Absent in the “work 90 hours a week” debate

Our country is obsessed with counting hours. Everybody asks the school topper: “How many hours a day did you study?” Journalists shove their microphones into the faces of UPSC-toppers: “You must be studying 16 hours a day, no?” And now employees are being asked: “How many hours do you work in a week?”

- Abhishek Asthana

The reason is simple.

At one level it’s a hangover from our socialist days. The principle is “your one hour is equal to my one hour, as we both are just labouring, we are both blue-collar”. Hence it becomes a standardised measure of effort. IQ is anyway an evil capitalist construct. As for new-age IT services companies that continue to count hours, that’s what they export – billable hours. And it’s no surprise they want to maximise this.

The L&T chairman’s exhortation, to work 90 hours a week, comes in a different context. Ironically, for the last seven days, people have spent 90+ hours outraging about it trying to prove him wrong, thereby proving him right.

I understand where he was coming from. Many corporate leaders like him are hard workers, usually with little or no familial inheritance, who realised education is the only key to prosperity, who burnt the midnight oil, who used Resnick and Halliday as a pillow, cleared competitive exams, built great careers, achieved a designation which is an acronym, even as they lost some hair and empathy. As they climbed the ladder, they grew to dislike (though they didn’t always show it) non-hard-working people or those who spent their time away from the assembly line.