Ranjan Das, the youngest CEO of corporate India left behind a startling legacy. His sad demise on the 21^st of October to a massive coronary was reason enough for some of the big corporate honchos to take notice.

Work – fine, affects the company in a big way. Life – Helps when you are refreshed at work, Balance – You call the shots on how you want to live. Work Life Balance was a buzzword and still continues to be a hotly contested debate. With a term so subjective, it is not very difficult to see why there would be debates. More on WLB later in this piece.

Work, Life and a little balance, these values have been extolled in myriad forums and have consequently become the rear-end of a considerable number of jokes. This little demon has now decided to come out of the closet and influence an even larger number of corporate best practices that find themselves languishing in our inbox. There is stress at work, period. There are deadlines that almost all of us would want to meet/beat. These deadlines bring timelines and we are, after all, slaves to the 24 hours that run down during the course of a normal day. So where does sleep come in?

Lack of sleep was pin-pointed as the reason for the massive heart attack that claimed Ranjan Das’s life. This is a new symptom that we are fighting in the industry. The attention to features that are not inherently coupled with our work. Our lives inside the 4 walls of our offices are subject to review and reprisal. Ditto for our actions in a social gathering that spans members from our workplace. We are also accountable for not making complete fools out of ourselves in public, after all each employee is an ambassador for the company s/he works in. However, with the ticking of the time-bomb that is corporate life, even the best practices of life have a corporate flavor to it. There used to be a time when corporate showmanship tried to spread its tentacles beyond the boundaries of the workplace. It seemed odd earlier but do watch this space to see the relevance of your life growing in the eyes of corporations that you work for. The virtues of Yoga being extolled and advice on a proper diet will also start to play a much more prominent role as instructions from high up in the corporate chain.

What used to be WLB still remains WLB. What used to be Work Life Balance however, now takes the name of Work IN Life Balance. In conclusion, I read off a status message that caught my fancy this past week – “WLB, but when Work is Life then what to Balance?”

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