The Loneliness Bug Biting India's Working Young

Young workers in a new city who embrace a busy work-and-party lifestyle lack the comfort and support of genuine friends. It's warping expectations in a consequential way

- HARISH BIJOOR

The seed of this column was planted exactly 14 months ago. I was delivering the inaugural keynote address at an offsite in Udaipur for an IT firm of repute. There were 350 people in the audience from the key client-facing realm of bleeding-edge work. My hour-long address was followed by a question-answer session. At the end of 20 minutes of Q&A, I decided to reverse the format and said I would give questions to the audience that anyone could answer. I got to ask just one question, though—as about 40 people wanted to answer that one first question. The answers shook me up a bit. It has been the subject of my probe in corporate organizations over the last year, and it is the subject of my column today.

The question, then: "What is the biggest regret of your working life to date as an employee and a human being, in that order?" Surprisingly, the answers were all more or less the same, all pointing to a cluster of thoughts that led one to the narrow alley of loneliness. Loneliness seems to be the biggest corporate disease around. The working person is today more lonely than ever. While some realize it, others don't.

Everyone, however, is making some kind of effort to fill in this vacuum. The working man and woman are lonely. The younger ones seem more prone to this "disease" than the older ones. The married ones who started a family rather young seem to have escaped, while those still single and looking to form relationships seem to be on a different boat altogether. This is a massive ship of the lonely that's lurking.