The Hindu Business Line : <I>Midsummer madness </I>

Suddenly summer is upon us, this time a fortnight earlier than usual. Squeezed awkwardly between the mad rush in April to get audited annual results out and watch how the market reacts to the announcements, and the serious business of getting the first quarter of the new business year off to a good start, for the corporate world this is a wedge, a hiatus, a limbo of four-six weeks when everything is in a mutually agreed suspended animation.

It is the most difficult time of the year to do any sensible business as you will see presently.

For a start it is too distractingly hot all day to do any sensible thinking. Merely moving around is a punishment that makes you want to curl up and go to sleep or makes you murderously irritable.

Road rage is perhaps distinctly correlated with the mercury level.

Predictably there are frequent, random power cuts so that even air-conditioning, now the normal ambience of commercial India everywhere, is useless unless you have own power supply. Above all, it is the holiday season for all and sundry.

Junior staff has been saving up their precious annual leave and travel entitlements for this period when the children are off on vacation although every form of mass transportation is impossibly booked up to overflowing.

Meanwhile, the top brass has good reasons to go off and confer in far off places, all of which have one thing in common: A salubrious, cool climate and a good view or at least creature comforts and shopping of a high order.

The worst hit are those waiting to get approvals from the CEO for employment of trainees (for which this is also the peak season) or purchase some capital items, or get a group together to run a convention or management course.

Ask anyone who has ever tried to get a date from a director or CEO of a large organisation for a keynote address or an inaugural between early May and mid-June.

You will hear a range of plausible excuses patiently dished out by trained secretaries about the boss's busy schedule: He is back from Kodi on Friday but won't be in office because of an important board meeting. He goes off on the Sunday on an overseas business visit sir, and I do not quite know when he will be back!

So there is no way you can get through to the top person anyway. Others have important negotiations that demand a good seat at Wimbledon or during the Lord's Test as part of the business entertainment plan. As one who has worked both in academia and in the service professions I have learnt this to my cost and great dismay.

Why not be creative and encourage offices to close down for a few weeks or run in a low gear, because not much happens anyway?

Given our tropical climate, this is a good case for not sticking to Western standards set in temperate zones, but develop Indian working life and routines.

One could well compensate by working extra hard if need be in the October-March period when everything in the commercial world peaks anyway.

(Feedback can be sent to srchander23@netscape.net)

S. Ramachander

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