England Diary Part 3: London Tube Trails

After landing in London, my employers provided me with an ‘Oyster card’, a blue ATM card-type object that can be used to criss-cross London. All you need is to swipe to gain entry into the tube and buses. 

The nearest station to my lodgings was Wembley North. And on the first day, I got into the station by scanning the card and was guided by my colleague to the relevant platform. 

Wembley North is an ancient-looking two-platform station, and the premises could easily be mistaken for a Matunga or Tambaram or any other Indian suburban station - minus the plastic bag and cigarette packet litter, unauthorised flex and paper billboards, no handbills of piles and fistula clinics strewn around, no paan stains, and finally no stench of urine. Even the tracks looked free from any litter.

Conversely, this is how most stations in India would have looked if people had shown better civic sense and the authorities were more service-minded.

The station had a smallish entrance with two swipe card entry gates and the stairs to its two platforms. 

Wembley North was the overground outpost of the Bakerloo line, which goes underground after Queen’s Park towards Elephant and Castle in Central London.

It was around 7 am and sparsely crowded. But as I gazed at the passengers on the platforms, I could sense the multi-cultural Britain with many South Asian and African faces.  

After a short wait, a tube train ambled into the platform, making loud clanking noises.

The train’s footboard was nearly a foot below the platform! 

All through my stay in London, the most common in-train announcement used to be ‘please mind the gap while deboarding’. 

The train was a rickety old one, and to me it came as a big let-down. I was expecting them to be on par or even swankier than Bengaluru’s Namma Metro.

I later read that the Bakerloo line is one of the oldest among London's tube rail system, and the rakes that run on this line are the oldest ones, with some of them of 1972 vintage. 

The doors of these trains appear to be very reluctant to close, and at some stations they do so after many back-and-forth groaning, like children being dragged to get an injection.

And unless all the doors close, the trains don’t leave the platform.

The seats are fabric-upholstered ones and placed with a mix of along the side and across formations.

Once the train entered the underground section mobile network became patchy, and the clanging noise grew louder, often drowning out the in-train announcements. 

Other than ‘mind the gap’, the other recurring announcement was advising passengers not to touch any strange-looking objects and dial a particular number if anything unattended is found.

Some of the stations on the Bakerloo line have been immortalised by authors and figure in some well-known English novels. 

Thus, on the first day, my heart leapt in excitement when I came across stations like Baker Street and Charing Cross, as it reminded me of Sherlock Holmes. 

Some other names, like Paddington and Piccadilly, brought back memories of reading Agatha Christie and P G Wodehouse, respectively.

We got off at the last station, Elephant and Castle, and my colleague guided me to the office, a five-minute walk from the station.

Baker Street

Although Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character, the Baker Street station’s walls are adorned with memorabilia of the famous detective, who gave many edgy moments for generations of readers.

During my later explorations of this station, I came across a Sherlock Holmes statue outside, and I was told there was a museum nearby.

I also realised that Baker Street station may look ordinary and nondescript while passing in a train, but it was a civil engineering marvel with a complex web of platforms and escalators catering to different lines. 

And mind you, this multi-tiered tube station was built sometime in the late 1800s. 

I had a similar shock when I once got off the Paddington station to meet a friend. 

It too had a maze of different platforms for different lines of the tube station, and it also had overground platforms catering to outstation trains bound for Wales and other destinations. 

When I reached the outstation train platform, a train was getting ready to leave for Swansea.

I had trouble getting used to the escalator etiquette. Those not in a hurry should stand on the right side, and those in a rush can climb up the stairs on the left. 

It came as a bit of a surprise, as the UK follows a left-hand side traffic rule, and I carelessly landed up on the left side a couple of times. 

I was politely told by those in a rush to make way for them and stay on the right.  

Though the Bakerloo line remained the mainstay of my office commute, I used to explore some of the other lines during my weekend sightseeing trips.

The rakes in some of these lines were much swankier and lived up to the expectations we normally have of a first-world country like Britain.

Moreover, the footboards were at platform levels, and there was no need to ‘mind the gap’.

Familiar faces

Though the co-passengers' faces keep changing during the morning tube rides, some appear to be constant and acquire an air of familiarity. 

One of them is a middle-aged black guy with long beaded hair like those Caribbean pop singers, and a neatly trimmed beard.

Whenever I take the last compartment of the 7.15 am train, he will be seated on the last seat.

He used to keep his eyes transfixed on his mobile phone screen, probably watching some downloaded stuff, as once the train goes underground, the internet connectivity gets patchy. 

He used to get out at Warwick Avenue station. His trademark beads were something that caught my attention when I first saw him.

Another is a white, portly man with a beard. He is also in his 40s or even early 50s.

He often wears a shirt with flowery patterns that men would like to wear in beaches, longish shorts, and sports shoes. 

He often carries a suit cover bag. Probably carries the suit he wears at the office. 

His colourful dressing was something that drew my attention on the first day.

Though the October nip was growing stronger by the day, there was no let-up in his Hawaiian sangfroid dressing.

‘Crowded’ Tubes

One day, it was getting late to leave the office, and a colleague told me to hurry up, as trains could get crowded. 

I rushed through my remaining work and reached the Elephant and Castle station. 

Having come from India, where boarding a train at Churchgate and CST in Mumbai is nothing short of a blood sport, I psyched myself up for an impending struggle.

As I entered the Elephant and Castle’s Bakerloo line platform, I began wondering where the crowds were! 

Ok, the number of commuters on that platform was a tad higher than usual, but it in no way appeared intimidating. 

As the train entered the platform, I wondered, “Why is no one lunging into the moving rake to get the favourite window seat”, or “why are the waiting passengers not girding up to gate-crash into the train the moment it came to a halt?”

They patiently waited for the incoming passengers to alight before getting in. 

The seats got filled, and a few were left comfortably standing. 

The doors soon closed, and the train got going. No broken spectacles, no loosened shirt buttons, no ‘ooh-aah’ over fresh aches on shins acquired while boarding the train. 

Maybe things might get tough on the way. 

There were some additions at the subsequent stations like Waterloo and Paddington, but they were no match to Dadar, which can populate a train to bursting-at-the-seams level even at midnight.

All through the journey, the crowds never looked even marginally threatening or suffocating, like say while travelling from Churchgate to Virar at 6.00 pm.

Doom scrolling

With smartphone doomscrolling becoming a worldwide affliction, London Tube commuters, too, were not immune to it. 

