I was taking a mid morning nap yesterday when my friend Raman woke me up with a phone call from Secunderabad. He was on an enforced holiday, it being Gandhi Jayanti.
The year 2013 so far has had many such midweek holidays and Raman has been evangelical about making it a permanent feature as he finds it, shall we say rejuvenating, for lack of a better word. Having woken me up, he held forth on his idea which he is spreading with evangelical zeal among many young people.
I of course told him that for me there are no mid week or end of the week holidays as every day is, or not, depending on how I want to treat it. He has some distance to go before he reaches there, but reach he will and before he does that, he wants to pass the baton on to younger zealots to pass on the message.
Since I find that he reads my blog posts, I want to share some other information with him. My long time readers know of my fascination with synchronicity and here it is at play again. Just last week I was reading an article on less number of working hours per week in the Economist which traces the history back to the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the economist Maynard Keynes. That article concludes that working less may actually be of benefit and thus Raman’s zeal is not all that bizarre!
In their marvelous book How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life, the father and son team of economist / philosopher Robert and Edward Skidelsky also talk about this idea in great detail and perhaps the time has come for this great idea of working less but more productively, to get the attention that it surely deserves.
