PFA: My Dead Vacation

Artificial Intelligence will soon be out there to take our jobs. But as the popular Internet meme goes, machines can’t take our jobs… if we become machines.

And so, working crazy is primed and stress has become a currency to flaunt. Taking a breather is for losers, real men take a paracetamol and email the project file at 3 am on a Saturday night. The gulag-like slavery and peanut-sized paychecks are so mainstream that if you leave office at 6 pm, people ask you if you’ve taken a half day. And do you dare ever ask for leave?

Going on leave is so demonised in Indian office culture, that employees feel guilt and shame even asking for a few days off — about as stressful a question as asking your boss for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He looks at you with the same level of love Arvind Kejriwal reserves for Narendra Modi; the tension could be cut with a knife.

Every leave application turns into a leave negotiation that would put a sabziwala outside Malad station to shame. “Why do you need three days for your sister’s wedding? I’ll give you three days for your wedding. Chal, two days extra I’ll give even for honeymoon hahaha.” You pretend that was funny because you have a job to keep, but you know what’s coming next. In a velvety soft tone comes the dangerous question that’ll decide the fate of your “vacation”.

“You’ll carry your laptop, right?”

This right here, ladies and gentlemen, is the word of the devil. You can judge the evil in the framing of the question itself. It’s not asked in a polite and neutral tone – Will you carry your laptop? That’s where decency and niceness lie. But ain’t nobody got time for that in desi office culture. The question already assumes that you will carry your laptop. That’s what normal people do right? Go on a trip to Bali so they can work on spreadsheets from a beach. Right?

The other 364 days of the year, you’re an incompetent buffoon who can never get anything done and is an embarrassment to the organisation. But on this one question, if you respond in the negative, you will be subject to a long barrage of “how deadlines are important, how your work is important, how we operate on a tight schedule in a competitive environment”. Yes, everything is important, except your honeymoon.

In Indian corporate offices, there is work in office, there is work at home, and then there is carry laptop on leave. It is an attempt to squeeze some work out of you even when you’re on a camel in the middle of a desert safari or in an underwater staring match with a dolphin. There is something rooted in basic common sense and logic that bosses fail to understand, which is that working while you’re on leave is not leave. It is the textbook definition of work. And work ≠ vacation unless you’re a Yatra.com tour manager or a fashion blogger.  

You’re always told there’ll be no work, you need to carry it “just in case”. They always make it sound sweet and innocent, maybe you’ll have to just update a file for a couple of minutes or forward a mail, it’s going to be nothing really. It sounds like merely a formality, akin to linking your Aadhaar to your bank account. But we all know how that one ends. You will receive a message every 12 seconds and eventually you’ll want to kill yourself in a foreign environment.

Carrying your laptop on a vacation also has wider psychological impacts. The first time you take the laptop out of your luggage bag on your vacation, you feel inexplicable guilt and shame like the first time you uploaded a washroom mirror selfie. But then you get used to it. Even friends and family travelling with you keep continuously mocking you for being a fucking loser, like Hrithik Roshan from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

If you ever think your work from a remote location in Himachal in the middle of a trek will ever be appreciated, you’re in for another thing. In India, whether it’s kids, students or adults, we don’t believe in being appreciative of anyone’s work. It’s always important to point out mistakes and the one time your network wasn’t available in the middle of an important meeting. They’ll never understand, it was just Airtel having that time of the month.

There is no other way to get out of this situation, except a straight-up refusal. When it comes to the office laptop question, always deny. Not only are you allowed leave as per company policy, you are also allowed statutory leave and the whole point of leave is to tune out work, chill, and relax the fuck out. Regardless of what managers try to tell you, no one dies if an Excel file isn’t finished or a mail doesn’t get sent when you’re away for six days. Besides, knowing that you’re on leave, it’s their job to assign it to someone else and get it done.

After all, the hint of a manager’s role lies in their designation, it is literally their job “to manage”. He gets a salary that is three times yours — let him also justify his paycheck.