A major chunk of passengers could be seen glued to their phones with ear pods snugly affixed inside their earlobes. Thankfully, no playing of videos without headphones.

However, I still find a tiny minority reading physical newspapers and paperbacks. 

Most newspapers were those picked up from free newspapers like Metro or The Standard stacked up at station entrances. After the commute, they often get discarded on the train. 

Some rare serious readers may carry the bulky print edition of The Guardian or The Times. Once, I was surprised and impressed to see a man reading The Economist.

Newspapers in Britain are unwieldy, running into 50 plus pages, and on Sundays most of them run to over 100 pages!

Those who read paperbacks are more diligent types, and many of them are women. It could range from the current bestsellers to classics, and they read them with much more commitment, unmindful of the surroundings or the train’s clanging and grating noises.

Disruption

During my tube journeys, I often used to come across announcements of services on certain lines getting closed for maintenance works or other reasons, or facing delays. 

I used to pay them the same amount of attention we generally do for safety instructions air hostesses make before take-off. 

But one day, I got caught up in one such disruption, and this happened when I was returning from Oxford University.

I got off the Oxford Tube bus at Hillingdon and took a train to Baker’s Street. 

From there, I got on the usual Bakerloo line for Wembley North. A little later, I heard the announcement that the service will terminate at Queen’s Park. 

When the tube reached Queen’s Park, it was around 9 pm and drizzling. The temperature on my phone was showing 6 degrees Celsius. 

I got off the train and began wondering ‘what next?’ Will I have to walk all the way to the next station in this inclement weather?

I have done that in Mumbai a couple of times during such disruptions.

Or board a bus with little idea of the routes it will take. 

I came across a white lady in a railway uniform and told her my predicament. 

She told me the trains have stopped services, but directed me to a group of railways unform clad guys at the exit. 

They appeared to be South Asians, and they directed me to a nearby bus depot, where a bus with a ‘Rail Replacement Service’ board was waiting. 

I told them about my destination, and they replied that the bus would take me to the nearest station, Harlesdon, from where I could continue my train journey. 

They didn’t charge any money, and the bus took me through various deserted streets and dropped me near Harlesden station. 

At Harlesden, there were a couple of volunteers, this time of African origin, who directed me to the right platform to board the train for Wembley North. 

This hardly even seemed like a disruption, and many of my initial fears were quite unfounded.

England Diary Part 2: Tryst with Big Ben and the Mahatma

As I was climbing the stairs out of the Westminster tube station, I could see the cheerful and touristy hustle outside.

It was a week after I had landed in London, and I was getting used to the intricacies of various routes that the suburban trains or ‘tubes’ had on offer. 

Once I came out, I saw the iconic Big Ben – one of the most photographed structures. It figures prominently on the social media accounts of people who land in London.

It was a Sunday afternoon and the October sun brought no relief from chilly winds.

People were clicking endless photos and selfies and I overheard one young woman grumble, “Damn my phone has run out of storage space.”

Luckily, I arrived a few seconds before 4 o'clock. Though the crowd was waiting in anticipation for the Big Ben chime, I was blissfully unaware of it.

Hence, when it let out its melody, it came as an unexpected surprise.

Barring the vehicles on the road, the whole place got into a suspended animation with all eyes on the landmark clock. Once the chiming ended, the footpaths came back to life.

With the British Parliament and Westminster Abbey in close proximity, the whole area has an upmarket heritage look and has been vigorously marketed for tourists with open-top double-decker buses and guides chaperoning the tourists.

A lot of the tourists happened to be of South Asian descent (read loud-mouthed uncles and aunties, and their equally noisy extended families), with a smattering of Southeast Asians and others thrown in.

I decided to explore around on my own and came across a wooded place where there were many statues.

They were the statues of all the worthies who had made a mark in Britain’s political history.

The first one I came across was Winston Churchill, and to me he looked quite out of sorts without his top hat and cigar. Then I came across other greats like Lloyd George and Robert Peel.

What I next saw was something I was not prepared for. It was a famous face we Indians can never miss. It was the statue of Mahatma Gandhi. 

It came as a very pleasant surprise and made me wonder how the statue of a man who was responsible for the downfall of the British empire find a place right next to the British Parliament! 

Truly, it shows the maturity of the British politicians and the people. Though Gandhi was responsible for ending their empire, they now appreciate his greatness as a person.

To satisfy my curiosity, I later did a Google search and found that it was erected fairly recently in 2015 during the time of David Cameron. 

This is something a person like Churchill, who had called Gandhi a ‘naked fakir’, would not have appreciated, to put it very politely. 

Gandhi stands in good company here - his neighbours are Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom shared his egalitarian views and made it a mission to fight inequalities.

I tried to visit Westminster Abbey nearby, but was told that tourists are not allowed on Sundays, as it is reserved for prayers.

As I was ambling along, wondering ‘what next’, I saw a road sign near a junction, ‘Trafalgar Square’. I decided to walk in that direction. 

I came across a memorial called ‘Women of World War II’ to honour their contributions during the world war. It was in the middle of the road and I could see lots of flower laid near the memorial. 

As I was passing by, I saw on the other side of the road a fit-looking soldier’s statue. 

It made me stop by and wonder, “Is this him?” 

The face looked somewhat similar to the black and white photos I had seen in books and documentaries on the Second World War. 

My hunch grew stronger as the man in the statue was sporting a beret, which used to be his trademark. 

I decided to cross the road to verify. Once I reached, I realized, “Yes, it is him” – Field Marshal Montgomery, who led the British Army during the famous battle of El Alamein in the present-day Egypt.  

He was famously known as Monty, which was prominently written at the bottom of the statue. 

He was standing there unsung. No flowers, and I was the lone visitor at that time. 

Probably it was one of those odd, low-turnout days, or the guides think people may not be interested.

The defence ministry office was located right behind the statue.

After that, I walked down to the street to Trafalgar Square. 

The road was strewn with various government buildings, all easily 400-500 years old. 

At Trafalgar Square, the famous Lord Nelson statue was placed on a very high column, and it was barely visible from the ground. 

I had to move away to the adjacent street to capture it on my phone.

I wish I could see the battle of Trafalgar hero - the original one-eyed Jack, who stopped Napoleon from invading Britain, from closer quarters.  

By now, the dusk was falling, and the nip in the air was getting stronger. 

I decided to call it a day and moved to the nearby Charing Cross station to go back to my lodgings.

England Diary Part 1: The Ubiquitous Letter Boxes

 

During my recent visit to the UK, what struck me on the very first day was the presence of letter boxes on street corners. 

