At the beginning of my journalism career, when I moved to Delhi in 1995 and started working in a leading business magazine, I found that juniors addressed seniors by their first names or nick names. I was a novice and naive too. It was the beginning of my exposure to the real world of working life. Prior to my first job in Delhi I had just put in six months in Patna in the office of a big national daily.
The working environment in Patna was encroached by the backward, feudal mindset of Bihar. There also juniors addressed seniors by their first names but always suffixed the name by ji or sir. I figured that the national daily was trying to set up a new working ethos steeped in liberty, fraternity and equality as practised in the developed Western world, but it was too much to expect Bihar to really accept it.
But Delhi, I assumed, must be different. For me, calling my boss by his first name meant that I could feel close and friendly with him. It meant camaraderie, openness, fluidity in the hierarchy. It meant I could not just appreciate something good he had done but also question some wrong done by him. How very unrealistic I was. Soon, through several incidents and encounters, I realised that calling seniors by their first names was just hollow tokenism.
The rigid hierarchy was very much in place. Yes, someone could be foolish enough to question one's boss. The boss might be refined enough not to take a person to task blatantly for doing that. But it would mean that the person would become a marked man for the boss and made to suffer so much that he would start thinking of changing his job.
Nothing had changed in corporate India. I am talking about 1995, four years after liberalisation was introduced. A lot of multinationals had come in, modern workplaces were being set up, international standards of quality of work were expected from the workforce, a lot of international, read Western, modes of professionalism were introduced, but the crooked egos, reeking of negative energy, remained.
On the surface, the workplace looked an honest place where sobriety and civility was practised. But underneath the polished exterior, it was a rough place where lowly politics hounded talent, meritocracy and clean, hard work.
The private sector workplace was an arena of greater stress and tension than the public sector because not only was the work regimen longer in duration and harsher, it also had the possibility dangling on every worker of being dismissed after being made a target of cheap politics. The Pareto principle was in full operation and 20 per cent of the employees did 80 per cent of the work.
Those who did work were the simple lot who were constantly burdened with more and more work and those who shirked work were the smart ones who compensated their lack of performance by guile and chicanery.
One example will show how work was done. Work took place almost round the clock in the business magazine for which I worked in Delhi in 1995. On one occasion, while I was still quite new to the place and the most junior worker in the editing department, my seniors left office at 3 in the morning after telling me to "just flip through some pages".
They told me I was unlikely to find any mistakes in them as they had already thoroughly edited them. left alone in the office, I finished my quota of work and then started going through the pages they had left for me. They were full of mistakes. It was likely they had never been edited. I will never know if that is true, but the ploy of my seniors might have been to dump their work on me and move on.
If I did not sincerely edit those pages and mistakes remained in the work, they would tell their superiors that they had asked me to check the pages and I had done shoddy work. In the stifling hierarchical set-up of the place, I could not argue with them and tell their superiors that I had been told the pages had been edited and my job was to just give them a cursory glance. Arguments and clarifications would be construed as misbehaviour and insubordination.
The pages they had given me had a map of Europe and some major cities were marked on it. I found at 5 in the morning that the position of the most European cities named in the map was incorrect. I was not sure about the location of the cities and I didn't know the location of the atlas too in the library of the office.
It was still not the era in which the Internet was available to every person in the editing department round the clock. I had no access to any source from which I could find the correct location of the cities on the map. I dived into the library with all the vigour I could summon at 5.30 in the morning after putting in about 18 hours of work. I finally found the atlas and changed the locations according to it.
In the process of "flipping through the pages" in which I was unlikely to find any mistakes, the clock struck 11 am of a new day and employees started streaming in for the day's work. The blessed editor too came and when he found I had been stuck with work for almost 24 hours non-stop, a look of utter sympathy came over his face. It was the closing day of the magazine.
After putting the magazine to bed, which means after sending it for printing, employees in the editing department took two consecutive days off. The off days came after 10-12 days of work without any off. The editor looked at me with utmost compassion and asked me to take an off that day. I told myself that the off was due anyway.
It was no extra relief provided for the gruelling 24-hour workday. And then the editor looked at me sternly and asked me to come for work the next day. I protested that I was entitled to two days' off after the cycle of an edition. The stern look on his face grew sterner and he said, "Amit, what I have said is final."
It did not make matters one bit more pleasant because I addressed the editor by his first name.
amitshekhara@gmail.com