Control + Alt + Delete. Shut down.

Should Women Cricketers Get Equal Pay? The Economic Argument

The Indian women’s cricket team is on an absolute tear in the ongoing Asia Cup, demolishing opposition with an authority that rivals world-beating sides like Viv Richards’ West Indies and Steve Waugh’s Australia. Despite proving for the umpteenth time that the quality of their game is on the same level as their male counterparts, a yawning gap exists when it comes to how they’re rewarded. The prize amount for winning Player of the Match, an honour bagged so far by captain Mithali Raj and Harmanpreet Kaur, is a paltry 250 USD. In comparison, the Man of the Match in the 2016 men’s Asia Cup final, Shikhar Dhawan, took home 7,500 USD. When it comes to getting a slice of the monetary pie, women cricketers are still getting the stepchild treatment from the BCCI.

In March this year, BCCI announced new contracts for both the men’s and women’s cricket teams. A few of Kohli’s boys would be earning 14 times more money than Mithali & Co. To sum up the irony, they decided to make the announcement just a day before Women’s Day.

The pay gap between men and women players of the Indian cricket teams needs more scrutiny than merely comparing final contract figures of male and female cricketers. Not only is it a gender issue, there are also economic realities of the free market attached to it. It is important to understand why these differences exist, how the BCCI – generally regarded one of our most corrupt admin bodies – has failed, and what they can do to correct course. And there’s a lot that the richest sporting body in cricket can do.

Why do male cricketers get paid so much more than their female counterparts?

Think of men’s cricket as a chain reaction, where one thing leads to another. Male cricketers attract bigger crowds and large viewership on TV. These in turn attract big sponsorship and branding deals, which result in higher revenues being generated from the game, which then enable these fat cheques and huge monetary contracts for male players. One of the reasons women are paid less is because – sadly – women’s sport makes less money.

It brings us to a difficult question that needs deeper introspection than just a knee-jerk Twitter outrage. Why do people not follow women’s cricket with the same ardour and in the same capacity? If we don’t watch the games and follow the team’s progress with the same level of obsession that we followed Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma’s wedding, can we really blame sponsors and advertisers if they don’t see a similar potential in the women’s game? The very people who want equal pay for women players haven’t adapted to the game. Are we, then, not part of the same problem?

Some arguments have been made about how women’s sport isn’t as interesting. To which, I call bullshit. One only needs to recollect the enthralling Olympic final between PV Sindhu and Carolina Marin, or thousands of other exciting contests across sports day in and day out. To say that men’s sport is 10, 20, or 40 times more interesting to demand that kind of a pay difference, is a ridiculous argument that holds very little ground. Besides, it’s not true. Think about the success of the Women’s Big Bash League in Australia, that has been an economic success and witnessed record viewership in 2017. The 2015 Women’s Football World Cup final had more viewership in the US than the men’s football world cup final.

The market and the opportunity is right out there. If only we – viewers, the BCCI, sponsors, and advertisers – knew how to take advantage of it.

But we don’t, because women’s cricket has been primed for failure. This isn’t an equal opportunity market at many levels, and the pay cheque is only a small part of it.

This is where the BCCI can make amends. Women’s cricket will catch up with the men’s game only and only when the body decides to invest in it commercially. This can’t happen piecemeal. It has to be at a pace similar to the men’s game. They have to ensure infrastructure and quality wherein women don’t have to work part-time because sport is not a viable full-time profession. Senior domestic players make around ₹30,000 a year, which is ₹2,500 per month. You probably pay your house help a little more than that. How can the players be expected to opt for cricket as a full-time career?

It is quite appalling how little Indian women’s players are paid compared to their international counterparts in Australia and England. Cricket Australia covers its domestic cricketers under central contracts and also came up with the Women’s Big Bash League. Even the England Cricket Board has pledged £3 million for a Women’s Twenty20 Super League.

This is an important time to emphasise, yet again, that the BCCI is the richest sporting body in the cricket. In the entire world. What gives?