I stood by to take a closer look at one of them near my lodgings and realised that it was a functioning one with a neat coat of paint and clearance timings distinctly written on it.

It had a regal appearance with an ornate top when compared with our bowler hat top letter boxes.

Before the advent of internet, they were the foot soldiers who kept the wheels of communication, both official and personal, running. 

They were the broadbands of that era.  From the central business districts of metro cities to the far-flung hinterlands, they stood steadfastly braving harsh summers and winters.

Royal Mail has a 500-year-old history dating back to King Henry VIII, and in India it is a legacy of the British Raj, established in 1854.

The coming of internet and mobile phones pushed them to the margins and in India these letter boxes soon started gathering rust and disappeared unceremoniously.

Hence, it was quite a surprise, tinged with amusement, for me to see a functioning letter box in the UK.

During my subsequent days of stay in the UK, I came across the presence of gleaming red 'Royal Mail' vans, many of them electric, at various parts of London and other towns I visited.

All this gave me the impression that the despite the internet and mobile phone, the good old 'snail mail' was still not a 'has been' in the UK, and it whetted my curiosity.

Later on, during my visits to some households, I noticed that all houses invariably had a letter box plate on the front door to receive letters. 

I also saw a pile of letters lying on tables near the house entrances. 

I noticed they were mainly official communications, mainly from the NHS and power supply companies.

During my conversations with my hosts, I got to know that many of the official correspondence continue to happen through letters.

So, I surmised that it is the official correspondence that was keeping the Royal Mail afloat. 

But I was in for a surprise while at a Tesco outlet near my lodging. 

There was a section for greeting cards, which almost reminded me of the 1980s and 90s India, when such a display of greeting cards was the norm at all book shops and fancy stores.

The cards ranged from festival greetings for Christmas and Easter to personal ones like birthday, wedding or even a job promotion.

Though the sale of cards may not be anywhere close to the pre-Internet, mobile phone days, it was encouraging to know that there still exists a market for such cards, and people value sending and receiving cards with handwritten messages scrawled in them, and no mindless forwarding of WhatsApp greetings received from friends circles to relatives and vice versa.

Something totally forgotten in India.

Brain rot: A malady of our times

Oxford University Press (OUP), the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has named brain rot as the word of the year. 

It is defined as deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, mainly as the result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging.

Though the term brain rot is nearly 170 years old, it is now being used to describe mindless consumption of low-quality, low-value content found on social media.

Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl said that brain rot in its modern sense, "speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time."

With social media having acquired a vice-like grip over our lives, we end up consuming excessive amounts of such low-quality online content. A major part of our day is spent scrolling Instagram, X, Facebook and other social media feeds.

Smartphones have proved to be a force multiplier in providing access to social media anytime and almost anywhere. These devices have become so deeply entwined with lives that it is the first thing we look at after waking up and the last thing we check before crashing at night.

TS Eliot’s Prufrock had claimed “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”. Had Eliot been alive today, he might have substituted Instagram reels and ‘likes’ for coffee spoons.

OUP claims that though the first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854, where he attacks people for not making enough mental and intellectual efforts while interpreting complex ideas.

However, the coinage later fell into obscurity. After languishing in the wilderness of dictionaries and thesaurus for over a century, the term has now suddenly gained traction in the digital era.

It has now caught the fancy of Gen Z and Alpha generations, who grew up amid the social media. OUP claims the usage of this term increased 230 per cent in its frequency from 2023 to 2024.

Brain rot beat five other phrases or words on the dictionary publisher's shortlist, namely demure, lore, slop, romantasy and dynamic pricing. More than 37,000 people voted to help choose the winner.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

My Experiment With Snail Mail

I recently wrote a letter in the good old manner – using pen and paper and dropped it in a post office letter box. It was like taking a horse-coach for travel, in this era of high-speed trains and flights. The experience was a bit surreal. 

Since I had to write to a friend who is based abroad, I went to the post office and asked whether they still sold aerogrammes.

My tone was cautiously apologetic as I was expecting some in-your-face smirks and sarcastic responses. But the clerk was kind enough to tell me with a straight face that they no longer sold aerogrammes. He suggested that I can send my letter using a normal envelope. 

Then he asked the country where I intend to send and after a few taps on his computer told me the postal charges. 

I came home and did a search for A4 sheets and thankfully some blank pages, the leftovers after my daughter finished college, were available. 

The idea of writing a letter came as a whim. I had forwarded to my friend a newspaper story of a guy who still used post cards to send messages. 

Soon the conversation veered around the letters we used to exchange nearly two decades ago when emails were unheard of. We both lamented that we had lost those letters while shifting houses and moving cities. 

I then told my friend that I wish to restart writing letters. It hardly got registered in her mind. I then had to reiterate my intent and told her to share her postal address.

She obliged out of politeness, but with little expectation. This topic never figured in our later WhatsApp exchanges. 

So here I was, plonked on a chair with a blank sheet of A4 sized paper placed on my folded laptop. I decided to begin the letter by narrating about my enquiries about aerogrammes. 

But writing was a tough act. During my revision, I realized that even for commonplace words I was missing out certain letters. The absence of a spell-checker was sorely felt. 

The hand-mind coordination was patchy with the pen going astray. Every second sentence I had an inverted V symbol to accommodate the missed-out articles and prepositions. 

However, on the plus side there were no distractions. I could focus well while writing. There were no push notifications from YouTube or Facebook, or the 5-10 tabs open on the laptop browser to distract me.

Then I went to the post office and approached the same clerk who directed me to another person selling stamps. 

During the pre-email days, they were the busiest people, selling stamps, envelope, inland letters and other stationeries, and they had to handle the long queues. Quite often heated arguments used to break out over loose change.

Now there was no one. She gave me the stamps and after affixing them I went about looking for the letter box.

These cylindrical metallic structures with a military hard hat top were once ubiquitous at every street corner. They were the ‘broadbands’ of the pre-internet era. From the central business districts of metro cities to the far-flung hinterlands, they stood steadfastly braving harsh summers and winters.

Once the internet and mobile phones became well entrenched, they discreetly retreated from our street corners with no one realizing it. 

At the post office, I found a small wall-mounted version of the letter box near the entrance. It was placed so inconspicuously that anyone would have missed it. 

I then inserted my envelope into the box and it became apparent that it was empty. I could hear the thud when the envelope hit the bottom. 

