To work or not to work for seventy hours, that is the question. Since the Infosys founder Mr. Murthi expressed his opinion about the need for a seventy hours strong week, India has exploded in to opinions in such a vehement way that no need now, or ever since, would there be to prove Amartya Sen's title "The Argumentative Indian"!
Well, there seem to be three groups; industrialists/owners who support Mr. Moorti, often quoting the 9(hours) 6(days) Chinese formula form the first group. Their argument seems to be that we cannot follow the laid-back Western formula of 'forty hours' types.
Well, true in a way because we are thus aping the West, while jumping across-n-over many steps when/where they worked very hard to now relax the cool way. This expectation is like that of the hot-headed wifey's who wants her young husband, who could be just two years older than her, to immediately provide her all the creature comforts that her father provided her mother when the lady was in the late forties or early fifties!
The second group is obviously the working group who finds the expectation ridiculous because the wages are low, the office-home balance is butchered, and so on. Doctors, the third group, provide all the jazz in to this melody, rather cacophony, because they quote the life style diseases as if such diseases do not have other parentage such as bad eating habits, lack of exercise, et al.
I have a fourth and a fifth reaction to this debate! To begin with, my feel is that it is only the organised (mostly the I/T) sector that can thus grumble. Anyways, their percentage in our society is minimal. The majority of Indians work in the unorganised sector where they work for ten hours a day, Monday through Saturday, both inclusive (as job offer letters would put it!) anyways, and yet live long, and lead rather happy and healthy lives!
My second opinion is a question. "Do the cribbing people really work so sincerely, so hard"? I get this kind of reflex reaction even when people opine that for a peon's job, there were hundred Ph. D. candidates. Well, are these so-called Ph.D. holders really knowledgeable? We all know very well what goes on in that factory called Ph.D. production!
Are not most Ph. D. degrees a bigger version of the "spit/vomit" variety of appearing for the exam fiasco, that is, relax/bunk the whole semester, but the night before the exam, stay-up the whole night, memorise as much as possible, and the next day, spit/vomit as answers whatever you might remember!
Can there be, for example, a Ph. D. in any subject (as the thesis is anyways written in English!), but especially in Linguistics and the ELT (two really very easy areas actually), who cannot speak or write a single qcorrect, simple sentence in English?!? Why then grumble that such candidates apply for and get a peon's job!?!
Do we really have a genuine, efficient, smart (not hard!) work culture? Very rarely in government offices! In private companies, it might be a shade better. Most employees work for the pay cheque alone. Very rare are the employees who love their work!
Least actual work, procrastination, making others shoulder the responsibility, ugly and cheap politicking and ganging up, third rate gossiping, that is the sum total of the work experience hereabouts, the great Indian jugad! Work (ethics!) is hardly worship hereabouts! Honourable exceptions, very very few anyways, prove the rule!
When such storms rage, I feel, all these people should ask their favourite heroes, cricketers and film stars how much and how hard they work!?! May be, Mr. Moorti would then be less maligned!
Pratima@ All the bitterness apart, the Moorti remark has generated a blast of cartoons of all varieties. Most wonderful was the one my brother forwarded to me, in which Akshata Moorty, lovingly buttoning in a carnation/a rose in husband's lapel, is all the while telling him,"Papa called and said, tell Rishi to ask the English cricket team to practice in the net for seventy hours"!
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