Every Step You Take, They'll Be Watching You

There are many lessons from the work-life balance debate. One is for leaders to watch their words. Another is to recognise the generational shift in attitude towards work

- HARISH BIJOOR

The week gone by saw a tumultuous debate on work-life balance in India. Hardworking India has suddenly seized the subject for an intense to-and-fro on social media platforms. The catalyst this time—on an issue that keeps hitting the fan in our country from time to time—was the chairman of multinational Indian conglomerate L&T, Sekharipuram Narayanan Subrahmanyan. In an internal video communication, Subrahmanyan could be seen exhorting folks to toil longer, even suggesting a 90-hour work week with Sundays included. The zing in the video was a remark with a veiled sense of caustic humour, "How long can you stare at your wife?"

And then all hell broke loose. A meme-fest followed on social media. Television debates raged on. Some women's organisations even attributed a gender-skewed attitude to the comment. Others said he should have used the word "look" rather than "stare." The inane took over the serious, as normally happens with such debates on media—every Tom, Dick and Harish (I included) had a view on the subject. The sublime became the ridiculous.

Now that a whole 10 days have passed and the noise has subsided, I think it is time to look beneath the skin of the issue that brewed and boiled a whole nation to debate. Time to sit back, relax and see why Subrahmanyan's seemingly innocuous and jocular remark hit the spot it did with Indians. There sure are lessons to take out from the whole episode.