To Narayana Murthy, without love from a former employee

On this May Day, the International Workers' Day, not so fond memories of my first employer comes flooding, helped no doubt by his latest wet dream on exploiting workers. This anti-employee nature comes naturally to his kind. Even in the times of a pandemic, their only thought would be on how to exploit more the existing workforce. The much celebrated, but overrated Elon Musk went a step ahead and wanted 80 hours work a week and all work to restart right now.

When I joined Infosys as a fresher, workers' rights was something I was unaware of. But before I read Marx, I had some kind of experience and realisation how these guys manage to squeeze out the last bit of work out of you (learned this by watching others who were happy to be squeezed :P). I was the kind who left work right at 5 p.m and refused to work on weekends, all through my three years there. My defense all those years was that I was working in a project for a company which also makes fighter planes. So, my laziness or lack of initiative might actually save lives.

Later followed arbitrary change of work timings, from 8.25 hours to 9.15 hours daily, retrospective application of this rule from the previous year onwards, which was used to steal all our accumulated leaves for "shortage of work hours" (when the 9.15 hours was not mandatory). All these and the amount being billed in our name and the pittance paid to us all led me towards the slow awareness of workers' rights. Thanks boomer Murthy for that.

The other bosses at Infy were also similarly good at being guiding lights. Like, Nandan Nilekani, the architect of the chilling surveillance system that is Aadhar or the HR head T.V.Mohandas Pai, who became a flagbearer for violent Hindutva online. All of them became models for me in what one should not become. Thanks all of them for that on this May Day, from a former employee.

Also, from the economy point of view too, this is such an idiotic comment to make, for this aims at making the existing workers work like donkeys and not providing employment to more. Our problem is not shortage of people or insufficient working hours, but shortage of jobs. Quite a few are forced to work more than this in our country, where labour laws are being weakened by the Government with every passing day.

8 hours work. 8 hours leisure. 8 hours sleep.