Column | Work on Sundays: About 90-hour weeks and uber wealthy uncles telling everyone to work harder 

‘You must be seen working, or rather you must be seen at work.’ 
| Photo Credit: Illustration: Sreejith R. Kumar

Even the song tells us ‘Never on a Sunday’. Oh you you can kiss me on a Monday… a Tuesday… a Wednesday… a Thursday, a Friday and Saturday is best… But never, never on a Sunday, a Sunday, a Sunday, ‘cause that’s my day of rest…

Well, not if Larsen & Toubro chairman S.N. Subrahmanyan could have his way. Unlike Narayana Murthy, Subrahmanyan was not a household name. But now thanks to an undated video that’s gone viral, he has his 15 minutes of fame. Or at least one Sunday’s worth.

In what appeared to be an internal meeting, Subrahmanyan is seen regretting he cannot make his employees work on Sundays, too. “If I can make you work on Sundays, I will be more happy, because I work on Sundays also.” His logic? “How long can you stare at your wife? How long can the wives stare at their husbands? Get to the office and start working.”

Subrahmanyan has been roundly roasted for his cavalier disregard for work-life balance. It also seems he lives in a world where the men work and the wife stays at home, waiting for her man. Even when said man is home, his only job seems to be to stare at his wife because, god forbid, he should help out with the housework. One of the stinging ripostes to his statement was a meme that quipped ‘Someone needs to tell the L&T head that if you work 90 hours & don’t stare at your wife, someone else will’. 

Also, the poor rich man does not understand that spouses staring at each other is so 1990s anyway. In 2025, they will spend their Sundays staring at individual screens anyway, just on their smartphones rather than the office laptop. Nothing says married life as much as a couple, sitting quietly next to each other, at home or in a cafe, staring into their phones.

Never really out of office

Subrahmanyan joins the list of uber wealthy tone-deaf uncles telling everyone to work harder so they can become wealthier. As it is we live in a world where thanks to smartphones we are never really out of office. Murthy had already urged younger employees to work 70-hour weeks. Subrahmanyan has just moved the needle up a little bit to 90. Surely, someone else will come along and round it off to 100 soon.

This is not to say the larger message about enhancing productivity is misplaced. Except, Subrahmanyan and Murthy seem stuck in a world where productivity seems to be still measured in the number of hours at the office rather than efficiency. You must be seen working, or rather you must be seen at work. 

In that sense, little has changed from a government office in 1943 Kerala stingingly described by Abraham Verghese in his novel The Covenant of Water. Here “the work is to sit. You come in the morning, you sit and stare at the files in front of you, and make a long face. Eventually you take out your pen. When the high priest looks your way, you take the first file and untie the laces holding papers down. But whenever the high priest steps out, you and the others jump up and stand near his desk, under the fan, telling jokes. That’s the work.”

Working seven days a week

Of course, what Subrahmanyan (and his critics) fail to note is millions of Indians don’t have Sundays off anyway. They work seven days a week — not because they don’t want to stare at their spouses but because they cannot afford not to. The household help getting a day off is a new and relatively rare phenomenon still. In most homes which have a cook or a cleaning person, they still come every day. And most Indians, including myself, have grown up used to that even as we have complained that we only get Sundays off and not the whole weekend. 

The istri-wallah on my street irons clothes every single day. The fishmonger sets up shop at the crack of dawn every morning. The young men running the cheap hotel across the street are up past midnight every day washing pots and pans and chopping onions and potatoes. By the time I wake up and have my coffee, they are back at work cooking huge pots of rice and dal. I never see them take a day off. 

And even higher up the pay scale, millions of freelancers can never say “Never on a Sunday”. When you are a freelancer, a day you don’t work is a day you don’t get paid. But it’s a compulsion, not an aspiration. That’s what Subrahmanyan did not realise as he turned Larsen & Toubro into the subject of memes.

But the richly entitled would not understand that, not in a month of Sundays.

The writer is the author of ‘Don’t Let Him Know’, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions, whether asked or not.