On Thursday 22 Mar 2012 2:42:39 am Srini RamaKrishnan wrote: > There's no shortage of jobs that will turn you single if you let them. > I once worked in consulting where everyone with at least five years in > the firm was a divorcee, or a drunk or a serial credit card debtor or > all of them.
When I first went to the UK in the 1980s I deliberately applied for and got a job that entailed my being a trainee surgeon on call every alternate day. That translated to working 132 hours and 40 hours every alternate week i.e an average of over 85 hours per week. For an unmarried young me it made sense because I was doing operations in numbers that few people can hope to do in any other system. The system was made illegal in a few years when it was realised that tired doctors were making mistakes. But I found a cultural difference in the work ethos I had been taught and what was practised in the UK. I had been taught these vague ideas that "Work is worship" and "Duty first". In the UK I learned that there is such a thing as "time off". When I had a free wekend I was totally free. From 5 PM Friday to 9 AM Monday nothing work related would come my way. This does not work well in private medical practice, but nevertheless it made a change from what I had been exposed to for years. I get the feeling that tens of thousands of young enthusiastic Indians have been "had" and taken for a ride by the "Info tech" sector. All young Indians join with their heads full of "Work is worship", "Duty first" stuff. If the pay is low they soon learn that work need not be worshiped that much. But if salaries are insanely high - people are driven to think that they need to put in as much work as they think the salary is worth - or else the employer implies the same thing. Especially in India where young people have family support from parents newly freed from paying college fees proudly encourage their clever baby to earn his gi-normous salary and fully support his busting his butt and having no life outside of work as an apt follow on to his 6 AM to 9 PM tuitions schedule that he had before he got into college. shiv
