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Work culture of No 1s

B. S. Raghavan

THERE has been any number of articles and seminars on work culture, mostly talking down, or at, readers and participants. The preachy stuff is meant for levels other than the top brass, especially the No 1. The assumption is that everybody else should gi rd up his loins and get going, while the No 1 and his coterie are above any such obligation.

I have known bosses who ask their private secretaries/personal assistants to come early, say at 8 a.m., telling them grandly that they would like to dispose of some important assignment. The poor chaps turn up at 7-55 a.m. after hurrying through their mo rning chores at home and roughing it out in buses and trains, only to find that their bosses turn up at 11 a.m. without a word of apology.

There was a No 1 of the Indian subsidiary of a foreign firm I knew who, after issuing an order directing the employees to take a cut in their pay or risk a layoff because the company was doing badly, had the executive suite, and his own office, refurbish ed at an unconscionable cost.

I find it difficult to stomach instances of No 1's enjoying themselves when those working under them are going through hardship and even facing death. The other day I read reports in the media that the US President, Mr George W. Bush, and his family were watching the world series in baseball, with 1,200 security officials deployed for their protection, while thousands of US soldiers, sailors and pilots were sweating it out and courting death in operations on the Afghan front.

General Dwight Eisenhower too, while he was the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces at the time of invasion of Europe in the final stages of the World War II, used to spend his quota of so many hours every day playing golf. Winston Churchill similarly took time off painting, swimming and entertaining in the thick of war when the troops were fighting in sub-human conditions beggaring description.

When German armed forces were being decimated in the Russian winter, and millions of innocent Jews were daily being deliberately put to death in gas chambers (on one single day 20,000 were tortured and murdered in Bikenau concentration camp), Hitler, Goe ring and Goebbels were having fun with their consorts in Brechtesgarden.

Somehow, the picture or even the thought of a leader living in luxury and security while sending others to death goes against the grain. It is impossible to even imagine how they could so hugely enjoy themselves in such situations. Likewise, I wince with an unbearable pang when I see photographs of our leaders grinning broadly on the occasion of meetings having to do with stark human distress.

The only leader of modern times who subjected himself to greater privation and suffering than what he asked of his followers was Mahatma Gandhi. From 1920 until he was assassinated in 1948, he lived the life of the poorest of the poor wearing only a loin cloth, walking barefoot on thorns and thickets in Noakhali and forcing even the Viceroy to meet him in the *bhangis'* (sweepers) colony which he made his home while in Delhi.

Would that all No 1's emulated his example instead of wallowing in ostentation!