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SN Subrahmanyan, a leading Indian business boss, made remarks earlier this month calling for a 90-hour working week. In doing so he sparked a furore by touching on twin obsessions of the country’s professional class: long work hours and their toll on family life.
“I regret I am not able to make you work on Sundays, to be honest,” the chair of the conglomerate Larsen & Toubro told staff in a corporate town hall event in Mumbai.
“If I could make you work on Sundays, I would be more happy because I work on Sundays also.”
“What do you do sitting at home?” he added. “How long can you stare at your wife, how long can the wife stare at her husband? Come on, get to the office and start working.”
Though the meeting was meant to stay within company walls, a video was published on Reddit and then shared widely online, to Indians’ widespread outrage and bemusement.
This is not the first time a business leader has admonished employees in India for the hours they work.
NR Narayana Murthy, chair of outsourcing giant Infosys, invited similar controversy last year after calling on India’s youth to work 70 hours a week to compete with the likes of China, and urged them to avoid picking up “not-so-desirable habits from the west”.
Back in 2011 the late Ratan Tata, chair of the Tata Group, questioned the work ethic of British managers after his group’s acquisitions of Jaguar Land Rover and Corus, claiming “nobody is willing to go the extra mile”.
In a country with a conservative government that prizes consensus and bristles at criticism, Indian corporate bosses tend to keep public statements workmanlike and patriotic, if not studiously bland.
Subrahmanyan’s comments have prompted attention for their frank outspokenness and reference to staring at one’s wife, which some Indians found bizarre and which helped the video to go viral.
“He made it sound as if being at home and being with your spouse is a terrible waste of time,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder of Teamlease, an Indian staffing company.
Some uxorious Indian men have in recent days posted pictures of themselves staring lovingly at their wives; others rechristened Sunday as “Stareday”, which is now circulating online as a hashtag.
Leading Indian chief executives have piled on — some perhaps sensing an opportunity for virtue-signalling or schadenfreude.
“My wife is wonderful,” Anand Mahindra, CEO of the eponymous family conglomerate, said at a conference this week in New Delhi. “I love staring at her.”
Mahindra added that the debate that had been unleashed was “in the wrong direction” and should be about the quality of work, not the quantity.
Larsen & Toubro has largely sat out the controversy, initially backing its chair in a statement saying that “extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary effort”. Colleagues say he was not serious. Subrahmanyan has declined to comment.
The question of how many hours executives in India should work has led to serious debates about the country’s economic growth.
Away from the online japes and memes, Subrahmanyan’s comments touched a nerve because India’s hard-working professionals are feeling the pinch from persistent inflation and stagnating wages. These in turn feed often-voiced fears that India — no matter how hard or long people work — is heading for a “middle income trap”, in which its huge population grows old before the economy becomes rich.
While reliable data is not available on India’s average working hours, long commutes running to two or three hours both ways are common in Indian cities.
Rajiv Bajaj, managing director of Bajaj Auto, said Indian companies should move away from “archaic and regressive policies” of enforcing long working hours and instead focus on “speed at the front line”.
Others were more forthright. “90 hours a week?” Harsh Goenka, chair of RPG Group, fumed in a post on X. “Why not rename Sunday to ‘Sun-duty’ and make ‘day off’ a mythical concept!”
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