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?"