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Heatwave!! Ha Ha Ha

British newspapers recently came up with a warning of an impending heat wave all over UK by the end of June. “Cities that will be the hottest include Birmingham, Cardiff, London, Manchester, and Newcastle. This warm spell is anticipated to sweep across Britain from June 26 to 28,” Daily Mirror reported.

The met official warned that on some days the temperature will ‘peak’ around 26 degrees Celsius in certain intervals. 

This made the Indian social media users crack up. In a country where the maximum temperature is at a kissing distance of 50 degrees Celsius in many towns and nearly 150 have died of heat strokes so far, 26 degrees looked aspirational. Because it is nearly 10 degrees less than the minimum temperatures of these towns. 

Most Indians, especially those residing in the northern Gangetic plain are no strangers to mercury soaring above 45 degrees Celsius during the day. But what has caught them unawares this time is that the nights bring no relief. A 40-degree Celsius at 10 pm has become the new normal in many of these towns. 

Amid all these miseries, the Daily Mirror’s social media post on an impending ‘heat wave’ evoked widespread hilarity among Indian netizens. 

The banter can be broadly classified into two categories: 

The first is 26 degrees Celsius just two degrees above the temperature set in most air-coditioners humming round-the-clock in Indian households. Some even said they needed blankets for such temperatures.

The second one takes a more historical view and tries to vent their angst about being a British colony – How did the Brits rule India for 200 years if they can’t even withstand 26 degrees?

Names like Frederic Tudor began to surface. Tudor was an American merchant from Boston, who made a fortune by shipping ice to India. And cities like Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chennai had ice houses to store them.

This sniping on UK ‘heatwave’ was not confined to Indian users. Cross-border colonial cousins Pakistan too joined in. So did the Floridians across the Atlantic. 

Certain aggrieved Brits tried to explain that it is spring in the UK and temperatures are expected to be cool. Hence a 'spike' of 26 degrees Celsius is indeed a heatwave. Morever, most houses don’t have airconditioners or even ceiling fans. But they were few and far between and got drowned amid the widespread English roast. 

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Two Indias

During its periodic listing of the world’s billionaires, Bloomberg recently came up with an interesting analysis of wealthy Indian families and their rich heirs. Some of the names were well known like Adanis and Ambanis, and some were low profile types like supermarket chain DMart promoter Radhakishan Damani.

The young sons and daughters of top 10 industrialists are collectively worth $382 billion (₹3.18 trillion or lakh crore), according to the analysis. This is three times more than what the equivalent Chinese heirs can expect to inherit.

The analysis also points out that in many Indian companies, it is common for founders to hold 50 per cent stake or more in their operations, hence appointing children to public boards tends to be seen as a natural progression. In other markets, this would be seen as a breach of corporate governance.

They belong to the top one per cent who own 40.1 per cent of the country's wealth, the highest since 1961, and their share of total income was 22.6 per cent, the most since 1922, according to Paris-based World Inequality Lab. It claims India has entered the 'Billionaire Raj' and the inequality today is greater than the British Raj days.

Now cut to the rest of the young men and women of the rest of India. The country is often described as a youthful nation with the median age being 28 years, which means that nearly half the population is below that age. It is 37 in China and the United States, 45 in Western Europe, and 49 in Japan.

Around a decade ago, many used to gush about the demographic dividend India could reap as China and many other countries had done in the past. But to attain that the younger population must have access to quality education, adequate nutrition and health. 

It goes without saying we never got anywhere close to fulfilling those parameters. In fact, we now have nearly 80 crore people or 60 per cent of the population relying on government rations.

A recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) paints a dismal picture on the employment front. It points out that the youth form over 80 per cent of India's unemployed population.

What is even more disturbing is that those with higher educational qualifications are the worst hit. The ILO report says the proportion of young individuals with secondary education or higher among the total unemployed youth rose from 35.2 per cent in 2000 to 65.7 per cent in 2022.

The report highlighted that the highest youth unemployment rates were observed among those with graduate degrees, a trend particularly impacting women.

Even elite institutions such as IITs and IIMs that are generally immune to unemployment statistics are now facing the heat. 

To a middle-class household, a son or daughter making it to these institutions is seen as a high road to professional nirvana. The presence of many Indian-origin CEOs in top US technology firms like Google, Microsoft, and IBM has only reinforced this belief.

However, many of these institutions are now finding it difficult to provide placements to their students and are reaching out to their old students to help them out.

Even for those who got placements, the salary package offered is much more modest, and students with lackluster scores are settling for jobs with less than Rs 10 lakh per annum package. 

Software firms which used to take a lion’s share of fresh graduates from engineering colleges and business schools have tightened their belts. This year their intake was lowest in 20 years. Biggies like Infosys and TCS have put hiring on hold for many quarters as they claim they have a significant number of freshers on the bench and are working on better employee utilisation.

This is the condition of upper-class white-collar job seekers. Now as we move down the pecking order the scenario only becomes bleaker. 

One of the most visible tell-tale sign of this distress is the substantial rise in the number of farm workers. The agriculture sector has now added around 60 million in the past four years. This only reflects the lack of opportunities in other sectors. Youth are taking up agriculture for want of any suitable job opportunity. 

Recruitment exams for government jobs attract candidates that are exponentially higher than the vacant posts. Uttar Pradesh conducted recruitment tests in February for over 60,000 police constables, and over 48 lakh turned up to write the exam in 2,400 centres. Many of them were overqualified and from other states.

Another sign of desperation is jobless Indian youth queuing up to work in conflict zones like Israel. They are paying hefty sums to agents to get these jobs. Many told journalists it is better to die in Israel and die of starvation in India. 

Many are trying to smuggle themselves into the West. Indians are currently the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants in the US, their numbers having surged faster than those from any other country.

In the UK, Indians rarely used to figure among the undocumented ‘boat people’ who take the risky voyage from Calais in France to Dover in England in small boats. A good number of them come from countries like Afghanistan to escape state persecution. But now there is a steady rise in the number of Indians taking this route, baffling the British authorities as India is considered a ‘safe’ country, unlike say Afghanistan or Syria.

The situation in many households is dire. A recent Reserve Bank of India report says India's net household savings are at a 47-year-old low. Household net savings are the total money and investments families have, like deposits, stocks, and bonuses, minus any money they owe, like loans and debt.

On the other hand, there has been a sharp jump in household debt in the same period. 

While some dub it as a sign of rising consumerism and the confidence among the people that their income will rise enough to pay off the debts, others see it as an alarming situation.  They point out that in a country with low per-capita income, people increasingly relying on debt is a worrying sign. 

