Work to live, don't live to work

L&T chairman S N Subrahmanyan has gone one up - actually, 20 hours up - on the venerable N R Narayana Murthy. He has suggested that employees should be working 90-hr work weeks. He recounted his encounter with someone who claimed that China can 'beat' the US because people there work 90 hrs a week, while Americans work 50. He went on to exhort L&T employees to 'get to the office and start working' by exclaiming, 'What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife?' One presumes L&T does have women in their employment.

Putting in more hours at work seems to be the latest sweat-sport in town. The subtext: having a life outside work is for sissies. This line of thinking smacks of an autocratic mindset, a slippery slope for societies that aren't communist China. A 'My way or the highway' ethic is an invitation to have everyone march to the beat of one drum - even if that leads everyone off a cliff. India needs latitude to innovate, imagine, live. This is not to diss workaholics - they have their usefulness.

In political science, 'territorialism' refers to a principle in 16th c. Europe that required inhabitants of a territory of the Holy Roman Empire to conform to the religion of their ruler, or to emigrate. We, thankfully, live in 21st c. India where such territorialism is regressive, repressive. L&T pulled out that old rabbit of 'work as nation-building' out of its hat, explaining that its CEO's remarks reflected this larger ambition. Nations that treat individuals as mere cogs for a 'national project' are unhappy nations. After all, 'Arbeit macht frei' (Work sets you free) was the slogan written on entrances of Nazi concentration camps.