The solution lies in another chain reaction. If the BCCI decides to invest in the game, women players can think of it as a full-time profession. Which in turn means, that the quality of the players and the overall game will get better. We’ll see an influx of fans and sponsors that the women’s game truly deserves.

India keenly followed the 2017 Women’s Cricket World Cup, with the final attracting 19.53 million impressions, making it the most watched women’s sporting event in India. It’s a no brainer that we love cricket in India, and the women in blue made us super proud. After the end of the tournament, captain Mithali Raj floated the idea of a women’s T20 league in India, saying that the “time is right”.

The BCCI keeps paying lip service, making public statements about doing more for the women’s game. Now, however, the time is right for them to put their money where their mouth is. Equal pay will follow.

“Science, Commerce Ya Arts?” Where Teenage Dreams Go to Die

When you are the tender age of 15, you will be asked a question that will define the rest of your life: Science, Commerce, or Arts?

To expect to know what you want to become at an age when you are still following Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon on Cartoon Network, is like taking the host of a reality show and asking him to run the most powerful country in the world. Oh wait…  

To say that the pressure is immense is an understatement. Justin Bieber and Prithvi Shaw would probably be the only teenagers who can deal with that kind of pressure at that age. The cluelessness and anxiety you have about making this decision is the kind that the BJP government had before making the demonetisation announcement. So I did what desi kids do, turn to my parents. Big mistake.

“I scored 77 per cent, which was pretty good in the ’70s, but we didn’t have a clue what to do. So I submitted my form in a Science college, a Commerce college, and an Arts one,” explained my pitashri. I was waiting for the punchline but it never came. To sum up his decision-making in two words, it was bhagwan bharose. I started to lose respect for my dad faster than the stock price of Gitanjali Gems tanked after the NiMo scam. But I looked back and realised that things have worked out pretty fine for my father.

In 2005, bhgawan bharose would not cut it. Also by 2005, I had to not only deal with regional, linguistic, and cultural stereotypes, but also educational stereotypes. Students who decided to pursue the Science stream were considered geeks, nerds who would never get laid, and would grow up to be Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk. The average students, who were not geeky enough to pursue Science, but were not complete losers, would end up pursuing Commerce. Arts was for people who didn’t take their life and career seriously, but wanted to while away their time and fool around with girls. We are truly secular in the sense that there’s nothing we won’t stereotype.

But what decided your future and the stream you finally picked was “scope”  – a word as overused in 2005 as “lit” was overused in 2017. Which stream provided what career scope was a much-discussed topic with dads, uncles, uncle’s best friend, and every other male member the family knew of. Of course, Science was declared as the “scope-iest” of them all, but in the end, marks were the prime decider of your fate. It was merely an illusion that you had choice. This was an academic North Korea. If you scored 60 per cent and wanted to take up Science, people would look at you like they looked at Ryan Seacrest at the Oscar red carpet. None of my cousins had ever pursued Arts; it was seen as the WWE equivalent of tapping out of a career.  

In the worst sales pitch of all time, I was advised to take up Commerce because I loved math. I began my journey as a Commerce graduate, who then went on to pursue CA. I made eight attempts and survived hundreds of sleepless nights, but as you can see that didn’t quite work out. After spending about six years in the industry crunching numbers and my soul, I decided to chuck it all to pursue my passion for writing. And it hasn’t been all too bad. Because careers don’t end at the age of 25.  

Now in 2018, we are grappling with the dreaded question again, as my sister gets ready to start college. A decade has passed since I appeared for the Std X examination, but things have changed quite drastically in India. Ask the Congress. The decision-making is more structured. Both the children and their parents are experimenting with revolutionary ideas like… finding out what their kids are good at, asking them what they like, and actually being supportive of them.

