MUMBAI: Larsen & Toubro chairman SN Subrahmanyan who expressed support for 90 hour workweeks for company employees, adding “how long can you stare at your wife?” has kicked up a storm. In fact, many would call it a violent typhoon.
A simple statement like that has become fodder for debates on television which newsrooms, for want of better topics or developments to discuss, have latched onto. As have so-called social media and celebrity influencers who know that what Subrahmanyan said can attract many more followers to their handles if they take a stand against him. Especially from the younger lot who can be influenced. Stand-up comics have found his statement perfect to go witty or punny about. Of course, every one can crack up as Subrahmanyan has become every Tom, Dick , Harry, Larry, Jane, Cynthia, and Joyce’s favourite whipping boy.
Respected industrialists like Harsh Goenka and Anand Mahindra have found a lot of fault with what Subrahmanyan has advocated. They have been pretty vocal about it. But both inherited large corporations. Yes, they have grown them larger. But they did not have to do the grunt work that Keshub Madhindra and Ramnath Goenka put in. The long hours, the hard toil. (I have no intention of hurting their sentiments. I am sure both Harsh and Anand worked hard too. However, the labour, the pain that an entrepreneur goes through when he's starting up and growing his enterprise is different.)
Subrahmanyan said what he did as an engineer, and as an excellent leader, what he does to excel. Students at the IITs and other engineering institutes slog their butts off .to get their degrees. That's probably where Subrahmanyan got his work ethic from. He works seven days a week - or may be eight, if it was possible to have those many in a week. That’s what’s made L&T a GOAT in what it does, develop infrastructure and construct anything that's challenging. That ability has not come by chance, L&T folks work really hard.
As do scientists. As do researchers. As do inventors. As do seriously-driven journalists - online or TV - who have a mission. As do zillions of GenZ geeks and nerds or ingenious youth at startups who want to build their enterprises. In the Valley. In Bengaluru. In Hyderabad.
As do producers, writers and online video editors working in the movies or on television.
These folks are so deeply absorbed in the problem they want to solve, or the solution they want to get to, or the product they want to deliver - that time is of no consequence. They are driven. They are passionate. They take ownership of what they do. They are fortunate they love what they do. It is not a nine to five job that they are in.
BTW, how many of you have family members who are gamers?
Do they have a schedule?
I rest my case.
They love what they do, and many have made millions of dollars out of being professional gamers. Yes, they live in their cocoons and are sometimes maladjusted to the so-called fake society. Where superficiality is the norm.
Hey, also what Subrahmanyan said is nothing new.
Do you remember what the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had penned almost a century or so ago :
“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”
Of course, he did not say that one needs to work seven days in so many plain words. But implied in that verse is the clarity that man or woman does not achieve greatness until she or he put their all into what they want to achieve.
Do I work 90 hours a week? Well, heck I do. When the need arrives, I sleep four to five hours every night. And for months on an end. Has that harmed or helped me? I love what I do so it does not seem like work at all. So, I guess it only helps me.
Lampoon me if you like. Troll me if you must. But I give my thumbs up to Subrahmanyan.
Just a little note of caution to Subrahmanyan: you could have gone a bit easy when you spoke about "staring at the wife. "
There's a phrase that I keep in mind: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
I won't ask Subrahmanyan how his spouse reacted when he got home that night of the conversation when he referred to "staring at the wife."
If they are a well-adjusted couple, who understand each other, probably there was no reaction or maybe a laugh from the wife as she gave it back to him playfully.
If their relationship is not sorted - like many an Indian marriage is not (it's a hollow marriage where the husband sleeps in a room and the wife in another and they quarrel all the time or give each other the cold shoulder) then he would have got hell. And he might well still be getting it.
I would like to believe that his is the first type of marriage mentioned above. After all he is an engineer, and engineers calculate everything they do.
Both he and his wife are probably having a sound sleep while a large part of corporate India, employees and the media rage about the "ninety hour work week" and about "not staring at the wife."
