If things had gone according to plan, Anna Sebastian Perayil’s parents would have been celebrating her wedding this month. Instead, the 26-year-old’s family had to make arrangements for her funeral. Perayil, an employee at Ernst & Young India’s Pune office for four months, allegedly died from overwork. Her untimely passing would have remained a personal tragedy, a tiny speck on the burnished record of EY India, had it not been for her mother’s heartbreaking letter to the accounting firm’s head honcho, Rajiv Memani.
Anita Augustine’s letter, written a few months after her death on 20 July, is one of the most excruciating, but dignified missives I’ve read. Augustine spoke about the culture at EY India, detailing how her daughter was under extreme stress due to working 18-20 hours a day. Perayil would be on calls well past midnight, only to resume work at 6 am, all at the mercy of a callous manager who would reschedule meetings to be able to watch cricket matches. She painted a picture of a young woman driven to exhaustion, skipping meals, and unable to even attend her own convocation properly.
“Is this what parents send their children to do after spending so much on their education?” the anguished letter asks. It goes on to describe Perayil’s deteriorating health and the cold responses from her superiors when she requested time off. “You can work at night. That’s what we all do,” Perayil was reportedly told. Even though her parents encouraged her to quit, Perayil persisted but the pressure proved too much for her. “I wish I had been able to protect her, to tell her that her health and well-being mattered more than anything else. But it is too late for my Anna,” Augustine writes.
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No conclusive action
Augustine’s letter acted as the spark that set off a firestorm that many have labelled the “#MeToo of corporate India”. Twitter, Instagram, and even LinkedIn—oppressively tedious on a normal day—were awash with similar stories of exploitation in not just the “Big Four” firms, but every sector of corporate India.
In the middle of this groundswell, EY India’s response proved to be predictably clumsy attempts to sidestep accountability. Memani’s first statement to The Indian Express was a masterclass in corporate deflection: “We have around one lakh employees. There is no doubt each one has to work hard. Anna worked with us only for four months… We don’t believe that work pressure could have claimed her life.” As if to suggest, what was four months of extreme stress, when the rest of the firm is handling so much more?
When that backfired, his subsequent public post, likely vetted by the company’s counsel and communications team, used a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. “I am absolutely committed to nurturing a harmonious workplace, and I will not rest until that objective is accomplished,” he wrote.
And yet, the comments on the post tell a completely different story. Former employees of EY India, and others familiar with that kind of work culture, have discussed a reality completely at odds with Memani’s bromides. The commenters spoke about how they are not paid overtime and are explicitly asked not to charge beyond 34 hours a week. A commenter claimed that a book was flung at her during an interview at EY, while others spoke of “constant bullying, workplace harassment, unrealistic expectations at the cost of mental and social well-being”. Another said her husband has “zero time to give towards his health or to the family” and that EY’s work culture has put “immense strain on our marriage and his health.” When these issues are highlighted, employees are given responses that run the gamut from insensitive to outright sociopathic.
Perayil’s death has led to some political hand-wringing: While Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made a heedless remark about “inner strength” to handle workplace pressure, Shobha Karandlaje, Union Minister of State for Labour and Employment, announced that her ministry had “officially taken up the complaint” and promised a thorough investigation. In a rare show of cross-party unity, Opposition leaders joined the chorus. Rahul Gandhi and Shashi Tharoor both met Perayil’s family, with Tharoor describing the encounter as “deeply emotional and heartrending”. But the sentiment on the ground seems to be that when the crowd falls silent, nothing will really change.
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Don’t dismiss work-life balance
No one is unfamiliar with the work culture that is now being called out—and EY is hardly the only offender. The toxicity permeates every stratum of every field. The numbers reveal a crisis of epidemic proportions: one in three Asian employees is facing burnout. In another study, 41 per cent of Indian employees cited “a lack of separation between work and personal life, which may be stress-inducing and harmful to wellbeing”. A joint report by the Confederation of Indian Industries and MediBuddy found that a remarkable 62 per cent of Indian employees experience work-related stress and burnout, which is triple the global average of 20 per cent.
This suffocating work culture doesn’t materialise out of thin air—it’s carefully cultivated from the top down, with beloved CEOs and industry leaders acting as its most ardent evangelists. Take Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy, who recently exhorted young Indians to work 70 hours a week to boost the country’s productivity. Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of OlaCabs went a step further and asked this generation of Indians to do “tapasya” and work for 140 hours. On a podcast, he dismissively branded work-life balance as a “Western concept”. One could argue that being on a podcast is work-life balance, but what do I know?
These titans of industry, comfortably ensconced in their high-rise offices, seem to have forgotten the gruelling realities of the trenches they send their troops into. It’s also no coincidence that these voices glorifying this endless toil—and hitching their company bottom lines to the bogey of national interest—are overwhelmingly male. They can afford to extol the virtues of working yourself to the bone in office, precisely because the invisible labour of managing their homes and families has fallen to the women in their lives. For professional women, the pressures of being ideal employees as well as perfect homemakers, are extra cruel. The result is a corporate landscape where men set unrealistic standards, women struggle to meet them, while shouldering additional burdens, and everyone suffers in the process.
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Tragedy by design
The tragedy is that young professionals like Perayil find themselves utterly powerless to counter this work culture. But this isn’t merely corporate failure—it’s the culmination of a lifelong socialisation process that begins in our homes and classrooms. India’s education system, still sighing under its colonial and ancient past, values rote learning and unquestioning obedience over critical thinking. In our classrooms, compliance eats creativity. Students quickly learn that doubts are best left unspoken, lest they invite reprimand. We are not taught to question or think or even stand up for ourselves; we are conditioned to conform. But this approach isn’t failing to prepare us for the challenges of the modern workplace. It is actively grooming us for exploitation.
Our education system is only a reflection of the familial structure, where respect for elders is synonymous with blind deference. We are taught at an early age that questioning authority figures, be they parents or teachers and sometimes even strangers, is tantamount to disrespect. The “adarsh baalak or ideal child” is obedient, conformist, never curious and always submissive, and any deviation from this norm is treated as a character flaw. In a system where even emotions are policed, individual expression bows to family and community harmony, effectively destroying the idea that people are capable of forging their own paths.
This cultural conditioning only calcifies with age. The child who learns to swallow questions at home becomes the student who fears challenging ideas in the classroom, goes on to become the adult who lacks the tools to push back against unreasonable demands at the workplace. The result is a workforce perfectly primed for the grind, an employee’s ability to advocate for themselves systematically dismantled long before they ever set foot in an office.
Maybe, some of the much-needed questions that we are aiming at the corporate culture that claimed Perayil’s life, should be directed toward ourselves, and the systems we uphold in our families and lives. Because a culture that moulds unquestioning children into acquiescent adults needs more than just an investigation or a policy change. It needs a complete overhaul.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
The issue of underbilling (not billing or getting paid for additional hours worked) is an open secret within the service industry. This would be unheard of in western countries due to fear of class action suits, but is quite rampant in India. What everyone seems to have missed in Murthy’s 70 hour work-week missive that in reality he is asking his employees to work for 70 or 80 hours and get paid for 40 only – all in the name of country.
It is an asian cultural problem where one’s identity is tied to his achievememts in workplace alone and sycophancy to bosses is encouraged