My sister was learning Spanish by the age of five and took horse-riding classes in the third grade. She is 15 and she has already taken three different aptitude tests, has attended multiple sessions of counselling with education experts, and has attempted a number of mock entrance exams. If we give her a couple of more years, she will probably star in the next Avengers movie. She has set her mind on the future with a confidence alien to all of us. She has decided to piss off half the family by opting for a career in the performing arts. Convincing the family that it’s a stream with “scope” was like challenging the existence of God. But she managed to do it.

I’m pretty sure her decision will turn out to be the right one. With all the analysis and groundwork that goes into making the big decision these days, it would be cruel to know it worked out for my dad but not my sister. As for me, I got it wrong at first, and then eventually right because life is all about second chances, third chances, and 28 such chances.

The 21st Century’s Cold War is the Office Air Conditioner

Elon Musk has managed to float an electric car in space, we’re transplanting animal organs into human bodies, and we have even achieved recreating meat in the laboratory. We have all of this technological progress and finesse at our feet, but there is a final problem we still don’t have the solution for: the office air conditioner.

That seven people in a co-working space can’t agree on a mutual AC temperature must surely be one of the biggest questions of this age. In a world where Google can provide the answer to every question, why does the air conditioner stand in the way of complete collegial harmony?

One reason could be that we can’t get the language right. If you really look at it, “temperature kam karo,” is an ambiguous command, open for interpretation. Does it mean yanking up the warmth? Does it mean that your colleagues could do with more chill (they almost always do)? Lloyd has come up with an AC that has WiFi and AC remotes these days have more buttons than a PlayStation controller. But every AC in every office still has only two modes: igloo and desert.

Which would have been OK if you’re from Delhi. However, for the rest of the working population in the country, this “blow hot, blow cold” attitude leads to intense internal politicking.

One brave soul will break the ice and ask the rhetorical question “Isn’t it too hot here?” Nobody wants to force their personal preference on other people and this soft approach is the best way to gain consensus. After all, there’s centuries of empirical evidence that democracies work better than dictatorships. You can’t just change the AC temperature because you feel a certain way. All you need is someone else to also validate your personal condition, or suddenly it just becomes only “your” problem.

Another area of conflict in office is – who should be the custodian of the AC remote? The remote in an Indian office gets passed around more frequently than a soft toy in the passing-the-parcel game at a toddler’s birthday party. Everyone is constantly on the lookout for where the damned thing is, since it always has a sneaky habit of hiding under a mound of tissue paper in the pantry. Maintaining a clear line of sight for the remote at all times is more difficult than the job of an American sniper. Just like dogs mark their territory, desi colleagues mark the AC remote and the acceptable range it is allowed to travel.

After spending a few months in office, distinct groups are formed that lobby together to have their say over AC temperatures. You tend to get along well with people around you who have the same “AC taste” as you. People who don’t agree with the decision have their own passive aggressive ways to show discontent. This can sometimes devolve into an ugly battle of the sexes, although not always.

You’ll find the people divided over the climate change debate, wearing sweaters in Mumbai in the middle of May. You start sweating with just the thought that there is that much wool making contact with their skin. At times, folks will just get up and move to a different place, but in this very loud and overt way, making sure that you’ve noticed their movement, a not-so-subtle way of letting you know that you’ve driven them out of their preferred seat, and by the way, you’re also on asshole. Out of nowhere, someone will loudly make a call to the office boy and ask, “Yaar who changed the AC temperature?” The tone is arrogant and seemed to be aimed at office help but it is actually directed at other personnel in office.

In a country of immense diversity in food, language, culture and tradition, we still struggle to come to an agreed solution in the simple binary of hot and cold. This is the real cold war of the 21st century and there seems to be no imminent solution in sight.

Desi Parent Trap: “Abhi Mehnat Kar Lo, You Can Enjoy Later”

Every desi kid has been told three things, growing up: “Paise ped pe nahi ugte”, “Shor karoge to bhoot aa jayega”, and “Abhi mehnat kar lo, baad mein aish hai”. While the first is just a plain hard fact, the second is a sly tactic to get you in order that neither party believes, while the third is a sadistic, evil, and dangerous trap.

