Work-Life Balance: My Time, Your Convenience

"So there's no such thing as work-life balance. There's work, and there's life and there's no balance," Sheryl Sandberg.

- Meera Seth

Janki Vallabh sat in her car looking devastated. She had been so lost in her world of workshops and training and support and schedules and rearranging and rescheduling and teaching and discussing... even arbitrating... that she had clean missed an SMS that had been coming to her day after day after day. Her batch mate from B-school, Raghu Mani had been struggling with his mother’s ailment and had been messaging her daily in a manner of reaching out. Janki had read them and tried to remember to call but her memory eluded her and she ended up remembering them late. Finally, in two of his recent SMS-es he had mentioned the prayer meeting for his departed mother, asking Janki to be present. “She was your music teacher and she remembered you a lot during her last days...”

Janki had not meant for things to come to such a pass. Never, never at all. She was being bounced from wall to wall without a moment to inhale. And being in sessions almost all day she had left her phone with Mercy, her assistant, in case Ma called. And by the end of the day, another 100 SMS-es (of which at least 40-60 would be idiotic offers to lose weight or speak in public fearlessly or buy property at rock bottom prices in Noida or Nellikupam ... these idiotic messages had buried Raghu’s reminders.

How was she to face Raghu? Would she tell him, ‘Gosh Raghu, I have been so busy...?’ This was precisely the kind of moment that told her the foolishness of a life like hers. Often, when she dozed off in her car driving interstate, she would surface during her semi-aware state and remember Wilfred Owen ask, ‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’(‘Futility’)