You all must remember the scene from 3 Idiots where Virus says to Rancho after a student dies of suicide, “Ek student pressure nahin le paata, toh hum zimedaar kaise hai?” Sounds familiar in context to a recent death in the country? When the mother of 26-year-old Anna lost her daughter, she penned down a heartfelt letter to the Chairman of EY India addressing how the extreme work pressure led to her deteriorating health and her eventual demise.
One expects a response to this with sheer empathy and accountability, right? Read what Rajiv Memani, EY India chairman had to say. “We have around one lakh employees. There is no doubt each one has to work hard. Anna worked with us only for four months. She was allotted work like any other employee. We don’t believe that work pressure could have claimed her life.”
Yes, they don’t believe work pressure could not have claimed her life. After 15 years of Rancho saying, “Aisi koi machine hi nahin bani, jo yahaan (dimaag) ka pressure nap sake”, we really wish there was one, one that could measure and tell the correlation the cause-effect has.
One thing particularly caught my attention while reading the letter from Anna’s mother, she had constantly mentioned that Anna was a fighter, that she was not weak. Every time something like this happens, a section starts complaining about how they were unable to handle the pressure of life and work, how they were just weak. Anna was a Chartered Accountant, which requires you to crack one of the toughest exams in the country. Saurabh Kumar Laddha, the 25-year-old consultant at McKinsey & Company who died of suicide for a similar reason of excessive work pressure is an IIT and IIM graduate. So pressure and competition were no apprehension for these young individuals. Thus, no matter what anyone says, we won’t believe that work pressure didn’t kill them.
What really baffled me in that letter was that no one from her company attended Anna’s funeral. Have the coveted walls of these esteemed organizations become so thick that they are now impervious to empathy?
There’s an unequivocal sentiment echoing across all the news channel discussions now that we need cultural shift in our corporate structure, a culture that glorifies long working hours and hustle. According to reports, nearly 60 percent of Indians are experiencing burnout in workplaces. And when this myth of ‘great place to work’ busts for the youth, they see the reality of those places marred with a psychological lack of safety and poor role modeling. The company culture is after all a trickle-down of what the leaders of the corporation’s leaders think. Are human lives not an important index of what leadership is about?
Why overwork so much then you ask, where it’s at the cost of your own health and sometimes, your life itself. Well, it’s sort of an accepted norm that if you want a corporate career in India, you have to be a part of the rat race. The apparent ‘meritocracy’ systems in these corporates create a perception that you ought to work beyond your limits and beyond anyone else to succeed, or at the least to survive in the organisation. In a developing country like ours, where there are thousands of unemployed people with degrees available at a cheaper cost than one, one is always reminded how replaceable one is. The pressure to succeed in life is already at an all-time high, with the constant popping up of some 30-year-old becoming a billionaire on our screen.
EY was a dream job for Anna. When Anna joined the team, she was told about the excessive workload that was upon the team for which a lot of employees had left. Anna was asked to ‘stick around’ and change this image and she tried her best. While she didn’t crumble, she succumbed. I wish Anna and many freshers like her knew or had been provided the courage to set boundaries and say no in workplaces to unrealistic expectations.
As her mother writes, “Anna was a fighter”, we want to address all the people in the workplaces who say, “Pressure nahin le paa rahi/raha”. Why create that pressure in the first place? And if you have accepted that it’s the only way to go about it, the least you can do is show the empathy every single human being deserves. Hard work might not kill someone, but chances are the pressure, from work and peers, might just do it.