Work - Life Balance in India: A Chimera

With the opening up of the economy circa 1991, I have been privileged to be a part of a generation that has seen many firsts!

During the first Gulf War, we were privileged to see CNN for the first time and what a boom it led to! Today we in India have so many channels – though when you really sit down to watch some TV, you don’t see anything interesting, but at least we have the choice!

Cars – I remember the time we Indians only had the Ambassador, the Premier Padmini and Maruti! Today – Bentleys sell in India! The Japanese and Koreans auto makes are vying with each other to make inroads in the market. We have BMW and Audi showrooms in our cities. You would be surprised to see quite a few Ferraris and Porsches on pot-holed Indian roads!

Shops – There was barely any choice in India – Now with the retail sector opening up – We will soon see the Walmarts, the Carrefours and the Tescos of the world trying to tempt the great Indian middle class.

What drove this great Indian Middle class revolution?

Opening the Economy and the IT and the BPO/ITeS boom

Once the economy opened up, it was just a matter of time that corporates across the world began to discover the college educated English speaking droves that passed out our colleges every year!

Thanks to the Y2K issue – the IT boom really hit India – So many Indians were recruited in India and flown to the US to help Americans get ready for the doomsday scenario that never really materialized! That was when the floodgates opened with the BPO boom – What the IT boom did to Engineers in India, BPO did that to the rest of the country! BAs (Bachelors of Arts) who had no scope of jobs earlier – suddenly woke up to jobs that were paying Rs. 8000 ($ 177) – Rs. 10000 ($ 222)! So suddenly every kid who passed out of college had money to spend! MNCs woke up to this disposable income and started to vigorously target these kids with products never before seen in India!

Impact on family life

What impact did all this money have on Indian family life? Children started earning salaries that their parents barely heard of! Children began to move away from parents, workplace romances began to bloom because of the weird hours these people began to put in (Call Centers actually work American or European timings, which is night time in India). Kids suddenly had credit cards at their disposal and started splurging without either understanding the impact of the usage of the cards or the payment schedule! Debts of each household began to increase!

Impact on marriages

At around the same time, workplace romances began to bloom, a lot of people got married to their colleagues. This increasingly led to marriages on the rocks because of the pressures of the job, bad timings, and last but certainly not the least, competition with the spouse at work, which spilled over at home! Marriage counselors suddenly are in huge demand in a country where a divorce is still looked down upon! Offices began to employ counselors where employees can go and get things resolved!

Materialism

Materialism has now become all pervasive and to satiate the urge of shopping, both spouses started working, started to delay having children – even led to an acronym (DINKS – Double Income No Kids)! A lot of couples started working American timings or one of the pair worked in the complete opposite shift – it was as if one of the couple was in India and the other in the US! With both the spouses working, children are increasingly being taken care by either parents or nannies! This is leading to the parents having to spoil children by giving them stuff, to satisfy the guilt of not having the time to spend with their own children, makes me question the whole concept of having children!

What disposable income?

While salaries went up, most of these people don’t realize that the effective disposable income remained the same because they are paying for the child's needs, the child’s education, mortgage on the house, the car and then their whole lifestyle, what they earn is already accounted for! By the time the 20th of a month arrives, the couple begins to tighten their belts, and wait for the salary to get credited into their account and the vicious circle continues…

Chimera: Work - Life Balance

I am 30 now and if I want to retire by the time I am 45, I conservatively estimate that I will need to have a nest egg of, at the very least, Rs. 3-5 crores ($666,666 - $1,111,111) for me to continue to have the lifestyle that I would have gotten used to by the time I am 45! A salaried person or couple will never make that kind of money in India – They will need to supplement the salaries with an additional source of income that is far more lucrative than a job! My parents will, in all probability, pop a few blood vessels when they read this!

So I have given up the thought of work-life balance – I want too many things in life for me to stop now!

Human Rights

US – Custodians of Human Rights or a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

Someone please explain Guantanamo Bay to me where people are held without any charges for years? Or maybe you can try to explain CIA’s rendition flights across the European Union (EU), which the EU countries also seem to be condoning!

