Jokes Apart | 70 hours a week? Seriously? And why do we work anyway?

When I was ten, my grandma gave me an ‘autograph book’. It was a pocket-sized notepad with multicoloured pages like yellow, pink, and green, in which acquaintances and relatives could write down something for me, usually an inspirational quote. My father’s friend wrote: ‘Live life king-size.’ I ran to my mother and asked her to explain this word puzzle. My Dadi wrote in it too: ‘Work is Worship.’ I ran to my mother again. When I came across Narayana Murthy’s recent comment about Indian youth— that they should be putting in 70 hours of work every week, those two phrases came back to me. There are those who feel that there is more to life than office presenteeism. Namitha Thapar, Executive Director, Emcure Pharmaceuticals, wrote on X, “If we listen to you and other experts about working 70 hours/ week (plus horrendous commute time) will we ever find time for family, creating precious memories and most importantly for mental health?” Others made the quality-over-quantity argument, which also makes sense. I remember my first job at a news website in 2000. It had a swanky office that no one left. It’s not that my co-workers were working extra hard. They were there for the fast broadband (then not available for personal users), the full-power air-conditioning and the turbo generator, which kept the AC running even during power cuts. The reason why everyone was here was because it was better than home. I had heard that San Fran dotcoms had a flexitime work model. I was in love with that word and practised it, arriving for work at 2 pm and leaving well past midnight. I was a night owl. I was putting in more hours than required, but at my pace and convenience. This didn’t sit well with my editor who asked me to report at 11 am. In my earnest innocence, I said, ‘But this is a dotcom. I thought we had flexitime!’ I mention this anecdote because offices generally have a one-size-fits-all model, even though it doesn’t suit everyone. Like in cricket, temperament plays a big role in the workplace; productivity is linked to it like ball and chain. You cannot make Suryakant Yadav play like Rahul Dravid. Both are match winners, but with contrasting styles. It’s also true that Covid changed the way we work. WFH was mostly unheard of, except in rare cases. Bosses and owners are more incentivised to work because they have more at stake, both financially and otherwise. A common complaint that friends have is the unnecessary number of meetings they have to attend in office. I have some experience with this. When I was teaching at a posh boarding school, the headmaster was fond of scheduling meetings after school hours. One meeting was called because some hungry boys had been caught scaling the boundary wall at night. The housemaster recovered a bag of bun-omelettes from them. The unanimous decision taken in this emergency meeting was to raise the height of the boundary wall and put coiled barbed wire on top of that. This would make the precincts bun-om proof. The headmaster worked through the vacations. Once, when he tried to schedule a meeting during the first week of the summer holidays, the idea was shot down by the staff. Work is worship, fine, but people also have a life beyond work. “What do you do with your time?” asked the boss. My colleague replied, “We clean our cupboards, visit cousins and friends in other cities, and read for pleasure.” I remember this little story from Italian actor and writer Luciano Crescenzo’s History of Greek Philosophy. If I remember correctly, it’s about the owner of a bicycle shop. The author turns up only to find a notice pasted on the shop-front, something to the effect of: Having earned enough for the day, I have shut shop and gone to the beach. Productivity means different things to different people. The grocer down the road from me in Dehradun is a bit like the Italian sole proprietor. He opens in the mornings, shuts down in the afternoon, then opens again in the evening. He doesn’t do home deliveries. Maximisation of profits and productivity is one kind of business ideal; not everyone buys into it. It can become a fetish in big corporations. There are enough horror stories around about floor managers in e-commerce warehouses controlling how many times an employee can go to the loo, and calculations made about how millions of dollars are lost by employees lighting up. According to a UK survey published this year, smokers gain a week of holiday every year from cigarette breaks. Who does these surveys and why?! Narayana Murthy refers to work hours in post-war Japan and Germany. I’m not sure if that’s the best analogy because those were societies that had to restart from scratch, not the boat India is in at present. There’s also a generational difference. It’s not true that Gen Z or Millennials are lazy or want the fruits of labour without the labour. Every generation prioritises differently; it’s how the workplace evolves. As Elon Musk told Rishi Sunak at the recently-concluded AI summit at Bletchley Park, there are times even he wonders why he’s ‘burning the 3 am oil’. Very soon, AI will be doing this work for you. Seen in this light, Murthy’s talk of post-war economies and number of hours put in sounds quaint. At this stage, it might be interesting to ask a more classical question: Why do we work? Which leads us to: What constitutes work anyway? It’s not just humans who work. We know about the industrious ants and bees, and how the early bird gets the worm, how they build their nests, tinka by tinka, straw by straw. For 19th century theorists like Karl Marx, work was the defining feature of the human race. Birds and bees work by instinct, whereas only mankind works to a conscious plan. Keith Thomas asks in the Introduction to his anthology, The Oxford Book of Work: Is the Queen working when she gives a garden party? Is a house painter working when he paints his own house in his spare time? To this I’ll add: Is an author working when he’s promoting himself on social media, 24/7, 365 days a year? Friedrich Engels argued that a worker works not from natural impulse or love of work, instead, “he works for money, for a thing which has nothing to do with the work itself.” We work for the sake of remuneration, which in America is called ‘compensation’. Thomas cites a study of car workers from the 1960s: “…their attitude to work was instrumental: It was a means to an end, a temporary surrender of liberty for the sake of material reward.” This holds true even now. Those who disagreed with Murthy’s proposition raised the issue of adequate compensation: I’ll do 70 hours a week, but show me the money first. But what if you won the lottery? Will you stop working? Thomas gives the example of Linda Hill who won 2 million pounds, and yet continued with her job as a chambermaid at a holiday camp. Point being: Jobs, apart from income, also give us an identity. Hill is quoted as saying, “I love my job, and life wouldn’t be the same without it.” Aside from income and identity, work can be psychologically and intrinsically pleasurable. As W H Auden wrote: “You need not see what someone is doing To know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing his sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, the eye-on-the-object look.” The reason for working can also be prosaic and practical. Thomas again: “As often as not, the attraction lies not in the job but in the human relations involved. Samuel Pepys, who stayed late in the office so as to avoid coming home to quarrel with his wife, is one of an infinity of people who have found solace in the workplace for a frustrating life at home.” By this logic, bad marriages, not national GDP, will be the perfect goal for making young India work 70 hours a week. [Postscript] People get WFH but few get what it implies for a writer. When I’m in the writing tunnel, I don’t take calls or answer WhatsApp messages unless they are work-related. I once made the mistake of taking a call from a photographer friend in the middle of writing a sentence. I said, “I’m writing, will call you later”. The guy started imitating and mocking me, “I’m writing! I’m writing!” What if I’d called him in the middle of a shoot? Others take offence and go into deep sulks. Somehow, saying that one is writing doesn’t convey the seriousness of, “I’m in office.” I envy MS Dhoni who would famously switch off his mobile phone after winning a tournament, and vanish into his Ranchi farmhouse. The writer is the author of The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolor Youth_, and the editor of_ House Spirit: Drinking in India_. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views._