Improve My Life !

While talking to a colleague in Brussels this week, she said she wants to "improve her life", what she really meant was she wants to improve her work-life balance - apparently her Dutch did not translate correctly in English. I tried to find that out of course (I am not the one who trusts on first impressions either !), I asked her, did she mean she wants to change her identity and run away to Canada or perhaps find a new partner (bling! opportunity!!) - no she did not mean neither. She meant her well deserved holiday should not be jeopardized with our commitments on her time. Of course we did not listen to her, I bought her some Leffe and explained to her the importance of work and life (yes that pithy four letter word reserved for magazine writers!)

Everybody talks about it work-life balance and if one asks people to define it - they would generally end up giving you a book to read - but can not define themselves. It is such a vague concept. It does not tell you if you should have more fun or do more work. And what if people enjoy the work that they do? Should they be working more to achieve work-life balance or less? We keep complaining that work is bad - I think that is primarily an urban thing. I don't seem people outside cities complaining about their work - or maybe it is just me. I think the civilization as it stands today has made life more comfortable and that includes millions of people doing work. Imagine you take a vacation at the same time hotel staff is on vacation, how the hell you are going to enjoy the vacation? You want to go on a picnic to improve your life and the petrol pumps go on holiday too! So if one part of the society has to enjoy life the other part still has to do the work. Is that what is work-life balance is all about? I am sure it improves the life of several million people at one go!

Friends in Small World

I was in Europe couple of weeks ago. While in London I met with quite a few friends. Friends with whom I spent most of my youth. It was an interesting experience, we would fight for or cup of tea in most cheap places in Pune and there we were drinking Starbucks on Kensington high street, like couple of snobs (I even used cab in London – I am really getting indulgent). People who could not have afforded a bottle of beer between them were drinking lager in posh London lounge! Of course we have come long way from cheap (er.. economical more like) college students to some kind of office workers. So we make some money and spend it; however we did not plan this future. A friend of mine is now Queen's subject, another one is a development executive (and a pitiful bore at that!), third one runs a company. In big scheme of things these are not small achievements. Everybody has worked hard for this. However the bond that connects has remained same. It was great fun to recall old days and talk shop.

One good thing about meeting close friends is that you don’t have to be socially polite or have inhibitions. I can be very frank, I can tell them what happens to me or my work, I don’t have to underplay it. I don’t have to gloss over the difficult subjects. I feel very relaxed in their company. This is a typical challenge I face nowadays, I can not share what I really feel to many of my office colleagues or people otherwise I meet around the world. Most of the times they are business contacts with vested interests and very few actually qualify to become good friends.

We talked about our lives and realized that the world has really become small (my mother argues that we have grown big – but then she has been commenting on my weight for a while now). We could meet as easily as we would meet in Mumbai or Pune. The travel times have come down and travel convenience has increased (still Asiad buses in India of 80’s and 90’s were better than modern day business classes of most of the airlines). Most of my friends shuttle between US, UK, India, AP and it is such a common thing. All NRI’s have their relatives distributed around the world and it makes traveling continents a necessity than novelty. The dreaded visa and other regulations are dissolving rapidly – for example one can get visa for bulk of countries in Europe at one go. This is convenience. Eventually passports and visas would become biometric so we don’t have to carry these pieces of paper around us. The world as we know it is becoming much smaller.

In my college days, I recall we used to talk about how people feel going around the world. One of our friend was in merchant navy and we had quite a bit interest in his life as he goes around the world. After a while when we all started visiting different parts of the world, the novelty kind of wore off. In our office-speak it is more important to remain connected than where we are physically. My phone keeps ringing even at odd times – in global village and 24/7 work environments, people on wrong side of time will always suffer. And I think we are getting used to this lifestyle – even to the extent that the word ‘globe trotter’ has become a bad word in social circles. People speak of going to international shopping places for Diwali. My wife likes to do shopping in Singapore or Dubai (haven’t taken her to either places since I learnt that – if she spends her money on shopping binge that is her problem; nobody is buying Prada handbags on my money – ever!). Airline delays become national news. In my childhood, when my brother first traveled on airplane from Aurangabad to Mumbai, it was a celebration moment – now my nephew complains of headache in direct flights between Mumbai and Atlanta.

I don’t know is it simply because of convenience of travel or because we are becoming more dependent on things around us. The Soya requirement of China is causing depletion of Amazon jungles, gold consumption in India has caused challenges on London exchange. Open trade and bigger businesses are causing the world to shrink to the point that everybody feels connected with each other – no matter where they are. I think that would be the greatest achievement of our times in 20^th and 21^st century – returning to a small world – where we started a million years ago!