Updating India's rituals

Particularly economic ones

Don't you agree that managers in India stop doing any real hands-on work once they reach their late 30s and merely go through the days enacting rituals of holding meetings, chairing reviews and so on?" "I looked at my friend who had just asked me this question over lunch at a posh restaurant in BKC Bombay. He had invited me, saying we must meet, we haven't met for a while", etc. He is the founder and chief executive officer of an IT services company employing nearly 5,000 people and we have known each other from the time we started working.

While I was trying to digest his question and frame a correct enough answer, he clearly noticed the puzzled look on my face and asked: "Did you hear my question?" "Yes, I did," I told him. "I was merely thinking through all my experiences with managers aged late 30s that I have worked with over time and wondering whether that is also the period when their parents start having age-related health problems, their children are probably struggling to make it to a top college and so on...

these pressures may be the real reasons that distract this age group of managers and explain why they start viewing work as a ritual." AJIT BALAKRISHNAN "I don't think these family pressures are the real cause," he said. "I believe it's the age-old Indian practice of stepping back from anything day-to-day as soon as you achieve a basic sense of financial comfort." management types that I meet at business school conferences who, in their addresses to an audience of MBA students, keep emphasising the need to "delegate" tasks and not try and do things themselves.