Thus while the top one per cent has heirs born with silver spoons that have diamond-studded handles, for the rest it is a struggle to stay afloat amid shrinking opportunities and a dwindling number of stable jobs.

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Meeting Arfa Khanum Sherwani

 

When some of my friends told me that they were organizing a lecture at a college in Kerala and Arfa Khanum Sherwani from The Wire had agreed to come, I was keen to make it but was not sure.

Though she has been a veteran TV reporter, I stumbled upon her videos only after she joined The Wire. I hardly followed Hindi TV channels pre-2014 and began exploring them after the doyens of English TV channels started singing Raag Darbari in praise of the new regime. It was then I discovered Ravish Kumar, Sakshi Joshi, and Punya Prasoon Bajpai, and tried to make amends by watching their old videos.

The way Arfa presented pressing issues in ‘Hum Bhi Bharat’ got me hooked on. Her shows were a mix of panel discussions and ground reports. They were a refreshing break from shouting matches that most mainstream TV channels had adapted to survive in the TRP-driven rat race.

The way she used to say the opening lines of her show ‘kahani us bharat ki jo karodon ke dilon me basta hai’ with the old Parliament house in the background, to me it appeared as an ode to the vanishing pluralistic India.

Soon I became a regular and began seeing her shows as and when I got notifications on my Facebook feed. Later she began figuring on top of my YouTube list of videos.

Arfa soon grew in stature and began getting invites from prestigious universities abroad and also picked up a few awards at home. The speeches she gave during those occasions drew large-scale views on YouTube.

Unlike most Hindi journalists, Arfa is conversant in English. So for BBC and Al Jazeera she became one of the go-to persons for discussions on India-specific issues.

After a few postponements the date of her lecture was finally fixed on January 18 and luckily I managed to be in Kerala.

She arrived late at night at Kozhikode on January 17 by flight from Delhi and my friends ushered her into a hotel. Meanwhile, the organisers were deliberating about who will accompany her to the college, located nearly 30 km from the hotel. 

For me to be able to converse with a person whom I regularly see on online videos looked like something too good (and somewhat giddy) to be true. But I kept a low profile thinking that many would have already put their hats in the ring. However, I was surprised to know that there were not many takers. 

I then decided to stick my neck out. And they readily agreed that myself and another guy would be accompanying her in the car to the college.

At the appointed time we reached the Taj hotel where she was staying. We gave her a call and waited in the lobby. 

The wait was getting longer and the other organisers were making calls to enquire whether we had started. The route to the college had some stretches of slow-moving traffic due to the construction of an expressway.

After a while, Arfa Khanum Sherwani turned up in the lobby wearing a black sari. She had that immaculate appearance that we see during her shows – saree neatly worn, proper make-up, and not a single strand of hair here or there. But she appeared a bit shorter than I had assumed and I noticed she was wearing tallish heels. 

When I approached and smiled at her, she realized I was the guy who had come to pick her up. “Hi I am Arfa,” she said. After I and my friend introduced ourselves, we got into the waiting Toyota Innova and left. 

She apologized for the delay as she had a video call to attend that got stretched more than expected. It was regarding some conference she had been invited for in the US in the coming month.

The driver took the beach route as there was less traffic. She recalled the state election coverage she had done a few years ago and her visit to Calicut Beach then. 

Early on, Arfa opened her laptop and began typing. I had to strike a balance between engaging her in a conversation and not interrupting her work.

I told her that I knew Hindi and watched her programmes regularly, and she gave a polite ‘thank you’ though she didn’t sound very convinced.

I then asked about how during her recent Rajasthan assembly election coverage, she managed to get a saffron hardliner to agree to be interviewed by her. This broke the ice, and she realized that my claim of watching her programmes was not hollow. 

She explained how one of the staff members of the BJP leader gave her details about his whereabouts and she managed to track him down. He was an Adivasi and somewhat disgruntled with his leader.

When his followers realized he might find it difficult to answer her questions, they began shouting Jai Shri Ram slogans and disrupted the interview. 

I then observed with concern how during her interview with college girls in Jaipur, one of them told her that ‘she did not want the country to be run by a bar dancer (referring to Sonia Gandhi)’. Arfa too said it was quite sad. The girl appeared to be a bright student, claiming to be an atheist and feminist, holding such views.

Meanwhile, our Innova was passing through the verdant countryside and Arfa was looking out with wonderment. We crossed a few bridges from where the sea looked visible. 

Her attention was drawn to a huge water body and I explained to her that it was a temple pond, which older Kerala temples have.

I then remembered her visit to Dadri village a few years after the first lynching over beef happened during the Modi regime and the hostile reaction she encountered from the villagers. 

She pointed out that she was going to speak about that in her speech. “It was four years after the incident and I had thought the situation must have cooled down and people may have let bygones be bygones. But I was wrong,” she said.

The discussion then drifted towards the forthcoming elections. She said that North is completely under BJP’s grip and many people see Narendra Modi as a Vishnu avatar. 

We entered the stretch where the expressway was being built. There are long stretches of cavernous pits with traffic being diverted to two narrow stretches on both sides. 

Traffic moved at a slow pace with restless drivers resorting to high-decibel honkings, and the whole area had turned into a dust bowl. I was wishing this stretch got covered without any major traffic hold-ups.

Once we got out of that stretch, it was a fairly smooth drive. We soon covered the rest of the distance at a good pace and arrived at the college some 20 minutes behind schedule. 

I was entering a college campus in Kerala after nearly three decades and nothing much seems to have changed. The presence of flags and banners of various student unions on the walls gave the impression that the rough and tumble of campus politics continues to exist.

After she got out of the van, her attention was drawn to a notice board with Joseph Stalin’s picture. She took a photo of it and asked a random college student who happened to be there, “Who is this?” Pat came the answer, “It is comrade Joseph Stalin.” 

She exclaimed, “Hmm only in Kerala!” The yesteryear Soviet leader, who is looked upon with fear and trepidation, and long forgotten in other places, continues to be a popular icon among Kerala’s college students. 

Shortly afterwards we were ushered into the principal’s room. I was a bit reluctant but college teachers insisted that I too should go. After some small talk and tea, we went to the auditorium where Arfa was to deliver her lecture.

The auditorium was of modest size with a capacity of around 300 people and though it was not packed, almost in every row some seats were occupied. In her lecture, Arfa spoke of the growing polarization of India and peppered it with some personal anecdotes. 