Everyone vividly remembers the first time they fell for it: the big 10. Your tenth grade board exams is the first big test of your life and it’s hyped up like an end-of-the-world war which will determine whether you live or die. Teachers are blunt: “If you don’t score well, how will you ever make anything of your life?” Parents are a little more subtle. When you’re watching TV and a nariyal wala, a thelawala, or any blue-collar worker shows up, their response is, “Dekho padhai nahi karoge na to ye sab karna padega,” delivering a dual blow: One to your ego, and the other to the dignity of labour. Fuck Pokemon, WWE, and cricket, getting a good score in the 10th grade is treated with the same level single-minded concentration as Hrithik Roshan displayed in becoming a good soldier in Lakshya. After all, abhi mehnat kar lete hai, baad mein to aish hai.

You kill every impulse, compromise every aspect of your life, and tirelessly work like a Soviet worker at the gulag. Of course, you ace your board exams, and are all ready for a life full of aish. As you begin the inevitable planning for a celebratory party, the parental unit taps you on the shoulder and reminds you: It’s not time for “injwoyment” just yet. Another storm awaits in the form of your 12th-grade exams.

Your 10th score is casually dismissed, like a beef-related lynching in Uttar Pradesh or Haryana. Securing admission to a good college is now the new mission, and just like The Fast and the Furious franchise, the same characters are saying and doing the same things, but in a different set-up. Bas ek baar ache college mein admission ho jaaye, baad mein aish hai.

You look forward to college life the same way Diljit Dosanjh looks forward to a Kylie Jenner Instagram post. After all, aish time is upon you and you’ll party like it’s 1999. However, excitement is short-lived, as the party is crashed on the orientation day itself, when the college principal telling you these are the “most important years” of your life “that will decide your career”. The buzzwords are already getting to you now, and you are overwhelmed by a nagging sense of yeh saare milke humko pagal bana rahe hai madar…

By now, your enthusiasm is beginning to lose its sheen. You’re a little world-weary and you feel a little like India, four years after 2014, hoping against hope for acche din.

You go to tuitions and coaching classes where professors are just raising the stakes all the time like an IPL auction, belittling your school success with “college exams are the only ones that matter”. If you don’t get good scores, how will you get a good job? For the fourth time in six years, your life has a new defining moment. Just like Dairy Milk after the keeda fiasco, the same chocolate has a different packaging and now you’re told “Abhi mehnat kar lo, college ke baad toh aish hai."

You get out of a college with a reputable degree and that diminishing voice in your head asks you to hang on to hope. Maybe now, you think, finally it’s time for aish. No one is going to fucking ruin your party. You’ve done all this mehnat the entire decade and it is finally time to chill and mint money.

You walk into your first job with the confidence of Harvey Specter only to be shot down like a US drone in the Middle East. And even here, there is no respite. Whispers of the same fucking catchphrase float about, and each one leaves an exit wound in your soul. “Bas pehle thode saal mehnat kar lo, baad mein aish hai”. The cut-throat competition doesn’t even allow you to take a lunch break in peace, and the low-paying jobs ensure that the only place where you can afford a house is in the game of Monopoly.

You start to wonder and ask yourself: When will this mystical era of aish arrive? Do we just keep slogging away the best years of our life – school, college, early 20s – to never be able to enjoy? It dawns upon you that there’s no way you will be able to retire anytime soon and by the time you might have some leeway, you’ll become ancient like the statues at Khajuraho that are defiled by everyone from Sonu to Tina.

What aish will you have when your spine looks like a question mark and you lose your breath after every three steps? Instead of dessert and drinks, you’ll be consuming injections and pills. At that age, the only fun you can have is getting six uninterrupted hours of sleep. You realise that all of this aish talk – indeed your entire life – has been a lie, just like the planet Pluto and whatever character JK Rowling plans to manipulate this week.

“Abhi mehnat kar lo, baad mein aish hai” is the original Fake News of the world. Don’t fall for it.