. and Czechoslovakian it had to stay.That was sacrosanct. All the talk of Canada - pronounced Kenarha - was so much bilge. Still, the introduction of this new "Canada" theme needed to be thought out. One realisation did strike him forcefully. That is why he turned towards me and wondered aloud - in Hindi - "So Canada is in Czrchoslovakia?"

Slow march to anarchy?

My cousin Ashoke Chatterjee (Ashokeda to us) was the Director of the National School of Design in Ahmedabad for a good many years. It was from him that I first heard of this premier institute, a long time ago. Since then, over the years, I have had the chance to meet a few ex-students of N.I.D. As only to be expected from its alumni, I find them to be highly talented people, committed towards value-addition to the community and society.

Hence, I wonder what made Utsav Sharma, a product of this august institute, take it upon himself to physically attack the ex-DGP Rathore of the notorious Ruchika molestation case? The point is, Utsav is neither a relative nor a friend of Ruchika or the Girotra family! SPS Rathore may have got away with a six-month jail sentence for his various offences of molestation, intimidation, abetment to suicide, abuse of official police powers to ruin a family, etc. - and that too after two decades- but the people have not been satisfied by the delay in justice and quantum of punishment meted out to this villain. Utsav Sharma happens to be a part of this outraged population, albeit more proactive with his views and beliefs than the others. Obviously, he took it upon himself to strike a blow for justice, where no justice was perceived to have been delivered!

It is not my intention to hold a brief for Utsav. Not at all. But this whole incident does fan the fear in me....are we headed for anarchy? Looking around, one has to merely take stock of the state of governance in the much vaunted democracy called India, to realise that governance exists more by accident than design. Hence my fears of the age of vigilantism and eventual anarchy.

Governments do not or cannot seem to prevent crime and violence. The warnings of our intelligence services about terrorists and terrorist threats, if at all forthcoming, are casually dealt with. Meaningful information on potential threats appear to come from foreign powers. The process of dispensation of justice for the common man is so effete, corruption-ridden and slow that it ceases to hold any meaning in the common man's life.

In this context I recall the immortal words of Edmund Burke, "for evil to flourish, good people have to do nothing and evil shall flourish!" Our courts and the legal system do not act when they should. Our administration does not administer when it should. Our police forces follow their own agenda without a thought for the grievances of the public. Our politicians are too busy trying to garner votes and seize seats of power to douse the flames of rebellion amongst the masses. Look at the outcome of the crimes against people like the Babri Masjid, the '84 anti-Sikh riots,the Gujrat riots, the rise and rise of the so called Maoists who have brought so many administrations to their knees! Yet, we get a lot of words and no action. Look at the justice system. Look at Nithari, the Aarushi case and now the Rathore case. It comes through quite clearly that the rot in our systems places influential people above the law. It also comes through very clearly that in this much tom-tommed democracy politics is more important than law and order. For, it is politics that prevents the administration from nipping the viciousness of the Sena and MNS in the bud in Mumbai.

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. Similarly, governance also abhors a vacuum. Where the administration abdicades its right to govern and dispense justice, for whatever reason, people will sooner or later assume the roles of the administrators.One does not have to go far. One look at the traffic management in Delhi should be suficient to drive home this point. Motorists themselves are handing out justice more and more with their fists, feet, knives and guns while the police remain helpless to come to the aid of the wronged party. The vacuum in policing has brought about such a situation, which, to say the least, has assumed alarming proportions.

So when SPS Rathore is let off practically scot-free for his heinous crimes it is not surprising that an individual decides to fill the void left by the system. This is truly alarming. When will the administrators wake up? Will it be when the maoists rule the roost in a good part of the country or will it be when the MNS and the Sena drive away sane and good people from Mumbai. Will their be someone or some institution to ensure that criminals are caught and punished? Or will we see thousands of Utsavs all over the country taking the law into their own hands in the interest of perceived justice? In other words, are we slowly, but surely, headed for utter lawlessness and anarchy?

This is my fear. I earnestly hope I am wrong.

2010 A.D.

The first relationship of 2010 I establish with my blog is only in the month of February! Imagine! If you ask me for a genuine reason for this lapse, I will be "genuinely" hard pressed to find one. Was it because of the unprecedented bad weather during the whole of January which numbed my senses into a state of stupor? Was it due to a singular lack of things to "reflect" upon? Was it because of a sudden rush of lecture notes and presentations to prepare? Or was it a plain and simple case of laziness? Although I would be inclined to put my money on the last one, fairness demands that I plump for the possibility of a mixture of all these reasons (and more) that was responsible for my absence.
So, having done with the excuses, what do I have to say now....for 2010? May everybody's life (read my own!) be full of happiness, joy and prosperity? Trite! Very trite! But Yesssss! I could certainly do with a great deal of prosperity! But then, I had wished for it for the last 50 years! And look where I am! So, big deal!
So, what does it leave me with? Firstly, I do wish mental and physical "shanti" for all those dear to me including my whole family and the entire circle of friends, wherever in the world they may be.
Apart from that, I do wish that those bally extremists come to their senses and allow the world to go on without subjecting it to a perpetual barrage of big-bangs!
I wish that our planet would shrink unbelievably to enable me to visit and see the whole world without taxing the body, mind or the pocket!
I also wish that the peculiar phenomenon called consumer price index ( also known as prices to the lesser mortals like me) abandons its dogged defiance of the Newtonian theory of gravity and decides to come down , for a change!
And lastly, dare I wish that we the mere citizens of this mighty nation - the world's largest democracy - for once get at least a semblance of governance and political leadership?
It is your turn 2010 A.D.!