“I cannot go to a public park or a gym in Delhi,” she said. Arfa also spoke at length about the online trolling, and how her being a journalist and a Muslim puts her at a double disadvantage. 

She said she even avoids announcing her public functions on social media, but made this one an exception “because I know Kerala is a safe space”. This, of course, drew a spontaneous applause.

The lecture was followed by a question-answer session, but the mike provided to the audience was in no mood to oblige and displayed its reluctance by emitting some grating noises. It was then decided that those wanting to ask questions should come near the stage and ask. 

Once it was over, she left to have lunch. I too was offered but had some urgent errand at my home in Calicut, so left by bus. 

By evening I was free and decided to join them. I called up my friends to check their whereabouts, and they told me they were at Paragon – the iconic restaurant every celeb visitor to Calicut stops by.

When I reached there they had already ordered food. When the food came she began taking pictures of each dish after asking what it was. There was a dark brownish dish on a plate and when she was told it was beef fry, she desisted from taking its picture!

The plan for the next day was to visit Wayanad. I got picked up on the way and as we raced to the outskirts of Kozhikode, she began marveling at the greenery and wondered what the AQI may be in the area. All through the trip Delhi’s toxic AQI was there at the back of her mind and every now and then she would thank herself to be out of it for a few days. 

At some places, we decided to stop by so that she could get photographed. A couple of times she handed over her iPhone to me to take her pictures. I dutifully obliged, but at the back of my mind, I was psyched out by my abysmal record in this department.

She wore a T-shirt, cargos, and sneakers. She was quite a natural in front of camera, used to put forth her best smile and pose with poise and in an uninhibited manner. “The only thing common between Narendra Modi and me is the love for camera,” she remarked.

She recounted how The Wire was raided a couple of years ago. The policemen who came to the Wire office sounded apologetic. A couple of them even told Arfa that they watch her programmes regularly, while some others claimed they have never heard of this publication before.

As the car winded its way through the ghats and entered Wayanad district she was very excited because it happened to be Rahul Gandhi’s constituency. We stopped by Wilton restaurant for lunch. 

She was again bowled over by the food and wondered how the bill was ‘a fraction’ of what it would be in Delhi. The only explanation we could put forth was lower rents, beyond which we could not come up with anything plausible.

We then moved to the famed Pookot Lake. I had gone there in 1988 as a student and back then it had not made to Kerala’s tourism map. The lake had a pristine and wild look untouched by any governmental or even human intervention. 

There was a white painter living in a small cottage nearby.  He told us he hails from Scotland and showed us his paintings, mostly landscape ones with the lake acting as his muse.

But now it has acquired a touristy look with boats of various sizes out on the lake, a walking track. At the entrance, we had a bevy of shacks selling sundry snacks to exotic ‘forest produce’, which range from honey to herbal remedies. 

The journey down the ghats was smooth and the sumptuous Wilton food made me fall asleep. By the time I woke up we had crossed the ghats. After about 45 minutes I was near my home. I took leave while my friend went to drop her at the hotel. 

As I got out of the car and walked home, I still found it hard to believe that I had interacted with a celeb anchor whom I never thought I would ever meet. 

Hot Off the Press

Deccan Herald editor Sitharaman Shankar recently penned down a longish full-page piece on the workings of a newspaper after shadowing his own daily right from the printing press to the reader’s doorstep.

It evoked mixed reactions with some marveling at the coordinated efforts and hard work that go behind the production of a newspaper, while a select few dismissed it as an ego trip or marketing gimmick.

For those who have worked in the newspaper offices, this will strike a special chord. For someone like me who spent a good part of my working life at the newspaper desk, reading this piece was a mix of nostalgia and spotting some discerning changes that have crept in over the years.

One of the things that Shankar missed out on was the physical parting of the printing press from the newspaper office.

When I started out, many newspapers had presses located on the same premises, and the relationship between the two departments used to be frictional. 

The press superintendent will often drop in for a chat with the news editor and politely recount how the previous day’s edition could not reach certain places because the desk released the paper late. We used to look at his entry into the newsroom with a degree of hostility.

When there was some inordinate delay in the release of pages he would either walk in or call the shift in charge on the phone to enquire.

Many times an alert sub-editor may spot a mistake in a page that got released earlier in the day. A frantic call to the press will be made as a last-ditch effort to rectify the error. If lucky, the error gets fixed, or they will say the 'plates' have been made and nothing can be done. So the error gets a safe passage to the next day’s edition in cold print. 

The dressing down that follows the next day remains etched for many weeks to come, and sometimes becomes the recurring motif of nightmares.

Our interaction with the press staff used to be minimal as they get active after the newspaper is 'put to bed', and for us it is time to leave for home. It was mainly confined to a nod or a smile while bumping into them in the canteen. 

There was also a class barrier – while the editorial and marketing staff were mostly university-educated, the press staff came from more humble backgrounds with ITI certifications and diplomas. They were, however, more active in workers’ unions and in organizing strikes. 

Sometime after 2000, due to real estate constraints and the advancement of technology, most newspapers began relocating their presses to the city outskirts. 

This also brought to an end the era of open confrontation between the two departments. 

Nowadays, I guess, the press superintendent might be using phone or video-conferencing to raise his concerns.

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Those were pre-internet days and newsrooms used to be overrun by papers, with every table having some pile or the other and lots of paper strewn on the floor. 

The ever-rattling teleprinter machines dish out paper despatches from various news wires throughout the day. It was the job of the attenders to neatly cut each dispatch and leave the pile at the desk in-charge’s table.

Once the desk in-charge arrives, he/she goes through the pile and sorts news according to their importance and what pages they are meant to be carried – Page 1, city, state, nation, world, business and sports. Around 90 per cent gets dumped in a bin.

Even though boxy first-generation computers with black and white display monitors had made their entry into the newsrooms, the shift in charge used to be more comfortable in handing out ‘hard copies’ to sub-editors. The subs had to spot the story on the computer based on the time or serial number in the wire feed.

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Those were pre-social media days and once the shift gets over, one could choose to remain cut off from the news cycle till the next evening.

There was no internet or mobile phone to intrude into your day-to-day activities.

With smartphones being our constant companions, no such luxury exists.

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Revolutionary Road

After the dastardly killing of journalist Gauri Lankesh on September 5, 2017, her first birth anniversary was observed in a big way at Bengaluru Town Hall on January 29, 2018. Popular youth speakers Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Shehla Rashid Shora, Jignesh Mevani, who were close to Gauri Lankesh, spoke to a capacity crowd. Veteran freedom fighter H.S. Doreswamy was the well-known local face, while Carnatic musician T.M. Krishna, who is very vocal about his egalitarian views,  played a few of his famous protest numbers. 