As per the US Department of State’s website, which states:
Because the promotion of human rights is an important national interest, the United States seeks to:

• Hold governments accountable to their obligations under universal human rights norms and international human rights instruments;
• Promote greater respect for human rights, including freedom from torture, freedom of expression, press freedom, women's rights, children's rights, and the protection of minorities;
• Promote the rule of law, seek accountability, and change cultures of impunity;
• Assist efforts to reform and strengthen the institutional capacity of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Commission on Human Rights; and
• Coordinate human rights activities with important allies, including the EU, and regional organizations.
  

Aren’t Guantanamo Bay and CIA’s rendition flights a violation of the same policy stated above?

Haven’t they become a culture of impunity by their own definition?

Then, there was this piece in the newspapers the other day:

Woman raped and sentenced to 8 months

A woman raped in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 8 months in the Kingdom! Why? The judge has said the woman is responsible because she went out her way to meet a man, who was NOT her father or brother! Added to this her brother also beat her up!
In this age, of woman’s emancipation, isn’t this stunning?

The US does not say anything to the Saudi’s, do they? They need oil and cheap oil at that – and can therefore turn a blind eye to Saudi’s misadventures such as the above!

The US has given a new definition to hypocrisy!

News or what?

First and foremost, let me apologize to the Western media for taking a swipe at them recently in one my earlier posts: American Media, Trivializing News and too internally Focussed?

Our Indian channels are just as pathetic. Yesterday, when the main news stories were that of an earthquake in Sumatra killing at least 60 people and a lot of folks still trapped in debris, the other news story being that if at least 100 people being killed by suicide bombers in Iraq, guess what was a half hour special on one of the news channels!

A special on the wedding of Liz Hurley and Arun Nayyar! How has the value of human life fallen? Channels will do anything to sell to get more and more eyeballs and in a country like India which has such a huge population, so many people dying is hardly news! Some other channel will cover the tragedies of human life – We however need our profits to survive! This is really so sad!

Meanwhile on another channel – there was a special on the upcoming Cricket World Cup, where one of the fathers of Indian news analysis (at least as far as I am concerned), Prannoy Roy, was asking a panel of retired cricketers who is the best looking of them all? Imran Khan who was on the panel said that it does not matter how they look, but what is more important is how they play, but again is it really a topic of discussion – How low can channels stoop for profits is stunning! What also disturbed me was Prannoy Roy, was hosting this! I was truly amazed at how inane the whole program was!

Is this what news channels are to propagate? There is absolutely no sense in all this!

Business of Education

A friend of mine wanted admission in MDS (Master of Dental Sciences), in Bangalore, India and had to write the entrance exam COMED-K. She had to get at least 50% in the exam to get a seat and rank in the top 50 to get a government seat. The fee for a government seat is around Rs. 2 lakhs per annum (translates to around $4652). The fees for a management seat is an unbelievable 20 lakhs for the entire course plus the yearly fees (works out to be around $50000)!

Now, please help me understand, which middle class Indian family can afford this kind of money? Suddenly, education has become the prerogative of the rich Indian and the Non-Resident Indian (NRI)! India, needs educated people especially doctors, with our health services being among the worst in the world! Apart from which, a lot of these doctors pay this indecent amount of money and go abroad and our health services continues to be backward!

What can the government do? The government can increase spending on Education to make it accessible to the ordinary Indian and ensure that students that join premier and world renown Indian institutes such as the Indian Institute of Technologys (IITs), Indian Institute of Managements (IIMs), All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and other such premier institutes funded by the government of India, they stay and give something back to the country first – at least for a period of 5 years to ensure that the country gets what it has invested in them! I know that this sounds very jingoistic, but this is surely one of the ways to guarantee that the country gets back!

Male Bonding

I had a very interesting conversation with a close friend and somehow came to conclusion that women do not bond with other women as much as men do with men.

Why does this happen?

If you look at human kind’s entire evolutionary journey – you will find that men traditionally went hunting with other men, while the women stayed at home, protected the home while the man was away and gave birth and raised their children.

So while the men went hunting together, they spent time, made friends, depended on each other for safety and eventually bonded! The conjecture is that this has somehow gotten into the gene pool, which seems to have been replicated over multiple generations, which is why we see men bonding, even to date!

Women on the other hand, spent most of their time in their home, taking care of their offspring and thus did not either have the time or the patience (remember even at that point in time, it was survival of the fittest) to bond with other women! Therefore, we don’t hear as much about women bonding!

My apologies to feminists – this is just a theory and I thought it was too good a subject to blog about!