Bonded to labour

In Maximum City Mumbai, 35-year-old glass designer Murtaza Mamajiwala is among the many professionals impatient with the indulgence of a holiday. In the last three years, Mamajiwala has allowed himself five days8217; leave.

The 9-to-5 job has long been killed by graveyard shifts and the perform-or-perish diktat. Now, a new breed of overreachers is wiping the office calendar clean of that blessed word: holiday. On the job, 24215;7, 365 days a year, these professionals are pushing themselves to meet impossible targets, revive flagging bottom lines and stay ahead of the competition. If in doing so their world shrinks to the office cubicle and the grid of PowerPoint presentations, they aren8217;t whining; burnout be damned.

8220;I don8217;t want to work after I am 50. I have just 10-12 years more to give to my career. I can either make it big or become mediocre by the time I am 45. At the beginning of your career, it8217;s no big deal to push yourself beyond the limit,8221; says Sharma.

This media executive and others of his ilk are products of their time. Like Sharma and Deshmukh, burger-chomping, mall-hopping urban India too is chafing at the limits set by earlier generations and warming to the promise of a resurgent economy. In April this year, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram set a target of 10 per cent growth rate. It8217;s these young men who promise to make it a reality. They are the faces of India8217;s growth story unfolding across bourses and boardrooms. The energy one senses in their restless career graphs is also the energy powering the Sensex on its romps towards higher peaks.

However, behind the dash to meet the deadline lurks an anxiety: there is only so much space at the top. Between 1994 and 2000, the Indian job market grew by only 1.07 per cent a year. The workforce has grown at an annual rate of 1.9 per cent. Only the information technology sector bucked the trend: Infosys, Wipro and TCS added between 50,000 and 80,000 employees each in the last 10 years.

But Sharma 038; Co are betting on globalisation. Over the last three years, India has been the second fastest-growing economy in the world, clocking a 8.6 per cent growth rate. Let8217;s put it in perspective. According to the World Economic Outlook, a report released by the International Monetary Fund in September 2006, the forecast for global growth has been marked up to 5.1 per cent in 2006 and 4.9 per cent in 2007. It also predicts a slowdown in the growth of the US economy from 3.4 per cent in 2006 to 2.9 per cent in 2007.

Another study by the IMF in 2004 estimates that the Indian market will show an 800 per cent wage increase over the next four decades. Even the chronicler of globalisation8217;s discontents, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, is optimistic about the country. 8220;India has benefited enormously from globalisation. One of the major sources of growth for India has been the export of services. That growth wouldn8217;t be there without globalisation,8221; he said in a recent interview.

And if India is the new land of opportunities, people like Nikhil Lodaya, 24, are game for hard work. The senior consultant with Hanmer and Partner in Mumbai did not wait to finish his studies before venturing into the job market choosing, instead, to balance a postgraduate diploma with his first job with Paradigm Shift, a PR firm. 8220;These days it doesn8217;t make sense to take a break and then study. I thought I could manage both and I did,8221; he says.

So, in the past two-and-a-half years he has spent with Paradigm, Lodaya has taken only two days8217; leave. 8220;Why do I need to waste time on unnecessary things when I could use it to do something constructive?8221; he asks. The puritan work ethic has walked into Indian offices. And it pays.

In his nine-year professional life, Sharma has got eight promotions. Deshmukh earns nine times more than what he started with and has worked his way to five promotions in five years. Women too aren8217;t ready to lose out on the sweepstakes. Shobha Pawar, a public relations officer with a Pune-based holiday company, Destinations Resorts, has put in 10-hours workdays to expand her client base. It has also meant taking only a day8217;s leave in the past two years. Marriage is on hold for the 31-year-old. 8220;I am young and can devote a few more years to my profession.8221;

Perhaps. Often, though, it is at the cost of one8217;s health. 8220;In the last 10-15 years, stress levels have gone up so sharply that the age of a person prone to cardiac arrests has gone down from 50 years to 32,8221; says Shailaja Ranjan Raj, consultant with Gurgaon-based Rubicon Learning Systems. 8220;Everyone is running, but in the process they forget that their bodies and minds need rest.8221;

This may also be the reason that the road from air-conditioned offices is leading to lonely homes. All work and no holiday is not the recipe for a happy domestic life. Sharma8217;s wife, a lecturer, finds it difficult to deal with his decision to skip holidays. Like many couples, they don8217;t find time for each other. A normal day for Sharma begins at 8 in the morning and ends between 10 and 11 pm. By the time he gets back, she is fast asleep.

Companies are making the most of this zeal and many professionals are walking into the no-holiday-fat-incentive trap. Bangalore-based Nalin Reddy, who works with a software firm, says, 8220;I don8217;t mind working on weekends or even while I am on holiday. Employers reward us through promotions or foreign trips.8221; A few organisations encourage workers to use up their leaves. 8220;We give our employees flexible work timings. To ensure motivation, we organise movie outings and dinners once a month,8221; says Anirudh Rajan, director, Paradigm Shift. Radhika Das, HR manager of GlobalServices, seconds Rajan. 8220;We believe in intelligent use of our employees8217; time. So we send them on foreign tours often.8221;

For all that, the invasiveness of professional life is becoming a cause for worry. Delhi-based psychoanalyst Mridula Ghodke gets 10-12 patients a day suffering from anxiety and nervous breakdowns, which, in turn, lead to physical disorders. 8220;It8217;s a competitive world, so you can8217;t take a break. There is also the fear of losing out on the competition,8221; she reasons. The fragility of personal bonds is also pushing professionals to seek fulfilment at work. 8220;If they are unhappy at home, they don8217;t mind spending the extra time working. Laptops and cell phones also don8217;t allow you to switch off work,8221; she adds.

Do they want to? The answer lurks between the puff of a cigarette, the peal of a cell phone and the meeting that never gets done.