The mood was very anti-establishment with every speaker berating BJP and its policies ranging from demonetization of high-value currency notes to crackdown on various universities. Doreswamy’s open call to vote out BJP drew thunderous applause.

When the function got over, I hung around the Town Hall veranda waiting for a friend as the crowd spilled over to the streets. The main speakers had a tough time negotiating among fans and selfie-seekers. When Kanhaiya, Umar, Shehla and Jignesh reached the veranda, I overheard someone saying, “They need to be careful. After all they are the real opposition.”

These youngsters were far more vocal in questioning the government and its controversial policies than the dispirited opposition parties. Kanhaiya, Umar, and Shehla had earned their spurs after the JNU agitation in 2016, while Jignesh became the face of the protest movement following the flogging of four Dalit youths in Una, Gujarat. 

Kanhaiya belonged to All India Students Federation, the student wing of CPI, and later unsuccessfully contested Lok Sabha election from Begusarai in Bihar. Umar too came from a hardcore Communist background and is a professed atheist. Shehla belonged to All India Students Association, affiliated to CPI (ML). Jignesh was a lawyer and Dalit activist based out of Gujarat. He himself hails from the Dalit community. 

On the other hand the Opposition parties were seen as being inhibited in taking to the streets. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was still battling with the pappu image and even those who were opposed to BJP were not taking him seriously. The regional party leaders were seen as too weak with limited appeal and fixated to caste-specific and region-specific agendas. 

Under the Modi regime, the mainstream media had undergone an acute dumbing down with self-censorship taking precedence over speaking truth to power in most media houses. Outspoken Journalists and TV anchors were weeded out and only the pliable ones remained. They were so fully engrossed in singing praises of the government that they gave hardly any space to opposition parties, and lost no opportunity to belittle them.  

Different Trajectories

Now over six years after the Bengaluru Town Hall meet, the career trajectories of these youth leaders have moved in different directions. Kanhaiya moved to the Congress party after being associated with CPI for a few years. Jignesh too gravitated to the Congress party after being elected as an independent MLA from Vadgam in Gujarat. 

Umar continued to soldier on with atheism and ties with left-leaning organisations. He got arrested during the Delhi riots in 2020 as an alleged conspirator and was booked under the draconian UAPA. He has now spent over 1000 days in prison without a trial. The way his case is progressing, with numerous adjournments, is a classic case of ‘process as punishment’ – something that will make Franz Kafka blush.

His case hearing was adjourned on January 23 despite the court making it clear during the previous hearing that no further adjournments would be given. Earlier he was also denied parole during the deadly Covid-19 pandemic as he was a UAPA detainee. Khalid also contracted the virus in jail but survived.

However, all through his struggles, the deafening silence of his erstwhile comrade-in-arm Kanhaiya Kumar appeared very glaring. It is not clear whether there was any personal rift or pressure from the Congress party bigwigs. 

However, Kanhaiya has now become the face of the Congress party, holding press conferences along with senior leaders like Jairam Ramesh, and often regales journalists with his rhetorical flourish.

On the other hand, the Congress party has done little to tap Jignesh’s talents and he remains a nondescript MLA in Gujarat. The party could have projected him as its Dalit face and used his services during elections in various states.

Abject Capitulation

However, the most mystifying trajectory among this lot is that of Shehla Rashid’s. During the above-mentioned Gauri Lankesh birth anniversary function, civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad, who was the MC during the function, had praised Shehla effusively. Teesta said Shehla is a Kashmiri, a JNU student, a Muslim, and a woman – in short, she ticks all the boxes that put her in the crosshairs of BJP’s troll army.

Shehla made an impassioned speech about how she was close to Gauri and what a blow her untimely demise was. She attacked the BJP government for throttling dissent and urged the audience to vote out the BJP in the assembly election that was to take place a few months later.

On social media, she was a stormy petrel. She was very vocal on Twitter with frequent jousts with the right-wingers over issues ranging from stifling of dissent to misogyny. 

When the union government abrogated Article 370 that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir in 2019 and downgraded the state into two Union Territories, she was among a group of 23 petitioners who had filed a case in the Supreme Court in 2022 challenging the government ruling.

However, a year later Shehla sought to withdraw her name from the list of petitioners and it was granted by the apex court.

After that capitulation, she kept a low profile for a while and was conspicuous by her absence on social media platforms. Twitterati was abuzz speculating about her sudden disappearance.

Then she began appearing on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms with posts laudatory of the Narendra Modi government. The icing on the cake was an interview she gave to Smita Prakash of ANI where she hailed Narendra Modi and Amit Shah as being ‘selfless leaders’. She also spoke about her ‘flirtation’ with revolutionary politics and being in an ‘echo chamber’, during her days as a JNU student and how she has outgrown it. 

What caused this turnaround is a million-dollar mystery and hundreds of theories abound. She is not the first person to distance herself from a left-leaning outfit, many have done so in the past owing to various reasons. But the way she is dissing her erstwhile ideology has angered many of her former comrades.

She is now singing praises of the Narendra Modi government with the fervent zeal of a born-again religious convert.

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Second Reads: New Insights

In his essay ‘Of Studies’, Francis Bacon remarked, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” He was suggesting how a reader should approach books based on the quality and depth of their content. Those ‘tasted’ were worthy of a quick read, while those ‘to be swallowed’ contained important knowledge, like scientific facts, and those with philosophical ideas need to be ‘chewed and digested’.

However, during my reading experience, I have come across books that appear hardly promising while being ‘tasted’, but during a second read, they tell a different story – almost the opposite of what I had earlier thought. I then realised why critics have labelled them as classics.

I first encountered this while reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness during my college days, as it was a part of my course syllabus. I had never read a Conrad novel before, though books like Lord Jim and Secret Agent used to be prominently displayed at bookshops and libraries.

Heart of Darkness appeared much slimmer (150-200 pages) in comparison, but its structure and the main character Marlow’s narration tied me up in knots. I could barely figure out what the novel was about and gave it up midway.

Once the exams were over, and I had nothing better to do during the vacation, I picked up the novel again. Probably because I was in a much more relaxed frame of mind, Marlow’s narration appeared much more comprehensible and the horrors brought about by Western colonialism in Africa became palpable. I immediately realized that I was holding a masterpiece in my hands.

