Editorial: Sundays aren't for staring

There’s something about India’s uncle-age corporate chieftains that makes them sound off like an oracle or a medicine man when they are given a mic and an audience of underlings. From the easy languor of their CEO swivel chairs, they hold forth on things of the cosmos, imagining that they are dispensing pearls of wisdom gained from a life of striving and achievement. Unfortunately, all that gyan ends up as squiggles on the notepads in front of said underlings. There’s invariably a bigger-than-thou undertone to the spiel, which is why it falls on deaf ears.

The latest to join the ranks of unwanted oracles is Larsen & Toubro chairman S N Subrahmanyan, whose proddings to his subordinates have been leaked to social media. "I regret I am not able to make you work on Sundays,” he is seen saying on video. “If I can make you work on Sundays, I will be happier, because I work on Sundays also. What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife? Come on, get to the office and start working."

When in such a vein, it’s never long before the corporate shaman brings in China. And Subrahmanyam duly quoth: "Chinese people work 90 hours a week... If you want to be on top of the world, you have to work 90 hours a week." One can discern multiple layers of privilege in such utterances. Foremost of it is the male gaze, the typical old man’s male gaze that is weighed down by weariness with and, possibly contempt for, the company of women, especially those from whose services they benefited lifelong. It also contains a latent disapproval of even the dregs of a romance that might have survived into twilightyear Sundays. Frequently, this casual misogyny finds expression as wife jokes shared by senior gents on WhatsApp or by male CEOs to a captive audience of subordinates round a corporate table.

It raises several intriguing questions about Boomers’ attitude to one half of the work-life balance—the half furthest from their heart, life itself. Did they really, even in the prime of their lives, limit their tenderness to the Sabbath? Did that tenderness take the form of ‘staring’? What really is ‘staring’ a euphemism for?

Was ‘staring’ just a frantic and sneaky distraction from work? Was ‘staring’ a guilty pleasure on their Sundays?

Beneath that layer of misogyny, we also discern in those words the overseer’s entitlement, of perverse happiness derived from putting other humans to work, at ungodly hours, and away from anything like love. And it’s always the slavedriver’s justification that he does it too, and did it not fetch him handsome reward?

Challenge him further, and the overseer always moves the conversation, as Subrahmaniam did, to something bigger — pyramids in the old days, nations now. China is what Indian CEOs want to build, a temple to capitalism built under a collectivist whip. If India’s workers could only match the Chinese communist ethic —90 hours according to Subrahmanyam, 70 by N R Narayanamurthy’s count—we  would be a nation transformed. Never mind the facts as per ILO: India ranks among countries with the longest workweeks and lowest wages. The average Indian puts in 46 hours and takes home INR 38.31. And China? 46 hours and INR 428.

But take it from the shamans. Just do it.