The novel was later adopted by filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola to make Apocalypse Now. Coppola changed the setting to Vietnam to narrate the horrors caused by the US military misadventures.

Interestingly, in both the novel and the film the villain's name is Kurtz. He subjugates and rules over the local population. The main protagonists (Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now) are given orders to eliminate him.

Another such book is James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I had tried to read this novel during my college days but gave up halfway as it appeared too dense and convoluted. The stream-of-consciousness narrative for which Joyce was famous for appeared a hard nut to crack.

This writing style rests on the premise that we never think chronologically. Hence the writers try to capture the randomness of the thought patterns of their characters, and the readers are allowed to “listen in” to the characters’ thoughts.

I found this narrative style a big turn-off and became wary of its practitioners – Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, and others. However, I also used to get baffled by the accolades the critics used to shower upon them. Joyce’s Ulysses is often rated as one of the best books of the previous century.

After a long hiatus, my interest in Joyce got rekindled while reading a piece on Ernest Hemingway’s advice to an aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson. The Nobel laureate had provided him with a list of books he needed to read before deciding to become a writer, and James Joyce’s Dubliners figured in it.

Since Dubliners happened to be a collection of short stories, I decided to revisit Joyce. The brevity of short stories made them less daunting. While trawling through second-hand books I came across Dubliners and the price was low as the book appeared somewhat soiled.

I bought home the book and took the plunge. What struck me was the incisive characterization. Joyce takes us into the minds of the protagonists and brings out their eccentricities and quirkiness. However, the endings often were somewhat vague, a far cry from the dramatic O’Henry twist. Some stories even make the reader wonder whether the story is really complete.

I didn’t read all the stories in Dubliners, but after reading a few I began to see Joyce’s writing as less intimidating.

A few months later I did see a copy of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man at a second-hand bookstore, but baulked at buying, as previous experience weighed heavily in my mind. However, while going back home I thought maybe it was a mistake. I made amends during my next bookstore visit.

As I waded through the first chapter that recounted the childhood of Stephen Dedalus, the timid and precocious alter-ego of Joyce, I began to see the book in a new light. In fact, it came across as a very vivid picturisation of the insecurities and anxieties while growing up, and makes you wonder: Isn’t this similar to what we all underwent during our school and college days.

The dinner table discussion after the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, a polarizing Irish freedom fighter, with the elders of the Joyce household getting divided into two camps, reminded me of similar discussions my father and his friends used to have during the Emergency. While most saw Jayaprakash Narayan as a great white hope, some were wary of his intentions.

Though Joyce spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Dublin remains the muse for all his works. In Portrait too he recreates the sights and smells of the city and eccentricities of its people. Those were the days of gas lights, as electric street lights had not made their appearance.

It was also before the advent of telephones. I often wonder how Joyce, a master stylist who experimented with the language and coined new words, would have approached the present-day SMS lingo used by mobile phone users. YKWIM.

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Enter Return to Office, Exit WFH

 

Remote work that kept companies afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic has now fallen out of favour of corporate czars. HR managers of various big corporations have issued return-to-office mandates and are exerting pressure on employees to be present in offices. In the post-pandemic world, companies are eager to return to the pre-2020 working norms as they brace for an economic downturn.  

The latest to do so is e-commerce giant Amazon which has mandated managers to sack employees if they don’t attend office three times a week. Earlier, banking majors JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs had issued directives to do away with hybrid mode and want employees to attend office on all five working days of a week. 

Closer home, Tata Consultancy Services in June scrapped work from home and wants its employees to be present in the office five days a week.

Infosys CEO Narayana Murthy also has a dim view of letting employees work from home and feels it leads to the waning of institutional culture. Regarding the Indian context, Murthy said the WFH system does not work as people live in ‘multi-generational households’, ‘have poor Internet bandwidth’, and ‘do not have a separate room to convert into a home office’.

However, Infosys has not totally scrapped work from home option, though it claims that the number of employees attending office was steadily increasing. It claimed as many as 70% of its employees are on campus at any given point in the week. 

Boost to Collaboration

The reasons being cited by various companies for bringing people back to the office include productivity, collaboration, training, and networking. Managers feel that face-to-face interactions improve camaraderie among employees and boost collaborative efforts. On the other hand, remote work runs the risk of employees working in silos.

The other reasons include lack of supervision and training, especially for younger employees. This could seriously affect their learning curve.

Lastly, there is the overhead expenses like real estate. Many of these companies have continued paying rents and leases for the office space even during lockdowns.

Interestingly, Tesla and X chairman Elon Musk has even added a dimension of morality to this issue. He observed that working from home was possible only for a certain set of white-collar employees, while others had no choice but to attend office. Hence he felt that remote work was ‘morally wrong’.

WFH as a Saviour

When the dreaded Covid-19 pandemic made us hunker down in our homes to duck the invisible virus, and the governments imposed lockdowns to contain its spread; employers and managers saw remote work as the go-to option to keep their businesses running.

While industries like software have used this option on a limited scale in the past, for others such as banking, insurance, and publishing it was a headlong plunge into unchartered waters with too many imponderables. 

This unplanned experiment, thrust upon them by the virus, forced them to shift work from office premises to the 1 and 2 BHKs of employees, with dining or study tables doubling up as a home office. Webinars, Zoom meetings, and Slack messenger provided the tenuous link in the socially distanced world to keep the offices ticking.

Once the teething troubles such as lack of enough laptops, ensuring data safety and patchy internet connections at the homes of employees were sorted, the companies found the going smooth with not much dent in productivity. While the pandemic was raging, TCS even announced its 25 by 25 vision - under which only 25% of the workforce would work out of office by the year 2025. However, this year the plan was given a quiet burial.

This eagerness to call back employees triggered an exodus among the women staff at TCS. For the first time, women employees leaving the company outnumbered their male counterparts. The company, however, decided to stick to its return-to-office policy. 

Survey Narratives

Before the pandemic, remote work was looked down upon by most managers. They saw it as the first refuge of slackers and used to sanction it with much reluctance, and most companies had a monthly cap on WFH.

However, the pandemic ensured that WFH was the only way out and skeptics were forced to list out its virtues. Many research organizations came out with surveys stating that remote work had not affected productivity and the work-life balance of the employees had improved. Though some of them claimed that employees were complaining of longer working hours. 

Once the virus was gone for good, the surveys began to sing a different tune. They began to list out the ills, including low productivity, longer turnaround time, employee tendency to procrastinate, and lack of supervision and mentoring of new employees.

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